The SAIC employee’s car, a 2003 Honda Civic, was parked in a garage that housed many luxury cars, “yet the thief or thieves, who went to great effort to avoid security, did not break into any of the luxury cars in the garage, targeting instead the relatively inexpensive car containing the confidential data.”

Industrial espionage is a real threat, and proposal teams are in the cross hairs because they handle time-sensitve and critical mission-sensitive information every day. Don’t get casual about the confidential nature of your information.

These incidents should be used by proposal managers to tune up everyone’s awareness of the importance of security for all your proposal information.

Have a brainstorming session to discuss what might be a security breach for your group, and talk about how to tighten it up a bit.

Here’s a few ideas to consider:

1) Back in the dark ages, proposal teams had to create their own backups and decide how and where to store them. Today, you can count on your IT department automatically doing this for you. However you should ask about your backup procedure. In one firm, I discovered that the IT department had the members of the proposal team on a lower priority backup schedule. Once a week is not nearly often enough for a proposal team.

Since the team wasn’t considered executive staff, their computers weren’t flagged as being more mission critical than the Marketing VP. I’m prejudice, but everyone handling a proposal due in 30 days, for serious money, are more critical than someone handling the color of the new logo.

2) Laptops. How do you manage these?

What is your property policy? How and where can they be used? Does everyone know how to distinguish a secure internet connection from an insecure internet connection? Invite IT in for a brown bag session, and buy their lunch to show you how to stay safe on-line.

3) Fax machines. I hate ‘em because they are almost completely insecure. A seven year old can set up an intercept on a fax machine undetected. If you must use one, make sure it is the busiest machine you can find, so someone would have to pull out your information from all the minuetae being transmitted. Better yet, don’t use them. I only use them for lunch orders.

4) Print shop. Most of the current printers keep a file of every page copied in memory. When I use an outside print shop, I bring some work and sit there during production.  Any misprints I take with me for destruction, rather than let them sit in their trash bins. When we are finished, I stand next to the operator and watch as they delete all our files.

Check your own copy machines and printers and ask IT to help you create a procedure to purge the memory on them if they don’t automatically delete. My printer deletes only when it shuts down, but not otherwise, so during proposal production, it gets rebooted everyday.

5) Email lists. Some of us use emails lists to communicate during proposals. Have you checked these lists lately? Sometimes we fail to notice that someone has left the company, or is no longer in the same department and in a “need to know” status. Clean up your lists, or better yet, make it a policy to delete mailing lists after each proposal and recreate at proposal start.

One of my proposal team members was responsible for the daily backup to tape (I’m REALLY old!) and we talked about the safest place to keep the backup tape. My policy was that the most recent tape had to leave the building each night. He jiggered a cassette tape from a local band, so his backup tape would travel with him undetected. The two greatest talents of proposal professionals are that we are all ingenious and fun. Use it!

Follow your data and you’ll come up with more potential leaks you can address before a problem arises. Stay Safe out there!

“This is Crap”

Steve Jobs reacted in extremes. Ideas presented to him were either vilified or worshiped. Often ideas were dismissed, only to appear again later, but now as Steve’s idea and insight.

Genius doesn’t react well to surprises. And in my experience neither do mere mortals. Nothing in a proposal should be a surprise. EVER.

Most often, we are working to respond exactly to the requirements of an RFP. But sometimes the RFP is so far from what the client should be doing, that our firm wants to propose an entirely different idea. Here’s how to win in this circumstance:

One of our clients was well served by a team of engineers who’d been working with their facility for years. Corporate HQ wrote an RFP for a project that each of their plants would need. But our engineers had been talking to their customers at the local plant about a different approach. They believed by combining efforts among several of these types of projects they could save their customer money. They recommended creating a database that would be used for all these types of projects, instead of repeating work and collecting the data from scratch each time.

They wanted to respond to the RFP with a proposal that offered a completely different approach, and cost quite a bit more.

