The sum of the client’s decisions on how to contract the Work:
At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar —
fresh as a daisy, cute as a button,
and sharp as a tack.
We don’t have much occasion to use similes in proposals, but clichés go well beyond that.
Cliche, also spelled cliché, is a 19th-century borrowed word from the French which refers to a saying or expression that has been so overused that it has become boring and unoriginal. – Vocabulary.com
In Proposal Land all technology is leading edge, cutting edge, or state-of-the-art. All transitions are seamless. All reporting is real-time and transparent. All services are high quality, superior, or excellent. All training is just-in-time, all standards are met or exceeded, all results are bottom-line. All management? Responsive. All relationships? Collaborative.
Yup. Boring and unoriginal.
Worse, even when the actual claims are true, these words slide off the reader like water off a duck’s back. I mean, like ice cream off a toddler’s cone. Splat.
Instead, tell them what systems and equipment you’re going to use, what you’re going to do, and how. Specifically. To pick one example from the mush above, let’s look at collaboration:
Is this more work? Uh, yeah. Will it get better marks? Yup. And that’s why we’re here, right? Well, that and being cute as a button.
If you’re working in an in-house proposal group, being paid on time *shouldn’t* be an issue but you can still benefit from better in-house clients. Of course, it’s hard to pick your boss or even to directly tell them what to do, but you can pay attention to who makes proposals better/worse (both at the executive sponsor level and at the proposal manager level), figure out why, and work to propagate the helpful behaviours and to compensate for the less-than-helpful ones. For example . . .
You can support achievable schedules:
You can support productive processes:
You can support balanced workloads:
You can support good personnel management:
And so on.
We can treat our companies as a given. We can mutter about what we wish managers would do to ease the pain. Or we can change the conversation by modelling new behaviours.
Although Gandhi didn’t say that we can be the change we want to see in Proposal Land (or in the world), apparently he did say this:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
So there you have it. We need not wait to see what others do. A wonderful thing it is.
Better clients challenge you. They support you.
They spread the word. They pay on time.
They pay more and expect more.
Everything else will take care of itself
if you focus on getting better clients.
– Seth’s Blog
It’s easy to say and hard to do. I worked as a freelancer in Proposal Land for almost half my career and my highly selective modus operandi was to accept work when it was offered.
Why? My first concern was always getting enough work. For a long period, I was also unaware of what better looked like. Didn’t it work like this everywhere? Then I was unsure of my ability to get better and still get enough. Maybe unsure of deserving it.
But better clients really *are* a joy forever.
Better clients challenge you. They support you.
They spread the word. They pay on time.
They pay more and expect more.
Even one of those traits would be worth selecting for; the truth seems to be that they often travel together. I’ll add one more.
Better clients make it easy to do your best work.
And who doesn’t get up in the morning wanting to do that?
The flip side of all this is the companies that hire Proposal Land freelancers. Maintaining specialized proposal resources in-house just doesn’t make sense if there are long gaps between bids, but hiring them is not like buying a widget. You can’t just pick one off the shelf at random and slot them into a gap. Well, you can, but you can get better help by being a better client.
Challenge them. Support them.
Spread the word. Pay on time.
Pay more and expect more.
Company submitting a bid; used extensively in DB/DBFM contracting.
To be distinguished from “successful proponent,” which is the winner. This distinction can clarify whether work noted in the draft contract (for example, submission of a plan) is part of the response requirement (and, therefore, to be submitted with the proposal), or part of the SOW (and, therefore, to be submitted after contract award).
And no, response instructions should not be in the draft contract, but have been observed there, nonetheless. Sigh.