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.

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?

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!

Matteo Ricci was the first missionary from the West who was welcome and became revered by the Chinese leadership. He arrived in 1583 with new knowledge from the West, but was open to discovering the sciences and inventiveness of the Chinese educated class. Contrary to the BBC article, he was not the first missionary sent to China, but the first who was allowed to stay.

His first work in China was a small book, On Friendship, which just became available in the US in english. The Chinese Prince who had commissioned the book was pleased, and the small book became very popular in China.

I’m going to try to get to Washington D.C. to see this before it leaves for Minnesota where it will have a permanent home with its new owner. It’s one thing to try to keep up with the Joneses, but just try to avoid being a slacker with ancestors like these!

The Shoe is on the Other Foot

For instance, I hired a contractor to update my website to the latest version of software. The site is large, with over 200 pages. And I’m not technically competent with these CMS platforms (that’s why I hired them to do it for me!)
In the meantime, I’m busy with other work.

Problems Creep In

The contractor is quite competent at what they do. I’ve worked with them before, so I’m not worried that they aren’t doing the right stuff. However, they’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that this project is my main focus, and are treating it like the center of my universe as well as theirs. I’ve been on their side.

Who among us doesn’t feel the proposal in front of us is of paramount concern and should trump anything else on the desk of the Subject Matter Expert we are calling upon for a resume update?

This morning I check in to see what progress is being made and I get a message assigning me work! To complicate matters, the message is in a foreign language: “Additionally, be sure to use JCE advance link for the internal links so that all links will be the Joomla’s default, not the SEF ones as it will cause problems when turning off SEF.”

Take a Deep Breath

So, now I have new work I hadn’t anticipated (1st problem) and instructions that presume more knowledge than I have (2nd problem) and no alternative offered to solve either (3rd “opportunity”).

How to Make it Win Win

The beginning of the project is key to ending with a successful project.
Ever notice that some proposals go smoothly and others are knock down, drag out, battles? When I think back on these proposals, I usually find that we tried to skip or give short shrift to a methodical kick-off meeting, and/or new players joined in but were not given a full briefing before taking on tasks.

Problem 1 could have been solved if the contractor had gone over the process and explained in the beginning that there would be some work I would have to do to rename files once he got close to the end of the project. I would have been ready and willing.

How often do we get push back when we send a request for information or a write up we need to respond to a specific section of the RFP? Is it possible we could do a better job prepping folks so they know these types of needs will crop up and need to be responded to promptly? Were any examples offered so that they had a clear picture of what your requests might look like? Did you tell them a story about prior proposals so it was easy to remember and easy to imagine themselves in the role they have for your proposal?

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.

This is from GE Ecomagination group. That’s me, holding a hologram that moves as I move the frame. To create this 3D hologram, I’ve printed out a frame and then held it up to my webcam, push the button and magic is in my hands. The sun rotates as I move my paper “frame.”

Too Cool to Miss Technology

Do this yourself by clicking on the picture, or going to the website here.

Most proposal folks I know are fascinated by technology. After all, who else could do what we do, bringing science and technology to life under the constraints of a typical proposal RFP?

If you have a webcam, this is a cinch. Now, for the serious part.

Could your next proposal deliver a working model?

How can your firm use this technology to deliver demonstrations of your work? Would it help to send working models  with a proposal? In this screenshot, you can’t see the moving elements: sun, solar panels, birds, etc.

What will happen if your competition adopts this first?

Check out the website for information about the code required for this animation. Inspire someone at your firm to take a look at this and wonder about whether it can be used to help demonstrate a project in a sales call, or help decision-makers get comfortable with your recommendations.

The code for this hologram is open source. My favorite price, free. However, as Professor Dave Clark says, “That’s free as in free speech, not free beer.”

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.

In Part 3 of this series we described the importance of providing discriminating proof for theme features and benefits to substantiate your claims and to give your customers the reasons to believe. In Part 4 we describe a proven methodology for developing winning proposal themes that are compliant, compelling, and position your company to win.