Here’s how I helped them win: We broke the RFP down into storyboards, and outlined the recommended approach. As we reviewed the storyboards, for each one, I asked, “Who spoke with the customer about this and when? Do you need to refresh their memory about this topic?” These guys were good. With over 20 elements outlined on the storyboards, they’d discussed almost every single item. Only one idea they were putting in the proposal they had just come up with. Immediately they made an appointment to get out there and cover this new idea with the customer.

When the proposal arrived, nothing in it was a surprise. The customers used the proposal to defend the decision to spend 3X the budgeted amount on our approach.

Anyone else would have said, “This is Crap.”

“What Do You Do Here?”

Junior folks at Apple avoided riding the elevator with Jobs. They were terrified that he would ask them questions, the scariest one being, “What do you do here?” A misstep could mean the end of your job.

I grind away at proposal teams that they should always know exactly what they are doing that makes a difference to the bottom line. If you don’t know, you ain’t making a difference. You are just overhead.

“We won 18 of the last 20 proposals I supported.”

“We won $xxx million last quarter from new clients.”

“We NOGOed the xxxxxxxx project that Lockheed Martin is losing money on.”

Avoid telling executives that you saved money. You can’t grow a company by cutting expenses. If you don’t know, track your progress and figure out where you can make a difference and focus on improving that. Hurry up. The book is out and your own Steve Jobs wannabe will soon be walking your halls.

P.S. I greatly admire Steve Jobs. I came late to being an Apple Fanboy, but I now have 5 Apple products I wouldn’t want to live without. And I get it. I’ve worked with Genius, and it ain’t patient, deliberate or diplomatic. The adrenaline Geniuses run on keep them high as a kite and to try to tether them to the mortal realm is folly. Our jobs are “Supporting Good People Doing Great Things” and we’re pretty smart and can invent ways to capture their Genius to translate for customers. And the ride is the best time of our lives.

The last minute scramble to throw things together and get it out the door is nonsense. It will cost you contracts you should have won. I always say the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win. But really, the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win because it never got reviewed because it was late or non-compliant and was tossed out before the reviewers saw it. (How ’bout the time the RFP specified that every page be numbered, but someone’s 11×17 z-fold wasn’t, and it got tossed out by the compliance clerk?)

How do you get everyone’s cooperation to stay on schedule?

Tell a Story

Storytelling

Never let a teaching moment slip by. Broadcast stories about your near misses and heroic saves that were possible because the schedule was met by the technical staff.

• When a competitor’s proposal was not accepted because the team stepped off the elevator on the wrong floor with less than one minute to delivery deadline, we made sure everyone in the firm knew about it.
• When a FedEx truck broke down with a proposal inside, and we had to empty a PMs discretionary account to courier a backup copy on the last flight out (at 10 times the usual flight cost), we made sure everyone knew about it. And the story included how lucky we were that the proposal team followed our schedule so that we actually had a) backup copies ready and b) time to get on a plane with the proposal.
• When a proposal was due in a remote corner of West Virginia, and our production schedule includes a step to confirm at least two delivery paths, we found that FedEx doesn’t deliver to that town. Because the schedule was adjusted for this, we prepared for electronic delivery to a Kinko’s in that town, where they could print, bind and courier the proposal on our behalf. When the roads became impassable during a storm, 3 of our esteemed competitors failed to make delivery deadline, but we were on time.
• When a proposal was discovered to have a mistake that under-priced the fixed fee by 18%, which we found while running through our production checklist, we made sure everyone knew about our production checklist saving the day.
• When the client server went down the day before the proposal was due, and didn’t come back up for 3 days, but since you’d accounted for the possibility of their new system backing up, you’d delivered 2 days before deadline and then told everyone in the firm about it.

Don’t assume your technical staff has any idea what you guys do once they turn in their materials. They don’t know and don’t care.

But don’t think they aren’t interested in hearing a good story. They are.

Photo from druzifer.livejournal.com. Druzifer's Journal

This weekend was another turning point for Social Media.

