Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

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

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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

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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.

 

Customer Satisfaction

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Many Canadian Federal Government RFPs required bidders to address customer satisfaction, which can mean one or both of two things:

  • The happiness of end users of the service/product with the contractor’s responsiveness and service quality. In the context of administrative services, this happiness might depend on their answers to these questions:
    • Do they answer the phone/email as fast as I want?
    • Do they resolve all my problems?
    • Do they act just like the public servants who used to do this job?
    • Do they understand my work environment in a way that only someone who’s worked there possibly could?
  • The happiness of client officials with the contractor’s responsiveness and service quality. Using the same administrative-services context, this happiness might depend on their answers to these questions:
    • Do I hear complaints from end users about how fast or how well the contractor answers the phone/email?
    • Do contractor staff answer the phone/email as fast as the contract says they must?
    • Do contractor staff give accurate information and advice when they do answer?
    • Do I have an easy way to be sure of the answers to either of the two previous questions?
    • Are complaints handled quickly and transparently?
    • Are reports on time? Complete? Accurate?
    • When a senior contracting officer calls, do they jump?
    • Does the contractor do whatever we tell them to do, even if it’s not in the contract?

Discerning readers will have noticed a few things:

  • These two lists are not the same, and the differences matter. That’s true for contracts for administrative services, technical services, cell-phone plans, software development, design/build services (facilities and equipment), and for categories of procurement I can’t think of at the moment.
  • Some list items are subjective assessments and some are objective measurements. That, too, applies to most contracts.
  • Some list items cannot possibly be delivered. Yup, broadly true as well.

So what? Well, the response period is not the time to start thinking about customer satisfaction. The RFP requirements (Work and response) are not even the place to start, although you have to get there eventually.

Start, as so often, with Seth: Don’t insulate yourself from the user experience.

Spend some time in the store.
Visit your own website to get work done the way a customer would.
Answer the tech phone calls for a few hours.

And ask yourself: Would I be satisfied with that? With how easy it is to find things on our website? With what our staff have the information and tools to do? With their speed? With their knowledge and helpfulness?

And figure out how to turn the user experience into a metric that’s as easy to measure as how much money you made last month.

That’s the answer you want in your proposal, backed by some examples of changes you’ve made in response to that metric. In addition, of course, to ticking all the boxes the RFP requires on this topic.

And no, it doesn’t resolve the problem of unrealistic/impossible expectations, but we always start with what we can control.

 

Term: Proposal

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The document (contractual, technical, management, and pricing sections) submitted by a bidder in response to an RFP.

With the simultaneous efficiency/ambiguity that make Proposal Land so delightful/irritating, also refers to the period of time involved in putting together said document.

For example, “How long is this proposal?” can mean the response period or the number of pages. Usually clear by context.