A mysterious stranger
joins forces with a notorious desperado
to protect a beautiful widow
from a ruthless assassin working for . . .
the railroad.
Yes, this was an actual movie description on a to-remain-unnamed streaming service. I understand the breathless tone when you’re going for the click, but too much proposal writing is also of this sort: loud with extraneous modifiers, yet silent where it should speak.
Seth Godin almost always has a perspective worth reading, but I’ve been startled to discover how many of his posts directly apply to my world: proposal management. Today’s was no exception.
Fill in the blanks looks at the amazing development of the periodic table. In laying it out, Mendeleyev had a small problem. Building on the work of earlier scientists, he thought he could see the pattern in the properties of the elements, but he didn’t have an element to fill every slot in his framework. So he laid it out in what he believed was the right way, and left blanks where, well, there ought to be an element, dagnab it.
. . . they pull me back in.
– Michael Corleone
Into proposals. Into blogging about proposal work. And so here we are.
Where exactly is “here”? Time will tell.
If you’re going to use page limits,
either to manage your proposal evaluation timeline
or to force bidders to think about what really matters,
here’s the second tip on how to do them better.
Align your page limits with the content required to answer the questions you ask, by doing a sanity check on the number of elements and the number of pages.
In Proposal Land, a lead is a proposal team member assigned to coordinate a task area, as in “Who has the lead on that?”
In the real world, a lead is someone (just short of a supervisor) assigned to coordinate a task area. Most often seen on large projects that require layers of supervision and technically or functionally conversant supervision.
In both cases, this use connotes that the position does the work as well as supervises it.