In Texas, months of drought set them up for wildfires throughout the central part of the state. In the end a few lives were lost, hundreds of homes were lost, and we don’t know yet how many pets and livestock perished or were lost.

It was hard to find information yesterday, chaotic earlier today, and now, things seem to be settling into a routine to manage news, evacuations, animals and begin figuring out where to go from here.

Television was worthless. I knew more about what was going on than friends who are social media illiterates in the areas threatened by the wildfires. They were glued to television, and I live in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

A few gals I know (Ruth, Bonnie and Betsy) in Texas  kept the posts flowing on Facebook until pages could get organized to coordinate news of evacuations and the large animal folks could get organized. Others were also posting, re-posting and tweeting to connect information to folks who needed/wanted to know what was going on. I stayed glued to the screen for the last two days.

Hopefully the local authorities were doing a great job on the ground and every person got the information they needed to evacuate or not.

I’m just a rubber-necker, eavesdropping on the crisis, but it seemed obvious that the large animals were overlooked in planning for such an emergency. The wildfires charred acres of ranch land where 70% of the horses in the US live, central Texas. However, evacuation of livestock wasn’t part of the game plan for the strapped emergency responders.

The evacuation of horses and large animals required some innovation which turned out to be self-organized on Facebook and Twitter. It was fascinating to watch, and should be lessons learned for every business uncertain whether they should be on social media and anyone who might be faced with a crisis that requires timely information in order to react appropriately.

What started out as limited options, slowly became organized evacuation.

Traditionally, horses are let loose to fend for themselves in a wildfire. It’s a nasty option. You are uncertain you’ll ever see your horse again, and certain the sensitive creatures will never be the same again. But getting horses into a trailer takes time you can’t afford. And they can out-run cars and trucks, so traditionally it has been the only possible option when fire was headed your direction.

One friend was out of town when her husband got the call to evacuate. He had no choice and let the horses out to fend for themselves. Luckily, by 2AM he got an opportunity for another run home, and he had the chance to catch and trailer out his wife’s favorite horse. By morning, he got another chance to return and corral and trailer out the others.

However, there were at least 12 hours of no options for folks with livestock in the path of the wildfires. But by the end of just 12 hours, folks with ranch land, water, food or trailers were organizing to fetch horses and other livestock in harm’s way. Everything took place in plain view on Facebook and Twitter.

A zoo was evacuated in just a few hours when things started to look dicey.

The right (or maybe “good enough”) equipment arrived and new safe havens were arranged so exotic animals could be moved. Cell phones were helpful, but overwhelmed as the emergency spread. However, a single call was amplified when posted to Facebook looking for “enclosed heavy metal trailers of at least X’ x X’ and able to travel at least XX miles to deliver drugged lion and two drugged tigers. Three additional enclosed trailers able to carry at least XXXX lbs. each for transport of exotic animals in heavy cages.etc. ” (paraphrased from my own memory of the post)

Veterinarians running low on supplies put out the word for replenishment so they could stay in place while volunteers picked up and delivered.

When the wind shifted, a safe haven for 43 evacuated horses faced fires coming their way. In less than 3 hours the horses were on their way again. If you’ve ever watched horses being loaded to trailers in a calm setting, you know loading this many horses in an emergency is a miracle.

I especially loved seeing University of California at Davis Veterinary School piping in. They offered suggestions. “If you must release horses into the wild when evacuation can’t be arranged spray paint your phone number on their side.” I sent this suggestion along to one of my social media illiterates with my insistence that they sign up for Facebook immediately since this ain’t the last of the wildfires in Texas this season.

There were a few moments of levity. Everyone tuned in to one of the several sites serving up radar with fire postings. By using radar, they showed the smoke plumes so folks with respiratory problems could plan their response. Around dusk on Monday, a new large plume showed up on the radar. For a few minutes panicky posts came over asking whether this new area was yet evacuated. Turns out the colonies of free-tail bats come out in swarms each evening. They mass so tightly and in such great numbers, that radar picks them up and they look like a smoke cloud.

