Proposal Reviews — Can We Make Them Better, Faster, and Less Prone to Going Off the Rails?

Proposal reviews are the bane of most bid managers’ lives. The stress factor ratchets up exponentially when you have multiple people involved, spread across multiple sites in multiple time zones. And that assumes you are just making one submission! Combine dozens of version changes with deadline pressure and you have a recipe for mistakes, frustration and a process that gets harder to manage by the minute.

I recently came across a terrific article on the topic of proposal reviews by American proposal specialist Joe Latta, who has clearly given this issue a great deal of thought.

Joe shows how we can leverage technology to make the process better, faster and less prone to going off the rails. His article centres around the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat products, including how to annotate comments in PDF; export comments to Word; keep track of everything in SharePoint; and use new features of Acrobat such as EchoSign to get electronic signatures on PDF documents.

There are some great tools and techniques in Joe's article for anyone who manages complex bids.

Why Good Performance Isn't Enough To Retain An Important Contract

When I work with companies who are looking to re-compete for important contracts that they know will be coming up to RFT in 12 months’ time, one of the things that the bid team most often talks about is their operational performance. Of course operational performance is important. It’s what suppliers are being paid to do. But it isn't always the most important, particularly when customers are deciding whether you're worth keeping around for another contract term.

Have you ever heard of a phenomenon called “digital distraction”? Here are some startling examples that explain why looking at the thing that’s right under your nose isn’t always the best idea:

• In December last year, a Taiwanese tourist fell off the end of St. Kilda Pier in Melbourne because she was checking Facebook on her phone and not watching where she was going.  She was found by police 65 feet from the end of the pier, floating on her back in an attempt to keep her phone dry and safe — even though she couldn’t swim.
• Likewise, in August, a man drove off a bridge in Texas after sending this text message: “I need to quit texting because I could die in a car accident.”
• There have been some very serious cases of digital distraction, including a young child who drowned in the bath because the babysitter was looking at Facebook on her phone.

Of course, it’s not our mobile phones that are to blame — it’s the way we use them. It is very easy to be distracted by something that seems like it needs to be done in the here and now without looking at the bigger picture of what’s going on around us.

Likewise, operational performance is the most obvious and the easiest thing to focus on when delivering a services contract. But good performance is what we're being paid for - it's just a baseline expectation. As the RFT gets closer, the relative impact of operational performance is at its greatest and therefore maintaining performance tends to take up a lot of people’s time. There are, however, three other things that incumbents need to focus on — above and beyond operational performance — in order to retain important contracts.  And this work needs to start well before the RFT is released.

Every contract changes hands at some point. Whether it gets into your new, improved hands — or is snapped up by someone else —is really up to you. If you have an important services contract that is coming up for bid this year, contact me and let’s talk about what you and your team need to start focusing on now, over and above operational performance, to make sure you retain it.

Your Credentials Are Not a Sales Pitch – or Why Not to Fall in Love with Your Own Story

There’s more information in the market than ever before, but two things haven’t really changed.

The first is that customers really only care about their own pressing problems — the things that they are charged with figuring out or delivering within their own organisation.

The second is that the great majority of suppliers are, naturally, quite keen to sell their own products and services.

So, as a result, there is often a real disconnect in the way that suppliers deliver their message to customers.  Many “proposals” are really just credentials pieces that push the supplier’s story and assume that the customer will be able (and motivated) to read between the lines and see how that’s relevant to them. This is just showboating — it’s not an actual sales pitch.

The rise of competitive tenders has actually compounded this problem, because “proposal production” has become an assembly-line job that is delegated to the least experienced and least knowledgeable members of staff. A lot of the boilerplate information available to cut and paste into proposals is really just white noise to the customer, who is busy being kept awake by problems that suppliers don’t seem to understand and definitely don’t look like they have a solution for.

Too frequently, suppliers often become unhealthily attached to our own story, and it takes maturity and presence to know when it’s time to change a pitch we spent a lot of time and effort on.

