How to Protect Yourself From the Amateur Houdinis PDF Print E-mail

Lockheed Martin proposal teams work in secured areas with no windows, sentry posted 24 hours a day, and regular sweeps for electronic eavesdropping devices. They aren't doing this because they like it. They do it because they have to. And it's not the professionals that create the greatest threat, it's the hobbyist spies. 

To protect yourself from an overzealous hobbyist or disgruntled employee, you need to pay attention to your marketing information and proposal process. Here's what you should do:
  • Provide a secure facility for proposal and marketing meetings to take place
    An inside office allows you to cover the walls with whiteboards or tack boards for proposal planning and strategy. You should also unplug phones when they're not being used in meeting rooms. (There's a neat-o piece of equipment that sells for less than $300 that allows the speaker to a phone to be "opened" even if the phone on that line is "hung up;" the tap works anywhere, between your phone board and the phone company's transmitter several blocks to several miles away.)

  • Do not share any information without a "need to know"
    Marketing intelligence and proposal information should always be treated as privileged. One of my clients invited three new hires to sit in and watch a theme meeting. Afterwards, one of these fellows went to a local gym and described all of the details of the meeting to his buddy. He didn't know that the gal on the Stairmaster next to them was a proposal coordinator from the competition. When she told her boss about it, he planted three ghost stories in their proposal to sabotage that firm.

  • Do not use a dedicated FAX machine for your proposals
    FAX machines can be intercepted with ease. No one is interested in tapping a FAX line flooded with general business traffic like your lunch orders, office supplies, and an occasional tidbit from a proposal. Make life difficult - if you must FAX, use a busy FAX machine for your proposal business.
  • Humor your resident paranoids
    Their instincts are good and they will save you grief someday. Make sure all of your employees realize that their jobs and the future of the organization rely on your ability to win competitive contracts. (No one ever lost a proposal because they were too paranoid.)

  • Lock your doors, even when going to the bathroom
    It only takes a few moments for someone to "lift" a document off your desk or glance over your notes.

  • Don't use temporary help of any type
    During critical proposals, do not let the janitorial staff in the proposal preparation area. Shred all outgoing paper or secure it until after delivery of the proposal.
Next page in the Magic of Winning Proposals | Senior Management | Proposal Manager | Proposal Coordinator | Production Staff
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We were working on a $25 million dollar proposal. The competition was fierce. We tightened up security to the point that even I did not look at the cost proposal because I could see no reason I needed that information to manage the rest of the effort. Within 32 hours of our delivering the proposal, I received a phone call. A friend of mine had a friend who worked in a beauty salon nearby as a manicurist. Seems she had a customer yesterday who came in and told her all about a $25 million dollar proposal that her important Vice President hubby was in town working on. She related the client for whom the proposal was being prepared, the method we were using for delivery, and the cost of the total project along with the costs of each of the three major tasks. I was embarrassed to have to go ask someone else to verify that all of these numbers were correct because I had prevented myself from knowing this information as a matter of security. Unfortunately, one of our competitors had called and asked for a 48-hour extension and got it. I don't know to this day whether they had any inside information... because we lost, and the commercial client was not willing to show us the winning proposal.
 

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