Laura’s Winning Ideas

Use natural vocabulary

When search software was less competent, we used tags to categorize database entries. A tidy database was admired by all, so proposal team leaders would work hard to pigeonhole data into tidy packets labeled with key words.

Here’s why you SHOULD NOT do this in your databases:

1) New technical references will emerge before you can create a new category, and this is valuable in beating the competition to offering new technology.

“No Virginia, the scientists and engineers know about new technologies long before they can translate it for management and sales.”

2) If you create categories, they will write to them. Don’t do this. It mutes inventiveness and disguises innovation.

TRUE STORY: Our waste water group had invented a fast-track method to create man-made wetlands for use in sanitary waste treatment. Several of the group were working on their graduate degrees and engaging in research on these techniques. The vocabulary they used among themselves and the academic researchers was foreign to previous descriptions.

A young engineer from the team was assigned to rewrite a project description that had been used for a research report, “so that it fit with the existing project summaries.” Lucky for us, he asked us for a vocabulary list so he could “blend in” this new technology so no one would notice.

3) Proposal folks know we are communicating all the time. Whether we think so or not. Stream of consciousness project descriptions are valuable and will help you stay ahead of the competition.

TRUE STORY: Imagine a group of early adopters, providing dynamic pages loaded from a backend database for website access in 1996. Imagine the chagrine of management when they found out that this bleeding-edge technology was hiding inside their company because senior management had declared the internet nothing more than a way to get pornography into the home.

4) Customers adopt new language to describe problems and issues. You want that vocabulary to infiltrate your firm as soon as possible. Sometimes sales will notice this and bring it in, sometimes your support folks hear it long before the customer’s senior management has adopted it.