In The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adams describe a pitch that a group of sales reps had spent six months putting together, and that they had to change on the fly to focus on the single issue the customer CEO had most on his mind the day they got a chance to see him.  It’s a good reminder that the sales pitch you prepared is not necessarily the one that the customer wants to hear — or the one that will actually end up closing the deal.

Obsess about Your Customers, Not Your Competitors

Do you spend a lot of time watching what your competitors are doing? If so, it might be time for a re-think. It's summer time in Australia, and for many of us in business, it represents an opportunity for down-time and reflection that we don't get time for during the year. It's tempting to spend that time in contemplation of what competitors are doing — but if you do this, it will only make you crazy.

We all present the best and shiniest face of ourselves to the public. So if you're trolling competitors' websites, looking at their social media feeds and everything that they're putting out publicly, it's likely that what it looks like they're doing is a lot shinier and more impressive than what they actually are doing.

At best this is historical (and sometimes aspirational) information, and at worst it’s simply fiction — not to mention a huge waste black hole of wasted time and effort.

I've worked with companies in industries where every player focuses obsessively on their competitors, and it is a great way to get a headache, not a customer.  This makes perfect sense when you think about it. If everybody in your industry is spending time watching each other, then who is looking at what the market is struggling with or asking for?

So, if you are planning to spend this summer developing your strategy for 2014, start by looking at what your market and your customers are doing. What did they achieve last year? What are they looking to do in 2014? Where are there gaps that you can help them with?

Focus on your customers and what you can do for them — not your competitors — because that's where true competitive differentiation (and sales) actually come from.

Dear Procurement: all I want for Christmas is…

Last December I ran this letter in the Winning Pitch, and it had the highest open rates of all my newsletters in 2012. So if you missed my Christmas letter to Procurement it, here it is again, with a few amendments to bring it up to date for 2013. Unfortunately, the bad news is that not much has changed in the buyer/supplier relationship in the past twelve months. The good news is that there is still room for improvement!

Here's hoping that the New Year brings more balance for all of us in the tendering system. No matter what side of the fence you sit on, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year :-)

Dear buyers,

You need stuff done; we know how to do things.  We need each other, and we really want to work with you to do great things together.

Unfortunately, the tendering system is turning us into adversaries, not collaborators. Like us, you are probably drowning under a pile of forms and schedules, and you must be wondering if there is a better way to make buying decisions.  We think there is.  Here is how, with only a few small adjustments, we can change this system for the better.

• Let us talk to you again. A tender isn't the only way to scope the market and for complex purchases, it really isn't the best option. So let’s have a chat. Things change quickly and you might be surprised about what we can do for you now that you haven't yet heard about. And, while we’re on the subject…
• Bring back Expressions of Interest.  If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and reasonably straightforward for us to complete. They make us feel like we’re in with chance, and not like we are jumping over a very high hurdle for a very small likelihood of return.
• Say what you mean. Years have passed since the introduction of competitive tendering, but the tenders themselves haven't changed very much in all that time. They are often hard to interpret, and the evaluation criteria don’t always match the questions. With better instructions, any supplier with a bit of common sense will be able to bid confidently. That’s good for you, and it’s good for us.
• Timetable a response period that’s reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex RFT requirements and shrinking deadlines. Crunching us for time because you’re late to market only means you get rushed, poor quality submissions. On the other hand…
• Don’t issue a timetable and then grant a last-minute extension just before the deadline. This unfairly disadvantages (and discourages) the suppliers that are prepared, and have made it a priority to respond to your RFT.
• Please, answer our questions when we ask them. We think very hard before we submit questions about an RFT, because we don’t want to waste your time. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or sometimes, any answers). Better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate.  And finally…
• Have a heart - don’t drop a tender on 21 December.  We know you like to come back to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.

There's no doubt the tendering system could work better, and together, we have the power to make it happen. 

You know, at the end of the day, we are all just people. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. So come meet some of us; we bet you will like what you see and hear.

With hope and best wishes for a Happy New Year, Your Prospective Suppliers

Why Exam Swots Make Good Bid Writers

It's been a long time since I was last at school, but in some ways it feels like I never left because my job involves developing bids and responding to tenders. Answering RFT questions often feels like you are sitting an exam every day of your life.

