One of my orphan URLs is Proposals2Win.com
If you’d like this URL, and are among my circle, let me know. I’ll sell it to you for cheap. Real cheap. Like in, buy me a Latte or two.
I just hate to let it back into the wild for a URL pirate to pickup for resale.
Much is being published about the life and work of Steve Jobs. After reading Walter Issacson’s book Steve Jobs, I have some notes that apply to our work. These may protect you from the managers who will read this book and decide that they too have attributes of Steve Jobs that they want to unleash.
“This is Crap”
Steve Jobs reacted in extremes. Ideas presented to him were either vilified or worshiped. Often ideas were dismissed, only to appear again later, but now as Steve’s idea and insight.
Genius doesn’t react well to surprises. And in my experience neither do mere mortals. Nothing in a proposal should be a surprise. EVER.
Most often, we are working to respond exactly to the requirements of an RFP. But sometimes the RFP is so far from what the client should be doing, that our firm wants to propose an entirely different idea. Here’s how to win in this circumstance:
One of our clients was well served by a team of engineers who’d been working with their facility for years. Corporate HQ wrote an RFP for a project that each of their plants would need. But our engineers had been talking to their customers at the local plant about a different approach. They believed by combining efforts among several of these types of projects they could save their customer money. They recommended creating a database that would be used for all these types of projects, instead of repeating work and collecting the data from scratch each time.
They wanted to respond to the RFP with a proposal that offered a completely different approach, and cost quite a bit more.
Here’s how I helped them win: We broke the RFP down into storyboards, and outlined the recommended approach. As we reviewed the storyboards, for each one, I asked, “Who spoke with the customer about this and when? Do you need to refresh their memory about this topic?” These guys were good. With over 20 elements outlined on the storyboards, they’d discussed almost every single item. Only one idea they were putting in the proposal they had just come up with. Immediately they made an appointment to get out there and cover this new idea with the customer.
When the proposal arrived, nothing in it was a surprise. The customers used the proposal to defend the decision to spend 3X the budgeted amount on our approach.
Anyone else would have said, “This is Crap.”
“What Do You Do Here?”
Junior folks at Apple avoided riding the elevator with Jobs. They were terrified that he would ask them questions, the scariest one being, “What do you do here?” A misstep could mean the end of your job.
I grind away at proposal teams that they should always know exactly what they are doing that makes a difference to the bottom line. If you don’t know, you ain’t making a difference. You are just overhead.
“We won 18 of the last 20 proposals I supported.”
“We won $xxx million last quarter from new clients.”
“We NOGOed the xxxxxxxx project that Lockheed Martin is losing money on.”
Avoid telling executives that you saved money. You can’t grow a company by cutting expenses. If you don’t know, track your progress and figure out where you can make a difference and focus on improving that. Hurry up. The book is out and your own Steve Jobs wannabe will soon be walking your halls.
P.S. I greatly admire Steve Jobs. I came late to being an Apple Fanboy, but I now have 5 Apple products I wouldn’t want to live without. And I get it. I’ve worked with Genius, and it ain’t patient, deliberate or diplomatic. The adrenaline Geniuses run on keep them high as a kite and to try to tether them to the mortal realm is folly. Our jobs are “Supporting Good People Doing Great Things” and we’re pretty smart and can invent ways to capture their Genius to translate for customers. And the ride is the best time of our lives.
Archetypes were described by the ancient Greeks, and used in Jungian psychology to analyze family dynamics. Today they are used to guide marketing for corporations.
If you are a manufacturer of consumer goods and will need millions of buyers to grasp the value of your brand of gizmo, a discussion about archetypes will help you design a message that is more compelling than BUY OUR GIZMO!
If you are a soap manufacturer, you spend time and serious money on just the right inflection to communicate your special features, to the masses of potential soap buyers. But no matter what color, size or variety of advertising, you are just selling soap. (and dreams)
But for my clients, this approach is not the best, and often is a complete waste of time and energy:
1. We are not mass manufacturers. We are more similar to bespoke(1) Tailors. Each client seeks professional help to create/solve/construct a one-off project. Trying to attract them to your firm by noodling over a mass market message won’t work, and is more likely to make you look silly.
2. We provide the solutions required in the moment. And that means we solve problems differently depending on the issues of critical importance to that client for this project. So an archetype that applies today, will not apply to the next project we do, and will change again with the following project. It’s a rabbit not worth chasing.
However, it is important to always be honing your skills and finding new ways to extract the precious stories that qualify your firm for great projects. Archetypes can inspire you and give you questions to help your technical staff remember stories and tidbits about their work and solving client issues. These you weave into stories about why you are a valuable asset to future clients.
TRUE STORY
Our client was a micro-manager. He liked to be at the table every time a meeting was held about their project. The lead PM had learned to include him as a member of the team to a degree way beyond most client’s desires. We’d won work regularly with this client and knew what he wanted and we gave it to him. (Damsel, Guide, Great Mother archetypes)
But now we had a new project RFP. The building was similar to others we’d done for them, but in our meeting to discuss the opportunity (GO/NOGO meeting) I asked what was changed from the last time we proposed to them. “Well, one of his kids has leukemia. They just found out a few weeks ago. She’s starting treatment at the Children’s Cancer Hospital. Very sad.”
Would our usual approach work when he would need time for his family? Should we offer a different approach? Wouldn’t a turn-key project be better for him under the circumstances? We took a chance.
“You know us, and how we make decisions. You can trust us to include you when necessary. And this project is similar enough to projects X,Y and Z that we know how you’d like most of the details handled. This time, we propose a turn-key project that minimizes the hours needed for your involvement and provides you sufficient access to know we are meeting your expectations.” (Networker, Mentor, Engineer archetypes)
We won, and his daughter finished treatment by the time ground was broken.
In our industries, focus on a firm-wide archetype misses the greater value our clients seek in us. They want to be heard, and their problems solved. The successful firms deliver bespoke solutions with grace and passion. It is challenging and interesting work we do.
If we were tailors, we’d think it fun to make a Red Zoot Suit for one customer, a tuxedo for the next, and a military uniform for the next, and an “ordinary” looking suit for a lawyer needing to connect with a jury.
We ain’t selling soap.
(1) bespoke describes a high degree of “customization”, and involvement of the end-user, in the production of the goods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bespoke Retrieved 2011-10-11.
A perennial challenge is how to keep the team on schedule so your production can proceed professionally.
The last minute scramble to throw things together and get it out the door is nonsense. It will cost you contracts you should have won. I always say the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win. But really, the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win because it never got reviewed because it was late or non-compliant and was tossed out before the reviewers saw it. (How ’bout the time the RFP specified that every page be numbered, but someone’s 11×17 z-fold wasn’t, and it got tossed out by the compliance clerk?)
How do you get everyone’s cooperation to stay on schedule?
Tell a Story
Storytelling
Never let a teaching moment slip by. Broadcast stories about your near misses and heroic saves that were possible because the schedule was met by the technical staff.
Don’t assume your technical staff has any idea what you guys do once they turn in their materials. They don’t know and don’t care.
But don’t think they aren’t interested in hearing a good story. They are.
Reader (RSS)
Email