“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.

If you are a manufacturer of consumer goods and will need millions of buyers to grasp the value of your brand of gizmo, a discussion about archetypes will help you design a message that is more compelling than BUY OUR GIZMO!

If you are a soap manufacturer, you spend time and serious money on just the right inflection to communicate your special features, to the masses of potential soap buyers. But no matter what color, size or variety of advertising, you are just selling soap. (and dreams)

But for my clients, this approach is not the best, and often is a complete waste of time and energy:

1. We are not mass manufacturers. We are more similar to bespoke(1) Tailors. Each client seeks professional help to create/solve/construct a one-off project. Trying to attract them to your firm by noodling over a mass market message won’t work, and is more likely to make you look silly.

2. We provide the solutions required in the moment. And that means we solve problems differently depending on the issues of critical importance to that client for this project. So an archetype that applies today, will not apply to the next project we do, and will change again with the following project. It’s a rabbit not worth chasing.

However, it is important to always be honing your skills and finding new ways to extract the precious stories that qualify your firm for great projects. Archetypes can inspire you and give you questions to help your technical staff remember stories and tidbits about their work and solving client issues. These you weave into stories about why you are a valuable asset to future clients.

TRUE STORY

Our client was a micro-manager. He liked to be at the table every time a meeting was held about their project. The lead PM had learned to include him as a member of the team to a degree way beyond most client’s desires. We’d won work regularly with this client and knew what he wanted and we gave it to him. (Damsel, Guide, Great Mother archetypes)

But now we had a new project RFP. The building was similar to others we’d done for them, but in our meeting to discuss the opportunity (GO/NOGO meeting) I asked what was changed from the last time we proposed to them. “Well, one of his kids has leukemia. They just found out a few weeks ago. She’s starting treatment at the Children’s Cancer Hospital. Very sad.”

Would our usual approach work when he would need time for his family? Should we offer a different approach? Wouldn’t a turn-key project be better for him under the circumstances? We took a chance.

“You know us, and how we make decisions. You can trust us to include you when necessary. And this project is similar enough to projects X,Y and Z that we know how you’d like most of the details handled. This time, we propose a turn-key project that minimizes the hours needed for your involvement and provides you sufficient access to know we are meeting your expectations.” (Networker, Mentor, Engineer archetypes)

We won, and his daughter finished treatment by the time ground was broken.

In our industries, focus on a firm-wide archetype misses the greater value our clients seek in us. They want to be heard, and their problems solved. The successful firms deliver bespoke solutions with grace and passion. It is challenging and interesting work we do.

If we were tailors, we’d think it fun to make a Red Zoot Suit for one customer, a tuxedo for the next, and a military uniform for the next, and an “ordinary” looking suit for a lawyer needing to connect with a jury.

We ain’t selling soap.

(1) bespoke describes a high degree of “customization”, and involvement of the end-user, in the production of the goods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bespoke Retrieved 2011-10-11.

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.

Just got a robo call from the local Theatre. Now, I appreciate that sales are down and the Fine Arts are struggling. I’ve been called regularly by the Symphony the Ballet and almost every theatre to which I’ve ever purchased a ticket. This call was different.

After a blessedly quick intro, Scrooge came on the line, to tell me very quickly about a sale on tickets to the upcoming Christmas Carol that coin squeezers like us would appreciate. The sale is on Monday of next week, buy tickets online or by phone. Now, Get back to work! he barked, and the call was ended.

Perfect. I wouldn’t have otherwise gone to this performance, but I might now buy tickets just to support great marketing like this.

Here’s the other I noticed this week. Border’s Books closed in one of the nicest buildings downtown. We have our share of vacant space downtown, and most of it looks sad. Here’s some of the signs in the windows of this place:

First Lease sign to capture my imagination

Lease sign in storefront Milwaukee

Lease sign in retail window

Here's the Building being Leased. It fronts on the Milwaukee River and two major Downtown Streets.

And the typical Lease sign. Boring. Sad.

If you are looking for space, who are you going to call?

If you are a reviewer of proposals, which one are you going to pick up first? Which team do you want to work with?

http://goo.gl/tjr4A

Here’s a great idea to make presentations more mobile.

In most meetings, folks are carrying smart phones,  iPads or laptops. Why not use that feature to expand your ability to present anywhere you meet?

Here’s how it works:

1) Post your presentation slides to SlideShare.net

2) Create a short URL for your presentation slides.

Search “short URL” for sites that convert long URLs to a tiny URL all free. If you use Google’s service, you can save yourself a step below.

3) Create a QR code that points to your slides on Slideshare.net

Search “QR code create” for sites that create a QR code from a URL. If you used Google’s service above, just add “.qr” to the end of your short URL and click to get your QR code.

4) provide the QR code and short URL to your meeting members.

If they are on a smart phone, they’ll scan the URL and be instantly looking at your slideshow. If they are on a laptop, they’ll type in your URL and be instantly looking at your slideshow. If they are on a tablet, they’ll do either, depending on whether they have a camera or browser.