I'm often asked about the skills that are most needed in a bid writer, and how to identify aptitude in internal staff who might be good at that kind of work. Probably the most important is an ability to understand what's being asked for in the RFT, and to respond accordingly. Therefore, a good predictor of likely success in such a role is how good someone is (or has been) at exams, particularly in subjects requiring a complex written response.

Getting good exam marks requires the confidence to understand and interpret and unfamiliar questions very quickly and under time pressure; to plan a response that addresses that question; to identify relevant content and ignore stuff that isn’t relevant; and to weave an argument or point of view throughout. Therefore, a member of staff who has a good academic record with high exam scores in complex subjects is highly likely to be suited to the task of responding to tenders. It doesn't really matter what kind of subjects they were good at – it’s their pre-existing aptitude for this kind of work that is important.

I’ve just finished re-reading the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. In it, there is a character called Mma Makutsi, who is famous for having achieved 97% in her final exams at the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi is the Assistant Detective to Chief Detective Mma Ramotswe, and together they are a force to be reckoned with. Mma Ramotswe has fantastic intuition, where Mma Makutsi is the person who dots the is and crosses the ts. I am willing to bet that if they weren’t in the detecting game, they would make a great bid team.

Likewise, in your business there is an important role for staff members that aren’t academic and don’t think of themselves as “writers”.These people are often great students of life, are good at reading between the lines and have useful insights customer behaviour. Therefore they make great proposal strategists who are good at seeing the big picture.

You need these big-picture proposal strategists, together with great bid writers who are good at the detail, to form the core of a successful bid team.

The Power Of Graphics For Page-Limited Submissions

This week, I’m coming to the end of a strategically significant bid process, working with a large team on a submission that has been in the making for a very long time. I will miss this delightful, talented and committed group of people very much when we hit “send” on the proposal next week. This is a consortium submission from incumbent suppliers pitching to retain a complex range of services worth tens of millions of dollars, and where dozens of people’s jobs are on the line.

Notwithstanding the bid’s complexity, the RFT response templates are — as always, it seems, these days — highly limited in what they will let us include. In one case, we have a total of three pages to cover our expertise, experience, and understanding of the service delivery need. Getting this message across within such tight word limits is extremely difficult, and we have used graphics extensively in this proposal to help overcome our space challenges.

Unfortunately lack of space in RFT responses is a trend that isn't going anywhere.  (Check out my blog post "Why Buyers Are Asking For Short Proposals").

Last year I ran a short program in conjunction with Colleen Jolly of 24 Hour Company in the USA on International Best Practice in Proposal Graphics.  Today, Colleen shared a link to an article written by Mike Parkinson — her colleague and the author of Billion Dollar Graphics — on the topic of Using Graphics in Page-Limited Proposals.

It seems Mike’s clients over in the USA are feeling the same pain as my team and I are feeling here. Mike says “RFPs often ask for the sun, moon, and stars in 10 pages. The challenge we face is when, where, and how do we add graphics to a 10-page proposal (that should be 40 pages to effectively answer the RFP)?”

If you’ve wondered about this yourself, check out Mike’s article where he discusses the reasons why graphics are easier to understand than text alone; why they get the point across more quickly than words; and how graphics reduce perceptions of risk.

"Trust Me – I’m A Professional" - The Limitations of Defaulting To Your Expertise

For technical professionals, such as engineers and project managers, getting a report or recommendations accepted often means getting the customer’s head around fairly complex concepts and problems that the professional understands a lot better than the customer does. Despite this, it is often difficult to convince technical professionals that they shouldn’t be peppering their technical reports with dense and impenetrable jargon that nobody really understands but them.

Last night, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar to a group of 120 young engineers on the topic of Customer Focused Writing. It's always great working with groups of young professionals who are open to new ideas.

Getting people to actually adopt and integrate new techniques - as opposed to just seeing and hearing them presented — is one of the great challenges of a teacher, and particularly one who only gets to interact with trainees once and for a couple of hours, as was the case for me last night. Often the best that you can hope for is that people understand enough about the need to change that they are compelled to review and practice the techniques they have been shown, and to build upon the limited exercises that they get to do in a short training session.