Most experts agree that you need to think about (and write down) your proposal themes BEFORE you start the proposal drafting process. Failing to follow this simple idea causes proposal teams to fall into a number of common proposal development traps.

1. Drafting proposal prose before themes are identified and vetted.
2. Placing too much emphasis on the wrong features and benefits.
3. Lacking a common vision and thematic threads throughout the proposal.
4. Playing into the hands of your competition with a ‘me too’ response.

What can proposal teams do to avoid these common pitfalls?

The Recipe for Success
There are a number of established ways to develop proposal themes and discriminators. The best recipes for theme development all have common elements that include a few simple ingredients that come from the RFP, the capture plan, and the collective intelligence of your capture and business development teams. (Exact measurements may very depending on the type and quality of the RFP.)

• 2 ounces of proposal evaluation criteria (Section M)
• 1 ounce of proposal instructions (Section L)
• 4 ounces of requirements (Section C, SOW)
• 2 dashes of customer hot buttons
• A pinch of competitive intelligence

Your proposed solutions are also key theme development ingredients. Most recipes for great proposal themes require at least 1 scoop of solutions for each of the following areas (technical, management, past performance, and business/pricing).

Use a Method…Any Method
Although the proposal theme recipe sounds simple, most proposal themes end up being…well…half baked. The problem is many proposal teams fail to invest the appropriate time and resources developing proposal solutions and themes. Many proposal teams bolt for the boilerplate and forget about themes altogether – hoping that they will miraculously emerge in the Executive Summary the night before the proposal is due.

There are scores of proposal development methodologies that include some form of theme development process. I recommend a 3-step process that starts with the RFP and leverages information that should be documented in the capture plan.

Example: The technical volume of a five volume proposal is worth 60 percent of the points and the other four volumes are of equal weight (10 percent each).

Step 1: Develop high-level themes (starting with features and benefits) that are roughly proportional with how the customer will weight (and score) your proposal. Detailed evaluation sub-factors (in Section M) are an excellent place to start and literally tell you what the benefits should be. For this example, consider 5-8 high level technical themes and 1-2 themes for the other four volumes to represent the relative (6 to 1) ratio between the weighting of technical volume and the other volumes.

This approach obviously depends on the wording of the evaluation factors and the real weighting of the price factor. The main point is that placing too much emphasis on anything but the technical solution in this example is likely to yield a number of themes that are not as important to the customer resulting in lower evaluation scores.

Step 2: Once the high-level features and benefits are developed, list the proof-points and discriminators for each theme. Define as many proof statements for each theme as you can, using quantifiable metrics. Be creative and get as many of your ideas down on paper. A good starting point is 5-6 proof statements for each theme. Use a template (PowerPoint or Word) that highlights the volume, theme statement (feature and benefit) in a highlighted box. List the supporting proof statements (in order of importance to the customer) for each theme underneath the theme statement in a separate box. Use the capture plan as the basis for integrating customer hot buttons and competitive information into the themes and proof statements to create powerful discriminators that set you apart from the competition.

The resulting high-level proposal theme deck (approximately 10-15 slides) should be included in the proposal management plan, uploaded to your document management or backup server, and posted on the proposal room wall. The theme deck also serves as the basis for the development of the executive summary.

Step 3: Develop more detailed themes (features, benefits, and proof) to support the high-level themes at the volume, section, and requirement levels in accordance with the proposal instructions, evaluation criteria, and the requirements (SOW). Incorporate these lower level themes into the storyboard, module plan, content plan, or whatever pre-proposal planning deliverable you use. Now you are really ready to write the proposal.

Even the companies that have established proposal development organizations, processes, and tools in place often fail because they either lack the discipline to follow standard theme and proposal developments procedures or they simply don’t have the right people on the team. Part 5 highlights some of the most common theme development challenges and provides some practical recommendations you can use to create great proposal themes.

Chris Simmons is the founder and principal member of Rainmakerz Consulting—a business development solutions company specializing in proposal management, writing, and review.