You could print these on businesscards you hand out, you could offer the scan from your phone, you could email the short URL with QR code.

I didn’t think of this, but I wish I had. Todd Ogasawara at SocialTimes thought of this when he was asked to speak to a group, but they met in a restaurant without AV support. His commenters added the suggestion of having a URL alongside, so folks without cameras could also join in.

Proposals can use this idea: Think about building a set of pages with additional detail/illustrations/animation for which QR codes could be created and printed in your proposal. Do you honestly think a technical reviewer will pass by the opportunity to check out what is behind the QR code?

Is huddling around a big laptop to show a presentation more professional than allowing each person to see the presentation on their own device? I’ve seen folks lugging in laptops for meeting presentations, but that limits the audience to one person or maybe two if they are comfortable snuggling up to one another.

For confidential materials, you can get a short URL that is time limited. Search for “URL shortener temporary time limit” which allows you to reach pages you don’t want them seeing again after you are out of the room.

Would it help if you knew whether they were showing the materials to others? Many of the short URL sites provide tracking so you can see how many folks visit the link.

All the examples here are free services, so you have no excuse not to try it out and noodle about how it might help your organization.

I’ll stop here. Lot’s of interesting opportunity to expand your ability to reach prospects. Go get’em!

This is brilliant. If you are selling cat food, what does your target audience like? Watching videos of cute cats, but better yet, watching their own precious feline being cute.

What the heck does this have to do with your firm? Plenty.

The leaders in our industry are already developing their social media chops. Barton Malow has an executive focused on Social Media, and they are a Construction Management firm.

No, you don’t need to be tweeting your lunch selection to the ether. But if you were the FDA, you’d be a hot twitter feed by posting drug approvals via Twitter. They are now a must have app for Pharma execs. (search for @FDAMedWatch at Twitter.com)

Think about what would help and thrill your clients. Could a preview of an aspect of your proposal be put on YouTube? Saves your client having to manage a video file and you having to forego “showing them” how it would work. YouTube allows you to select Private settings so you send a link to your video and it doesn’t get displayed with Lady Gaga’s latest music video. This isn’t high security, but it is “good enough” for straight forward information that isn’t sensitive.

I delivered an electronic file to a client a few months ago. It is a pretty nifty file, which converts a Goals to Metrics chart to a Gantt Chart and allows them to use the file as a living document. We worked from a set of dummy data to design the file. I hired a consultant who turned my nightmare idea into a dream. He video taped his demo of the file so I could approve it. Once it was finished, we loaded the client’s proprietary information into the file and delivered the file. However, I posted the video for them to refer to as instruction when they started using the file. That was helpful for them since I couldn’t be there in person to demo the file.

Is there a helpful bit that could be made into an App? A lookup table particular to your industry? A reference document that could be interactive and distributed to clients?

The folks at Solar Roadways are making great headway, and they accomplished most of their publicity with social media. They do a great job on videos, even though they have a lousy website.

Can you turn a manual you have written for internal use into an eBook for clients and customers? <shameless self promotion> One of my books: The Magic of Winning Proposals is available as an iBook and at Amazon as an eBook for the Kindle. </shameless self promotion>

Proposal folks are creative souls. What do you have that would be better communicated with a video? What would help you stand out from the herd in a crowded competition? Cruise the app store of your choice and download a variety of apps to see what might spark an idea for your firm. Keep it simple at first.

When I discovered that the YouTube search engine is the second only to Google, I started shooting video for my husband’s small business. (As my friends say, tell’em what your husband does, because THAT’s interesting.) Take a look a few of our videos, shot by an amateur and edited by a professional. These videos helped his business close its best year during the worst recession of our lives.  These are the car guy equivalent of cute cat videos: Davids4Speeds – Restoring 4 Speed manual transmissions for 1960′s and 70′s muscle cars.

Can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

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. . . .

I also just finished reviewing a stack of proposals. One loser I could predict from the cover alone.

The cover can hurt you badly. On this cover, a smear of logos was at the top of the cover, more than a half dozen, some big firms, some unfamiliar firms. The client was mentioned in the fine print. The illustration was meaningless.

The story this cover told me is ugly: Our team is VERY important, more important than your agency and your project. We are all dedicated to maintaining our corporate identity, so we are less likely to be easily managed. In fact, a smaller firm is Prime, and some really big firms are sub, so it will be very interesting for the customer to deal with who is in charge. If they can figure it out!

Don’t do this.

Here’s how I like to work up covers, in order of preference:

• What is your Theme? Illustrate it. (some folks aren’t using themes yet, and if so, try the next approach.)
• What brilliant ideas are you proposing to the client? Can they be illustrated?
• What is your client most proud of? Can it be illustrated?

The cover should be all about the client and how your team brings something special to their project. If you don’t bring anything special, you’ll be just an also ran, so why bother writing a proposal doomed to lose?

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!