One of the techniques we looked at in the webinar was how to present complex technical concepts. To illustrate the idea that densely packed technical language is hard to understand, I had the group analyse a piece of medical writing that was unfamiliar to them. This piece only contained 150 words, but most people could identify more than 20 unfamiliar terms. That’s almost 15% of the document that the audience had absolutely no hope of understanding.

At the end of the webinar, I was encouraged by comment that came from Paul, who said "You know, I write reports all the time, and I usually just present my recommendations. I never really think about just how much work needs to go into making them persuasive." I’m pretty confident that Paul does now, and that his career will benefit enormously as a result.

Think Like A Journalist When Planning To Present – by Simon Mossman

To be persuasive, you need to have a point of view, and then you need to make an argument that brings the audience around to that point of view. This is something that journalists do every day, and do very well.  I strongly believe that the more you read of what professional journalists write, the better your writing will be.

A friend of mine, Simon Mossman, is a former journalist, and he has written a Slideshare presentation on a related topic.

These days Simon is a media and communication advisor and presentation skills coach, working with business owners and corporate leaders to address their business challenges through communication. If you like this presentation, check out Simon’s blogs at www.commseilleur.com and www.confidencetricks.com.au

Why you should think like a journalist when planning to present from Simon Mossman

Why buyers are asking for short proposals

Like me, you are probably seeing a lot more word and page-limited tender response requests coming out from the market these days. A quick check of the tenders I worked on over the past six months revealed that more than half had page limits for responding to each criterion. On the surface it makes sense as to why this might be happening. After all, if you're a procurement officer or a buyer and you're expecting dozens or hundreds of tender responses, you would want them to be as succinct as possible so that you don't have to wade through pages and pages of unnecessary information in order to score the response. Page limiting and word limiting proposals might reduce your workload by as much as 50%.

But there's another reason why it's a good practice to ask for word and page-limited responses.

That's because buyers understand that it actually takes much more effort to write something within a tight set of limits than it does when no limits are given.

There's a famous quote by the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 17^th century. Pascal said, "I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

To me, that sums it up nicely. When suppliers are not limited in how much information they can provide, it's easy to just throw the kitchen sink into the bid and let the buyer sort it out. This has led to a lot of lazy, assembly line proposal writing.

Buyers know that they will get better quality responses if they force you to think about how you can make your proposal shorter. If you have less space and fewer words to get your point across, the good proposals will be better —and those that were never going to be any good anyway at least won't be as tiring or taxing to assess.

Proposal positioning tip: how to retain important contracts

In contract retention projects, the stakes are very high.  Often there are millions of dollars and many peoples’ livelihoods on the line. My specialty is working on critical bids for contracts that are strategically important to the growth or stability of the clients I work with.  This means I often work on retention projects with incumbent suppliers who are seeking to retain their biggest clients. In one extreme case, I was asked to work with a new client on a tender that represented 100% of their business.  No pressure, then!

In my experience, there are many traps for incumbents, not the least of which involves working with a lot of nervous people who are relying on you.  So if you already have the business, and need to retain it, here’s what to do.

• Sit down with everyone in your organisation that interacts with the customer and ask them a very simple question – ‘If it were in your power to improve only one thing about (customer’s) business, what would it be’?  Really LISTEN to the people at the coal face.  They are your eyes and ears on the ground and they usually have the best ideas about what the customer really wants.  They will also know which of your competitors is talking to them– and the ideas the customer is listening to.
• Approach the proposal like it’s your very first pitch to the customer.  Incumbents get unseated because they lose the fire and the passion for the business.  Prove to them that you’ve still got it.
• Use your proposal to paint a picture of the future, not to talk about the past.  Relying on past successes is a classic mistake that loses business for even the most worthy suppliers. When leading an incumbency pitch, your job is to get the customer excited about why they should sign with you for the next three years and beyond – not tell them what you’ve done for them for the past three years (or thirty).
• Spell out the risks of losing your know-how, your proprietary systems, your people - whatever it takes to make them think long and hard about what it will really mean if they go elsewhere.

