I had a mail recently requesting information as to what percentage of “blind” RFP’s win.I replied,

“Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while but that’s not an appropriate basis for a (successful) business model.”

Said differently, my professional opinion is that the percentage of responses which win a competitive opportunity in which there was no previous contact is below 1%….and I suspect is closer to 0% than to 1%.

I’ve stated in the past,

“If you haven’t been involved throughout the customer’s RFP process, ideally from conception, and/or don’t immediately recognize the opportunity as one for which you are uniquely positioned or in a position to effectively compete, throw the RFP away or use it to line your birdcage.”

And I stand by it.

You know an organisation’s struggling when you circulate a document that mentions that proposal submission is followed by a “Negotiate and Close” phase, and the query comes back:

“Is this internal or external negotiation?”

Now, as a proposal professional, the post-submission negotiation process falls outside my remit. That said, it’s frustrating if you do ever find yourself looking on as a team which you’ve coaxed so carefully and professionally through the proposal phase disintegrates as the deal moves closer to signature. You probably know the signs:

• Externally, the customer appears to have the team on the run. Hastily-convened, late night meetings (because “they need a reply by the morning”) seem to redesign the carefully-thought-through offer on the fly, offering more and more in return for less and less.
• Internally: remember those folks who assured you that this could be done? Who promised they’d provide the necessary resources and support? You know: those folks who no longer return the team’s calls, and seem to have buried their heads in the sand? ‘Cos we’re not actually going to *win* this and be expected to *deliver* it, are we?

Recognise the symptoms, anyone? And guess which one’s the more painful?

Always remember: the enemy lies within. (Or alternatively you could go and engage one of the negotiation skills experts out there, and sort out your approvals processes! But a bid wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t painful, would it?!)

Working with a software company recently, I found myself drafting a document mapping out a new, improved proposal process.The team developing the proposal, I wrote, needed to be mindful of other bid activities that might be taking place in parallel. Amongst the critical things to consider, explained, were on-going client meetings, site visits and the inevitable:

“customer demons”

I actually meant demos - of their systems - but somehow my version felt closer to the truth. Fortunately, I did check through the process document before handing over the draft…

Discussing strategy development with a team recently, I found that two course participants had both recently peer-reviewed the same proposal, a couple of days before the event.An easy demonstration of powerful strategies came to mind. I asked one of the pair to leave the room for a few moments, and asked the other to use the flipchart to list the key messages that he could remember from the proposal. We then brought his colleague back in and asked the same question.

Not surprisingly, their lists differed somewhat - each of the readers having come up with differing lists of half-a-dozen or more themes. It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine the evaluation team having been left with similarly muddled messages as to the reasons why they should have selected this supplier. And as an illustration of the need for a proposal to focus clearly on three or four key messages, and to present these in a memorable way, the exercise couldn’t have been more powerful.

A few speed bumps I came across while reviewing proposals.The first one not only stopped me but had me thinking about it for quite a while. I was literally unable to continue reviewing the document due to my mind continually coming back to ponder this expression. Upon reflection, it (inadvertently I assume) combines several concepts and I find it actually expresses an even greater degree of difficulty than the original expression. See if you can find the three concepts I found within this one newly created expression. (Answers are provided below.) The expression within this document was, “There are no golden tickets.”

The second one was subtler but still caused me to trip while reading. The sentence read, “…when seen from this standpoint of view.” Not a big deal right? It stopped me. Would it have stopped you?

Then there was this one. “This is the solution we strongly suggest you go with.” Would you have let this ride or would you, as I did, have to mentally rewrite in order to move on: “This is the solution we recommend.”

* I think this writer has referenced and combined three concepts. The golden candy bar which entitles the bearer to inherit Willy Wonka’s factory, the E-Ticket required to ride the best rides at Disneyland way back when (before your time Jon) and the silver bullet that is the one sure way to stop a vampire.

