Laura’s Winning Ideas

Welcome to the August 29, 2007 edition of business proposal carnival. These posts from other sites have nuggets you may find helpful.

Management

Karl Goldfield presents Building a plan Part 3: Hunters, Gatherers, Communicators, and Collaborators.(ed. There are good tips here for interviewing team members.)

Proposals

Ben Yoskovitz presents Top 10 Reasons Why Proposals Fail .

Ben Yoskovitz presents The 4 Immutable Laws of Giving Great Proposals, saying, “As much as we might not like RFPs, proposals are necessary in a lot of cases to get business. Learn how to write better proposals.”

Strategy

Charles H. Green presents When Business is Incontinent , saying, “So often we know what we should do, nothing stands in our way, we want to do it… and yet we don’t. Why?”

Charles H. Green presents The Deeper Message of Financial Markets’ Volatility , saying, “In a massively connected world, corporate strategy is less relevant than customer strategy. It’s your ability to cut agreements with customers and suppliers that helps you—not your ability to squeeze pennies out of them.”

Chris Tackett presents How to Write a Headline and Grab Your Prospect by the Eyeballs! , saying, “The art of writing headlines is important for direct marketing. I will cover how to come up with some great headlines just like the one I use in this article.”

Tactics and Tools

Jason Rakowski presents How To Deliver Technical Support That Delights The End User, Part Two, saying, “For computer companies technical support can make or break you. If you are in high-tech this is a must read.”

I was in the grocery store and a business manager was ahead of me. His cart was filled with a variety of salted and sugared snack food and soda pop. I commented that it looked like he had kids coming over for a slumber party and he explained that he had a group of folks sequestered to finish an important project. These “treats” were intended to keep them working.

Poor team.

I have a rule that I’ll buy any food the proposal team wants so long as it is healthy stuff. My list of healthy includes any fresh fruits or vegetables, anything with less than 25% fat, and no high fructose corn syrup.

The last professional proposal suite I worked in had an excellent setup. Coffee and tea, of course. Plus a refrigerator stocked with juices and bottled water. The snack foods were all relatively healthy crackers and snack items. Only one sweet item included high fructose corn syrup, and the others were granola bars and cookies with honey or sugar as the sweetener. They brought in fresh fruit every other day.

No potato chips. No pop. Loved it.

This is food that keeps you going. You really can’t keep a group working our kind of hours without snacks. But you can help us remain alert if you avoid foods that put us to sleep.

One winter, we had some nasty cold/flu viruses going around. We couldn’t afford to lose anyone. I had Whole Foods make up a fabulous fruit basket which I returned to have them replenish each week. It was too beautiful to pass up without grabbing a piece of fruit. It seemed to keep us all healthy while our SMEs were sniffling and sneezing.

Pass the yogurt!

“Proposals are Hell.”

Here’s my strategy for managing myself during proposals.

First, I push the process at the beginning. When others are slowly warming up to the idea of writing a proposal, I’m Storyboarding and pressing for people to meet their first deadlines.

In my opinion, this is the stage at which proposals are won or lost. The best teams come out of the gate quickly, and work the process hard. Your best strategy comes after folks have been thinking hard about how best to meet the needs of the client. When they do this hard thinking early, you have time to incorporate it into the proposal.

Poor teams don’t get serious about the proposal until the eleventh hour, and any great ideas get short shrift (if they get mentioned in the proposal at all!).

I laugh when I hear senior executives barking orders to incorporate new material at the last minute. These hasty inserts can be seen by any casual reader as just that — hasty inserts that aren’t fully explained nor connected to the rest of the document.

“The deadline loomed and all was chaos.”

As the proposal nears it’s end, I’m usually the calmest person. Zen-like focus on the task in front of me is needed in order to avoid re-work due to hasty half-baked attention. There is no time to edit again or re-write, so I concentrate quiet energy on each task.

If we are working on a winning proposal, the scene is usually fast paced, but only an outsider would think it chaotic.

One time, my right hand, Susan, asked me to hold a proposal for 10 minutes while she ran an adding machine tape on the cost proposal. We always paid attention to each other’s gut feelings. The costs had come in too late to use a master spreadsheet, but the proposal manager had already signed off on the cost sheets.

Sure enough, the total price quoted was off by almost 9 percent. As I fetched the proposal manager from a meeting and ran down the hall with him to make the necessary changes, he exclaimed, “I didn’t know you guys were checking things like this!” Well, a proposal team working in chaos up to the last moment doesn’t check anything, and doesn’t catch glitches. Lucky for him, we weren’t a proposal team that worked in chaos.

Thanks Susan.

My notes from a column by Seth Godin, writing in Forbes Magazine, May 7, 2007:

“Bad news for control freaks everywhere: Your funnel is broken and you’re not in charge anymore. AMR, Verizon, Microsoft — you’ve all got problems, and you’re not the only ones. American Airlines might spend $1 million or more on a TV ad campaign and purchase only 100 new first-class customers as a result….”

–3 examples of companies suffering the consequences of good or bad service. Evangelists (thrilled customers) and customers with a megaphone for complaints {most often via internet / blogging/ YouTube}.

“The biggest mistake marketers make when they see the power of the consumer network is that they try to control it, own it or manipulate it. This always fails because the network doesn’t care about you and can’t be bought. The smartest marketers aim to inspire, not to control….”

–2 examples of companies trying to control public opinion rather than doing a great job.

“Great companies don’t push, they lead. The next time a p.r. firm’s experts offer to take your money in exchange for their help in dominating the network, show them the door. Hand the cash to your R&D, training and service people instead.”

Laura here: Some companies think they can win with a snazzy proposal. I’ve won plenty, and it’s never been a surprise.

The losers all think there is something going on in the background that thwarts their win. That is correct, but I don’t see it as a sneaky backroom operation.

Your clients have megaphones of their own and are talking inside their organizations about you, and all your competitors. Every day your reputation is being made, and a snazzy proposal won’t control nor change that.

I worked once with a firm that hired a PR firm and a lobbyist, thinking they could control the conversation about their firm in the months leading up to the RFP coming out.

What a disaster!

The megaphone in the agency was loud and clear, sounding an alarm about these slick “representatives” trying to “position” the firm.

IMHO, if they’d spent that money on beefing up their customer response, and having REAL engineers visiting the customer to understand their needs, they would have been ideally positioned. Then we would have had everything we needed to write a winning proposal.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

When the client longs for the greater good you propose, your proposal wins.