Kick-off

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:07:39 GMT

The importance of preparing and running a proposal kick-off meeting

A colleague of mine once described the arrival of an Invitation to Tender (ITT) as a ‘meatfest’, summoning up the image of a hoard of people desperate to get hold of a haunch of venison to satiate their hunger. The document would arrive, everyone would grab a copy, then a flurry of emails and conversations would start up between anyone and everyone about what should happen next.

I say: ‘Whoa, steady on. That’s not the way to do it.’ Discipline and control should kick in when an ITT arrives so that sensible business decisions are encouraged, and resources are used effectively and efficiently. Early preparation and planning are critical to ensure reduced stress later on.

In your proposal management process, there should be a step called ‘kick-off’. Contrary to popular belief, this should not happen on the day the ITT arrives, but between 10% and 20% through the response timeline. Let’s explore why this is so important.

Start as you mean to go on

When the ITT arrives, it should be received and assessed by the proposal manager and only the proposal manager. The first action is to make an inventory of the documents that have arrived. Store them in a central folder in whatever electronic system your company operates. In parallel, resources should be allocated to work on the proposal under the leadership of the proposal manager. These resources should comprise a core team plus writers, graphic designers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), reviewers and approvers. Each member of the core team will lead a different ‘strand’ of the work – for example, the technical solution, the delivery approach, and the commercial deal. Some people may well double up in different roles, but they must all be identified and allocated their responsibilities.

To bid or not to bid

Only at this stage should the proposal manager begin to share the ITT, but even then only with the core team and management. The proposal manager will distribute the relevant documents to the relevant people with a request for them to review and qualify that they contain what was expected (if you have been nurturing the opportunity) or (for new opportunities ) they represent something winnable, deliverable and profitable. For smaller ITTs, this may just involve one or two people. The main purpose of the step is to inform a bid/no-bid checkpoint before expensive time and effort is spent. Once the core team and management have agreed to proceed, the proposal manager can begin to prepare for the kick-off meeting.

Ready, steady…

Prior to a kick-off meeting, the following important tasks must be completed either by, or under the direction of, the proposal manager:

Checkpoint the win strategy : Assuming that the ITT was expected and that your customer-facing staff have done their jobs properly, there should already be a win strategy in place. This will include a good understanding of the customer’s key business drivers – what really matters to them in doing this project – as well as a detailed competitor analysis and a clear vision of the solution and commercial deal. A win strategy review meeting should check all these elements and enable the proposal manager to understand your own and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. All this information can be used by the proposal team to build a compelling story that confirms why the customer can be confident to buy from you and why they should not buy from your competitors.

Identify compliance requirements : Every document within the ITT must be ‘stripped’ or ‘shredded’ to identify all the requirements to ensure compliance with the customer’s instructions and requirements. These may be captured in a ‘compliance matrix’. Some customers include a compliance matrix in the ITT with instructions for you to complete it. Even if you are provided with one, you should still check through the whole ITT and create new compliance matrices to cover any additional requirements you may find – there are bound to be some! Consider not only technical requirements but also commercial and administrative requirements. Even a simple instruction like “the supplier will submit their response in Times New Roman font size 12” is a compliance instruction you should confirm you have followed. Compliance matrices are working documents.

Where possible, include the compliance matrices in your response and include a ‘proposal reference’ column to signpost the customer to the proposal section that explains the response in detail. This column will be completed when the proposal is finished. It is important to list every individual requirement to show thoroughness and make for easy evaluation by the customer.

Create the document structure and format : Determine whether the customer has instructed you to present the document in a certain format or structure, either wholly or partially. If so, set this up as a template ready for people to use. If not, the first action is to decide on the format for the document. It is advisable to have a prepared, branded corporate template so that you are sending consistently presented documents out into the marketplace. Having got the format, you then need to decide how you will structure the document. Remember that you are aiming to make it easy for the customer to evaluate your response so:

Try to mirror your document sections and numbering to the customer’s ITT and any questions and response guidance.
Analyse the customer’s evaluation or scoring criteria to determine the most logical way to structure your document to make it easy to score.
Whether or not mirroring is possible, consider where you will include the compliance matrices.
Consider if it is one or several documents; for example, you may choose to create a separate Commercial Volume and a Technical Volume.
Within your document(s) create the main sections and sub-sections.
Decide which sections will need to be ‘storyboarded’ or ‘content planned’, to what level and in what format – see separate blog “ Let Me Tell You a Story ”.
Consider what information you already have to inform your content plans.

Build the schedule: The proposal manager will prepare a timeline showing all the tasks, milestones and individuals responsible for each. This can be produced in a spreadsheet or using a project management software tool. It is worth having a standard template with all the potential tasks included to act as a checklist to ensure nothing is forgotten.

Prepare the kick-off meeting pack: A kick-off meeting is a briefing meeting, not an opportunity to discuss or change strategy or approach. Everyone who will be involved in the proposal process must be invited including management sponsor(s), proposal contributors, reviewers and approvers. If you are involving third parties, you may wish to invite them too, or consider running a separate briefing for them; whatever you choose, you need them to be fully on board with tasks and timelines.

The proposal manager must build an agenda, like the example below, but can delegate tasks to colleagues regarding presenting certain elements of the meeting.

Red is for....

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 14:21:27 GMT

Exploring the myths and realities of 'Red Team' reviews

To see red. Red is for danger. Get the red pen out. All these phrases conjure up negative emotions – anger, fear, criticism. Unfortunately, that is often how people perceive a Red Team review. Organised, briefed and managed effectively, a Red Team review can be the exact opposite – a constructive and positive experience. Let’s investigate how to achieve this.

What and why

First, let’s define a Red Team review. It is a key milestone in preparing a business proposal. Think of it as a review of the final document. Given that the purpose of a proposal is to win business, you need to check that the document you have spent time and effort putting together is actually fit for its purpose. Will it win you the business? That is what the Red Team will validate.

The document must be checked against a number of criteria. As shown in Figure 1, it must be compliant, score maximum points, show responsiveness to customer needs, articulate your win strategy and look good. Overall, it must satisfy your customer better than your competitors’ proposals. The role of the Red Team is to check you have done all these things to the best of your ability.

Who

An “independent” review is often how people refer to a Red Team exercise. This view has created the myth that all Red Team participants must have had zero involvement in the proposal development prior to the Red Team. So let’s dispel this myth.

One of the easiest ways to create last minute stress in a proposal environment is to involve someone completely new, late in the process. Even if this hasn’t happened to you, I can assure you it’s happened to many: Mr Independent arrives for the final document review and pronounces “You shouldn’t have done it that way, you should have done it like this”. Now, Mr Independent is often a senior person so everyone feels obliged to do what he says. Late nights ensue, leading to macho stories of “pulling an all-nighter” and eating cold pizza for supper.

The right people to be involved in the Red Team review are senior managers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who have been involved in the journey, not in detail, but at key milestones. They understand the customer’s objectives, requirements and evaluation approach, and they understand the win strategy. Hence, they are well-positioned to pass judgement on how well the final proposal shapes up as a winning document. You will typically have representatives from different functions of the business possibly including commercial, technical and professional services. Some companies also involve legal and procurement.

If you decide there is a really valuable independent person you wish to involve, they must be absolutely briefed on the background and their role, which is not to question the strategy, but to test how well it is executed and how fit for purpose the document is.

When

Red Team reviews are important for all major proposals, but they are useful for smaller ones too. Whenever you decide to include one, the same rules about timing apply.

There are many tales of Red Team reviews being convened on the day of proposal submission. This is, to put it mildly, nonsense. Even if you have done all your planning and management correctly, thereby minimising last-minute changes, there will always be something to amend. You have to leave yourself time to make those changes in a quality way and still have time to professionally produce the final document.

You should typically schedule a Red Team review between 70% and 80% through your proposal development timeline. Figure 2 shows a proposal response timeline with the timing of typical key milestones (for ease of illustration, the diagram depicts 10% contingency at the end of the process, but contingency is most effective when split across each stage of the process.

Where

Traditionally, Red Team reviews have been run in person in a dedicated proposal room where the documents can be laid out on tables. For large, complex proposals, this is still a good approach as it promotes a team atmosphere, ensures dedicated time and is most conducive to a wrap-up discussion. However, in today’s mobile age when many teams are distributed, the Red Team can be run using collaborative communication tools. Conference calls or emails can be used for briefings and de-briefings, and documents can be shared via email or a central intranet or portal. These methods are particularly useful where flexibility to suit people’s schedules and preferred locations is important.

How

Remember we defined a Red Team review as a review of the final document? By final, we mean final. The Red Team members should see a copy of what you intend to send to your customer. Even if you are going to send the proposal by email, you need to work with a hard copy at this stage; the customer is highly likely to print it off, so you need to know how it will look on the page.

As well as the final proposal, you need:

The customer’s documentation that triggered the proposal to be produced (typically an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Proposal (RFP)). This will include any evaluation criteria and/or scoring mechanisms that need to be checked.
A briefing paper or presentation on the win strategy that has been has been crafted into the proposal.

Those are the documents. Then you need the reviewers themselves. Each reviewer should be allocated a clear role and associated responsibilities. For example, is everyone reading everything, or are you splitting up the document and allocating sections to different people? Are you asking someone to check for compliance, someone to check for good articulation of the win strategy and someone to check how many points are being scored? Your decision will depend on the size and nature of the document, the people and the time available, but ensure that all the aspects in Figure 1 are covered.

For a major in-person Red Team review, it is advisable to use an independent facilitator to run the session. The proposal manager has been very involved and is emotionally attached to the document by now, so may be defensive about any feedback. Using a facilitator can ease this. The facilitator will learn the brief from the proposal manager, share this with the Red Team at the start of the review, then run a discussion at the end of the review to consolidate feedback ready for the proposal manager to take over again.

No matter which way you have set up the review, remember that we are looking for the Red Team members to be constructive. Their job is to spot anything that will improve the win probability of the proposal. You want them not only to indicate what can be improved, but how it can be improved. Comments like “this isn’t very good” or “not the best example” are not helpful. If the reviewer deems some text or a graphic “not very good”, then they must have a view on how to improve it, so they must say how. If they can judge something to be “not the best example”, they must know a better example and must say so. The best way to do this is using separate comment forms on which the reviewer must note the proposal section, the amendment to be made and whether it is mandatory or optional. It is also possible to use sticky notes. For remote reviews, people sometimes use Microsoft Word track changes, but this can make conflict resolution difficult during post-Red Team editing, so think carefully about the practicality of this method.

After the Red Team has completed its review, it is the proposal manager’s responsibility to incorporate all the mandatory changes and decide which of the optional ones can be included in the time available.

