Laura’s Winning Ideas

Laura Ewing just showed me a new site to research federal contracts.

http://www.usaspending.gov

Very nice interface. I’ve played around with it a few minutes and easily found contracts for clients and their competitors, as well as which agencies are contracting.

Tuck this one in your bookmarks and backup your bookmarks!

Technorati Tags: proposal database,contracts database,competitor data

The CIO at Kimberly Clark is working to eradicate tech speak and requires every word of the department email missives to be found in Webster’s Dictionary. (What have we come to that this is revolutionary news?!?)

As reported in the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Blog this week, acronyms must be translated into something meaningful for the recipient.

The time it takes to write with clarity and full explanation, multiplies your effort.

  Time saved by your readers X  Number of readers being addressed = Value of your time spent editing for clarity.

When sending a proposal, the importance of the clarity is multiplied by the dollars involved in your proposed contract.

He also uses the same template I teach for mass email. Begin the message with “ACTION NEEDED:” so the responsible parties know whether they are personally holding up progress or just being informed of progress. In the case of Kimberly Clark, they begin with: If you use this system (fill in specifics here), Please read on.

Vincent Wright posted a note about Scrum project management and pointed to this article about Scrum on Wikipedia. Next time you need to train a new person (on your team or interfacing with your team), this might be helpful.

Scrum is taken from a term in Rugby, a sport similar to Proposal writing.

A scrum project is organized into sprints, just as proposal teams organize around individual proposals.

Team members are divided into Pigs and Chickens:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, while chickens make a contribution, pigs are fully committed.

Chickens include the SMEs, salespeople, management, technical staff and stakeholders in your organization. The pigs are the ones who must get the proposal out the door. Chickens can edit the “Product Backlog” (AKA the proposal storyboards) and provide input to pigs as requested. However, the Pigs are fully committed to the effort and will make the proposal happen.
At the daily status meetings, only pigs are allowed to speak, though chickens may attend. The daily meeting is “time boxed” to 15 minutes, and everyone arrives on time or suffers the team punishment. This meeting is held standing.

The Sprintmaster (aka proposal team leader/proposal manager/proposal coordinator) keeps a Burn Chart, detailing what remains to be done before the end of the sprint (proposal delivery).

Every “sprint” (proposal) is followed by a debrief meeting called a Sprint Retrospective.

When trying to explain what and how we work, having other examples is helpful.

I read a white paper at Marketing Sherpa last month about testing your web site on mobile devices.

Some estimate that as much as 40% of the initial contacts to your web site will be via mobile devices within 5 years. Humm.

I was skeptical, until I caught myself. I sat in an SMPS meeting, listening to 3 speakers from various companies. As the panel got warmed up, I surfed to each of their web sites on my iPhone. The two medium sized firms had reasonable web sites. Nothing fancy, but I got an overview of what they do and who their market is.

However, the third firm is very large. In fact, they are one of the oldest privately held firms in the U.S. However they have a web site that is probably fancy because it would not render on my phone. (Let me go check from my desktop… Oh yeah. very nice dancing baloney on every landing page.)

I didn’t think it was important when I read about testing your web site for mobile devices, but now I’m convinced.

Check your own web site here: www.iPhonetester.com

Imagine your client sitting in a meeting reviewing proposals for THAT BIG JOB, and they pull out their mobile device and surf to your web site to check some detail. What do they get?

Notice that I didn’t bother to visit the big company web site once I returned to my office. It wasn’t a high enough priority for me. If I haven’t had this post to write, I would have moved on without a second thought about that company.

Which company would you rather be?

One more datapoint. This week, Forbes Magazine cited another study estimating that at least 50% of first visits to web sites are coming from mobile devices. Run fast.

Technorati Tags: mobile device,surfing,iphone,website,Marketing Sherpa,Forbes