“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.

Photo from druzifer.livejournal.com. Druzifer's Journal

This weekend was another turning point for Social Media.

In Texas, months of drought set them up for wildfires throughout the central part of the state. In the end a few lives were lost, hundreds of homes were lost, and we don’t know yet how many pets and livestock perished or were lost.

It was hard to find information yesterday, chaotic earlier today, and now, things seem to be settling into a routine to manage news, evacuations, animals and begin figuring out where to go from here.

Television was worthless. I knew more about what was going on than friends who are social media illiterates in the areas threatened by the wildfires. They were glued to television, and I live in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

A few gals I know (Ruth, Bonnie and Betsy) in Texas  kept the posts flowing on Facebook until pages could get organized to coordinate news of evacuations and the large animal folks could get organized. Others were also posting, re-posting and tweeting to connect information to folks who needed/wanted to know what was going on. I stayed glued to the screen for the last two days.

Hopefully the local authorities were doing a great job on the ground and every person got the information they needed to evacuate or not.

I’m just a rubber-necker, eavesdropping on the crisis, but it seemed obvious that the large animals were overlooked in planning for such an emergency. The wildfires charred acres of ranch land where 70% of the horses in the US live, central Texas. However, evacuation of livestock wasn’t part of the game plan for the strapped emergency responders.

The evacuation of horses and large animals required some innovation which turned out to be self-organized on Facebook and Twitter. It was fascinating to watch, and should be lessons learned for every business uncertain whether they should be on social media and anyone who might be faced with a crisis that requires timely information in order to react appropriately.

What started out as limited options, slowly became organized evacuation.

Traditionally, horses are let loose to fend for themselves in a wildfire. It’s a nasty option. You are uncertain you’ll ever see your horse again, and certain the sensitive creatures will never be the same again. But getting horses into a trailer takes time you can’t afford. And they can out-run cars and trucks, so traditionally it has been the only possible option when fire was headed your direction.

One friend was out of town when her husband got the call to evacuate. He had no choice and let the horses out to fend for themselves. Luckily, by 2AM he got an opportunity for another run home, and he had the chance to catch and trailer out his wife’s favorite horse. By morning, he got another chance to return and corral and trailer out the others.

However, there were at least 12 hours of no options for folks with livestock in the path of the wildfires. But by the end of just 12 hours, folks with ranch land, water, food or trailers were organizing to fetch horses and other livestock in harm’s way. Everything took place in plain view on Facebook and Twitter.

A zoo was evacuated in just a few hours when things started to look dicey.

The right (or maybe “good enough”) equipment arrived and new safe havens were arranged so exotic animals could be moved. Cell phones were helpful, but overwhelmed as the emergency spread. However, a single call was amplified when posted to Facebook looking for “enclosed heavy metal trailers of at least X’ x X’ and able to travel at least XX miles to deliver drugged lion and two drugged tigers. Three additional enclosed trailers able to carry at least XXXX lbs. each for transport of exotic animals in heavy cages.etc. ” (paraphrased from my own memory of the post)

Veterinarians running low on supplies put out the word for replenishment so they could stay in place while volunteers picked up and delivered.

When the wind shifted, a safe haven for 43 evacuated horses faced fires coming their way. In less than 3 hours the horses were on their way again. If you’ve ever watched horses being loaded to trailers in a calm setting, you know loading this many horses in an emergency is a miracle.

I especially loved seeing University of California at Davis Veterinary School piping in. They offered suggestions. “If you must release horses into the wild when evacuation can’t be arranged spray paint your phone number on their side.” I sent this suggestion along to one of my social media illiterates with my insistence that they sign up for Facebook immediately since this ain’t the last of the wildfires in Texas this season.

There were a few moments of levity. Everyone tuned in to one of the several sites serving up radar with fire postings. By using radar, they showed the smoke plumes so folks with respiratory problems could plan their response. Around dusk on Monday, a new large plume showed up on the radar. For a few minutes panicky posts came over asking whether this new area was yet evacuated. Turns out the colonies of free-tail bats come out in swarms each evening. They mass so tightly and in such great numbers, that radar picks them up and they look like a smoke cloud.

Don’t let the lesson be lost. Make sure your company hears about how Social Media got information flowing so people didn’t have to panic, working without enough information. How might this be used by your clients/firm?

Click here for Exclusive interview with Seth Godin on Leading VS Managing from GiANT Impact on Vimeo.

Leaders IMHO do not need to own the company. It is a choice you can make to lead from within, rather than manage from executive guidance. If you are building a team where none existed before, a Leader will build a team that accomplishes more than they could imagine.

A Manager will accomplish some synergy, and celebrate a 5% improvement over the sum of the parts. A proposal team with a Leader will accomplish much more, 35 or 40 percent improvement.

The suggestion to fire your “D” customers is one I’ve used with success for several clients. It’s a scary idea that makes Leaders take a deep breath, and then jump in and do it. Managers would rather cut their prices.

One of my mentors, Warren Yerks, taught me that you have two choices when your market becomes cut-throat: Cut expenses so you can cut prices, and you’ll make your firm a commodity, always competing on price. The other choice is to be gutsy, fire your “D” customers and sharpen up your offerings to your best customers, innovating so you sell them things they haven’t yet imagined they need.

Gotta love the idea of engineering change by adding fun to the equation. What about your process could be changed positively by adding fun?

Lottery for resume updates? Video dance of Joy for on-time submissions?

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.

• all their phone numbers (work, home, cell),
• all their email addresses (work, and  home) and
• street addresses (work, home, girlfriend) suitable for overnight delivery of documents.

Folks would tease that I kept a “little black yellow pages” with all the personal contact information for so many folks in the firm.

You never know when you’ll need to reach someone and proposals are too time sensitive to wait for the next business day.

< my excuse > I was brought in to help with a proposal underway and did not have the authority nor buyin to use my usual process.< /my excuse >

Sure enough, we go into our crunch weekend, and discover that no one has the home number for the keeper of the cost section. There was a problem, we’d called in a consultant to figure it out, but when he was ready, the cost person was AWOL. Friday night. No response to office voicemail messages nor emails. Great. That cost extra since the consultant had to work blind. With a 5 minute phone call, he’d have finished in minutes. But without his questions answered, he needed more time to work on his own, write out complete instructions, and discuss all possible answers to his questions. Luckily we had until Sunday morning to finish the cost section.

Saturday we meet, but the files are not available. Some of the firm’s servers are down and the internal team members can’t communicate. However, we don’t know this because we don’t have alternative email addresses that could be used to alert everyone. And we don’t have an alternative repository (I use Dropbox, so copies of everything would have been on all our hardrives in a case where the server had gone down.) so we waste time sending files to alternative home email accounts once we get together by phone.

Sunday, we need final approval and the signature of a principal of the firm. You guessed it, no one had the guy’s home phone number. The files couldn’t be emailed earlier because the servers were off line. He was carrying a blackberry so we could communicate with him, but he wasn’t close to a fax machine, and couldn’t open documents.

I abhor heroic efforts to do what should be effortless. I save the heroics for legitimate emergencies, and manage with a process designed to avoid details tripping up progress.

Example of a Legitimate Emergency:

True story: It’s final production on a proposal after hours, and the proposal person is packing proposals in a box. He looks out the window when he hears some commotion. A moose has ambled into the parking lot and walks over his car, smashing the roof in, and breaking all the windows. (Evidently moose aren’t too smart nor delicate.) This is a good reason to have home phone numbers in case you can’t get a taxi in time to get you to the last courier drop.

“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.

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.

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.