Think red, think positive

I hope this article has given you an idea of what can be achieved through good use of Red Team reviews. Done properly, they should help you win more business. So instead of seeing red, think perhaps of beautiful red roses to represent a perfectly presented proposal, red hot to represent the compelling story you have told and red for passion to represent the desire you will instil in your customer. Go on, give it a go.

Empathy – a new perspective

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 17:14:47 GMT

How hostage negotiation can influence a proposal

I’ve always been wedded to the importance of a strong emotional connection in selling. People tend to buy from people they like and trust.

Over the years, I developed my interest – I flirted with Aristotle’s persuasive appeals, ‘ethos, pathos and logos’, which led to a more serious relationship with Roman Krznaric’s book ‘Empathy’ . So, when I was invited to attend an Empathy workshop with Belinda Parma , I jumped at the chance. The bonus was meeting Martin Richards , an international hostage negotiator and crisis manager.

Martin explained that his line of negotiation relies on building empathy. Empathy is the absolute basis of trust, and trust is the absolute basis of persuasion – whether persuading a suicidal person back to safety or Middle Eastern kidnappers to release their hostages. Without empathy and trust, the other party won’t believe anything you say or do anything you ask.

As you might expect, hostage negotiation is traditionally spoken, although Martin said that text negotiations are becoming more common. Either way, the aim is to have a conversation. There can be long delays and silences, but a two-way exchange is crucial to a resolution. Empathy must be built and maintained all the way through.

Hostage negotiators use a range of skills to build empathy. Martin homed in on active listening, which I remembered from Krznaric’s book. Active listening keeps you focused on the other party’s agenda. It means picking up and responding to spoken cues – it shows you have heard and understood, it demonstrates you are interested, that you care and are intent on bringing the situation to a positive conclusion for everyone concerned.

A fascinating aspect of meeting Martin was learning that a seemingly specialised skillset is totally transferrable to our professional and personal lives. Martin teaches businesses and individuals, and volunteers for the crisis charity, Shout. We chatted about many aspects of transferability.

Thinking about negotiation skills in our world, it was easy to connect active listening with selling - conversation plays a huge part in generating the empathy needed to influence a buyer. But we also have to build and maintain empathy on the page. So, given this edition of BQ is about invention, I thought I’d have a go at mapping active listening skills into the written word. Being a lover of checklists (and good food), Martin’s ‘MORE PIES’ was just the ticket – the table below show eight active listening techniques, how they help generate empathy in a negotiation and ideas for proposal parallels.

Just as Martin inspired me, I hope my brief encounter with a hostage negotiator will inspire you.

[1] Roman Krznaric, ‘Empathy: Why it matters, and how to get it’, published 2014 by The Random House Group Ltd

[2] Belinda Parma, OBE, founder and CEO of ‘The Empathy Business’

[3] Martin Richards, former Chief Superintendent in the London Met Police, now freelance crisis and security consultant and author of ‘Just when you think you are winning…Humorous tales of a hostage negotiator’, published 2017. If you want to learn more, listen to this great interview: https://www.likemindsevents.co.uk/hostage-negotiator-interview/ .

Social Value by Design

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:09:22 GMT

A simple concept to help embed Social Value into hearts and minds

A bit of preamble

Early in my sales career, I was introduced to quality management and learned that errors are cheaper and easier to fix the earlier they are found – whether “earlier” applies to time, the stage of a process or anything else. A nice, simple fact that it was easy to get my head around.

When I moved into selling IT application development services, my nice, simple fact turned up as a principle of software engineering. I learned that software bugs are cheaper and easier to fix the earlier they are found. I also learned that software design and continuous testing are critical to producing error-free code.

Fast forward a few years, enter the Internet and, along with it, the threat of people hacking into organisational and personal computers. The new world of cybersecurity opened, and I began selling cybersecurity solutions. I came across a strange phenomenon – in those early days, the security of many systems and the information they contained was often forgotten or, at best, bolted on as an afterthought. This seems crazy; surely it would be better to build security in from the get-go? I wasn’t wrong.

I was fortunate to work with some rather clever technical folk who understood something known as ‘Secure by Design’ – principles developed in the 1970s, which took on new importance as more and more systems got joined up across the tech universe.

Secure by Design means that security is thought about early in the software development process. Security requirements are gathered and analysed with equal importance as other requirements; they inform design decisions, which drive software development. In good software development, tests are designed in parallel with the requirements, so it is easy to check later that what you set out to achieve has been achieved.

So, what’s all this got to do with Social Value? Let me explain.

The rise of Social Value

Demand for companies to operate ethically, protect the environment and support local communities has been growing for decades. The movement has gathered pace in the last twenty years; key milestones include ESG (Environment, Social, Governance, 2004), the Social Value Act (2012) and the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (2016).

The construction industry was the first to get involved in delivering Social Value. Building tangible structures in actual places meant that environmental stewardship, local employment and consideration of the community were relevant, easy to understand and practical to implement. They were also straightforward to measure. Buyers and construction companies got used to dealing with Social Value in every project.

On 1st January 2021, the UK Government boosted the importance of Social Value in the public sector with the publication of Procurement Policy Note (PPN) 06/20 and associated models and guidance . Social Value now commands a minimum of 10% in public sector tender evaluation. And, in parallel with the public sector, the private sector has been increasing its focus on ESG.

This means that today, all organisations – large and small, in every industry – need to understand and implement Social Value as a fundamental part of their organisational psyche. This brings us to Social Value by Design

Social Value by Design

New concepts, such as Social Value, take time to become established, effective and routine. Sometimes, a simple model can help. Secure by Design helped many people understand that security was a fundamental foundation (not a bolt-on) to keep systems and information safe across the Internet. Social Value by Design could help many people understand that Social Value must be a fundamental foundation (not a bolt-on) of organisations and procurements for it to make a genuine difference on the ground. Figure 1 below offers my straw model for Social Value by Design.

Figure 1: Social Value by Design

Consciously designing Social Value into every part of an organisation

Deconstructing the model

Be organisation ready: Every organisation needs to design Social Value into its raison d'être. They need to reconsider their operating models, and commercial organisations need to look beyond pure profit. Strategies, policies and processes, marketing materials, sales playbooks and delivery protocols must all be revisited to reflect the organisation’s commitment to environmental, economic and societal good.
Create cultural change: Through ethical recruitment, induction, training and continuous nurturing, everyone can play a part in implementing the new operating model. Attitudes and behaviours will gradually change as Social Value seeps through the organisation.
Prepare to buy: Just like the security requirements are gathered and analysed early in a software development process to inform good design, organisations need to gather and analyse Social Value requirements early in a buying process to inform the tender and contract design. The business case for a purchase will include (in simple terms) what needs to be bought, why, for how much and for what return. Now it should include relevant and proportionate Social Value developed in collaboration with stakeholders from the buyer and supplier communities. Suppliers must learn to have Social Value conversations early in the procurement process to help shape the requirements.
Tender responsibly: Too often, Social Value requirements have not been designed or explained, so the tender documentation ends up with a couple of random Social Value questions tacked on to fulfil an obligation rather than procure genuine Social Value. Where Social Value requirements are clear, they can be thoughtfully translated into the procurement process in terms of questions and evaluation.
Bid thoughtfully: Too much time is spent wondering what the buyer expects and what it’s got to do with the contract in question. Faced with a clear picture of Social Value requirements and sensible questions to answer, suppliers will be equipped to focus on designing innovative and thoughtful ideas in collaboration with their supply chains to deliver true Social Value.
Deliver collaboratively: Once a contract is awarded, Social Value must not be forgotten as just a mandatory tender exercise. It needs to be designed into the contract through a detailed Social Value plan and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Measure consistently: Transparent and open measurement and reporting show strong accountability and commitment to improving organisational and contract performance. By continuously gathering and analysing metrics, organisations can make informed decisions, adjust Social Value initiatives and set new targets. Buyers and suppliers can check that the project-specific Social Value requirements and KPIs are being met.
Improve continuously: Well-designed metrics will not only show success but also reveal patterns and trends that may indicate areas for improvement – enhancement, optimisation or complete change. Mature Social Value organisations will be ready and enthusiastic to re-enter the design process to constantly evolve and up their Social Value performance.

Where now?

For now, I am floating an idea. I’ve been involved in Social Value for around seven years, and it took me a long time to really ‘get it’. I read a lot and gradually things fell into place, but I did find the “curse of knowledge” popping up regularly - understanding a subject so well that one can no longer appreciate or cater for those just beginning.

These days, I am regularly asked if I can spend an hour explaining Social Value to an organisation that is new to it or is struggling with it. As a sales and bid professional, not a Social Value expert, I give a layperson’s explanation. This invariably goes down well; I don’t yet suffer from “the curse of knowledge”. If an organisation needs further support and/or training, I signpost them to the Social Value professionals, knowing that they will at least have a clear baseline from which to engage.

Based on my experience, Social Value by Design has become my simple way of explaining it. I hope it has legs and goes on to become a useful model for others.

Think Before You Write

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 10:51:59 GMT

How content plans can reduce costs and improve the quality of proposal writing

In the early days of cinema, celluloid was expensive. Moviemakers had to prepare carefully before they shot an inch of film. Preparation, or pre-visualisation, was done using 'storyboards” – a series of images and instructions depicting the tale to be told. Sharing the images with the film crew and cast served two purposes:

Getting everyone to understand the plot and plan
Validating and improving the structure and flow of the story

First used by Walt Disney in the 1930s, storyboards became widespread in the 1940s and, today, are an essential part of the creative process in many industries. In the world of bids and proposals, storyboards are also known as content plans - whatever you call them, it's quite simply about thinking before you write.

The Rise of Social Value

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 08:16:42 GMT

An introduction to Social Value and its importance in public sector tendering

When I first came across the concept of social value, it certainly didn’t have capital letters! I can’t recall exactly when it was, but I thought it was mainly something for buyers to worry about and that, from my side, a few fluffy statements about recycling would suffice.

Those days are long gone. Social Value has earned its stripes and now accounts for a minimum of 10% of marks in public sector procurement. As a result, there is a whole Social Value “industry” taking shape.

In this article, I share my Social Value journey so far and help you to fast-track your knowledge, score more points and win more business. But be aware, this is a vast and evolving landscape, so stay tuned.

What is Social Value

To understand Social Value, it’s a good idea to first think about the words individually. In this context, “social” relates to society or its organisation and “value” refers to worth. Put them back together and Social Value refers to improvements to a community that can be measured.

The “social” part breaks down into three elements - economic, environmental and social (people and communities) – and you will typically hear talk of improving the “well-being” of these elements.