Don’t let the lesson be lost. Make sure your company hears about how Social Media got information flowing so people didn’t have to panic, working without enough information. How might this be used by your clients/firm?

The organizers are doing a good job of  managing we speakers.

I owe them an Executive Summary by Monday morning, so I did my final edits and uploaded it earlier today.

Prior to this deadline, we had two deadlines. First we delivered our presentation proposals, and then we owed them bios and photos for the conference promotional materials. Now this deadline for a 1000 word summary. Next will be our slide set due a few weeks before the conference.

When you are working on a proposal, it is important to manage the submittals from your subject matter experts (SMEs). If you set a single deadline, you have no idea whether the SME can deliver all you need until the deadline, and that may be too late to find a substitute if they fail.

So take a tip from the SMPS managers and divide and conquer. Split up the requests into a series of deadlines. You’ll know sooner if your SME has a problem getting what you need, and you’ll narrow the number of failure opportunities to just a few items near the end.

Don’t string them along, pestering them every few days with new requests. Tell them up front that you have a series of deadlines. Tell them all the deadlines you have on your schedule for them, and remind them that there may also be a few surprises along the way for which you’ll notify them as soon as you know. Once you get good, there will be no extra requests, and every request will be on your proposal schedule.

I like to get the data I need for the graphics earlier than the proposal text so we have some time for the graphics production. Your team may work differently and prefer the resume updates early.

I’m looking forward to the SMPS conference. In preparation, I gave a new pair of shoes a test walk tonight when we went out to dinner because I don’t try to wear new shoes when I speak. But that’s another blog post. . . .

Click here for Exclusive interview with Seth Godin on Leading VS Managing from GiANT Impact on Vimeo.

Leaders IMHO do not need to own the company. It is a choice you can make to lead from within, rather than manage from executive guidance. If you are building a team where none existed before, a Leader will build a team that accomplishes more than they could imagine.

A Manager will accomplish some synergy, and celebrate a 5% improvement over the sum of the parts. A proposal team with a Leader will accomplish much more, 35 or 40 percent improvement.

The suggestion to fire your “D” customers is one I’ve used with success for several clients. It’s a scary idea that makes Leaders take a deep breath, and then jump in and do it. Managers would rather cut their prices.

One of my mentors, Warren Yerks, taught me that you have two choices when your market becomes cut-throat: Cut expenses so you can cut prices, and you’ll make your firm a commodity, always competing on price. The other choice is to be gutsy, fire your “D” customers and sharpen up your offerings to your best customers, innovating so you sell them things they haven’t yet imagined they need.

I use a quad diagram for this meeting. Easy to put up on a board or on a webinar screen.

Celebrate: The first and most important. What went right? Who was our hero? How did we make something special of the proposal that just went out? If someone outside the team should be celebrated, who gets to work on the Thank you. Will it be a note or a gift?

Fix: That went wrong? What is the timeline to fix this so it doesn’t happen again? Who will work on this?

A printer ran out of toner? Buy a backup, or get a key to the storeroom where replacements are kept.

Improve: What did we notice that “but for” could have been a serious problem? Is it in our realm of influence? If not, can we bring in the folks responsible to team with us on a prevention? How much time will we budget to fix this? When is it due back?

We had a production problem with the print shop. When we pulled the printers in, they suggested we send our files in a different order, and that made all the difference, erasing the slow down we’d suffered.

The Red Team review wasn’t successful, making changes that should have been made earlier, during the storyboard review. We needed to add some training. So, we developed a mini-course on Storyboards and recruited folks used for Red Team to attend these brown bag sessions. We also created an instruction sheet for Red Team Reviewers and packaged the pre-review packet with the storyboards used to create the proposal so they’d be reminded of the instructions driving the proposal development.

