We all know that first drafts are never perfect.
What some have trouble accepting is that drafts submitted for Red Team review are never perfect. Indeed, proposals as submitted are never perfect.
It’s the flip of that comic-opera song: I am the Captain of the Pinafore.
What never?
Yes. Never.
Operations concepts are never perfect. Costing is never perfect. And so it goes. We do what we can, hope it’s our best, and carry on.
If’n you don’t believe me, check out Seth: Perfect or we’re not going.
Email is great:
Email is not so great:
Proposal Land has both the email-is-great and the email-is-not-so-great communications. Before hitting “send” consider which category your communication falls into.
Agreement used at the bid stage to define how companies will work together on the bid as well as after contract award.
Covers things like responsibility for costs, work responsibilities, and intentions regarding future contractual relationships.
Often used in consortium arrangements.
Acronymized as MOU.
Today Seth’s blog builds on a tippy canoe.
The 16-foot canvas Prospector canoe made by the Chestnut Canoe Company
is not the fastest or the lightest or the cheapest canoe
but it is an elegant canoe.
I’ll have to take his word for it. I’m an occasional kayaker, not a canoeist.
Practical elegance doesn’t mean that the canoe will never capsize.
It means that the thing we built was worth building,
and it left the user feeling better, not worse, about their choice.
“Practical elegance doesn’t mean that the canoe will never capsize” or, as the vernacular has it, “Shit happens.” How can we make our clients feel good about choosing us even then?
Too often, “customer service” has come to mean “answer the phone and give a refund.”
Having recently bought a laptop where they quite reasonably changed-out the graphics card (due to obsolescence) but also quietly added a touchscreen I didn’t order/want and omitted software I *had* paid for, it took me hours on the phone to get to someone who could give me a refund for said software. And you know what? By that time, that was the minimum acceptable response: Necessary but not sufficient to make me feel good about having chosen them.
Customer service begins long before something breaks.
It’s about a commitment to the experience.
Creating delight before it’s expected.
Building empathy and insight into the interactions that people will choose to have with you.
So what’s the lesson for Proposal Land where we usually have clients, not individual customers? It’s the same thing. We have to commit to the experience, whatever that means to the client’s representatives:
And when we do have individual customers (aka end users) in the client’s organization — say, deployed members of the Canadian Armed Forces on a camp-services contract, or client employees accessing relocation services for a job-driven move, or retirees trying to get the right dagnabbed tax withheld from their pensions — then we must figure out how to treat them as valued customers rather than nuisances.
And when we figure out what that takes — hiring people predisposed to this mindset, training people to enhance their skills, recording data about interactions, soliciting and using customer/client input, including measures of the desired behaviours in our quality inspection sheets — then we document that and talk about it in our proposals, along with the client kudos that will naturally come our way.
Of course this takes effort.
So do all the other things that go into a product or service.