The “value” or worth can be expressed in financial terms, but other measures can be equally valid. For example:

Economic: creating x apprenticeships per annum; using x% local supply chain; increasing local employment by x or x%; investing x hours supporting local small businesses
Environmental: reducing carbon footprint by x tonnes; achieving x% recycling; reducing landfill by x%; reducing water consumption by x
Social: providing x volunteering hours volunteering; making £x donations to local charities; providing x support for disadvantaged people; paying the Living Wage

If you are starting to wonder about the difference between Social Value and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), then you are not alone - CSR focuses on the same three elements. A good way to think about it is that CSR is a demonstration of your company’s on-going commitment, whereas Social Value is about procurement-specific improvements and the measurable return they will bring to a local area. However, many organisations are evolving their CSR policies to be Social Value policies.

For readers in the construction or infrastructure industries, the descriptions above may resonate with the Balanced Scorecard for Growth model introduced some years ago for projects over £10m. Indeed, balancing cost with wider societal implications is an established practice for such projects. The new Social Value initiatives extend the same principles to a much wider scope of procurement.

The rules!

Social Value first achieved official status with the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. The Act requires public sector organisations in England and Wales to consider how their procurements can impact Social Value. Hot on the heels of this, Scotland introduced the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, and Wales introduced the Well-being of Future Generations Act (Wales) 2015, the same year that Westminster updated the Public Procurement Regulations to include a new European Directive.

In 2019, the UK Government began a public consultation into Social Value aimed at reinforcing and extending its role and scope. After much contemplation, Public Procurement Notice (PPN) 06/20 was published ready for a change in the law on 1st January 2021.

PPN 06/20 is about taking account of social value in the award of central government contracts. It is accompanied by “The Social Value Model”, a guide to using the Social Value Model and a quick reference table. And don’t be fooled into thinking “central government contracts” means only central government contracts - we are seeing it turn up far and wide with that whopping 10% attached. Note that PPN 06/20 and The Social Value Model apply to England and UK-wide in-scope organisations. Scotland has its own SPPN 10/2020 “Measuring social impact in public procurement” and Wales has WPPN 01/20 “Social value clauses/community benefits through public procurement”. Northern Ireland is set to follow PPN06/20 in 2022.

Despite national differences, all buyers are now supposed to build Social Value into their procurements. They should formulate relevant and proportionate Social Value requirements that are assessed through well-constructed tender questions and evaluation criteria. To maintain a level playing field across all size and type of supplier, evaluation is meant to be quantitative with a focus on local and specific benefit. The qualitative element comes into the contractual performance measures that will be binding on successful suppliers.

So, we have legislation and policies galore, but what should suppliers do in practice.

Wising up

To help you get to grips with Social Value, there are some rich resources available from organisations who champion Social Value. There are not-for-profit, commercial and social enterprise organisations who can help you develop a Social Value policy and guide you in creating measurable Social Value for individual bids.

There are also some excellent free modelling tools out there. For example, The Social Value Portal ( www.socialvalueportal.com ) developed and maintains the National Themes, Outcomes and Measures (TOMs) :

Themes (5 key principles):

Promoting skills and employment
Supporting the growth of responsible regional businesses
Creating healthier, safer and more resilient communities
Protecting and improving our environment
Promoting social innovation

Outcomes (18 pre-defined objectives or goals, aligned to the 5 Themes.

For example:

Theme: Promoting skills and employment
Outcome 1: More local people in employment

Measures (38 measures that can be used to assess whether these Outcomes have been achieved.

For example:

Theme: Promoting skills and employment
Outcome 1: More local people in employment
Measure 1: No. of local people employed on contract for one year or the whole duration of the contract, whichever is shorter

Using the free downloadable National TOMs Social Value Calculator tool, you can start to express tangible value.

To demonstrate your level of commitment to Social Value, there are recognised certificates for companies - check out www.socialvalueuk.org and www.socialvaluequalitymark.com . Social Value UK also offers individual certification.

Getting real

If we look in more detail now at what to expect in procurement documentation, let’s use the Social Value Model as an example. Buyers are pointed to the model, which is much simpler that the National TOMS and has five themes and eight outcomes:

Theme 1: COVID-19 recovery:

Outcome: Help local communities to manage and recover from the impact of COVID-19

Theme 2: Tackling economic inequality:

Outcome: Create new businesses, new jobs and new skills
Outcome: Increase supply chain resilience and capacity

Theme 3: Fighting climate change:

Outcome: Effective stewardship of the environment

Theme 4: Equal opportunity:

Outcome: Reduce the disability employment gap
Outcome: Tackle workforce inequality

Theme 5: Wellbeing:

Outcome: Improve health and wellbeing
Outcome: Improve community integration

Each Outcome then has Delivery Objectives.

PPN 06/20 has associated guidance explaining clearly how it is all supposed to work. There are model evaluation questions, model award criteria, model response guidance and reporting metrics.

Some buyers seem to be working sensibly. Sadly, there is a big “but”. Experience so far suggests that many buyers are far from savvy about how to use PPN 06/20 or the guidance. Here are some recent examples:

A link to the PPN asking suppliers to pick an outcome and write about it. Admittedly, this makes it easier for suppliers, but it hardly leads to a fair apples and apples comparison and it’s certainly not specific or local.
One Theme and Outcome selected with an unedited cut and paste of the Social Value Model guidance. Fairer, yes, but not necessarily relevant and proportionate.
Savvier public sector organisations using their own custom-built Social Value models. At least this approach makes it local, but it generates more work for the suppliers who have to tune into a different set of criteria.
“Tell us what you can do for us on Social Value.” That one doesn’t even deserve a comment!

Such nonsense leaves suppliers either asking for clarification – which is often met with equal nonsense – or guessing what the “right” answer is.

What now for suppliers?

If you want to supply to the public sector, you certainly need to wake up and smell the Fairtrade coffee. Social Value is serious (remember that minimum 10%) and specific (directly relevant to a local area, not just general policies). And don’t think this is just for the big companies. If you are a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) competing for public sector contracts, don’t expect any favours. Think positively - the desire to have more SMEs and Social Enterprises as public sector suppliers has fuelled the increased importance of Social Value and they are often well-positioned to make a strong local impact.

When you receive your next tender documentation, check the percentage set for Social Value. Also check the scoring criteria - you may have to achieve a minimum score to stay in the game. If a minimum score requires you to demonstrate something you haven’t got or can’t do, then qualify out quickly. But also remember that minimum scores probably aren’t good enough to win – you really need to work hard to maximise every score, so get your Social Value position straight.

If you receive a sensible Social Value request, thank your lucky stars that you have an informed buyer. And if you receive nonsense? Start with the Social Value Model. Use your best judgement on what’s local, specific, relevant and proportionate. Follow the guidance when constructing your response and tell them that’s what you’ve done. Make sure you include clear actions, timelines and measurable outcomes. Use the National TOMs to find benchmarked values and note there is a current consultation about formally linking them and the Social Value Model together.

Beyond the next proposal, think ahead and prepare. A good start is to get your board to recognise the importance of Social Value and to put it on the same footing as other corporate initiatives. Start to curate all your Social Value collateral along with questions you receive and your responses. Gather scores and feedback, then loop round a continuous improvement process so you get better every time.

What does the future hold?

The purpose of Social Value is genuine – to bring a thoughtful and caring side to procurement and encourage buyers and suppliers to be accountable for the well-being of the community through their actions. I can see it becoming equally as important in the private sector as the public sector.

A systematic approach can bring clarity and consistency, both crucial to support a fair procurement process where questions are relevant and appropriate, and assessment unbiassed. On the flip-side, systematisation can make things mechanical and remove the genuine thought and care. There is a risk that Social Value will become something we all pay lip service to in the interests of winning a contract.

I hope this article has given you a taste of Social Value and inspires you to research and begin your Social Value journey if you haven’t already done so. And don’t forget to keep your carbon emissions low as you travel the Social Value road!

* No recommendation or endorsement is implied through mention of any organisation in this blog

Engaging with Empathy: Part 3

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 14:00:02 GMT

How the six habits of highly empathic people can help us write better proposals

In Part 1 of this series, we got acquainted with the concept of empathy; tuning in sensitively to our audience’s feelings and perspectives, and adapting our behaviour accordingly.

In Part 2, we looked at empathy in selling – how it can help build relationships, differentiate and create shared values.

Now, let’s explore how we carry our good work into our proposals.

The role of a proposal

Last time, we established that aligning your sales activities to the steps in your prospect’s buying process shows empathy, which helps build trust – crucial for a successful sale in the 21st century. Modern selling is a far cry from sales methods such as the infamous ‘ABC’ (Always Be Closing), which are old-fashioned and downright un-empathic.

In the six-step approach in Figure 1, the proposal is the fourth stage when the prospect requests a formal offer from interested sellers.

By this time, if you followed the recommendations in Part 2, you should be in pole position to win. You will have brought insight to your prospect’s business, positioned your company as an important player and shaped your prospect’s needs. If you did a stellar job, your prospect may have decided not to bother with a proposal at all.

Let’s assume your prospect wants or needs a proposal for legal or professional procurement reasons. Think of the proposal as a continuation of your work to date. Think of it as the opportunity to pull everything together in one compelling document confirming why you are the best choice. With that in mind, we can turn back to our six empathic habits.

Remember your prospect

And remember Habit One: Switch on your empathic brain

“Shifting our mental frameworks to recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature, and that it can be expanded throughout our lives.”

Too many proposals forget about the prospect; putting pen to paper seems to cause amnesia. We end up with a document all about ‘us’. How fantastic we are, how marvellous our products are, what super features our products have.

So, remember a key part of Habit One - “ Shifting our mental frameworks ". In a proposal, build empathy by shifting the focus from you to your prospect. Plan and craft your writing so the prospect comes first. For example, begin sections, paragraphs and sentences with the prospect’s name. I often see entire pages where the first word of every paragraph is ‘SUPPLIER’; not exactly empathic.

Once we’ve got our prospect back in sight, bring what’s important to them onto the page – their visions, goals and objectives, the problems they are aiming to solve, and the benefits they are planning to achieve. Write about your offer in the context of the prospect and how it will help them. Instead of: “SUPPLIER’s Wondrous™ widget was the first of its kind and is exceptionally small ”, consider: “ PROSPECT can use the ‘Wondrous’ widget, measuring only 1 x 1, to help solve the engineering challenge to reduce the overall size of the Billy boiler. ”

That’s a good start.

Step into your prospect’s shoes

Remember Habit Two: Make the imaginative leap

"Making a conscious effort to step into other people's shoes - including our “enemies" -

and to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives.”

