Laura’s Winning Ideas

“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.