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.

“Laura,

Are you familiar with 360 evaluations? We are wondering whether we should consider a service that will survey members of our firm to understand their priorities and impressions of our department.

Times are tight, and we may be perceived as “expendable overhead” and want to be sure we are doing what we should to avoid being seen as expendable.”

Humm. I may be too late.

When dealing with technical professionals, I find they have difficulty reading the marketplace and understanding how best to connect with their customers who are not so technically oriented. Not all, but many. That’s why they hire marketing professionals!

Therefore, soliciting suggestions from them about what the Marketing department should be doing is like asking a visually impaired individual (or my husband) to critique the dresses worn to the Oscars.

However, Marketing Professionals must prove their value to the firm or be labeled as expendable “Overhead.”

We must focus on “why” we do everything, and design measures to prove that what we are doing is having the intended effect.

Too often I hear marketing folks make the same mistake their Subject Matter Experts make: “Isn’t it obvious that I’m doing the right things?” No, it isn’t.

Design Metrics and Measure

For example, at one firm, I changed a sacred company tradition, Holiday Greeting Cards. The practice had been to address all the Holiday cards, and then put them in the conference room for folks to riffle through during business hours, taking out the ones for folks they knew, signing those cards, then putting them back in the envelope and filing for the next person to riffle, sign, file. This was time consuming and resulted in cards worn out from so much handling, with a variety of signatures (some legible, some not) inside.

I wanted to change this.

Instead, I spent more money buying custom-made pop-up holiday cards which we designed in spring and had manufactured, assembled and sent back by late October. Each year the design changed.

One year, the popup was an engineer’s drawing table with a plot, an articulated lamp reaching over the desktop, and engineering tools laid on the blueprint. The card from which the pop-up sprang was an office floor. We had slits cut in the “floor” to hold 2″x 3″ mini-blueprints of each of our major areas: Wastewater, Transportation, Land Planning and Surveys. The small blueprints were printed at 45%, so they were muted.

Then, we sent each person a stack of small blueprints of their specialty, with a list of clients. Each person signed their name to the stack of mini-blueprints and highlighted everyone on their list to whom they wanted to send greetings. If they wanted to write a personal note to a person, they put a post-it(tm) note on the piece, with that person’s name, and wrote on the front and back of the mini-blueprint.

We compiled the lists, and a staff person would sit with the stacks of signed mini-blueprints, stuffing each card with the mini-blueprints, held by the slots in the “office floor.”

I documented the results:

Cost: We saved quite a bit of money by not having senior staff use billable office hours to sign cards. Instead we spent our money on seriously cool cards, and had junior staff stuffing envelopes instead of senior engineers. (I timed one of our senior people the first year I witnessed this debacle, and then sat at their desk while they repeated the exercise with the following year x number of staff signing Holiday cards. This ain’t calculus.)

Goals: Good Will for our company, and a lasting positive impression.

Results: Much nicer cards which arrived in pristine condition, instead of mussed up ordinary cards. (I included an example of each in the first report) For a lower overall cost.

Proof:
1) Copies of Thank you notes, from clients, for our holiday greetings.
2) Our cards were pinned up instead of thrown out. One customer wrote to say that they still had our card from the previous year pinned up on their board when the new one arrived the following year.

Metrics and Measurement

I rant to my trainees that they need to spend as much thought on how to measure results as on how to get attention in the marketplace. Then, they need to regularly report these results. Otherwise, they ARE overhead, and expendable at any shift in the winds. Marketing folks who don’t know how to market internally don’t understand a critical part of making their work a career instead of a job.

I rant about tracking Hit Rate and this is why. You must translate your work and your progress into tangible results, and do it routinely. As a Marketing Director, I tracked value derived from each of our activities:

• what is the value of the publications we subscribe to?
• What specifically is the value of the organizations to which we belong?
• Why are we doing this?
• Does it make a difference, and if so what is that difference?

Back in the dark ages, all federal procurements were published in a newsprint mailing from the Federal Register. In my firm, they had over 200 subscriptions to this daily newspaper. However, by the time RFPs are  published in the Federal Register, the winners have already captured all the information they need to win, and started collecting materials for their proposal. It was folly to use this publication as a starting point to identify work opportunities.

I recommended canceling these expensive subscriptions. The decision was met with howls by the subscribers, but the VP who cancelled the subscriptions understood both the reasons why and especially appreciated the savings.

It sent engineers running to marketing meetings to figure out how to infiltrate agencies for whom they would like to and should work. Instead of spending time writing loser proposals, they were figuring out who to meet and what to ask so they could find emerging opportunities. And the hit rate started to rise.

IMHO, the best 360 evaluation is to examine everything you do and figure out whether it is making enough difference to offset the cost. If your day is filled with unquestioned tasks for which you have no measure of value, pick one, and start measuring!

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.