Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Over-modified, Under-substantiated

And I quote, from front and back covers and preface: “The Ultimate Photographic Guide.  This definitive field guide . . .  innovative photography . . .  A unique fully integrated photographic approach for quick and easy identification of birds in the field . . .    No other work offers, for every North American bird species, the same combination of stunning iconography, including beautiful photographs and precise distribution maps; scientifically accurate and readable accounts of salient characteristics . . .  Furthermore, no other bird book introduces, in such an up-to-date and lavishly illustrated manner . . .  ”

Yikes.  Browsing through my new bird book for the western region of North America – the book I intend to leave in a box in someone’s back room here in Phoenix until my next sojourn in the Sonoran Desert – I begin to feel as if I might not be treating this innovative and stunning book with sufficient respect.

Worse, I begin to feel as if I might have missed the boat in selling my own book.  I did use “indispensable” on the front cover but in a humorous context, and the back cover explains what the heck it’s about and offers an endorsement, but otherwise I am pretty much relying on its content to sell it.

Starting in marketing, lo, these many years ago now, I was startled if not horrified at the boasting tone of so much of what I read.  Over the years my line moved, but I still cringe at a writing style that modifies every noun (definitive field guide, stunning iconography, salient characteristics . . .), especially without providing any, you know, data to support such claims.

I see different words in Proposal Land than in Publishing Land: words like world-class, state-of-the-art, rich, robust, extensive . . .  You get the (stunningly depicted) picture.  If I can’t persuade the writer or the executive in question to dispense with such content-free modifiers, I try to get quantifiable or at least verifiable data to soften the impact of that tone.

But here’s a book that’s been through Publishing Land and that uses words similar to those I eschew. (Bless you.) (Thank you.)  For my book, have I erred?

I don’t know.  Tolerance of, and requirement for, a sales tone varies by person as well as by application.  Me, I didn’t even read the cover or the preface of my new bird book until I got it home.  In the store, I noted its source (a natural history museum of good repute), and then flipped it open to see how it was organized and how the information was presented.  I read a few write-ups.  Then I did the same with a few other books.  How potential buyers of my book will tackle the go/no-go decision remains to be seen.

As for Proposal Land, have I erred in trying to drive out over-modified and under-substantiated  claims?  Nope.  And you can take that as your definitive guide.

Graphics: Not My Fort, Eh?

Lesson #1 for authors writing a newspaper column: You don’t get to choose the headline.

Lesson #1 for authors publishing a book: You don’t get to choose the title or the cover design.

Both are fair enough.  In newspaper column writing it’s because there are space constraints to consider, and because writing attention-grabbing headlines within those constraints is a skill not possessed by everyone.  In book publishing it’s because the person closest to the material may not be the best person to craft a snappy title.  As for the cover design, well, the less said about most people’s graphics ability the more accurate you’d be.  Including mine.

In another life I managed a corporate communications function and learned one hard truth: everyone thought they could help with the graphics but almost no one could.  People who would pass only a cursory eye over the text for a brochure or poster or advertisement would spend what seemed like hours picking at a design developed by professionals trained to develop such designs.

Wouldn’t green-blue make it pop better than blue-green?

Shouldn’t that space be infinitesimally larger?

Shouldn’t the font be indistinguishably smaller?  Italicized?  Bold?  Serif?

Surely that isn’t the best photo we have?

And so on, ad nauseam.

The roots of this pickiness are two.  First, we confuse our personal taste with professional judgement.  Second, we’re almost uniformly lousy at knowing what constitutes “good enough.”

And so it was that after a while in that job, I stayed out of the selection of colours, font types, font sizes, and page layout.  Sure I had an opinion, but so did everyone else.  One more (uninformed one) wasn’t helpful.  Instead, I concentrated on proofing the text for letter-perfect accuracy.  No one else was doing that.

And so it is now that I am grateful to my publisher not only for using my title for my book, but also for allowing me to comment on the proposed cover design for my book.  Given my experience, it’s a courtesy I certainly wasn’t expecting.  The best way I can show my appreciation is by remembering that my personal taste is not professional judgement, and that the designer’s smallest effort will absolutely be more than I could do in a hundred years. 

In Publishing, as in Proposal Land, it’s important to keep your eye on “good enough.”

 

RFP Responses: Not Victorian Scientific Monographs

Brevity is not just the soul of wit, it is a key target in all RFP response writing. And where one cannot be brief, one must use layout techniques, like bullets, that help evaluators see your content at a glance. Long sentences and paragraphs work against your objective: getting good marks for your content. We can all take a lesson from Charles Darwin in this regard . . . Continue reading“RFP Responses: Not Victorian Scientific Monographs”

RFP Responses: They’re Team Efforts

RFP responses are almost never done by one person: big RFP responses never are. Instead, they require inputs from, and the cooperation of, anywhere from 5 to 75 people. Just coordinating that many people is a serious project management challenge in itself.

Success demands that you tailor your processes and tools to the team you have.   Continue reading“RFP Responses: They’re Team Efforts”