Hopefully, during the early stages of the sale, you nurtured and built trust with each person involved in the buying decision. This should have included building up your positive relationships and trying to turn around any negative feelings towards you. In the vein of Habit Two, you made “ a conscious effort to step into other people's shoes…and to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives. ”

Build this knowledge into the proposal. Write for each person using key messages that will resonate with them. Position these messages in the sections they are most likely to read. Show them you understand and care by using language that makes connections. Instead of: “SUPPLIER will provide 24 x 7 maintenance from our Miniminster depot. ” Consider:

“ PROSPECT’S operations staff need to be confident of a 99.9% uptime. This peace of mind will come with SUPPLIER’s local 24 x 7 service centre where we have a 100% one-hour fix rate success. ”

Combine facts and figures with feelings to satisfy your prospect’s emotional needs as well as their logical needs. Buying is as much about the heart as the head, even in business.

Create shared experience

Remember Habit Three: Seek experiential adventures

“Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own through direct immersion, empathetic journeying and social cooperation.”

If you spent time exploring your prospect’s business in the selling stages through the “ direct immersion, empathic journeying and social cooperation ” of Habit Three, you will have developed a deep understanding. Did you try a job swap or a mystery shop? Or did you work together with the prospect to co-create brilliant visions and solutions? If so, make a list and work out the best placement in your proposal for maximum impact.

If it was difficult to get close to your prospect, did you identify parallels between their aspirations and those of your established customers? Did you publish thought-leading white papers or blogs? You are looking for material that goes deeper than simply trotting out the same old patter about you and your products; something that brings insight and makes you stand out from the crowd.

Hit replay

Remember Habit Four: Practice the art of conversation

“Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening, and taking off our emotional masks.”

In Habit Four, Krznaric schools us in the art of “ radical listening .” In your proposal, remember all the conversations, shared experiences and value that you have brought to the process so far. Show your prospect you listened by including reminders of the interaction. Just because you have moved into writing mode doesn’t prevent you having a ‘conversation’.

For example: “ In dialogue with PROSPECT at the Wondrous™ widget demonstration in July 2017, we agreed it would fit the Billy boiler re-design perfectly .”

Krznaric also explains “taking off our emotional masks” meaning we should admit vulnerability where appropriate. In a proposal, this equates to dealing head-on with weaknesses in your offer rather than sweeping them under the proverbial carpet.

For example, if your prospect has expressed a concern that affects your probability of winning, you should replay it and explain any mitigating action. Let’s say your prospect is based in Manchester and your main competitor is close by, while you are in London. Your mitigation plan is to open an office in Manchester if you win the contract. In your proposal, you would explain: “ To allay PROSPECT’s concern that SUPPLIER is remote, we will open a local office to support this contrac t.” To make this promise feel credible, include plans of potential office buildings and explain a local employment strategy.

Prove it

Remember Habit Five: Travel in your armchair

“Transporting ourselves into other people's minds with the help of art, literature, film and online.”

Habit Five encourages us to get to know the world through theatre, films, photos, books and songs. When selling, you can enhance your knowledge by continually researching via the rich source of traditional and online media.

For your proposals, spend time at your desk or with your colleagues building strong proof to support sales messages. An immutable law of proposal-writing is to always make the connection between features, customer requirements and a demonstrable outcome. Make the link: requirement>feature>benefit>evidence

Develop case studies that include testimonials, making sure they are linked to quantified business benefits. For example, cite that you saved your customer costs or increased their revenue in a specified time.

Add third party reports and internal research and statistics to your evidence bank. Remember to always note the source and the date – prospects may want to dig deeper, so don’t be caught out with an unsubstantiated claim.

Consider ways to present evidence in graphical format or any appropriate media. Photos add authenticity (do you have a photo of the demonstration of the Wondrous widget?), and charts, graphs, drawings and process flowcharts all help to reinforce your story.

Be visionary

Remember Habit Six: Inspire a revolution

“Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change, and extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world.”

Whilst Habit Six takes us into the realms of the impossible when writing a proposal, challenge yourself to be different. With a dash of creativity, even boring proposals can be spiced up.

It helps if you think of your proposal as a story: where are you now (“once upon a time”), what’s the vision of the future (“happily ever after”) and the journey to make that vision a reality with you.

Chuck out unimaginative, clichéd language and think up vibrant new ways of describing yourself and your products. Think how you can package and present your proposal so it’s a winner from the first impression. I remember a building restoration company competing to refurbish a famous World War II building – they presented their proposal in a genuine postbag from the period found on eBay.

Journey’s end

We’ve come to the end of two journeys.

We’ve travelled through the six habits, seeking how to transform our proposals from dull narrative to a captivating tale that focuses on the prospect and persuades why you are better than and different from your competitors.

We’ve also come to the end of the various routes we’ve taken through the subject of empathy as defined by Roman Krznaric. With thanks to him for inspiring this series. I hope I’ve inspired you.

Engaging with Empathy: Part 2

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 14:00:14 GMT

How the six habits of highly empathic people can help us be better salespeople

In Part 1, we cantered through Krznaric’s book introducing “the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that to guide your actions.” We learned that we are all wired for empathy and that we must simply develop our empathic brains and skills to make it natural behaviour. If you had a go at each of the six challenges I set, you should be getting the idea. Now let’s bring the subject back from the personal perspective and give it a business angle.

Krznaric confirms that empathy helps with three aspects of selling:

Building relationships > buying and selling are people-based activities.
Inspiring creativity > a sure way to differentiate.
Underpinning culture and codes > creating shared values on which to build trust and loyalty.

With this in mind, let’s consider how each of the six habits can increase sales potential.

Switch on

Remember Habit One: Switch on your empathic brain

“Shifting our mental frameworks to recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature, and that it can be expanded throughout our lives.”

Selling is not about you, it’s about your customer. Selling is not about your products and services, it’s about what benefits they can bring to your customer’s business. Shifting your mindset so that your customer comes first is crucial and there are some simple steps you can take to support this change.

Being sensitive to your customer’s buying cycle is a great start. Rather than designing a sales process based on the stages you intend to go through to make a sale, create one based on your customer’s buying stages. Focus on identifying what stage your customer is at and align your actions as shown in Figure 1.

Your actions at each stage must focus on helping your customer move their business forward. Modern selling (both online and traditional) is far more about helping your customer to envision a better place through insightful and helpful interaction.

No more product-pushing for a quick sale.

Throughout, it’s important to be genuine. Faking it will show sooner or later. You need to share your customer’s pain and show that you care about taking it away, not just show polite interest. They will notice and respect you for your authenticity.

Tune in

Remember Habit Two: Make the imaginative leap

"Making a conscious effort to step into other people's shoes - including our “enemies" -

and to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives.”

Previously, we learned that prejudice, authority, distance and denial are four barriers that prevent us tuning in to other people. Highly empathic people tend to be more open-minded and prepared to defy authority. They see everyone as individuals, even those they regard as enemies, and seek to appreciate them.

As salespeople, we need to get to know our buyer. Is it one person or a team? What is the composition of the team? Teams may cover many parts of the business; the user community, technical, quality, delivery, finance and procurement.

Once we know who they are, we must put ourselves in their shoes, whether sandals, brogues or army boots. In the ideal world, we will get to understand each person’s role, objectives, incentives, likes and dislikes, fears and hopes. No more treating the procurement department as a necessary evil only to be engaged at the last minute in a price war. No more worrying that the business sponsor is a superior being. Everyone is equal. Everyone is human. Everyone, including you, is simply doing their job.

Tuning in early and engaging sincerely will bring insight into the buyers and the buying dynamics. You will be able to hone your communications to build stronger trust and credibility.

Dig deep

Remember Habit Three: Seek experiential adventures

“Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own through direct immersion, empathetic journeying and social cooperation.”

When I was a rookie salesperson back in the 1980s, our boot camp training introduced us to the idea of a DILO – a Day in the Life Of. We were encouraged to go out into our customers’ worlds and experience their lives. In my first sales job in computing, I spent wonderful days at the BBC script unit and special effects department pondering how technology could benefit them.

In those days, we knew way more than our customers about computers, so this wasn’t difficult. Now, with the internet and social forums, our customers often know as much about our products as we do and, if they don’t, they “know a man who does”, so we must work hard to stay at least one step ahead. If we wish to become a trusted partner and advisor to our customers, we must be savvier than them.

So, spend time with your customer and with your customer’s customer – overtly or incognito like many of Krznaric’s examples. Try a job swap, or a mystery shop. Convert what you learn into stunning business ideas that will transform your customer’s business and allow them to see you as a someone who made a difference.

Listen up

Remember Habit Four: Practice the art of conversation

“Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening, and taking off our emotional masks.”

The Greek philosopher Epictetus is famous for his wisdom: “You were born with two ears and one mouth for a reason, so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

This saying is often quoted in relation to the tendency (perceived or real) of salespeople to talk too much and listen too little. The most basic of sales skills are about listening to your customer’s needs and wants before offering a solution. Even so, it’s amazing how many salespeople still fall into the trap of launching into the superlative features of their products and services without the faintest idea of their customer’s motivation.

Krznaric encourages us to be radical in our listening – to completely put aside our own thoughts and desires in favour of taking in every tiny emotional and logical detail and nuance we are hearing. He encourages us to be truly interested in our conversation partners and to bare our own souls in our responses.

Sit down

Remember Habit Five: Travel in your armchair

“Transporting ourselves into other people's minds with the help of art, literature, film and online.”

Habit Five is sometimes known as “armchair empathy”. It’s about getting to know the world through theatre, films, photos, books and songs.

To get to know our customers better, we must continually develop our understanding. Today, we have access to an infinite source of written and visual material via the internet, as well as traditional media. There is no excuse not to include desk research in your daily sales life. Make time in your diary to step back, sit down and be creative about how you can help your customers.

Get radical

Remember Habit Six: Inspire a revolution

“Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change, and extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world.”

Applying Habit Six to selling in its purest sense is perhaps beyond the call of duty. Instead, think of it as really pushing the boundaries to find innovation that could make a step change.

Can you turn a problem upside down? Propose a new operating model? Make a compelling return on investment case?

Inside your own company, can you change how resources are deployed to support the sales cause better?

To be truly different these days, we must be consistently more thoughtful and more insightful than both our customer and our competitors.

It’s a wrap

So, we’ve switched on, tuned in, dug deep, listened up, sat down and got radical. Along the way, we should have built better relationships based on genuine interest and understanding in our customers’ businesses and the individuals involved. This knowledge and rapport should have inspired ideas and trust. Altogether, this should have made us different enough to win.

Next time, we’ll delve into how to apply the six habits to writing a winning proposal. Until then, happy empathising.

