Laura’s Winning Ideas

There is a serious down-side to proposal teams sequestering themselves to focus on process improvement. My previous post was about avoiding drift of focus by avoiding agenda setting by executives outside the team.

On the other hand, proposal teams need a focus that is above their heads. Proposal teams who focus on “proof-reading” as opposed to improving the strategic message don’t improve the hit rate.

I worked with one proposal manager who brought me a proposal she was dismayed to say had been submitted before she was on-board to help. It was littered with grammatical errors, and a few mis-spellings.

“Did this proposal win?” I asked.
“Well, yes, but look at these problems. We need to prevent proposals like this from ever going out again. I’m going to have to stop this.”
“But did the proposal win?” I asked again.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Our brand is being hurt by this kind of proposal and I need to stop it.”
“May I suggest that you need to get involved, but in a different way? You need to figure out how this fellow manages to win contracts, even though his proposal is less than perfect. If you can help him win more often, that would be helpful. But if you are going to stop him from winning work, that would be moving in the wrong direction.”
“Yes, but this proposal is really bad. Look at this paragraph here. Let me read it to you!…..”

The sad thing is that this proposal professional was acting on the direction of her Vice President superior. Her instruction was to police documents, rather than improve the hit rate.

The second sad thing is that this proposal professional will be first on the list to be laid off when her organization faces budget cuts. She is pure overhead, with no impact on the bottom line.

The third sad thing is that I know what the proposal author really needed. He needed to have a foreign language character set so his proposal could refer to international sites in a vernacular familiar to his client. A proposal professional is the person who discovers this and makes the change.

As I explained yesterday, proposals are on the critical path to work backlog. Every other marketing task merely enhances the critical path. When looking for ways to improve performance, you must improve the steps on the critical path before anything enhancing the critical path will make any difference.

First fix the sidewalk, and then plant flowers alongside the sidewalk.

For instance, a great marketing brochure will help your customer representatives, but can’t sell anything. Meeting clients is on the critical path, not the brochure you leave behind. However, an opportunity passing through the sales process can be side-lined by a poor proposal. This is why I focus first on winning proposals.

In this case, a winning proposal and a less than elegant proposal were the same document. Choose winning first.