Ignore: Some issues can’t/ should’nt /won’t be fixed and don’t endanger delivery of a winning proposal, so we’ll spend a moment griping about them and then decide to ignore it.

Amazingly, we put very little in this box. New trainees would feel that everything was outside our control, but more experienced folks knew we had more tools than you might suspect and would figure out ways to nibble away at issues.

For example, resume updating was always behind.

• Our best writer took over the quarterly reminder message and made it a hilarious literary gem folks looked forward to receiving.
• Our best technical person brought in a friend who was programming the new management system and figured out how to grab data being used for billing to automatically update each person’s resume with the jobs they’d billed to. With the minutia already written (account number, client, project title), it was trivial to jot down a note about what you did on the project.
• Candidates for a plum assignment had to be identified quickly. We developed a list of candidates for the President based on the data in the resume database, and we made sure folks knew that the shortlist was created from the resume database.

These systems didn’t happen overnight. We tackled issues as we became aware of them, and bit by bit, built a monster proposal machine. Small disasters were a gift because they gave us the data to know what we had to fix to be ready for a bigger disaster.

We lost power for two hours one day. That got us thinking about what we would do if power were out longer and we had a proposal due. Over the next few months we whittled away at a list of issues until we had a disaster plan. It didn’t get a chance to gather dust.

A few months later, a transformer went out, taking down our entire campus and all our servers. Our group gathered up their supplies, headed for home, got on-line, created a network in the cloud, and were working within 45 minutes. The proposals underway were delayed by only a few hours as we transferred work to other team members and protected our critical path of proposals nearing deadline. We looked like geniuses. The rest of the firm took a pretty big hit in productivity that month with two days lost.

As the team leader, I would look at the issues raised and think about whether the correct place for prevention was actually farther upstream than it might appear. For example, we had a problem printing an odd file and were investigating other ways to print these particular files. However, the better solution was to ask for these files (data output from a proprietary system) a few days earlier than Red Team and produce them ahead of time. The data in these files would not change based on review comments, so there was no reason to delay production of those files until the rest of the document was ready. If we tried to fix this problem on the back end, during production, we had to convert the files and lose resolution, which was not necessary if we re-arranged the production schedule earlier in the process.

I never run out of things to fix, but it stays interesting because we don’t spend time repeating the same problems in the same boring ways.

However, individuals in your firm are on these sites. So every firm needs a social media policy if you don’t already have one.

TRUE STORY:

When the World Wide Web was brand new, the firm I worked for didn’t have a website yet. Only a few of our competitors had websites up, and everyone was fumbling around. We found some good ideas (posting a website and getting in the category for your business with Yahoo and the other directories)  and some bad ideas (posting graphics that were too big to load in less than two minutes!).

Our proposal team was the defacto marketing division since the only other “marketing” department was the graphics team. We took up doing vanity searches of our corporate name just to keep up with what was being said about us out in the ether.  Our employees were also dabbling on the internet, posting personal pages and fooling around with HTML.

Unfortunately, some of those personal pages were objectionable but also mentioned our firm as their employer. Search for our firm and you could get some pages of porn and pages with generally unacceptable lifestyle choices. Maybe you’d get a page that reflected well on our business, maybe not.

We suggested a corporate-wide policy be created to cover how and when the corporate name and/or logo could be used. You would think this wouldn’t have to be written down and disseminated to everyone, but common sense ain’t so common.

Same goes today, only moreso. Some managers worry about social media impacting work productivity. I worry about social media impacting your brand and your firm’s ability to qualify for and win work. A simple set of rules and cautions is all it takes to make folks understand they should avoid implicating the firm in their personal adventures.

Have you Googled your key personnel being proposed for the first time to a client? Don’t you think clients do that?  Add a step in your proposal process to Google all the key people during a review cycle, just to be sure you don’t get any surprises. If it turns out someone with the same name and profile that could be mistaken for your employee has unsavory posts that turn up too high in the search results, 1) coach your person to post their own profile to a few social media sites, especially LinkedIn and Facebook, and 2) consider using their middle initial or otherwise modifying their name to minimize the unsavory hits from matching.

