Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Silly but True

  2

I never understood why there was so much jockeying for completely irrelevant position when companies came together to respond to an RFP.

I’m thrilled to see the first Pfizer vaccine being administered in Ontario.
It’s time to put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.
– Tweet by Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario
(for American readers, a premier is akin to a governor)

I mean, I understood the effort to grab work: Work meant revenue. But other activities seemed senseless, like the effort each company put into having the name of their company come first in proposal text, when all were listed.

Nova Scotia receives first doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
– Headline in Halifax Today

“Why not just go with the alphabetical order?” I wondered.

Reassuring Data for Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine
– Title for article on the McGill University,
Office for Science and Society website

I mean, who cares? Pick an order and enforce it consistently. That’s it, right?

Watch as the first person in BC receives Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
– News feed from CTV

Well, maybe not. Although most official sites use the whole name — the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine — most commentators and the general public abbreviate that to Pfizer.

If BioNTech had gotten their name first, this would now be its vaccine.

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to do the sensible or cooperative thing and give up that “pole position” for no corresponding benefit. As silly as it seems, and especially in our abbreviation-happy culture, being first can matter.

 

Term: Proposal Team

 

The group of people assigned to produce a proposal in response to a specific RFP.

Always overworked; often overwhelmed; frequently underappreciated.

Structure and make-up varies dramatically with the scope/scale of the RFP.  (See chapter 3 of my manual for more on how proposal teams are configured to tackle the 33 tasks involved.)

Sale!

 

I wish everyone used the Kobo ebook format, because Smashwords is so cool to work with.

I put my memoir on a half-price sale as part of their end-of-year promotion (Dec 18 to Jan 1) and for anyone who sees this before my weekly digest goes out, the same discount is available using a coupon code:

XW45B

And it isn’t even case-sensitive. And it’s right on the ordering page. How great is that?

And how great would it be to use this opportunity to gift my book to your own proposal buddies and support Food Banks Canada in the process? Pretty great, that’s what. (And if your proposal buddies use Amazon instead, well, still great.)

Not the Worst Sentence Ever

  2

There I was, minding my own business on LinkedIn, when I saw a post by a former colleague about safety inspections on fall-prevention equipment. Boring, eh? But wait.

These inspections verify the integrity
of support structures and safety systems.

And I thought, “Wow. It might not sound sexy, but you’d never need to wonder whether your job was worth doing if you were doing that.” So then I thought, “I’ll just leave a nice note. A quick note, you know?”

That’s the kind of job where you never need to wonder
whether what you’re doing is worthwhile.

Mmph. Maybe not the worst sentence ever but hardly the clearest either, eh?  If it weren’t for that business of contradicting the negative of what I mean, it wouldn’t have been so awkward. And so on, into litotes overload.

Litotes (lie-TOH-tees) is an expression
that affirms an idea by contradicting its negative.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t object to this figure of speech in general.

It’s not the clearest RFP I’ve ever seen.

I mean, who among us has not said that?

But, and again in general, we should avoid them in proposal writing. They show up remarkably often, maybe because it’s  a way to avoid what seems like boasting or over-claiming. But the site is called Litotes in Literature not Litotes in Technical Writing. Instead, go for the simple declarative.

This is the stupidest RFP ever.

Bold? Short? Clear? All of the above. (And just to be clear, this declaration has no place in any communication with a client. Ever.)

With all that in mind, I rewrote my nice note.

That’s a job where you know every day
that what you’re doing is worthwhile.

Maybe not the best sentence ever, but better.

 

Good News, Bad News

  2

Are you the incumbent? The good news is you know how to do the work. The bad news is you know how to do the work defined by the previous RFP, which is almost never exactly the same as the work defined in this RFP. Your knowledge of the old work can make it difficult to read the new RFP and really get it.

I tell incumbent bidders that the challenge on their original bid was to get an operator into a room full of marketers. On rebids, it’s to get a marketer into a room full of operators, since most companies use the project or service-delivery team lead the re-bid.

Why do you need a marketer? For at least these three reasons:

  • To provide the proposal expertise that operators often lack, rather than conflating the ability to do the work with the ability to write about it and cost it.
  • To push technical/operational experts to bid to the RFP, rather than assuming it’s the same as the current contract.
  • To insist on citing experience and accomplishments in detail, rather than assuming the evaluators know the company and will fill in the blanks.

This article is a good summary of how to bid as an incumbent.