Laura’s Winning Ideas

In proposal debriefs, I am picky about who gets included the meeting.

In an organization with less than ideal hit rates, the proposal team needs to perfect their performance. However, they may need to do this work sequestered.

First, they need to focus energies on tools and process to improve the hit rate. Any other agendas will mute the focus and should not be entertained until the team’s performance is improved.

Second, outsiders with a poorer track record than the proposal team, but politically bigger than the proposal team, should not be guiding the process improvement initiative.

In other words, if you debrief with your team, and include a Program Manager or Subject Matter Expert who is higher on the org chart, they will naturally guide the meeting. Their agenda will be imposed on the group, even if unintended.

However, when these “leaders” perform less well at winning proposals than the proposal team, their “direction” will be misguided. After all, if they knew how to win more proposals, they would have been doing it already.

I wish I had a nickel for every executive who thought they knew just what the proposal team needed to do, but wasn’t. These executives most often have a wish list that they imagine would help them do their job, but does not improve the hit rate.

In my opinion, the proposal team must first focus on improving the hit rate, and once mastered, can expand duties to cover other marketing initiatives.

One way to look at it is, proposals are on the critical path to work backlog. Everything else is support to other activities on the critical path. When looking for ways to improve performance, you must improve the steps on the critical path before anything supporting the line of critical path will make any difference.

For instance, a great marketing brochure will help your customer representatives or sales people, but can’t sell anything. Meeting clients is on the critical path, not the brochure you leave behind. However, an opportunity passing through the sales process can be side-lined by a poor proposal. This is why I focus first on proposals, and second on support tasks to the sales process.

Proposal teams I train remain safe in the face of RIFs or layoffs because they win contracts. All other marketing functions are optional (off the critical path) when cuts are being considered.