“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.

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!

Chocolate and Hazelnuts. Lower fat than peanut butter, and all chocolate. A jar can be kept at your desk forever (which at my place is about two weeks +/-) And did I mention it’s chocolate?

“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!

The first assumption technical experts bring with them is that, what is obvious to them should be obvious to others. This isn’t correct, and loser proposals prove this. In many cases, your competitors are technically as qualified as your team. However, the winning proposal communicates value in a more illuminating way.

Chris Witt at Life after Powerpoint! said it best yesterday:

– Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
– Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
– Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

This is a perfect analogy for proposal professionals. We tip the candles of our SMEs to light the candles of our clients.

Question: Hi Laura,
I read your posts about Fun at Work and loved your ideas. I am an Admin Assistant for a satellite office of a large company. Our satellite office has roughly 14 people, but there are usually around 7-8 people in the office at a time since many employees can work from home or are traveling, and I am the only means of Administrative support physically in the office. I am finding it difficult to keep spirits up with the sagging economy and such a small office — many of our employees tend to complain no matter what I suggest. I have planned a few potluck lunches which we all enjoy and will probably institute a chili or salsa making contest as well.
With limited space, budget, and employee numbers, I would greatly appreciate some ideas to put smiles on some faces.

Tough crowds. I love ‘em.

Here are a few ideas. The first two are holiday events (tuck them away for next year) and the third is good anytime, with a few random suggestions to get your own creative juices flowing.

A) Mystery Gift Exchange

Create descriptions of each person that does not identify them. You are the perfect person to know some tidbits about each person that are not generally known by the rest of their colleagues.

For example:
I once played pool with a professional pool shark, as his ?bait man.? I would start the play, and be good enough to be a challenge, but not good enough to be overwhelming. Once we had an agreement to bet on the game, I’d set up the table for the professional, and then step aside while he cleared the table.

When I was fifteen, I bought my first car. It was a drag racer, and my buddies and I were going to soup it up for racing. My Dad went along to sign the papers and drive the car home since I was too young to drive on the streets. When he drove it, he realized the car was dangerous because it was already very fast off the start. He made me agree never to drive this thing on the streets because it was so dangerous. I guess it didn’t occur to him that drag racing might be dangerous as well.

My sister lives in Nicaragua as a missionary.

My mother worked on an assembly line for a munitions plant during WWII.

Pass out the descriptions to folks as their Xmas gift exchange. No fair sneaking around trying to figure out who you have. You have to buy a gift based only on the description you have.

You’ll be surprised at the gifts folks come up with. Much more interesting than the usual desk calendars you see at office gift exchanges. Participation is pretty good because no one knows who has the boss’ description.

B) Xmas Pixies

You draw names for your secret pixie, and no one tells anyone whose name they got. Between the drawing, and your holiday party, the pixies get to work.

Secret pixies can be good (leaving a few pieces of chocolate on their desk while they are away at lunch) or nasty (emptying their trash can on their chair while they are away at lunch). Folks who witness a pixie can’t let on that they know who the secret pixie is. Most pixies vacillate between being good and nasty. (Leave a bowl of fresh popped popcorn one afternoon, pour a cup of salt on their desk the next afternoon with a note ?Forgot the salt.?

C)   Kidnap your bosses stapler, favorite coffee mug, favorite pen.

The purloined item will be traveling a good deal, so get a sturdy container for shipping it back and forth. Take several pictures of yourself with the item, holding, using, scrubbing or having the item in the background. Print the pictures to send along with the instructions. Include these instructions in the shipping container with your pictures:

Tag! You are it! BOSS’SNAME will be looking for me soon, but I am anxious to get out of that stuffy office. Thanks for letting me visit.
Take a picture for my vacation album, add it to my box, and send me on my way to someone else from the office who I haven’t yet visited. OOPS! Don’t forget to cross your name and address off the list, or I’ll end up back again to visit soon!

By the time the item has made the rounds, it will likely be a topic around the group, by email and phone. Your boss may ask about the item, and that is always helpful.

This is a nice stunt for the month or two before Boss’s birthday. Helps to knit folks together. If you have a WIKI for your office, the pictures could be posted there, in an album you’ve tucked away on the site.

Good morale boosters are designed around your own office antics, and avoid ridicule. For example, we had a PM who mentioned that they hated yellow M&Ms. When a big project was won by that PM, we awarded them a jar of M&Ms with the yellow ones picked out.

When a fellow retired from full-time employment but continued on as a part-time consultant, we gave him a “gold office key” as a retirement gift, rather than a gold watch. (Took an office key out and had it gold plated)

Once you get the hang of noticing things peculiar to your teamates, it gets easier to knit folks together with morale boosting events. Practice makes perfect.

Have fun!
Laura Ricci

P.S. Congratulations to you for leading organizational change. I hope your boss appreciates your efforts or comes to recognize them before someone else recruits you to their firm.

I started working with a wired headset many years ago. You can’t type and hold a phone, so I set up the entire team with headsets.

Wireless has a range between 50 and 300 feet from your desk, depending on the set you purchase and your environment. Being able to walk around while on the phone has been a big help, especially when I’m on deadline. I can run to another office to fetch something, get a cup of coffee, or finish a call while I’m putting on my coat and packing my case to leave.