What to do when prospective customers won’t take meetings

One of the biggest complaints that I hear consistently from suppliers is that buyers won't take meetings any more. This trend has been growing for a long time, and now that professional procurement processes are firmly established in most organisations, it’s something that all of us are going to have to learn to live with. Suppliers in complex industries with drawn out sales cycles have long understood the value of content marketing; providing information to buyers when they need it to narrow down the field of potential suppliers and help them make their buying decision.

With direct contact with buyers proving more and more difficult to obtain, businesses of all sizes are now turning to content marketing to generate pre-sales activity.

In September this year, IDG Enterprise, a publishing company specialising in the IT market (titles include CIO, Computerworld and Network World) shared its recent study on pre-sales customer engagement.

What they found is that during the IT purchase process, IT decision makers download an average of eight pieces of content to help guide their purchase decision, ranging from product reviews, product demos and literature to feature articles and video. The study showed that video is becoming increasingly important at the beginning of the purchase process, and that these decision makers are watching interviews with industry experts and on the technology itself.

On the downside, the study showed that 82% of IT decision makers find it difficult to locate high quality and trusted content, and felt that much of the content they are consuming contains too much marketing hype and too many buzzwords. The study found that that independent, unbiased, and specific information elevates a supplier’s message and potentially results in their content being shared.

If you are finding it difficult to engage face-to-face with buyers, there is a message here to take notice of. Buyers are still out there looking for information about you —they're just looking in different places, and for different things, to what you're probably accustomed to.

Think about how you can equip your sales force with good quality videos, infographics, white papers, and other content to help drive the pre-sales process, and the optimum amount of content that a buyer will need to consume before they are amenable to direct contact from you.

Read more about the IDG study at http://www.idgenterprise.com/press/video-and-social-media-use-growing-in-connecting-it-buyers-and-vendors#CUSENG2013

Proposal Positioning: Is Your Expert Really An Expert?

Given my background in sales and marketing, I still have a keen interest in what the advertising and marketing industry is doing. One of my favourite things to watch on TV is Gruen Planet, one of the many versions of The Gruen franchise produced by Andrew Denton. I love the way the panellists on Gruen Planet try to get inside the head of what advertisers are thinking when they put certain messages forward. Sometimes those messages can seem very strange indeed.

Recently I saw an ad that - while it wasn’t funny enough for Gruen Planet - certainly struck me as very strange. It's an ad for Sensodyne Toothpaste, and it’s presented by an attractive young woman talking about the benefits of Sensodyne Toothpaste for “sensitive teeth patients”, I think she called them.

The thing that’s really strange about this ad is that this woman is the Marketing Manager for Sensodyne, and they actually say so in the copy. Since when have people trusted the marketing manager’s views as an expert on what makes a good toothpaste? Where have all the dentists gone?

For me, this served as a reminder to be careful about who we put forward as experts in our proposal. Sure, the ideas our experts talk about are generally concocted by a team of people, which may of course include the sales and marketing people. But customers want to hear from experts - the people who have the training and the knowledge to make such pronouncements. I’d be happy to hear the marketing manager talk about marketing, which is what she’s trained and experienced to do.  But when it comes to the benefits of toothpaste, give me a dentist any day.

Context vs content - using your proposal to fill in both sides of the sales conversation

When you speak to a buyer in person, you can tell by their body language and expression whether or not your message has actually landed.  In a proposal, you can’t – and that’s pretty scary. Like it or not, a large part of the sales relationship is transacted through formal RFTs these days, without the opportunity for a feedback loop.  This means your proposal needs to work extra hard to fill in both sides of the conversation – just as if the buyer were in the room asking questions and getting information from you.

Content is what you say in your proposal; it’s your message.  Context is what gives meaning to your message.  Content without context is easily misunderstood.

For example, let’s say you have arrived back in your office after two days on the road presenting new construction techniques to a major client.  Your boss buzzes you and says abruptly “Steve, come and see me right now.”  As you hang up you think “The client called, they hated my presentation, and I’m going to get my butt kicked.”

