Laura's Winning Ideas

Friskies Cat Food lassoed lots of buzz this week with release of some apps for the iPad (and probably most of the android tablets as well).

This is brilliant. If you are selling cat food, what does your target audience like? Watching videos of cute cats, but better yet, watching their own precious feline being cute.

What the heck does this have to do with your firm? Plenty.

The leaders in our industry are already developing their social media chops. Barton Malow has an executive focused on Social Media, and they are a Construction Management firm.

No, you don’t need to be tweeting your lunch selection to the ether. But if you were the FDA, you’d be a hot twitter feed by posting drug approvals via Twitter. They are now a must have app for Pharma execs. (search for @FDAMedWatch at Twitter.com)

Think about what would help and thrill your clients. Could a preview of an aspect of your proposal be put on YouTube? Saves your client having to manage a video file and you having to forego “showing them” how it would work. YouTube allows you to select Private settings so you send a link to your video and it doesn’t get displayed with Lady Gaga’s latest music video. This isn’t high security, but it is “good enough” for straight forward information that isn’t sensitive.

I delivered an electronic file to a client a few months ago. It is a pretty nifty file, which converts a Goals to Metrics chart to a Gantt Chart and allows them to use the file as a living document. We worked from a set of dummy data to design the file. I hired a consultant who turned my nightmare idea into a dream. He video taped his demo of the file so I could approve it. Once it was finished, we loaded the client’s proprietary information into the file and delivered the file. However, I posted the video for them to refer to as instruction when they started using the file. That was helpful for them since I couldn’t be there in person to demo the file.

Is there a helpful bit that could be made into an App? A lookup table particular to your industry? A reference document that could be interactive and distributed to clients?

The folks at Solar Roadways are making great headway, and they accomplished most of their publicity with social media. They do a great job on videos, even though they have a lousy website.

Can you turn a manual you have written for internal use into an eBook for clients and customers? <shameless self promotion> One of my books: The Magic of Winning Proposals is available as an iBook and at Amazon as an eBook for the Kindle. </shameless self promotion>

Proposal folks are creative souls. What do you have that would be better communicated with a video? What would help you stand out from the herd in a crowded competition? Cruise the app store of your choice and download a variety of apps to see what might spark an idea for your firm. Keep it simple at first.

When I discovered that the YouTube search engine is the second only to Google, I started shooting video for my husband’s small business. (As my friends say, tell’em what your husband does, because THAT’s interesting.) Take a look a few of our videos, shot by an amateur and edited by a professional. These videos helped his business close its best year during the worst recession of our lives.  These are the car guy equivalent of cute cat videos: Davids4Speeds – Restoring 4 Speed manual transmissions for 1960′s and 70′s muscle cars.

Can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

Gotta love the idea of engineering change by adding fun to the equation. What about your process could be changed positively by adding fun?

Lottery for resume updates? Video dance of Joy for on-time submissions?

I regularly rail about the folly of violating copyright.

Look at the Other Side of the Coin

However, I have an alternative viewpoint when my own copyright is violated. When folks “borrow” my materials, I am thrilled so long as they attribute the work to me and/or my website.

I was not born with this enlightened perspective.

Back in 1996, I was writing my training manual, The Magic of Winning Proposals. Friends were subcontracted to help me write and edit the manual. I threw all the pages up on the web, so everyone would have one source for the latest version of each page. I knew the search engine spiders would eventually find these pages, and made a note to myself to remove them as soon as possible. (This was before a small operator could easily firewall portions of their website, and FTP was too slow for our purposes.)

At the same time, I was new in my consulting practice. I was tracking my time carefully so I could figure out my split of of hours spent on billable, marketing, and administrative tasks. Because I was tracking my hours, I knew exactly how much time I spent responding to freeloaders. Freeloaders are the folks who called and snowed me as to their actual ability to pay for my advice. They would talk about hiring me, pick my brains, ask for a full blown proposal and then disappear. I knew I had to get better at screening freeloaders so I could spend my time in a fashion that would pay the mortgage.

After a few weeks work on my training manual, the search engines found my pages. I was surprised to see that these draft pages rose in the search engines over my carefully written home page and website pages. I was determined to wrap things up in the next 3 weeks and take those pages down.

However, I noticed something that didn’t make sense. The hours I spent on freeloaders dropped off to almost nothing. And, I’d started getting thank you notes from people who couldn’t afford to hire a consultant or trainer, but who needed some tidbit of information about my areas of expertise, Winning Proposals and Building Virtual Teams.

I’m a sociologist by training, and figured out what was happening. Some folks needing help couldn’t afford to hire me. They would find my website, and knew I had knowledge they needed but could not afford. When they were unsuccessful finding answers to their questions, they would begin to justify their “need” against my “fees.” Then, they would approach me to get the help they needed without paying me, and justified a dishonest approach because I was “withholding” from them.

Without realizing it, I’d created a negative vortex that was costing me hours of wasted effort, PLUS eliminating any positive impression that might result in work for me in the future. With this mindset, these people would never come back to hire me when their firm got bigger. With this mindset, they couldn’t regard me well. With this mindset, they wouldn’t remember me and call when they’d moved on to a larger firm where my services would be helpful.

This stopped when I “gave away” my training manual.

And I’ve been given contracts by people who found my manual, used it, and later were in a position to expand their expertise, and hired me to help them.

Funny thing is, I’ve never lost a contract because my manual is available on-line for free. Larger firms who can afford my services realize there are lots of books on my topic. They aren’t buying my manual, they are buying my expertise and ability to motivate their staff.

My competitors were sure I was nuts.They can’t believe I have my training manual on-line, though some of them are catching on to the profitability of “giving it away.”

My clients regularly get the pitch to cut costs by giving away data. One of my clients, a fortune 50 company, realized they’d wasted thousands on sales calls because they had a database they’d locked behind their firewall that non-customers needed to query. Once they unlocked the database and “leaked” the URL to the query page, they dropped a nice percent of sales calls (costing $5,000 each) and got thank you notes instead.

What valuable materials are you keeping locked away that are costing you money by witholding them from the wild?

Rent a Reviewer: might be a good idea to get some fresh eyes on your proposals!

It is inexpensive to hire me to review a proposal for you. I can travel to review with your review panel, or work remotely on comments for your proposal team.

I also am available to come manage a review meeting, helping coax actionable, helpful, comments from your review team. In one instance, I was asked to moderate a review team of 20 executives from six firms, with a Senior Vice President with a reputation for gutting proposals at the last minute. The proposal team was worried about what reasonably could be done if the review became a drubbing of this large, important proposal.

In that case, we brought sucinct comments to the team, which could be implemented in the time remaining, and resulted in short-listing the team.

Call me to schedule a review of your proposal!