The Pro-posal

Do you know what good looks like when it comes to sales proposals? Yes? Really? Prepare yourself for the biggest learning curve of your career...

In April this year I left my job as Global Head of Bid & Contract Training for Vodafone and entered the world of consultancy, joining Strategic Proposals to front their training activity. They'd been my main supplier for nine years so I knew them well and supported the fact that they're the world’s best proposal team. Their thought leadership was, and is, light years ahead of other proposal consultancy and training firms. So I was excited to become part of the team.

But I was also slightly nervous. Employment is one thing, especially when it comes with the annual bonus and uber-holiday perks of being a senior manager in a large corporate. Consultancy is a different challenge altogether. It’s riskier, but potentially more lucrative; it validates one's reputation as an expert, but it's a gamble where we invest in the one horse that we can influence the most: ourself. It's a sink-or-swim chance to make it with the best.

Five months into my new role and I seem to be cutting it okay, helping clients to achieve the gear-change they seek to win more bids, more efficiently. It's every bit as rewarding as I’d hoped it to be, and the perks I traded when I left corporate life have been more than replaced by the joy of working with a team that's stretching and pushing me to reach new potential. But, by gum, I’ve been on a steep learning curve.

We know that we ‘get out what we put in’, and that hard work and smart thinking can produce impressive results. (My 98% win rate over 10 years ain't bad, but it's humbling when I work in a team of 17 people whose collective capture rate is in excess of the magical '90%' mark.) But in the work-winning environment, we often find ourselves focusing on the next deadline and living and breathing ‘the project’. Finding time to stop and reflect on our achievements can be tricky. Harder still to make time to learn.

But make time you must, else you'll end up in the same freaked-out-intimidated and overwhelmingly impressed state as me earlier this year.

If you haven't done so already, pull your socks up and rev your engine.

I thought my knowledge of proposal best practice was pretty good, but upon joining Strategic Proposals I was shocked by how blatantly out of date it was – with documents following all-too formulaic structures, messages that weren't nearly customer-centric enough, and old-school marketing-style writing where benefits followed features. (Today it’s the other way round, and woe-betide anyone who lists a benefit that doesn’t align to what the customer values.)

The writing in these mega proposals was conversational, natural and to the point. Easy to read and evaluate. Paragraphs were short, following latest research into the attention spans of people influenced by websites and blogs. The layout was more visual. Less text, more graphics and always reflecting the customer's branding. Customer centricity was and is everything.

I'd never used a document manager in 17 years of working on bids and tenders – always performing that role myself, or sharing it with a writer. And I'd never used a designer on a proposal. Consequently, the look and feel of my proposals was about ten years out of date. For a starter, they always had the supplier’s branding and imagery rather than looking like a luxury brochure created by the customer's marketing team. And I'd rarely used an external printing company. All those late nights stood over the office printer, or getting bruised by the manual binding machine. How completely ‘unprofessional’. What a luxury to work with a professional document manager, designer and printing firm who brought their 'A Game' to every proposal.

What I saw in the Strategic Proposals output, I termed the ‘pro-posal’. (As compared to the much-dreaded ‘cra-posal’.)

It was humbling to see, making me realise that – whatever our experience – we always 'don't know what we don't know'. Which creates a new kind of value in every experience.

In proposals, silo working is an easy trap to slip into. It leads to stagnation of knowledge. Proposals end up looking dated and stale – lacking a contemporary look and feel and containing too much ‘lazily tailored’ boilerplate – standard content that keeps getting rehashed because it was fit for purpose at some point in the past. (Ever used content from an unsuccessful bid and hoped that it might prove successful this time round? As Einstein said, "Insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".)

So how do you up your game? How you see what good looks like and create best practice rather than chasing its tail?

Be proactive – search with insatiable hunger for examples and validation of what best practice actually looks like today. (It's likely to be out of date by tomorrow.) Identify the experts and seek their counsel. Be open to fair criticism. Expect them to benchmark your work and guide you honestly, which may require you to take a deep breath about your ability – or that of your organisation.

Become best friends with someone in procurement, a trusted adviser who sees proposals every day, potentially from your competitors. If they're in your organisation then all the better. Seek to understand how they assess proposals – both rationally and emotionally – and if possible how they write RFPs. Spot the trends and seek frank feedback every time.

Broaden your network. Encourage best practice sharing and innovation within your team. Encourage a creative culture (and escape the corporate brand police), to allow you to try out new things. Some ideas will work, some won’t, but the key is to try them. If you don’t, you’ll never know if they’ll work, and will end up stuck in that stinking bowl of tripe called ‘established ways’. ("Change? Us? But we’ve always done it like this.")

Peer review your colleagues’ proposals. See how you compare to your immediate team, learn from them, and spot their mistakes. Get them to return the compliment. Benchmark your ability, first close to home and then in an ever-wider circle. And get experts to benchmark your output too.

Attend courses from a variety of trainers and consultants. See the breadth of what works and what doesn’t. Join the APMP and get certified, and attend their regional seminars and national conferences.

Read loads. Not just proposal books, but sales and marketing books, procurement books, books about writing, punctuation and English grammar, NLP, behavioural economics, desktop publishing, design, journalism, in fact anything that will strengthen your ability to understand and influence the customer. 

Don’t do all of it at once. Plan your steps. Learn in a gradual, organic way. And have fun, celebrating all the new things you discover and do. Pretty soon you’ll be inching ahead of your competition.

So, reflect regularly, work hard and focus on your deadlines, but keep your gaze high. Make every proposal better than the last. And understand exactly how and why it was better. Track your win and capture rates, plot them on a graph, compete with the results of your peers, and email me for praise when you exceed the magical "90%". 'Cos that's when you're a pro-posal manager.

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You can read all my blogs at my author website: fennelspriory.com