But imagine if your boss had instead said “Welcome back Steve!  ABC Developments called, and they loved your presentation. Their engineers have raised some questions about the logistics of the new concrete panels.  It’s not a big deal but we need to work it out and get back to them by the end of the week.  Please come and see me now so we can throw around some options.”

What a difference this would make.  Instead of thinking you’re about to get hauled over the coals, you’re straight away thinking about how to answer the client's questions.

Presenting content without context in a proposal is a bit like walking up to an attractive stranger at a party and talking about yourself for 15 minutes without pausing for breath. It's not a great way to start a relationship.

As the expert, you have all this knowledge in your head that the customer doesn't have access to. The buyer doesn’t know what you know; you have to explain it to them. Think of context as a carry-bag for content – context holds your content together and helps it make sense. Part of the work of writing a proposal is to anticipate the questions you are raising for the buyer, and make sure your proposal answers them.

Book Review - Hooked: How Leaders Connect, Engage and Inspire with Storytelling

Stories provide a human connection that is often lacking in a business context. Were accustomed to substantiating claims with facts, figures and case studies, but while these might provide justification for a particular course of action, they rarely uncover the emotional need that compel us to take it in the first place. Hooked - a new book by Gabrielle Dolan and Yamini Naidu - will show you how to articulate and use personal stories in a business context, enabling you to  better connect with others and to motivate true insight, discussion and change.

As someone who has always kept their personal and professional lives quite separate, I have found storytelling a rewarding way to share more of myself with my clients and build greater understanding of who I am and what I do.

Hooked is practical, easy to read and provides a useful methodology to create and share your stories. If you work in a sales or leadership capacity - and particularly if  you're more of a facts and figures person, and you're not getting the results you want - you must read this book. Your communication style will change forever, for the better.

How we block ourselves from being good negotiators - by Bri Williams

Bri Williams runs People Patterns Pty Ltd, a consultancy specialising in the application of behavioural economics to everyday business issues - http://www.briwilliams.com.au  Negotiation is all around us because it is really about relationships. We fear negotiation because we think it is adversarial, and our behavioural biases get in the way of us getting into the headspace of our customers.

Here are five behavioural biases relevant to negotiation, and how to recognise and overcome them so that you can negotiate a decision to help all parties.

Not Invented Here Bias

We love ideas but struggle to take those of others on board. You may have heard this described as the Toothbrush Principle – everyone knows toothbrushes are important, but no one wants to use someone else’s! For negotiation this means you need to work extra hard to understand and consider an idea that the other party proposes.  Better, try collaborating on a mutually beneficial idea, building it together to ensure all parties feel like they own the idea.

Loss Aversion

It’s likely we enter a negotiation more worried about what we stand to lose rather than gain.  This can make us defensive and panicky. To overcome loss aversion it can be helpful to draft your worst case scenario and then what you would do to survive if that happened.  It means you will enter the negotiation without fear and being able to concentrate on a solution.

Actor-Observer bias

We tend to blame the mistakes of others on their character, and our mistakes on the situation.  For instance if someone cuts you off in traffic, they must be a bad driver.  If you do, it’s because you needed to get into the other lane to make the turn. For negotiations this means we are prone to attacking the person and their motivations, overlooking the situational factors that may have caused the issue. To overcome Actor-Observer Bias (also known as the Fundamental Attribution Error), focus on the situation not the character.

Confirmation Bias

Noticed that it’s easy to find stats and facts that support your view? Confirmation Bias is our tendency to zone in on information that confirms our understanding of the world, ignoring, distorting or rejecting contradictory input. In a negotiation it means we are blinkered and may miss facts that actually disaffirm our position. To overcome Confirmation Bias you need to do a 360 degree assessment of the issue. In other words, how would you argue the case for the other party? Remove yourself from the situation, step into the shoes of the other party and you’ll suddenly find a world of new data that can be used by you both to construct a solution.