Engaging with Empathy: Part 1

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 17:10:29 GMT

Six habits of highly empathic people - from Roman Krznaric’s book “Empathy"

Following my last blog - A Classic Tale - looking at how Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals – Ethos, Pathos and Logos – can be used to create winning proposals, I decided to dive deeper into Pathos. This led me to Roman Krznaric’s fascinating book on the subject. The two key features of the book are the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People, and the plethora of examples of empathic people. In this article, I skim the surface of the six habits and pick my favourite characters or scenarios to illustrate each.

Empathy defined

“The art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that to guide your actions.”

So, empathy is all about discovering, understanding and accepting different tastes and views. We learn that there are two types of empathy: affective empathy, a shared emotional response, and cognitive empathy, which is about perspective-taking. It is important to develop both. And there is a distinction between empathy, which can relate to positive or negative situations, and sympathy (or compassion), which typically only has a negative connotation relating to pity or mercy in a bad situation.

A whistle-stop tour of empathy through the ages confirms it isn’t a new fad. We find empathy-related words and sayings from different languages around the world stem from centuries ago. Take the Cheyenne saying, for example:

“Do not judge your neighbour until you walk two moons in his moccasins.

We are all wired for empathy, but it’s been swamped for centuries by a growing focus on ‘self’. Over four centuries, eminent scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud have reinforced the idea that humans are naturally selfish and aggressive – we must compete to survive.

In modern times, who hasn’t heard the phrases "Looking after number one“ and “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me?). Instant gratification, happiness through therapy, and craving to be slim, beautiful and fashionable are hallmarks of today’s society. All this is fuelled by marketing and social media. Yet many people are still dissatisfied and feel unfulfilled. Tuning back into our empathic brains could be just the answer.

Having set the scene, Krznaric introduces us to the Six Habits. Let’s step through them. And remember, this time around we are just getting familiar with the theory - next time we will apply it in our world. But just for fun, I’ll set a little challenge for each Habit, which you can ponder with personal or professional examples.

Habit One: Switch on your empathic brain

“Shifting our mental frameworks to recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature, and that it can be expanded throughout our lives.”

Habit One is really all about tuning into and recognising empathy. To convince us that it’s really there in all of us, Krznaric describes three ground-breaking advances in understanding empathy.

First, neuroscientists have identified an empathy circuit responsible for cognitive and affective empathy – it includes mirror neurons, which allow us to feel what other people feel or do what others are doing in a form of imitation or mimicry. Examples being yawning when you see someone yawn, or flinching when someone is hurt.

Second, evolutionary biology has proven we are naturally cooperative and empathic like primates (and other animals). Research into apes shows how they groom, protect and comfort each other.

Finally, child psychology shows that even small children can see things from others' perspectives. My favourite example is a story of a child who learnt to give her brother his favourite toy when he cried rather than her favourite toy, which had been her first inclination.

The good news is that we can all learn to be more empathic early or late in life. Training doctors to have a better ‘bedside manner’ has produced benefits for doctors as well as patients - doctors feel more fulfilled and patients feel more satisfied.

Challenge: think about times when you have mirrored a feeling or understood another person’s perspective.

Habit Two: Make the imaginative leap

“Making a conscious effort to step into other people's shoes - including our “enemies" - and to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives.”

Habit Two takes us to the next stage – really tuning in to other people. But we meet four barriers that tend to prevent us doing this.

Prejudice, for example in the form of stereotyping, tends to cause us to pre-judge people and jump to conclusions, often negative ones. This can prevent us appreciating good qualities.

Authority often gets in the way of people’s empathy - poor behaviour is often blamed on simply ‘following orders’.

And then there is distance and denial. We have less empathy with people if they are distanced from us through geography, community or social position – we care more about those who are close – and it’s easy to ‘turn a blind eye’ especially when they are far away or we feel disconnected from them. Highly empathic people tend to be more open-minded and prepared to defy authority. They treat everyone as individuals and humans, even those they dislike or fear.

Challenge: have you ever jumped to a conclusion about someone, then come to see them differently? What changed?

Habit Three: Seek experiential adventures

“Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own through direct immersion, empathetic journeying and social cooperation.”

Habit Three is about taking a bigger step towards understanding and really stepping into someone else’s shoes. Krznaric tells of people who have travelled and lived, often in disguise, to experience first-hand the lives of others. Sharing these adventures often contributed to major social reform – take Gunter Wallraff, a German who posed as a Turkish immigrant cleaning toilets. His book, "Lowest of the Low", charting his abuse by employers, citizens and authority sold 2m copies and led to changes in protection of foreign labour.

Other empathic journey-folk changed corporate attitudes. Patricia Moore was a 1970s designer who changed the face of design after taking on the persona of an 85-year old woman over three years to understand age-related issues and inform the design process.

Challenge: think of modern day examples of experiential adventures that you have participated in or heard about?

Habit Four: Practice the art of conversation

“Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening, and taking off our emotional masks.”

If Habits One, Two and Three are about tuning in, refining the frequency and observing from behind a mask, Habit Four is about really engaging. It’s about being a genuine, interested enquirer. It’s about asking questions, caring about the answers and showing some vulnerability.

In the age of email, text and social media, picking up the telephone is hard enough let alone actually making eye contact and starting a conversation with a stranger. But that is what we need to do to re-engage with society and each other in a truly empathic way. Anything less and we risk being remote and superficial. Contrast the inspired idea of the lady called Sarah, who invited all the other Sarahs in her office block to meet for a chat, with the concept of Chatroulette where you take pot luck with an online conversation and just drop it for another if you get bored.

Challenge: think of a time when you responded to an email or text, then wished you’d picked up the phone or walked to a desk for a face-to-face dialogue.

Habit Five: Travel in your armchair

“Transporting ourselves into other people's minds with the help of art, literature, film and online.”

Although Habit Five risks being second-hand experience, ‘armchair empathy’ has history and merit. Theatre, films, photos, books and songs have aroused emotion and inspired action throughout the ages.

Well-targeted and used carefully, our senses can be developed and refined by different media. When fired up, empathy can help to modify views and change attitudes. Who hasn’t been moved by books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? In their day, they brought injustice into sharp relief.

We must just be mindful that our emotions can be dulled by too much emotional fatigue and we can drift into sympathy rather than empathy, or even back to distance and denial. We need to tune into our media sensitively.

Challenge: when were you last moved to action by something you saw, heard or read?

Habit Six: Inspire a revolution

“Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change, and extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world.”

Habit Six is somewhat ambitious and I’m not about to suggest we all revolt. However, Krznaric takes us into the final furlong with examples of major national and global change that were fuelled by mass empathy. The abolition of slavery and civil rights reforms would never have happened if people hadn’t started to really understand the experiences of others. In more recent times, global charities and environmental movements have helped protect people and places. Think Live Aid and Greenpeace.

Challenge: is there something you would like to radically change? What could you do to raise awareness?

Inspired?

Krznaric’s book runs to 244 pages, not including the notes and acknowledgements. I doubt I have done it justice in this short article. But, it did inspire me. Next time, I’ll share my thoughts about how the Habits map onto selling. Until then…

A Classic Tale

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 18:24:03 GMT

How the ancient art of public oratory can help you build more compelling proposals

Aristotle created his seminal work, “On Rhetoric”, over 2,300 years ago. It included his theory of the three persuasive appeals – ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion) and logos (logic). This work is still regarded as the bible of public speaking, but the three appeals can be applied to any form of communication.

Whilst we often talk about emotion being the keystone of the early 'capture' stages of the business development life cycle, and logic being the keystone of the proposal phase, all three appeals apply equally to proposals – they play to the emotional and logical aspects of buying and the need to provide proof to be convincing. So, let’s explore each of the three appeals and how we can bring them to life on the page.

Ethos

Although ethos is the Greek word for ‘character’, we typically associate it with ‘ethics’ and think of trust. Indeed, by ethical appeal, Aristotle means convincing our audience we are believable, reliable and trustworthy by showing our character.

If we dig a little bit deeper, we find extrinsic and intrinsic ethos. Extrinsic ethos is your indisputable experience and authority. It is also your reputation, created by what others think and say about you. Intrinsic ethos is the impression you create through your communication, for example whether you show care, consideration and commitment.

An often quoted speech that demonstrates ethical appeal is Barack Obama’s Democratic Presidential Candidate Acceptance Speech on August 28th 2008. It exudes authority and conviction.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

" I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future. "

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

As we set pen to paper for a proposal, remember how easy it is to create an impression through text. Think of the different styles of, say, Geoffrey Archer and John Steinbeck, or The Sun newspaper and The Times.

Here are some simple steps to improve the ethical appeal of your business writing:

Use authoritative language: take responsibility by using ‘will’ and not ‘would’; use the active voice; be clear and concise - avoid fluffy wording.
Write objectively: show your customers you are fair and unbiased – you are seeking to solve their problems not just sell for the sake of it.
Include evidence of your expertise or pedigree: use case studies, customer testimonials and third party reports. Make these relevant and quantified; find the closest matches, explain what you did, how you did it and the result.
Ensure your spelling and grammar are accurate: this shows care and attention to detail - an example of the excellence of everything you deliver.

And if you're tempted to think that long, complex words and sentences make you seem more intelligent, think again. Fascinating research by psychologist Professor Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University proved that people who write simply are thought to be smarter and more trustworthy. George Orwell perhaps worked that out years ago when he said: “Never use a foreign word, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”

Pathos

Pathos, the Greek word for both ‘suffering’ and ‘experience’, is all about emotion. Think about empathy – seeing things from the other person’s point of view. We want our audiences to convert to our way of thinking, but we also want to show that we understand their way of thinking. We need to cleverly create a meeting of emotions so there is mutual empathy.

Take Winston Churchill’s Preparation for the Battle of Britain Speech delivered to the nation on June 18 ^th 1940:

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" What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over: the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: This was their finest hour.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stirring stuff. Churchill needed the British people behind him as the war continued, so he painted pictures of the future, which roused the emotional response of wanting to remain independent and be champions for the world. Ways to move your proposals toward such a performance include:

Acknowledging the customer exists: mention them first and at least as much as you mention yourself (I am constantly amazed how many proposals never mention the customer)
Appealing to your customer’s self-interest and identity: show you understand their objectives and requirements (both project and personal); paint a picture of a journey to a better place together; think how to alleviate their negative emotions such as frustration, fear and anxiety.
Expressing (appropriate) feeling: try an emotional tone; use vivid and sensory language; include examples, stories or analogies that evoke emotion.
Mirroring your customer: structure your proposal in accordance with their instructions; capture their style; use the same language, words and spellings; write to the same level of sophistication – avoid being clever (remember those simplicity points).
Using emotive visuals: photos with people - maybe presentations, demonstrations or reference visits - co-created diagrams or before and after shots.