I go one step further and contact many of the folks with my same name. I trade links with them and send traffic their way when it gets misdirected to me. Luckily none of them are strippers, neo-nazis or drug dealers, at least not so far!

• all their phone numbers (work, home, cell),
• all their email addresses (work, and  home) and
• street addresses (work, home, girlfriend) suitable for overnight delivery of documents.

Folks would tease that I kept a “little black yellow pages” with all the personal contact information for so many folks in the firm.

You never know when you’ll need to reach someone and proposals are too time sensitive to wait for the next business day.

< my excuse > I was brought in to help with a proposal underway and did not have the authority nor buyin to use my usual process.< /my excuse >

Sure enough, we go into our crunch weekend, and discover that no one has the home number for the keeper of the cost section. There was a problem, we’d called in a consultant to figure it out, but when he was ready, the cost person was AWOL. Friday night. No response to office voicemail messages nor emails. Great. That cost extra since the consultant had to work blind. With a 5 minute phone call, he’d have finished in minutes. But without his questions answered, he needed more time to work on his own, write out complete instructions, and discuss all possible answers to his questions. Luckily we had until Sunday morning to finish the cost section.

Saturday we meet, but the files are not available. Some of the firm’s servers are down and the internal team members can’t communicate. However, we don’t know this because we don’t have alternative email addresses that could be used to alert everyone. And we don’t have an alternative repository (I use Dropbox, so copies of everything would have been on all our hardrives in a case where the server had gone down.) so we waste time sending files to alternative home email accounts once we get together by phone.

Sunday, we need final approval and the signature of a principal of the firm. You guessed it, no one had the guy’s home phone number. The files couldn’t be emailed earlier because the servers were off line. He was carrying a blackberry so we could communicate with him, but he wasn’t close to a fax machine, and couldn’t open documents.

I abhor heroic efforts to do what should be effortless. I save the heroics for legitimate emergencies, and manage with a process designed to avoid details tripping up progress.

Example of a Legitimate Emergency:

True story: It’s final production on a proposal after hours, and the proposal person is packing proposals in a box. He looks out the window when he hears some commotion. A moose has ambled into the parking lot and walks over his car, smashing the roof in, and breaking all the windows. (Evidently moose aren’t too smart nor delicate.) This is a good reason to have home phone numbers in case you can’t get a taxi in time to get you to the last courier drop.

“Our hit rate is 40 percent. Is that good?”

I work across a broad range of industries. The target hit rate varies with the maturity of the industry.

In those industries in which complex sales (proposal competition being the end of the marketing pipeline) are predominant and precise, you’ll need a 70% hit rate so that your overhead expenses are in the competitive range.

Examples are government defense contractors, where the number of competitors is slim, the cost of producing the proposal high, and the precision and accuracy of the intelligence embedded in the proposal critical.

At the other end of the spectrum are industries new to RFPs because their clients are moving to the complex sales approach, and away from the consultative sales approach. Both the proposals and the review process by the client are less refined, less rigid, and more prone to influence from the remnants of the consultative sales process. In these industries 40% may be the target hit rate for that industry at that time.

Once you know the industry target hit rate, you can judge the maturity of your own firm by the distance from the industry target hit rate.

Another way to measure whether your hit rate is good or bad is to perform a diagnostic test on your team and then substitute in your current hit rate. Click here for a diagnostic test you can use to determine the level of development of your team. Once you find your level, use the hit rate you currently have instead of the hit rate used on my form (which was designed for one specific industry in a mid-range between the two described here). Now you have an idea of whether you have more to improve or are operating at a level suitable for your firm to remain competitive in their industry.

But don’t sit on your laurels! All markets mature, and those who don’t work on continuous improvement fall behind quickly.

In my own proposals, what was outstanding a few years ago is merely routine now. What was good enough to win a few years ago, won’t get you near the shortlist today.