Revenge It is deeply ingrained that we seek revenge for actions we see as unjust. Despite our best selves, when someone cuts us off in traffic there is that little part of us that wants to tailgate to let the other driver know how dangerous they were. Sadly that little part of us is too often the foot on the accelerator.  In a negotiation there is likely to be a lot of negative emotion, a desire by some for revenge.  To overcome revenge – your desire or theirs – takes a lot of deep breathing and distance. When things get heated (known as a “hot state”) you are extremely likely to make poor decisions so take a break, calm down and refocus on the issue not the motivation.

Proposal positioning tip: the tricycle for triplets

The other day I was walking around my neighbourhood when I saw something surprising - three identical 18-month-olds sitting on a tricycle that had clearly been built specifically for triplets. What a great idea! Our customers' businesses are full of opportunities like this; things that they need built to solve problems that they deal with every day, in this case how to manage three toddlers who all want to get on a bike at the same time.

What are the little niggles that your customers have, and that you can provide a solution for?

Not only will they love you for it, this is a great way to build competitive advantage by providing remarkable customer value.

Building a re-election campaign for your most important contracts

In Australia, the federal election is just about to happen.  So for the last six weeks, we have been treated to a once-in-every-three-years display of politicking designed to win our vote. OK, a confession. I’m a bit of a politics geek.  I follow election night stats the way others follow football. And I have been known to engage in a bit of heckling on behalf of causes I believe in.  (I’ll leave it up to you to guess how I'll be numbering the boxes on Saturday!).

Combine my personal interest in politics with a career in business development and you get someone who just can’t help comparing political campaigns to the campaigns we wage (or don’t wage) to win and retain important contracts.

The election campaign takes less than six weeks (though at times it feels like much, much longer). During this time, our pollies have been tweeting, Facebooking, flying around the country and appearing on any TV program that will have them.  Case in point - the TV interviews that Tom Gleeson did with Julie Bishop and Pauline Hanson in his segment “I Hate You, Change My Mind”.  (Julie Bishop’s performance in that interview really did change my mind.  Pauline’s? Not so much).

What’s most fascinating to observe in an election campaign is the way that people behave when they know it’s make-or-break time. Our politicians absolutely understand that what they do now will determine the job they get – if they get one at all - for the next three years or more. Will they be elected? If so, will they be on the winning side or the losing side? How much impact will they really be able to have for their electorate and for the causes they believe in?

There’s a lot riding on how politicians perform in this campaign - and of course, in the weeks and months that led up to it.

In contrast, think about the contracts that you have coming up for bid soon. You’ll have four weeks to respond when the RFT comes out.

What are you doing to get your agenda in front of the customer now, before the probity period locks down? What are you doing to boost performance? To innovate? To leverage your incumbency advantage, and fence off the business from competition?  In most cases, if you’re honest, the answer is probably “not as much as we should be”.

If you have an important contract that’s coming up for bid in the next 12 months, let’s make sure you have a re-election campaign to retain it.  Get in touch and let’s talk about how I can help you and your team to get ready to re-compete.

Spitball podcast: the changing face of positioning value

With so much competition out there, it’s no longer enough to simply keep providing a good level of service. Customers will always be looking for more - and unless you are going the extra mile to differentiate and to position yourself as the as the clear winner, you will find your competitors are pipping you at the post. As a business development consultant working on large bids and tender responses, I’ve seen first-hand the uphill battle faced by suppliers who haven’t put in the necessary work to position against highly motivated and methodical competitors. Unless you take the time to distill down your knowledge about your customer to what they actually need and value, your proposal or RFT response will be just another heavy tome to add to the pile.

In our latest Spitball podcast, Hamish Riddell, Bri Williams and I discuss “The Changing Face of Positioning Value".  Find out why we think that challenging the status quo and nudging the customer to step outside of what they know is a good thing - http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/

Proposal writing tip: should I use italics, underlining and bold text?

When you're making a pitch to a customer with a limited attention span, it's best not to do anything that is going to distract them from the point you are trying to make. Sprinkling italics, underlining and bold text throughout your narrative may seem appealing as a way to garner attention, but can actually end up breaking the flow of narrative.

If you want a piece of text to stand out, try using headlines, bullet points, or breakout boxes instead.