But a word of warning. Although starting your document with “We would like to thank you for this opportunity” or “We are delighted to present our proposal” may sound like stellar examples of pathos, such phrases can sound sycophantic and self-centred, so avoid at all costs. Focus on your customer and not you – re-read the Churchill speech and you’ll see he doesn’t once mention himself, but he gets what he wants.

Logos

Logos is the Greek word for ‘word’ or ‘reason’. We automatically associate it with ‘logic’, which is all about how we make sense of things. Hence, Aristotle’s logical appeal is about convincing an audience by use of reasoning.

Tony Blair’s Rethinking Leadership for Development Speech from October 19 ^th 2011 is a straightforward delivery of facts and figures that makes a powerful point:

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" To take just one example, Free Healthcare had been knocking around as an idea in Sierra Leone for decades. And there were even donor resources available to support the reform. Including very generous backing from DfID. But until the government lined up the political will –a clear lead from President Koroma –and the basic systems to manage the reform nothing happened. Once those things were in place the reform happened at speed. With great results: since Free Healthcare for mothers and young children was introduced almost three times as many under-5s were treated in government health facilities than during the previous 12 months, leading to an 80% reduction in child deaths in hospital from malaria, thereby saving thousands of lives."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Some of you may now be thinking that this appeal is easy, it’s just a question of listing out all your features. Unfortunately, this is often how proposals end up. For a better end result, try:

Linking features to benefits: translate what the feature will do for the customer – what outcome or result will it deliver. And quantify this wherever you can in terms of money, time or other relevant measure. That is the true value you are bringing.
Constructing balanced arguments: cite parallel cases or analogies; ‘ghost’ (disadvantage) your competition by setting out different designs or approaches with the pros and cons of each, concluding with why yours are best.
Supporting features and benefits with evidence: use past examples and statistics to provide proof. Use these throughout your proposal as part of your narrative.
Using logical visuals: graphs and tables, flowcharts, photos of solutions and technical diagrams

Final checks and balances

If you follow this advice, you should get a good balance of the three appeals throughout your proposal; balance of both quantity and position. It’s fine to weave all three together or focus on one for effect like some of our example speeches. To check your balance, one tip is to highlight the appeals in different colours. There will be some overlap – evidence in particular can support all three, and clear writing should pervade.

If you’re short of time, focus on your executive summary, key opening and concluding paragraphs, and strategic and high scoring sections.

Finally, try reading it out loud. Put your best ‘world leader’ hat on and see if you can impress your colleagues with your compelling oratory in the Aristotle style.

From Bid Sorrow to Bid Joy

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 17:56:42 GMT

A back to basics look at bidding to increase win rates and reduce stress

It’s the night before an important competitive bid is due to be delivered. The deadline for submission is 10:00h the following morning. It’s now nearly midnight and the printer’s just gone wrong. You are tired and stressed. The team is tense. And is the bid actually good enough to win anyway? After all, you started late...

Sound familiar? People put themselves through this every day; there are times when being up against the clock is unavoidable, but it shouldn’t be the norm. If you treat a bid like a proper project, with a plan and a structured framework, you will find life much easier. Or draw an analogy with choreography; you bring together a group of people, guide them through a series of sequences and moves with creativity and flare to produce a winning performance. You wouldn’t want the dancers tripping over each other and looking for their costumes and shoes during the dress rehearsal, and typically that just doesn’t happen. Why should bidding be different?

So, where to start? Here are some simple steps to get you thinking in the right direction.

Step 1: Don’t bid for what you can’t win

Sounds obvious, but so many companies submit bids without having conducted a thorough qualification of the opportunity early in the process. Although there are exceptions to every rule, best practice suggests that if the first you hear of an opportunity is when the Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Proposal (RFP) lands on the door mat, then you are wasting your time. Other suppliers will already have a relationship with the customer and will have been tracking and influencing hard for weeks or months.

One certain way to increase your conversion ratio (the number of bids you win out of the number of bids you submit) is to only bid for ones you have a high probability of winning. So, how do you judge this? There are many different qualification systems and techniques, but key considerations are:

Allegiances: do you understand the buying landscape, the different stakeholders and their preferences and influences? Do they understand and appreciate you? Do you have a champion in the camp promoting your cause?
Authority: do you understand how the decision will be made and by whom?
Money: do you know the budget and can you satisfy the requirement within the budget profitably for you and competitively for the customer?
Requirements: do you fully understand the requirements and can you meet all the mandatory ones and a good proportion of any desirable ones?
Differentiated solution: do you genuinely have a solution that stands out from the competition?
Timing: do you know the time frame for the project and can you inspire confidence that you can meet the schedules?
Competition: do you know who else will be bidding, how strong a threat they represent to your success and how to beat them?

These are just a few of the many questions you could ask yourself to build an objective view of your win probability.

As already stated, you really should be at this stage well ahead of the formal bid process, in which case much work can still be done directly with the customers to fill in knowledge gaps and influence thinking. Once you are at the formal bid stage, and probably subject to strict bidding rules about customer contact, you will need to focus on getting the key messages strongly articulated in your document.

Step 2: Build a Win Strategy early

Once you are satisfied that you really should be spending valuable resources pursuing the opportunity, you need to build the Win Strategy. This takes the key elements of the qualification exercise and starts to formulate how you will use this information to optimise your position - as shown in Figure 1 below.

At a more detailed level:

Customer evaluation process and criteria: whether formally issued or gathered through dialogue, it is essential to understand who will be involved in the decision- making process and how the bids will be judged. Be aware that many of today’s buying decisions involve multiple people and you need to understand each individual in terms of their role and their motivation.
Customer drivers: also known as 'hot buttons', these succinctly summarise what you know the customer is really looking for the supplier to provide to satisfy the requirement. Customer drivers don’t only capture what is contained in the tender documentation, but also what you know from your relationships with the various customer personnel. You are looking to articulate three or four key drivers that will collectively appeal to the customer at a deep level; you will use these to develop the core essence of your bid messages.
Competitors: you will need to conduct a detailed walk through of who else will be bidding and their strengths and weaknesses in this specific situation.
Solution vision: you need to know what to propose to meet the requirements; what are your strengths and weaknesses in relation to these requirements and how are you different to and better than the competition.
Pricing strategy: you need enough information about the customer, the competition and your own costs and profit aspirations to work out a price to win.

Once all the information is gathered, you need to work out how to:

Emphasise your own strengths
Mitigate your own weaknesses
Diminish the competitors’ strengths
Reinforce the competitors’ weaknesses.

Having got to this point, if you are still comfortable to proceed, then you need a plan.

Step 3: Build a Plan

Figure 2 below shows a simple Bid Management Framework showing the flow of activities and the key milestones during the bid process.

The more detailed plan will include the timeline, resources, roles and responsibilities. Carefully space out the key milestones and focus on getting the preparation right. A Kick-Off Meeting will typically take place 10% into the overall time schedule, not on the day the tender documents arrive; you need time to distribute and absorb the information and make the important bid/no-bid decision before beginning the detailed work. A Kick-Off Meeting will involve significant preparation to fully brief the team on what is expected of them. After that, they will be keen to get pen to paper, but it is preferable to build in a content planning step (also known as 'storyboarding') that involves producing a high level concept of the key bid components. The storyboards, which may be slides, flipcharts or any other media suitable to convey ideas, are presented at a review to ensure everyone is working in harmony and building the bid messages in a cohesive way.

Only when the content plans or storyboards are approved by the team does the actual writing begin. This feels very uncomfortable for many bid contributors, who feel they could have dashed off the words by now, but getting the overall structure and messages right up front makes for a much easier finale.

The last checkpoint should be the “red team review”, which is where the final draft of the completed document is validated by an independent team. They check if it complies with all aspects of a winning bid including that it addresses the customer’s true needs, it differentiates well from the competition and it is professionally written and presented.

Finally, make sure your plan has contingency, but don’t make the Quality Assurance (QA) and production tasks your contingency period – they are as important in the whole process as any other step.

Step 4: Communicate, communicate, communicate

Depending on the length of the bid response period, daily or weekly checkpoints are essential to keep everyone on the same page and handle issues arising swiftly and effectively. Create a standard agenda, for example:

New information: assessment and implications
Progress and issues arising: from each team member – action plan to resolve (note 'plan' and not actual resolution)
Timeline check: all on schedule or re-plan required?
Actions: finally, check back on actions from any previous checkpoints

Ideally, stick to the same time every day or week. The meetings should be short, focused and compulsory. This gets everyone into a rhythm and keeps the project flowing gracefully.

Step 5: Always be planning

There is a saying “a plan never survives the first engagement with the enemy” and throughout the bidding process various issues will come along to throw you off track; new information, bid question responses, illness, technology problems, to name but a few possibilities. It is acceptable to undertake re-planning along the way, and you will have included some contingency in the schedule, but a reminder not to regard the QA, production and dispatch time as contingency. This time should be sacrosanct as there is no point producing perfectly honed words and then submitting a poorly presented and packaged document.

Equally, realise that if you are struggling to complete the bid on time, this may indicate that you are not really on top of the game and you should consider whether or not to continue.

Step 6: Don’t be afraid to pull out

It’s a brave decision to pull out when you have completed so much, but it is valid to pull out right up to the point of submission if something changes and indicates your bid is not going to be a winning performance. In particular, if the red team results in significant change, consider if the recommended rework is feasible in the remaining time and if you can re-establish a winning position. Note, however, that if you follow all the previous steps, the number of times you will end up in this position will be few and far between.

These steps are just a “starter for ten” and give a flavour of some of the key thought processes and activities required to achieve a well-choreographed bid. Bid management is a professional discipline that is built with time, experience and training. If you are serious about bidding and winning more with less stress, consider carefully how you will establish this capability in your business.

Lifting the Curse of Knowledge

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 16:26:05 GMT

Looking at how your knowledge and expertise can ruin your writing

“The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know.”

Steven Pinker

If we want to win business, we cannot afford to confuse, frustrate or anger our prospects. Yet, every day around the world, proposals are triggering exactly those emotions. They are jam-packed with jargon, business speak, techno-babble and legalese, not to mention bad structure and poorly crafted language. Such documents risk misunderstanding, misinterpretation and false expectation. In the worst cases, your prospect may give up reading, unwilling to waste any more time fathoming what on earth you are trying to sell them.

As a proposal consultant, I edit reams of written content, often making sense of nonsense. I marvel at how people can write in such a complex, obscure and cryptic fashion. Although some authors love to show off their expertise, most are simply suffering from the curse of knowledge – labouring under the assumption that their audience has all the knowledge they have.

When writing a proposal, it is easy to get wrapped up in telling the prospect how marvellous we are and describing all the bells and whistles of our product or service. We completely forget to consider who is on the receiving end and whether what we are saying resonates.

So, let’s unravel the wonderful concept of the curse of knowledge – how it is cast, how to recognise you or your colleagues are suffering, and how to lift and banish it for forever.

