Laura’s Winning Ideas

Your firm may be considering a business blog.
If so, here are a variety of approaches to a business blog you might want to consider floating to the Execs:

Diary mode

This one is VERY scary. A person or two or three, post to the blog regularly. They sort-of talk about business and sort-of don’t. Maybe they are moderated, but that doesn’t seem to work so well unless they are senior execs and accustomed to the legal ramifications of speaking too freely. A popular blog that fits this style is Scoblelizer.

Robert Scoble worked for Microsoft under the title Corporate Evangelizer. He is now leaving to work for PodCast and taking his blog with him. (Read on ...)

A variety of metrics get floated, and while many of them are worthwhile for a short period to measure the success of a new program, I caution clients against metrics that create unintended consequences.

For instance, in one very large firm, “cost per page” was a measurement. Someone thought this metric would level the playing field between large and small proposals. Instead it caused proposal creep, as teams ballooned proposals to enhance this metric. It caused the hit rate to slip just a bit, so no one noticed for awhile.

However, the focus shifted from pithy and succinct writing to “throw in the kitchen sink.” When the recipients of these tomes tired from hefting these mega documents, they added page limitations to the RFPs. These teams found themselves retrofitting their process and returning to tight storyboards.

Surely, everyone who reads this blog is also measuring results of your activities…(I can hear my husband in the background, “Hey! quit calling me Shirley!”…his corny humor is like the sound of running water, necessary to life.)

According to a survey by the CMO Council and described in the Marketing ROI blog, the numbers aren’t good.

For proposals, the hit rate should be collected and dissected so you can watch performance by sector / sales division / geographic territory and any other meaningful portions in your organization.

Proposal professionals should capture their own metrics. Your hit rate should reflect that part of the sales cycle under your responsibility. Track your proposal performance at the next step, whether that is award, interview, best and final, negociation or selection. If you participate in preparations for the interview, track those metrics as well. There are different tools that can be polished for oral presentations and interviews, so I watch performance in this area separately. Then I can plan where to to spend time and money improving skills.

When you measure performance, you can see your progress if you are installing a system, or weaknesses when a market shift weakens your performance. If you don’t track things, you are just a cog in the sales process.

When you track performance you avoid a trap Jill Konrath calls “drive-by-selling.” For sales people, drive-by-selling occurs when they make the sale and then never follow-up with the customer to check on on whether they made a difference and track how things are going. How can you be confident your sales recommendation is on track, if you never follow up?

Same goes for proposal teams. You should routinely follow up for progress on the sale for which you wrote the proposal. What feedback have they gotten from the intial reading? What was the final result? When is the de-brief with the proposal recipient and can you see the de-brief notes?

I decided last fall to transition our yard to organic care, so this is my first summer trying to manage the lawn care without chemical assistance. I was glad to find commiseration with Gwendolyn Bounds, who is doing the same, and chronicling the process in her column in the Wall Street Journal, The Lawn Diary.

You see, once a yard has become dependent on the chemical high, it’s like taking away their drugs when you take away the dope and begin rebuilding the soil so it sustains stronger grass, less watering and a healthier environment.

Reminds me of installing a proposal process in a company that has been flying by the seat of their pants, and seems to enjoy the thrill of late night adrenaline rushes, and mad dashes to the airport, download portal, or FedEx.

They go through withdrawl when you suggest they need to give up the dope and begin a 12 step program to better living / selling / marketing.

For organic lawn care, the first year is hell. The weeds have a field day and the labor needed to hand pull weeds is back-breaking and must be kept up every day or the project is doomed.

In a proposal process installation, the first year is hell. The naysayers have a field day and the labor needed to attend to their whining and complaints is back-breaking but it must be kept up every day or the project is doomed.

At the same time, we are doing the same maintenance as usual. Lawn mowing and producing proposals, so we get pretty strung out.

However, the payoff begins to show up in the second year. The lawn begins to fill in some bare spots, and the soil begins to take on life again. You find more worms and bugs in the soil, and the birds want to eat in your yard because it doesn’t have that chemical dressing.

In the second year, a few proposal champions emerge. Some percent of the firm begin to master the strategy and avoid the late night re-drafts. One or two actually credit a win to your team. The hit rate creeps up.

In the third year, you move into a dressing mode on the lawn. Weeding is less frequent because the grass is getting too thick for weed seeds to find a place to root. Most of the bare patches are gone, and you are doing some seeding to fix those spots. Now, the neighbors are starting to notice that your lawn doesn’t go dormant and brown with the heat, and you aren’t running the sprinklers either. Humm. Could it be that the lawn is deeply rooted in rich soil so it doesn’t need constant infusions of water and chemicals?

In the third year of a new proposal process, you also move into a polishing mode. Some of the naysayers have actually converted to be advocates of the process, and most folks can’t remember that they ever did proposals any other way. New hires are coached by everyone on the process, so the proposal team begins to work with sales teams who arrive ready to work. The hit rate is higher and it is easier to NOGO poor prospects.

If you don’t have an organic lawn, you are on a constant cycle of gigging the lawn with cocktails of water and chemicals. The fix gets more expensive over time, and eventually the lawn fails and you have to rip it out and start over.

If you don’t have a proposal process, your proposal team is on a constant cycle of training new proposal meisters because they burn out and leave to work in a better environment. This gets expensive over time as you have no brain trust on which you can rely to bring the firm to life on paper and in PowerPoint. The hit rate is too low, meaning you are spending more money writing losers than the competition. Eventually these firms merge with firms who have a strong, well-rooted proposal process.

Humm.