Laura’s Winning Ideas

Comparing Microsoft to Apple is a common exercise, and I just read another analysis of why Microsoft is not improving profits and marketshare, but Apple is amazing us. However, the conclusion the author came to is different than my own conclusion.

The problem with organizations is that it is easier to focus on internal politics because the culprits are right in front of you. Of course, this mires the organization in a zero progress game. Everyone is poised to prevent internal disruption of their carefully balanced power base. The bigger the organization, the bigger the problem of internal politics constraining and consuming the creative resources of the organization.

Some analysts think that a fanatical focus on the competition is the difference between Microsoft and Apple. They are wrong.

Focus on the Competition Does Not Improve Results

If you shift the focus to the competition, you are plotting for small advantages in a world where the competitors are one step ahead of you. This will not lead to breakthroughs, and IMHO will spiral down a rabbit hole to mediocrity and “me too-ism.”

Focus on the Customer Renders Breakthrough

However, if you shift the focus to the customer, you have the opportunity to notice something overlooked by the competition. If you focus on the customer, you will be examining the root of the purchase decision, not your competitors interpretation of that purchase decision. You prevent being misguided by a competitors false interpretation if you stay focused on the customer and only monitor the competitor’s responses.

Apple demonstrates this beautifully, with offerings no competitor had invented. Microsoft, well, not so much. They seem to weigh down products with a clear offering, layering on “inventions” from other parts of the organization so that the final product is hard to distinguish from previous offerings and just too muddled to be amazing. Too bad, because the brains at Microsoft are no less brilliant than the brains at Apple. But the environments are very different.

Proposals are Opportunities for Breakthrough Invention

When I’m working on a proposal, I spend little or no time gathering competitor intelligence. Most of it is gossip and innuendo, some of it is just plain incorrect. Instead, we spend time focused on the customer. What keeps them up at night? What part of their mission can we improve? How does our work move the customer forward?

The breakthroughs always come during these discussions. The creative twist that attracts the customer to our proposal comes out in these brainstorming sessions.

The only thing generated by competitor analysis is fear and trepidation, so I avoid it.

My hit rate is solid at 85 percent and going up with this last year’s wins. I’ve kept this level of performance ever since I started using this approach. Might be worth a try.

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.

OMG. This technology is too cool to miss.

This is from GE Ecomagination group. That’s me, holding a hologram that moves as I move the frame. To create this 3D hologram, I’ve printed out a frame and then held it up to my webcam, push the button and magic is in my hands. The sun rotates as I move my paper “frame.”

Too Cool to Miss Technology

Do this yourself by clicking on the picture, or going to the website here.

Most proposal folks I know are fascinated by technology. After all, who else could do what we do, bringing science and technology to life under the constraints of a typical proposal RFP?

If you have a webcam, this is a cinch. Now, for the serious part.

Could your next proposal deliver a working model?

How can your firm use this technology to deliver demonstrations of your work? Would it help to send working models  with a proposal? In this screenshot, you can’t see the moving elements: sun, solar panels, birds, etc.

What will happen if your competition adopts this first?

Check out the website for information about the code required for this animation. Inspire someone at your firm to take a look at this and wonder about whether it can be used to help demonstrate a project in a sales call, or help decision-makers get comfortable with your recommendations.

The code for this hologram is open source. My favorite price, free. However, as Professor Dave Clark says, “That’s free as in free speech, not free beer.”

By Chris Simmons, founder and principal member of Rainmakerz Consulting

In Part 3 of this series we described the importance of providing discriminating proof for theme features and benefits to substantiate your claims and to give your customers the reasons to believe. In Part 4 we describe a proven methodology for developing winning proposal themes that are compliant, compelling, and position your company to win.

Most experts agree that you need to think about (and write down) your proposal themes BEFORE you start the proposal drafting process. Failing to follow this simple idea causes proposal teams to fall into a number of common proposal development traps.

1. Drafting proposal prose before themes are identified and vetted.
2. Placing too much emphasis on the wrong features and benefits.
3. Lacking a common vision and thematic threads throughout the proposal.
4. Playing into the hands of your competition with a ‘me too’ response.

What can proposal teams do to avoid these common pitfalls?

The Recipe for Success
There are a number of established ways to develop proposal themes and discriminators. The best recipes for theme development all have common elements that include a few simple ingredients that come from the RFP, the capture plan, and the collective intelligence of your capture and business development teams. (Exact measurements may very depending on the type and quality of the RFP.)

• 2 ounces of proposal evaluation criteria (Section M)
• 1 ounce of proposal instructions (Section L)
• 4 ounces of requirements (Section C, SOW)
• 2 dashes of customer hot buttons
• A pinch of competitive intelligence

Your proposed solutions are also key theme development ingredients. Most recipes for great proposal themes require at least 1 scoop of solutions for each of the following areas (technical, management, past performance, and business/pricing).

Use a Method…Any Method
Although the proposal theme recipe sounds simple, most proposal themes end up being…well…half baked. The problem is many proposal teams fail to invest the appropriate time and resources developing proposal solutions and themes. Many proposal teams bolt for the boilerplate and forget about themes altogether – hoping that they will miraculously emerge in the Executive Summary the night before the proposal is due.

There are scores of proposal development methodologies that include some form of theme development process. I recommend a 3-step process that starts with the RFP and leverages information that should be documented in the capture plan.

Example: The technical volume of a five volume proposal is worth 60 percent of the points and the other four volumes are of equal weight (10 percent each).

Step 1: Develop high-level themes (starting with features and benefits) that are roughly proportional with how the customer will weight (and score) your proposal. Detailed evaluation sub-factors (in Section M) are an excellent place to start and literally tell you what the benefits should be. For this example, consider 5-8 high level technical themes and 1-2 themes for the other four volumes to represent the relative (6 to 1) ratio between the weighting of technical volume and the other volumes.

This approach obviously depends on the wording of the evaluation factors and the real weighting of the price factor. The main point is that placing too much emphasis on anything but the technical solution in this example is likely to yield a number of themes that are not as important to the customer resulting in lower evaluation scores.

Step 2: Once the high-level features and benefits are developed, list the proof-points and discriminators for each theme. Define as many proof statements for each theme as you can, using quantifiable metrics. Be creative and get as many of your ideas down on paper. A good starting point is 5-6 proof statements for each theme. Use a template (PowerPoint or Word) that highlights the volume, theme statement (feature and benefit) in a highlighted box. List the supporting proof statements (in order of importance to the customer) for each theme underneath the theme statement in a separate box. Use the capture plan as the basis for integrating customer hot buttons and competitive information into the themes and proof statements to create powerful discriminators that set you apart from the competition.

The resulting high-level proposal theme deck (approximately 10-15 slides) should be included in the proposal management plan, uploaded to your document management or backup server, and posted on the proposal room wall. The theme deck also serves as the basis for the development of the executive summary.

Step 3: Develop more detailed themes (features, benefits, and proof) to support the high-level themes at the volume, section, and requirement levels in accordance with the proposal instructions, evaluation criteria, and the requirements (SOW). Incorporate these lower level themes into the storyboard, module plan, content plan, or whatever pre-proposal planning deliverable you use. Now you are really ready to write the proposal.

Even the companies that have established proposal development organizations, processes, and tools in place often fail because they either lack the discipline to follow standard theme and proposal developments procedures or they simply don’t have the right people on the team. Part 5 highlights some of the most common theme development challenges and provides some practical recommendations you can use to create great proposal themes.

Chris Simmons is the founder and principal member of Rainmakerz Consulting—a business development solutions company specializing in proposal management, writing, and review.