Brewing up a potion

In embarking on this section, I openly admit I am not a linguist or any flavour of psychologist. In short, we just need to recognise there is a lot going on in our heads that subconsciously influences how we put pen to paper. Here’s my layperson’s understanding of the complex ingredients of the curse.

The first ingredient is “chunking”. Chunking is one of the methods by which we learn. Think of a chunk as a building block. We assemble our knowledge bank by connecting chunks of information together into larger and more complex chunks - but we sometimes need to disassemble the chunks, so our audience can catch on.

Unfortunately, chunking contributes to complex writing. Imagine a banker describing quantitative easing (something few of us had heard of before the financial crash a decade ago) to another banker. It would be easy because they are at the same ‘chunk level’. Ask the same banker to explain it to a child and the communication level would have to change. Quantitative easing is only comprehensible if you learn and understand the underlying chunks. Kids get buying and selling, and they’ve probably been to a market. From there you can progress to explaining about economies and policies to manage the economy and so no.

The second ingredient is “functional fixity”, the human trait of thinking about things in terms of their function rather than their form. Functionally, a dinner plate is an object from which to eat a meal. Form-wise, it is a flat-ish, hard, round, easily cleanable surface. Functional fixity matters because it leads to abstract and conceptual writing. Take Steven Pinker’s example: “Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation” (functional) as opposed to “We tested the students in a quiet room” (form). The latter is concrete and clear.

Finally, we need to throw our four final ingredients into the mix:

A dash of mindblindness: the inability to see something from someone else's point of view.
A pinch of egocentricity: disinterest in considering a different perspective.
A drizzle of hindsight bias: an over-confidence in being able to predict outcomes.
A splash of false consensus: going along with the crowd regardless of your own opinion.

Once the cauldron is full, stir three times and, voilà, you’ve got yourself a tasty potion for prosaic disaster.

The curse is cast

You will know if you have been cursed if your audience fails to understand and engage with your proposal. This will typically be due to some critical symptoms of your writing: incoherence; acronyms and abbreviations; jargon and gobbledygook; complexity and clutter; and abstraction. Examine your own and your colleagues’ writing carefully to spot if you are afflicted – or better still, get an opinion from someone you trust.

As with many things, admission is the first step to cure. If you have a positive diagnosis, read on.

Lifting the curse

There are some traditional remedies you can use such as “put yourself in your customer’s shoes” and “imagine the reader on your shoulder”. Who exactly is the audience? What are they looking for? What do they care about? What is their level of knowledge? Writing with the customer in mind is a good start. And make a working assumption your customer is reasonably intelligent – you don’t want to dumb your writing down to a naïve and condescending level. It’s just they may not understand things to quite the level you do.

With that advice in place, let’s tackle the individual symptoms.

Incoherence : Incoherent writing is rambling and disjointed, without logical or meaningful connections. It is typical of someone who knows exactly what they are talking about and simply dumps it onto a page. There’s no flow. There doesn’t need to be – it’s all just obvious, to them.

Incoherence is the first symptom to cure. A business proposal must be structured overall and by section, so it addresses all the customer’s points and tells your compelling story without losing the plot.

The best medicine for incoherence is a content plan. Think of it as a skeleton that you will flesh out – the bones give it shape and hold it together. Take the time to work out the overall story you want to tell, decide on the sections and the key messages, gather ideas for content that will fit in each section. Check with colleagues the skeleton is the right shape before crafting the body.

Acronyms and abbreviations: Initials and contractions are like spots – they pop up everywhere and need treating individually. No matter how obvious they are to you, always expand acronyms and abbreviations the first time and show the short form in brackets afterwards. Don’t leave your customer guessing if ARMS stands for Aviation Resource Management System or an Automated Records Management System or one of almost 200 other options. In a proposal with many sections, which may be split up among evaluators, repeat this for each section. And consider if a glossary would help.

Jargon and gobbledygook: At the heart of the curse, we will find words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand. These words and expressions get spun into language meaningless to the layperson. Check out the example from Steven Pinker below, which simply means “the more you eat, the fatter you get”.

________________________________________________________________

“There is a significant positive correlation between measures of food intake and body mass index. Body mass index is an increasing function of food intake. Food intake predicts body mass index according to a monotonically increasing relation.”

________________________________________________________________

Remember George Orwell’s writing rule: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Make sure you write in plain English. If you need to use a specialist term, follow it with a short explanation and an example.

Complexity and clutter: The curse of knowledge tends to cause prosaic diarrhoea - long sentences with pompous and unnecessary words in abundance. Try this wonderful example.

________________________________________________________________

“Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal Buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.”

________________________________________________________________

When President Roosevelt saw it, he instructed: “Tell them, that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows."

Focus on getting paragraphs down to one key point and sentences to a sensible average (15-20). In the words of the eminent Professor William Strunk, “omit needless words” , whether they be adverbs, adjectives or other fluff and bluster. If you choose your words wisely, you can still achieve some personality in your writing and get your point across.

To test yourself, use software that will give you readability statistics – there are various options based on algorithms that assess how easy your prose is to read according to parameters such as sentence length and syllables.

Abstraction: To kill off our final curse symptom, we need to eliminate abstraction. Remember functional fixity? It leads to writing about generalities, ideas, concepts or characteristics. In business proposals, we need to write about real things - objects, events and people. We need to use concrete language with examples and be clear about who is doing what, to whom, when, why and how.

Ward off the curse forever

Having taken all the pills – or got your colleagues to take them - you should be feeling better, and so should your customers. Your proposal successes should start to increase.

Before you breathe a sigh of relief, don’t forget, it’s easy for the curse to come back. To ward it off forever, keep taking the medicine. Read more. And learn about writing – there are plenty of great books and videos out there.

Check yourself. Take a break, then go back and read your writing again before editing. For a really effective test, try reading out loud – or get your computer to read it to you.

But there is a limit how far you can edit your own work, so get an independent check-up. Get someone else to read it – someone in your field can assess accuracy and completeness; someone outside your field can review it for readability and comprehension.

And remember the readability statistics – always a useful test. This article is suitable for a 15-year old – about the right level for a proposal.

Oh, and for extra protection, you can always find a white witch - like me!

With thanks to Steve Pinker and his book “The Sense of Style” for inspiring and informing this article.

Prove It!

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 17:30:54 GMT

The importance of evidence in making a compelling case in your proposals

Purchase decisions are influenced by a combination of factors. Aristotle summed it up with his three pillars of persuasion over 2,000 years ago; people need to be convinced by "logos" and "pathos" (logic and emotion ) and "ethos", best described as trust built on reputation and credentials.

So, in our sales proposals we must logically explain how our products satisfy the buyer’s needs at an affordable price. We must also make an emotional connection and show our readers we are likable and trustworthy.

The role of evidence

Evidence (also known as proof points) plays a part in supporting all three pillars but is particularly vital to establishing trust; without it, our proposals can sound pompous and shallow. Superlative claims such as “we are the leading provider...”, “the best…” or “better than…” are unconvincing without supporting evidence.

The best evidence is:

Relevant: Don’t just scatter your evidence around and hope it works like fairy dust; select it wisely to back-up each key point. Make sure each point is relevant to the customer by linking it to the features and benefits of your product.
Quantified: Make your evidence tangible by including measures such as money gained or time saved.
Attributed: Always cite your source, unless you have genuine confidentiality reasons to withhold it. And always give the date of the evidence to show it still has currency.

With that in mind, let’s think about the various types of evidence we can use in our proposals.

Customer evidence

What better evidence than a satisfied customer? If you have online reviews, you can use these individually (customer quotations) and collectively (star ratings or equivalent). If you have results from customer satisfaction survey results and net promoter scores for all or part of your business, these are also valuable.

And get into the habit of writing up successful projects into a case study approved by the customer for publication. A full case study should be professionally written and include:

The customer’s situation before they made the purchase. Ideally, this will include baseline measures from which improvements can be shown.
A description of your product and/or service.
The results the customer achieved. These will be quantified benefits. Where you had baseline measures, compare the before and after to show the improvements.
A testimonial from the most senior customer representative confirming the value you brought to their business – again, quantified where possible.
Photos if appropriate.

Get permission to use the case study in part or in whole. This means you can snip soundbites as well as show the full picture.

Where you have a genuine confidentiality reason to withhold a customer identity (often the case when working in defence or security), write it anonymously with an explanation – if the case study is relevant, buyers will understand.

Third party evidence

Beyond your customer base, you may have received praise or endorsement from other third-party organisations. Here are a few ideas.

Have you or your staff ever won or been nominated for an award? As long as it’s from a reputable source, an award recognises superior capability (perhaps a skill, creativity or innovation) or achievement (maybe a first or an endurance). Always get a photo of the award presentation and keep the application or nomination, so you can tell the story - what you did, why you won and who you beat (especially good if you are competing against them in your proposal).
Have you been cited in an analyst report – plotted on a Forrester Wave™ or a Gartner Magic Quadrant? Providing it is a complimentary positioning and supports your argument, these are excellent independent assessments of your product. Beware any independent reports that require you to pay for the status – that’s not quite the unbiased commendation you are seeking.
Have you been mentioned in a publication or been on the television or radio? Being sought out as an expert in your field and asked for comment can be seen as an affirmation of your credibility.

Evidence of compliance

It’s common in proposals to have to present evidence of compliance with the standards relevant in your industry and proof of key facts and figures. For example:

Certificates
Audit reports
Accounts
Policy documents
Credit reports

Build a checklist of all the possible proof points your customer may ask for and develop good explanations for anything you cannot produce. For example, you may have a robust business continuity and disaster recovery policy, but you have not invested in an ISO22301 certificate. If your customer asks if you are certified, they may well think you should be, so you need to explain why not and show them what you have is equivalent.

In-house evidence

Within your organisation, there will be rich sources of evidence. Anything based on auditable facts and figures is admissible. Below is just a starter for ten:

Think about customers or users, projects completed and products sold. For each of these, consider the totals overall, in different geographic areas, sectors and lines of business, and new ones added in a period. Capture the information using different metrics – value, percentages and ratios.
Employee statistics – retention/attrition, average length of service, qualifications and training, resumes, apprenticeships and diversity records. Find out the industry averages for all these statistics and know how you stack up, so you can boast about it if it’s positive (and address it if it’s not).
And these days, a big topic is 'social value', set to account for 10% of every public sector competitive tender before long. Start collecting data on community benefits, charitable work, environmental performance and how you’ve boosted the economy.
Don’t forget the value of any online or traditional content you have published. Measure blog readership, numbers of books sold and white papers downloaded to indicate popularity.
Finally, if you do research and development, how much do you spend? Measure that as a percentage of your turnover or profit and compare it to industry averages – if you’re a front runner, you will be showing thought-leadership. And compile a list of 'firsts' to show innovation.

