Laura's Winning Ideas

One part of my process is to get everyone’s complete contact information at the beginning of the proposal. I want:

• 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.

To prove value, you should be tracking your wins and losses. Your hit rate is the percent of wins to losses. If your hit rate is improving, you are going in the right direction, improving your process, grooming your SMEs to write more effectively and executives to improve the flow of intelligence into the proposal process.

“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.

Today is World-wide Nutella Day. While you are out for lunch, stop and buy a jar  for each of your team members. Be sure to bring back spoons if you don’t have them at the office.
A fat scoop of Nutella on a spoon, and the few moments it takes to eat it are a heavenly break. You can trust me on this one.

Chocolate and Hazelnuts. Lower fat than peanut butter, and all chocolate. A jar can be kept at your desk forever (which at my place is about two weeks +/-) And did I mention it’s chocolate?

I look at “thrill your client” from a different perspective. If you try hard to please a client with unrealistic expectations, you can’t thrill them. You can only disappoint and upset, because they were expecting the impossible. The only way to “thrill your client” is to set the stage before work begins, with realistic expectations all around, and THEN go the extra mile.

A few weeks ago I responded to questions about whether we handled an interview properly.

IMHO we did, and thankfully did not get the contract. The client had very unrealistic expectations. He wanted us to write a loser proposal with his start-up firm. I balked.

The proposal would be expensive for us because they don’t have any support staff at all. The process would be grueling because they have a tight deadline. And they’ve never done a proposal before, so it would be a training exercise under pressure, and it would be tricky to manage all the moving parts. They had very little knowledge of the agency, had never worked with them, and not even met with any representative of the agency. Finally, the client could not convince us that they had a compelling offering for the agency. In other words, they had nothing to go on, and just heard that we have a great hit rate, so he wanted us to help.

The shortsighted goal is to get work. The long term goal is to partner with firms so we are the go-to consultant for proposals. In order to accomplish the long term goal, we must have enthusiastic clients, who are thrilled by our performance and have confidence in us.

How do you “thrill” clients?

1. First, you set the expectations with a frank discussion (and back it up in writing) about what their chance of success is, what will be required in order to proceed: how much time from the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), how much it will cost. Then repeat again your estimate of their chance of success.
2. Second, you do a great job.

You cannot “thrill” the client if you skip Step 1. Their expectations are not meshed with the actual capabilities of the team. Their expectations aren’t specific, so they tend to slide around during the project.

Begin with a Go/NoGo worksheet to estimate their chance of success, and then go from there.