Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Making Change Happen

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Today, Seth is primarily on about branding and advertising, but his questions are good for executives deciding which projects to chase. And for proposal teams tasked with the chase.

What do we intend to remind people of?

What genre are we playing in?

What problem do we solve?

What problem does our existence cause–for competitors, for users, for bystanders…

There are lots more. Go find the ones that make sense for your line of work, your company, your way of being in the world/market. And then answer them, in plain language.

Using an LLM in Teaching Proposal Writing

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No, I haven’t done it.  LLMs did not exist when I last worked a proposal. (Tell me how old you are . . .)

People can learn by doing, and one good way to illustrate how to write well is to expose writers and editors to bad proposal responses and to get them to improve the writing. Here’s the problem. You can’t use a bad example within a company without potentially humiliating the author. Neither can you use bad examples across companies, for confidentiality reasons. What you want is bad text on a relevant topic, created just for training purposes.

However, I have tried to write bad text and it’s a difficult and time-consuming task. Given all the bad writing in Proposal Land, you might think it would be easy to craft a bad response, but it is not so: Gobbledygook won’t work. The text has to make sense and be largely correct from a technical point-of-view, but also be badly organized, repetitive, and full of believable English errors. You want to approximate the mistakes that proposal newbies make.

So. If you would like to have bad text for training purposes, consider using an LLM to draft and revise it. As part of your analysis, check out this post by Scientist Sees Squirrel, and learn from his well-documented experience and results–albeit in a different field of writing.

The tl;dr: it’s possible to use LLMs spectacularly badly, both unethically and ineffectively, either for writing or for mentoring it.
It’s also possible to use LLMs well – in ways that help writers think about writing, rather than in ways that let them avoid thinking about writing.

Run in Circles?

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He’s OK now, but in late April my husband had a cardiac arrest at home. The reason that sentence doesn’t say “my late husband” is solely because of the astoundingly quick and effective response of one police officer and the team (more police! paramedics! supervisors!) that followed him a few minutes later.

That has led me to think more about emergency response and my limited capacity therefor in the last two months than I did all together in the previous 73 years. Not smart (the lack of earlier thinking, I mean, not what I’m doing now). From personal failings we now move to corporate ones. Organizations, after all, are full of people.

Of course most businesses have on-site first-aid kits (some, tidily stashed on a shelf where you need a ladder to get at it); many/most public buildings these days have AEDs. (Do you know where they are in the places *you* frequent?) Many/most businesses also have some sort of contingency plans. I know because I’ve edited them: lists of actions to be taken in both fast-moving and slow-moving disasters. Floods, power outages, pandemics, attacks by armed brigands. OK, that last one maybe depends on where you live and do business.

But do many/most businesses have contingency plans for what they’ll do when a customer complains? When a hundred do? On the same day? When a production line goes down and orders are going to be late? When a major supplier of essential goods or parts is attacked by armed brigands? When a big electrical storm hits a site where they deliver services to customer personnel?

Seth addresses this question today: And when it breaks? It’s definitely worth the 30 seconds it will take to read. It’s worth the hours it will take to figure out your answer, and the days/weeks/months to put your answer into action.

When you’re not smack dab in the middle of an emergency, spend some of your time getting ready for one. What will you do when it breaks?

What does this have to do with proposals? Just this: Clients ask about your contingency plans, sometimes. You should tell them about your contingency plans, always. And, boy, is that ever easier when you actually have some.

 

Pick One: Leverage or Panic

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Read Seth today.

Waiting for trouble
means that you’re going to spend your days dealing with trouble.

That is all. (That is me, channeling the PA announcements in MASH, the movie.)

OK, not quite all. I knew a manager like this once: a person who let a project get to crisis mode before intervening. Hi, ho, to the rescue!

I’ve known processes like this, often.

We can do better. Truly.

 

YES

 

The “YES” was me. The question was someone else.

Do we have to tell the truth?

The all-caps of that YES in print captures my tone. Back in the day, it didn’t seem like a question that should have to be asked in a business meeting on the strategy for a proposal. It still doesn’t. But some folks think all marketing communications is lying.

Just in case I hadn’t been clear, I went on.

Two reasons.
First, it’s not good to lie.
Second, they won’t be fooled.

And, indeed, customers–whether the corporate and government behemoths we were selling to, or the individuals that many companies are selling to–will not be fooled. That is, we might get away with it once, but we cannot lie our way to enduring success.

So think about the messages you might want to hear and know you could rely on.

Do we make mistakes?
We do.
And when it happens.
we work hard to make it right.
Here are three stories about that . . .

Or maybe this.

Do we offer the highest-quality widget
that you can buy?
No.
But we think it’s the best value
for these five reasons . . .

And so on.

And if your customers can’t handle the truth, then find new customers. I know, I know: easy to say, hard to do. But it’s nowhere near as hard as getting into a downward spiral with your customers. Proposals are not a con game, and we are not con artists.

Continue reading“YES”