Laura’s Winning Ideas

Yup. I was certainly skeptical of how you could use Twitter or Facebook to move forward an engineering proposal. Well, these fine folks are doing the best job I’ve seen in harnessing the power of the crowd to move their technology into the flow of funding.

I heard about them this morning when someone in my Facebook network posted this video to their page:

Transfer from Asphalt to Solar Roadway

After watching the video, I was happy to click out to vote for them. They are in a competition at the GE Challenge to win a portion of the $220 million being offered in their Ecoimagination Challenge grant program.

From there, I looked at a couple of other submissions. Only this one caught my attention so I voted for it as well:

Wind capture that avoids open blade windmill issues

Then I clicked back and voted for the other two proposals Solar Roadways has at GE:

Solar Roadway Wants to Win GE Grant!

And finally, on the Profile for the engineer/founder, I clicked out to watch a TED presentation he made in June 2010:

Endearing story about the genesis of this company

I haven’t looked yet, but I’ll bet they are on Twitter. AND I know the folks at ARPA-e must be watching this to track their progress.

I want to buy stock in this company. In the meantime, I’m stealing every good idea to help clients understand how to use Social Media to Win Work!

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.

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.