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.

If your firm works for government contractors, you may have heard complaints from the government about problems with contractors. Sometimes we presume those problems must be of personality or technical approach. But most of the time I suspect complaints stem from lack of understanding.

The Shoe is on the Other Foot

For instance, I hired a contractor to update my website to the latest version of software. The site is large, with over 200 pages. And I’m not technically competent with these CMS platforms (that’s why I hired them to do it for me!)
In the meantime, I’m busy with other work.

Problems Creep In

The contractor is quite competent at what they do. I’ve worked with them before, so I’m not worried that they aren’t doing the right stuff. However, they’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that this project is my main focus, and are treating it like the center of my universe as well as theirs. I’ve been on their side.

Who among us doesn’t feel the proposal in front of us is of paramount concern and should trump anything else on the desk of the Subject Matter Expert we are calling upon for a resume update?

This morning I check in to see what progress is being made and I get a message assigning me work! To complicate matters, the message is in a foreign language: “Additionally, be sure to use JCE advance link for the internal links so that all links will be the Joomla’s default, not the SEF ones as it will cause problems when turning off SEF.”

Take a Deep Breath

So, now I have new work I hadn’t anticipated (1st problem) and instructions that presume more knowledge than I have (2nd problem) and no alternative offered to solve either (3rd “opportunity”).

How to Make it Win Win

The beginning of the project is key to ending with a successful project.
Ever notice that some proposals go smoothly and others are knock down, drag out, battles? When I think back on these proposals, I usually find that we tried to skip or give short shrift to a methodical kick-off meeting, and/or new players joined in but were not given a full briefing before taking on tasks.

Problem 1 could have been solved if the contractor had gone over the process and explained in the beginning that there would be some work I would have to do to rename files once he got close to the end of the project. I would have been ready and willing.

How often do we get push back when we send a request for information or a write up we need to respond to a specific section of the RFP? Is it possible we could do a better job prepping folks so they know these types of needs will crop up and need to be responded to promptly? Were any examples offered so that they had a clear picture of what your requests might look like? Did you tell them a story about prior proposals so it was easy to remember and easy to imagine themselves in the role they have for your proposal?

Anatomy of a Winning Grant
from Jerry Buonanno of Executive Consulting Group

Stimulus funding has targeted industries and providers who aren’t the usual government contractors. In order to meet the objectives of the program, “shovel ready” projects are required, and DOE has targeted energy initiatives that will move the US away from foreign oil importation and develop new energy industries.

Our client was interested in the goings-on because they had been working on a new way to make a key ingredient for high technology batteries. BUT they weren’t accustomed to writing government proposals, and in fact didn’t know what they would have to do to manage a government project. And of course, only one person on the team had ever written a proposal. The rest had only seen one that was over 15 years old, and from a long-ago division that wasn’t even in existence any longer.

ECG was asked to provide some modest help, and Don Street flew in to help them set up the budgets and begin evaluating the changes needed to meet government accounting requirements. Once they saw the work required for the budgeting, they decided Don would have to stay with the project to the end.

As they began wrestling with the RFP, they again asked ECG to send in some help, and Laura Ricci was selected to work with them on the proposal. When she arrived, they had organized themselves and set a schedule, so they were doing pretty well. But some of the government language was cryptic and Laura translated the needs of DOE to maximize their score.

They had also set a figure for the request which they based on the available funding in the RFP, and were struggling to get internal support for a project that would require additional resources to meet the government schedule plus manage the risk of fast-tracking a large project.

Laura recommended they double their request and actually ask for the complete cost share amount needed rather than the amount they thought DOE would be willing to provide. “Their invention is critical to the mission of DOE.” said Laura Ricci. “If we could explain this clearly, I felt DOE would organize around funding this project.” and she continued, “The worst case would be the DOE offering a lower amount, but likely more than the “fair share” the client had estimated.”  This was a scary proposition since DOE was completely unaware of this ingredient before being briefed by the client a few weeks before the Stimulus package was released, and the RFP didn’t mention ingredients.

Announcements were just made and this client was happy to hear that they had been awarded the full amount requested and are off and running to meet an aggressive deadline in support of DOE objectives.