Previously, most wireless headsets were a problem for office telecom networks, but there are several ways now to be wireless and not suffer interference. I’ve bought several and had some problems and successes. However, there is a common thread to my success, and that has been the vendor, Hello Direct.

Hello Direct specializes in headsets and business phones. The customer service is great. They’ve agreed to replace problem headsets, walked me through debugging phone problems, and been helpful whether I’ve ordered a $1,000 duplex speaker phone or $100 desk phone and headset.

On my last purchase, I called the manufacturer with some questions about how to get set up, and wasted several hours in aggravation. I didn’t think Hello Direct would be willing to mess with this inexpensive set, but I was wrong.

(I don’t get anything from Hello Direct. I’m just passing on my lessons learned the hard way.)

I also use headsets with my cell phone. I can look pretty foolish with each ear hosting a different line! Good thing we don’t allow cameras in the proposal area.

New Book Offers Quick Start on Linked In

If you are responsible for Business Development at your firm, Linked In will expand your network of contacts and impress your boss someday.

IMHO everyone with a career should get a profile up on Linked In for these reasons:

• You never know when you’ll want to investigate new opportunities.
• Prospects, contacts of prospects and other important folks for you to meet likely have profiles on Linked In.
• Head hunters and Recruiters use Linked In to find candidates.
• Linked In offers search capability so a developer new to your community can search for a Civil Engineering firm.
• When you aren’t finding a match with Google, Linked In may lead you to a member of the industry willing to answer a few questions so you can find what you need. “Oh. They call it remediation instead of restoration. That’s why my search didn’t turn up the right kind of help.”
• You never know when you’ll need to investigate new opportunities.

Jason Alba wrote this quick read, and it offers exactly the advice I would give if I were sitting at your elbow helping you get your first profile up on Linked In. This book is perfect for folks new to Linked In.

Well, and I’ve been on Linked In for years now, and I learned several things I hadn’t known, got some good tips to improve my own profile, and generally improved my on line presence.

Besides, who wants to have just their Facebook and MySpace pages show up when someone Googles you?
(or if you’re too old for FaceBook)
Besides, who wants to be considered old because you don’t have any Web 2.0 cred?

1. These departing colleagues will be back again.

Many of these folks will go to work for your clients and be involved with your firm again. Some will go to work for smaller firms who may be good teaming partners for you. Some will go to work for larger firms who may buy your firm out someday.

2. It eases the departure for those leaving, to have a purpose in their final days.

Most often, folks avoid talking to the soon-to-depart, as if layoffs are contagious. Others commiserate and moan and groan. No one needs to nurture a bad attitude as they are closing out their work and emptying their desk.

Most often, my team has put out our shingle and spread the word that we would help with resumes. If your team has the ability, and your organization is going through change, you might consider doing the same.

Here’s the first steps I recommend:

1. Suggest they get a book to help

My favorite is The Damn Good Resume Guide by Yana Parker. This book is short, has lots of examples, and guides you through the process of writing a great resume. The resume and cover letter are simply a proposal, and getting an interview is the same as making the shortlist. In this book, the page of action verbs is worth the price of the entire book.

2. Suggest they start a master resume file

The goal is to look like you’ve been preparing for the specific opportunity at hand for years. The goal is not to work hard on the perfect resume and then make 200 copies to send out.

Sigh. Everyone should update their resume regularly in your proposal database, but not everyone does this. Sigh. Your corporate resume database should include career long activities so you have lots of fodder to customize resumes for proposals, but many organizations only maintain the latest version of each person’s resume.

Therefore, most folks will need a list of everything they’ve accomplished in their career, not just their latest activities. As they remember brilliant things they’ve done, these should be added first to the master resume file before using them in a current resume.

Most job searches will take longer than hoped for. You’ll need to create custom resumes on the fly, responding to opportunities within a day. With a career long master resume file, you have a checklist of your experiences from which to quickly build a responsive resume.

As a consultant, I’m always looking for work. I often find an opportunity in another industry, one with which I’m familiar only because I worked with that industry many years ago. My master resume file jogs my memory for those less recent activities.

A master resume file is just a list of all your previous activities. You’ll edit the ones you use for a resume, and update this file every time you create a new resume. I keep mine in MS Word, and any software will work.

3. Order personal business cards

If possible, they’ll want to hand out new business cards to everyone as they depart. And they’ll want to have them handy to give to everyone they meet along the job hunt.

Don’t be cute. Just have name, address, phone and email on a professionally printed card with a blank back so folks can note where they met and how impressed they were!

My favorite printer is VistaPrint. Pick a style from the FREE BUSINESS CARDS and then pay ($9.99) to leave off their logo on the back. Don’t use the microperf business card stock you print at home. It looks unprofessional, and costs more.

4. Bring in their sample resume for editing

Finally, you can edit their resumes. Fresh eyes and a professional writer are valuable gifts you can offer. Sometimes outplacement is offered, and you may be just an extra option. Sometimes placement doesn’t cover resumes right away and your offer may calm nerves. If no placement assistance is offered, you will be most welcome.