1. Don’t be scared to walk away. Put another way, don’t feel that you have to bid. Even (especially) when you’re incumbent, work out whether this is good business for you to win - and whether the deal is winnable. If you’ve been losing money on the contract for years, their requirements are unrealistic, they’re a nightmare to work with and their chief decision-maker’s best friends with a competitor, then qualifying out may be the best option.
2. Try and avoid them seeking competitive quotes in the first place. At the very least (e.g. if they’re a public body which has to retender), think what you can do to wire the RFP in your favour - you should have the information, and the access to their people, needed to influence their requirements and criteria.
3. “Play nice” in the period up to renewal - make sure there’s real focus on quality and cost-effectiveness of everything you do in the run-up to the tendering process, and try to throw in some new ideas and improvements as you go.
4. Draft your proposal well in advance. You should be able to predict the questions that they’ll ask. So develop your content, review it, highlight gaps in your knowledge - and make sure that your time between RFP receipt and the submission date can be spent on fine-tuning and tailoring.
5. Play back praise. If you’ve got “nice quotes” from the customer’s staff (at various levels - operational as well as senior management), or data points showing how well you’re doing, use them. Actually, more than this - make sure that your pre-proposal planning discussions recognise the need for such quotes, and that the sales team (actively but subtly) goes about gathering them in before the RFP arrives.
6. Be honest. If things have gone wrong in the past, acknowledge them - but show what you’ve learned, and what you’ve done differently as a result that has avoided a recurrence of the problem.
7. Use their data. If you’re the incumbent, you should have detailed insights into what they do now, and into volumes, costs, service levels, timescales etc. There’s no excuse for your proposal not being the most detailed and specific, in terms of its recommendations and the way it presents the benefits of the proposed new solution.
8. Present your improvement suggestions. One would hope that your “insider’s view” should help you to generate good ideas as to how things could be done better.
9. Show how you’ve improved things over the lifetime of the contract that’s coming to an end. (Sub-text: we don’t only offer you cool stuff when you force our backs to the wall).
10. Subtly - reflect the cost and risk of change, should they go to an incumbent.
11. Be clear, if asked, that were you not selected, you’d handle any “transition out” with the utmost professionalism - that the customer’s ongoing success matters to you, even if you’re not chosen as their supplier.
12. Remember that the competition will be hungry to dislodge you. “What would we do were we in their position” is an important test.

A café I visited last week offered a range of drinks, including a selection described as ‘aerated water’.Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite or Ginger Ale, it seemed, when I asked for a sparkling water, which they don’t stock.

I’m reminded of one of my favourite “worst ever proposal answers”, which addressed the question “Have you ever failed to complete a project of this nature on time?” with the answer:

“We are not at liberty to disclose details of any law suits which may be pending against our organisation.”

(Hey, they had some content from a past proposal. And they had this scary-looking blank sheet of paper in front of them. And it was so much easier to cut and paste than to do any real thinking…)

An email popped up in my inbox a little while back:

“Jon, how reliable is your computer?”

“You know,” I thought to myself, “the damned machine’s been a complete nuisance, almost since the day I bought it.” (Technology and me? Not a good combination).

Presumably, the vendor who sent me the mailshot hoped that my train of thought would go something like this:

“It’d be so much better to have a reliable PC. I really should do something about it. Oh look, they’ve got a special offer. That’s good value. But it’s only valid until the end of the month. I should buy one. Now, where’s my credit card?”

Instead, the flow went along these lines:

“Hold on. This email’s from the same company who manufactured this dreadful machine. I really should replace it soon. But, you know, they’re right: I really would like a machine that’s reliable next time. I must make sure to choose a different supplier when I buy the new box.”

It set me thinking about the challenge of writing proposals as the incumbent. Done wrong, the evaluators are left with questions such as:

Why have we had to force them through a tendering process, with the threat of losing the contract, for them to offer us this cool stuff?

They seem to think that everything’s been perfect over the past few years. It hasn’t. If it had, why would we be looking at their competitors? These folks aren’t realistic, and don’t really understand what “good” looks like.

They keep telling us how much better things will be. Are they admitting that what they do for us at the moment isn’t as good as it could - or should - be?

This is generic. But they should know what we do now, and be using that knowledge to present something really tailored to our needs.

In the next post I will offer you a dozen tips for with developing a proposal for a client where you’re the incumbent.

During a recent discussion with a proposal team, one member struggled quite a bit before he was able to articulate a question he wanted to ask. He just couldn’t find the right words. The question was whether a particular aspect of our offer could or would be evaluated and if so, what kind of weighting it might receive from the evaluators.I realized we needed a new term for just such a situation and offered for the team’s consideration and future use, “evaluweightable”.

Evaluweightable. Adj. “Is our being able to implement the solution in significantly less time than requested within the RFP evaluweightable?”

Feel free to use this when and where appropriate.

Have a favorite new term of your own? Please let us know. Perhaps we’ll start a glossary.

Wow – we had a wonderful response at last week’s APMP Conference to our Proposal Cartoon Caption contest. Nearly 200 entries came in, offering their captions to the following:

BJ and I battled valiantly to align our senses of humour and agree a shortlist of ten – here goes, in no particular order:

1. “How did we win that? We no-bid it!” – Romie Shield, OSIsoft
2. “The dog just ate our proposal!” – Ruth Turman, Blue Cross Blue Shield of SC
3. “So, who knows Urdu?” – Pat Thomas, Logica
4. “New hairdresser in town?” – Chris Rademeyer, Deloitte
5. “It was ‘Eastern’ time” – Diane Keane, L-3 Communications
6. “I stapled my hands together” – Tony Milani, Experian
7. “Oh no… they gave us an extension” – Paul Fleischman, Sybase
8. “The UPS proposal was shipped FedEx” – Esteban, Motorola
9. “Terrible news… we won!” – Ron Nagel
10. “There’s been a small change…” – Pamela Goodman, Ropes & Gray LLP

We’d love your comments as to which you think was the best, so that we can choose an overall winner.

(Huge thanks to our good friend Mike Parkinson of the 24 Hour Company, author of the wonderful book Billion Dollar Graphics, for drawing the cartoon for us!)