The slightly scary thing was that this was at 10.30 on the Friday morning. Oh well: there goes the weekend…

The sad thing is that it’s rather presumed by many salespeople that we proposal folks will merrily work 24/7 to get their documents out of the door. And the sadder thing, perhaps, is that many of us do.

I am SO glad to be out of my box once again. I’ve just arrived in Nashua, NH (that’s where the U.S. offices of Strategic Proposals LLC is located) having travelled (apparently by the slowest means possible!) from Chandler Arizona, where I attended the 20th Annual conference of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP).

The conference was great fun and I enjoyed being part of it. I even got to share the stage with Jon and BJ as they opened the event. I also hung out where the pictures were being taken for the profiles, helping the Dianes take all those pictures and hang up all those profiles.

I really enjoyed seeing and catching up with the folks whom I’d visited over the course of the last 6 months or so. Fortunately, enough time had passed since I’d seen many of these people and, fortunately for me, they seemed to remember only the good parts of my visit with them. I also enjoyed meeting the new folks who stopped by to meet me.

I was brought to the conference by Don Stewart of Honeywell, who lives in Chandler Arizona.

It was so nice traveling in his truck, even if it was just for a short trip, instead of being shipped! That box is getting kind of cramped these days as people keep giving me things to take with me. More on that in a minute. Prior to visiting with Don I was with Joe Villa and the gang at Motorola in Colorado.  I think they’re the ones’ that added the Air Force Academy T-shirt to my box.

Those of you who have been following my adventures will know I’ve visited with quite a few proposal groups across the U.S. I’ve visited with the 24 Hour Company in Virginia, with Medical Transportation Management in Missouri, Connexus in Texas, Project Time and Cost in Atlanta and a host of other groups and places. And I’ve got fond memories and mementos from each of my visits. Here’s what’s currently in my box:

•    A baseball cap from Leonies
•    A leather biker jacket
•    Wrap around shades
•    Three Hawaiian leis (orange, blue and white)
•    A badge for Sanborn (Total Geospatial Solutions)
•    A water bottle
•    A Motorola luggage tag and badge holder
•    An Air Force Academy T-shirt
•    Copies of what appear to be some animal’s rear end.
•    A folding beach chair
•    A photo album
•    An empty tequila bottle

It’s been quite an adventure so far. From here I’m headed overseas to meet up with Jon and the Strategic Proposal folks on that side of the Atlantic. I’m told there’s a quite a few proposal groups that have requested I visit them and that I’m going to get to see lots of place in Europe and maybe even the Far East and Australia! (If you’d like me to come visit you and your proposal team, just send a mail to me and we’ll put you on the list.)

But before I get back in my box I’ve asked BJ to take me for a ride on his motorcycle. Got my shades, got my jacket and it’s motorcycle week here in NH (Laconia!). Woo hoo!

For instance, the site has a graphic that depicts the various locations on a particular team’s schedule for the season. This could have been presented as a simple table which would have been pretty boring. Instead, it is presented on a map, with connecting lines from the home field, in much the same way an airline presents its routes.

The graphics on the site really made me stop and think about how information within a proposal might be presented in a much more relevant, interesting and most importantly, memorable way.

*The picture below of Jon at a Diamondback’s game while in Arizona for the APMP conference is how I typically think of a baseball game. Ok, maybe it was the jet lag.

You can picture proposal teams ten years hence, when the awful phrase has crept into everyday business usage:

Requirement – “You will resolve at least 99% of problems within one hour.”

Answer – “Whatever.”

In this article, Andrew Concors, a physical therapist and certified industrial ergonomist at San Diego-based CPT consulting, is speaking about the use of a ‘gym ball’ instead of a chair. No doubt you’ve come across someone in an office sitting on one of these things.  The gym ball, also known as a Swiss ball, is said to better for your posture, physical well being, etc, than sitting on a chair.

Andrew points out that the gym balls are not without risk, stating he is aware of several patients who have ruptured their balls while sitting on them. Ouch!

For those of you not in the know, Twitterers (twits?) send short text messages from their phones to the website, describing what they’re up to at any given moment in time. Frankly, I don’t really get it: I can survive without knowing what folks are up to on a hour-by-hour basis.

Yet it has provoked me to ponder the potential of this and other technologies to help when developing proposals. With the right security, it might really cool if all of those working on a proposal team had a window in the corner of their PC, in which messages popped up at regular intervals from others on the team. (”Just heard from the customer that…”; “Don’t forget to…”; “Anyone know how…”; “I’ve just had a good idea…”).

Twittering? Instant messaging? A blog open to all those working on the deal? Anyone out there already using these or other collaborative technologies to share information quickly between the members of the team working on a proposal?

“I don’t feel that we lost it, we just didn’t necessarily win it.”

No. You were the incumbent. The customer came out to tender. Your main competitor now holds the contract.

You lost.

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Take one recent document we reviewed. Apparently, should they win the contract, the supplier’s staff will conduct regular “client visitations” to the customers’ offices.

Having checked the Oxford English Dictionary, I assume they mean this in the context of ‘1. an official or formal visit’. Yet in the context of this project, where creating a sense of partnership was all-important, an air of ‘formality’ isn’t at all what the bidder was seeking to convey.

Moreover, most people would associate a ‘visitation’ with the alternative definitions:

2. the appearance of a divine or supernatural being.

3. a divorced person’s right to spend time with their children in the custody of a former spouse.

or

4. a disaster or difficulty regarded as a divine punishment.

None sounds like the proposed meetings would be a joy, although they may be eerily close to the truth of some customer-supplier meetings I’ve attended in the past.

Perhaps they simply meant ‘visit’ – so maybe that’s what they should have written! Proposal managers always need to remind contributors of some of the basic rules of good proposal writing – and encouraging them to keep it simple should certainly be on the list.

I heard about a new app today. This app is called RunPee. What this app does is identify the moment or moments in a movie where the person viewing the movie can leave to use the bathroom and not miss something critical to the movie. It goes even further, providing information as to what the person might have missed. In my opinion, this is pure genius and clearly demonstrates the concept of determining what a person might need and then providing it.

An, as most things do, this got me to thinking about proposals and wondering what I would like to be able to do from my iPhone as relates to proposal work.

I have a few ideas, but before I present mine, I’d love to hear from our readers as to the app they’d like to see.