Opportunity evidence

Given your proposal is to win a specific opportunity, don’t forget to tap into any related evidence. If you have been smart enough to influence the prospect’s request for proposal (RfP), you will have had conversations with them to shape their thinking. Did you create a proof of concept? Did you build diagrams or slides together? Anything you co-created before the RfP can be re-played to them as evidence.

Did you take your prospect on a successful reference visit to a customer or put on a demonstration that they loved? If so, mention it in your proposal and include a photograph if you have one – no excuses these days when everyone has a camera, but remember to ask permission.

Where you are an incumbent supplier, think about whether stability is important or whether your prospect is hungry for change. Match your evidence to support what your prospect is seeking – replay positive aspects of your relationship, remind them how you have addressed issues and demonstrate new ideas if appropriate.

Presenting your evidence

Once you have your evidence all present and correct, you need to think about where and how to include it in your proposal.

The 'where' should resolve itself – remember that evidence must be relevant, so connect each evidence point to a benefit linked to a feature of your product.

For the 'how', always consider if you can present your evidence visually (known as a 'graphic' in the proposal world). Think about the photos you’ve taken, and about graphs, charts, diagrams, process flows and tables. Then, make sure your graphics have numbers, titles and an 'action caption' to clearly explain your message.

Keeping you evidence to hand

Having captured the gems, crawled the web and combed the archives, it’s a shame not to store all that valuable evidence to use again next time around. Evidence is a vital component of your proposal library. Store it, maintain it and make it available for everyone searching to improve the credibility of their proposals. You will be the richer for it.

Public Sector Bidding: A 101 Guide

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:15:25 GMT

An introduction to public sector tendering

In 2019/20, the UK public sector will buy £848Bn of goods and services . To get a slice of that level of spend in the future, you need to understand how the public sector buys. It’s not a subject for the back of a postage stamp, but let’s explore the basics.

Be prepared

“Public Sector” often conjures up images of fusty Whitehall corridors with stuffy civil servants running bloated departments. In fact, there are thousands of organisations in the public sector from tiny to mammoth, many running tight ships. The Public Sector Classification Guide published by the Office for National Statistics is a good place to get a feel for the extent of the sector .

Selling to the public sector is no different to any other market. You first need to be sure that you have a defined offering or capability – you need to know what you are selling, who might need to buy it, why and when they would buy it, and what is different and better about your offering than your competitors. You also need the following:

To be crystal clear about the benefits, outcomes and results that you will help the buyer achieve – buyers are seeking value for money, which may be assessed purely on price, but for complex purchases will be decided on the basis of a mix of price and quality.
To have or be able to create credibility – buyers want to be confident they are making a sensible choice with an appropriate level of risk. Your track record, your credentials and the way you handle yourself throughout to procurement process will count.
To appreciate that public sector buyers are subject to a great deal of scrutiny and tend to be risk averse. Don’t be fooled by an emphasis on innovation if you see it – if innovation means risk, they’ll probably ditch the innovation!

Let’s assume that you’ve got that taped and you’re ready to go. Where do you find opportunities?

Seek and ye shall find

There’s always emphasis on the formality of selling to public sector – having to respond to an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Proposal (RFP). However, like any organisation, public sector bodies will go through stages in their procurement before they issue any formal tender documentation. They will identify the need to buy something, define and justify the requirements and the budget, and gather information before they seek formal proposals, choose a supplier and award a contract.

Although there are strict rules about fairness and transparency in public sector, suppliers who are better informed about the procurement from early on are better equipped to produce a winning proposal. So, as in any sales situation, you need to make yourself visible to your potential public sector buyers and demonstrate value. Use conferences, industry forums and networking (online or offline). Make direct contact and request an audience. Start a conversation.

As well as networking through standard sales routes, public sector buyers will often undertake Pre-Tender Market Engagement. This will involve formal interaction with the supplier marketplace and may be advertised via a Prior Information Notice (PIN), which are currently advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) – see below for more details.

You can also use Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests to learn about existing contracts and financial values. Published annual reports and strategies provide information about objectives and budgets.

Public procurement regulations

All public sector bodies must comply with the UK public sector procurement regulations. These were last updated in 2015 (and in 2016 for Utilities and Concession contracts). The UK regulations are based on the EU procurement regulations, but also include some UK national legislation to make life easier for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

So, every public sector buyer (usually a procurement officer) must choose and follow the most appropriate procedure for whatever (s)he needs to buy. The choice will be dictated by a range of parameters.

The first parameter is financial value. There is a published set of thresholds over which a strict procurement protocol must be chosen and followed. Ensure you are aware of the latest values published by OJEU .

The second parameter is the type of purchase. The default procedure is the Open Procedure, whereby anyone can respond to the published ITT or RFP. Other options are:

The Restricted Procedure for when there is a specific need to pre-qualify and/or there would be a large number of responders.
Competitive Dialogue or Competitive Procedure with Negotiation for when the nature or complexity of the requirement means standard solutions need adaptation or the requirement needs further discussion and development.
Light Touch Regime for certain service types including health, social and education.
Innovation Partnership Procedure for when there is no existing solution.

It is up to the buyer to decide the appropriate route. It is up to you to understand how to respond in a way that is compliant and optimises the probability of winning.

Each procedure has an associated timeline for each stage. There is an option to use an accelerated procedure if the procurement can be justified as urgent. You need to understand the timelines and be able to respond within them.

OJEU opportunities will be published using a Contract Notice. These may be found on Tender Electronic Daily (TED), the official OJEU website . There are many other online services offering aggregated views of all tender opportunities. Commercial service providers include Tracker from BIP and Tenders Direct . Free services are provided nationally by: Sell2Wales , Public Contracts Scotland and eSourcing NI (Northern Ireland). These sites will also publish PINs (which may just be for information or may be the first stage in a Restricted Procedure or Competitive Procedure with Negotiation) and

Contract Award Notices.

In England, Contracts Finder is the portal for tender publication - Contract Notices must be published on Contracts Finder within 24 hours of publication elsewhere (OJEU or other advertisement). This applies to all opportunities over £10,000 for central government and £25,000 for other government bodies.

The rise of Frameworks

Frameworks are a useful device for both buyers and suppliers. They are an OJEU compliant way of pre-selecting suppliers and then allowing buyers to choose from those suppliers either by running mini-competitions (which are not always that “mini”), asking clarification questions or by simply placing a Call-Off Order. You will need to watch for the window of opportunity to apply to join a Framework.

You may also come across Dynamic Purchasing Systems (DPS) which are like frameworks but allow suppliers to join at any time subject to a compliant application.

A raft of paperwork

Whichever way the buyer decides to come to market, the supplier will have to be prepared to read and respond to a range of published documents that will include:

Instructions to tenderers: how to ensure a compliant response (a must if you are not to be eliminated).
Statement of requirements: one or many documents describing what the buyer wants to buy either described as features or functions, or as outcomes or results.
Lots: descriptions of any Lots (sub-sets of requirements). Procurement regulations encourage buyers to divide their procurements into Lots to encourage more SMEs to participate.
Evaluation criteria: confirming exactly how the responses will be assessed to decide on the Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT). The evaluation criteria should show the ratio of price and quality, and the exact mechanism for scoring and reaching the highest score. Price may be the straight price or, increasingly, the total cost of ownership. Quality can include various factors, for example products and/or service capability, delivery methods, quality, track record and social factors.
Terms and conditions of contract: either draft or non-negotiable.

Early in the process (depending on the value and procedure being followed) you may have to complete a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ), sometimes called a Selection Questionnaire (SQ). These contain a range of mandatory and discretionary criteria that suppliers must meet to be able to continue. These will include company information and due diligence questions about legal and financial standing. They may also explore your basic capability to satisfy the requirements. Where this information is not obtained in advance via a PQQ or SQ (or because it has been done when establishing a framework), it will be required as part of the response to the ITT or RFP. There are various mechanisms in specific industries and within the EU to reduce the duplication involved in creating PQQs and SQs through centralised reusable documentation. Do your research to see if there is a route for you as it could save you time.

During the response process and depending on the procedure, as well as submitting the proposal/bid/tender, you may have to give presentations or demonstrations, participate in negotiations or reverse auctions, or submit a Best and Final Offer (BAFO).

Reaching a verdict

The buyer that has been the point of contact for the formal proposal response will organise the buying committee (on which (s)he may or may not participate) to assess the proposals in accordance with the published evaluation criteria. The proposal may be split up and scored by individuals and then reviewed independently. These measures are designed to ensure fairness – the evaluation approach is a logical mechanism to enable the buyers to reach an unbiased decision. However, you will ideally have got to know and understand the members of the buying committee early in the procurement exercise - early engagement will enable you to build understanding, value and empathy into your proposal. This makes a significant difference to the buyers’ perception.

Winning (and losing)

Once the buyers have reached a decision, they will notify the winner(s) and the loser(s) via a Decision Notice. There is always a 10-day standstill period after this announcement to give unsuccessful bidders the opportunity to object if they believe there has been some unfairness in the process. There is case law in the UK showing this can be a successful approach, but be sure to have your facts straight - only undertake a challenge with the knowledge you have a genuine case, not just that you are upset about losing.

After the contract is awarded, the buyer is obliged to publish a Contract Award Notice confirming: the date the contract was awarded; the award criteria; the number of offers received; the name and address of the successful tenderer(s); the value of the contract. The buyer must also feed back to the unsuccessful bidders their scores against the evaluation criteria, the winning scores and why there was a difference. Unfortunately, there are variations and exemptions from this useful rule, such as when a decision is made within a framework mini-competition or clarification process. So again, check the facts before you cry foul.

Always seek additional feedback not only to understand how you can improve next time, but also to show the buyer you are a professional organisation and to start the process of impressing them for the next procurement.

Should we or shouldn’t we?

Entering any new market is a major undertaking. You need to do your research and be sure you have a winning proposition. You need to understand the way the new market operates, and have a plan with realistic timeframes and resources to deliver a return on your investment. To summarise, let’s just round up the pros and cons of selling to the public sector:

Pros

Massive expenditure
Persistent marketplace
Good payment ethic (within 30 days for SMEs)
High likelihood of success once established
Focus on fairness

Cons

Long timeframes
High sustained effort
Complex and rigid processes
Political factors can have unexpected consequences
High visibility of failure

If you decide to go ahead, plan for success in a two-year timeframe (not overnight), and measure progress by a solid set of metrics. And remember, there is good support out there for you - look no further.

Let Me Tell You a Story

183:834033988 (Sarah Hinchliffe) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 16:09:43 GMT

How traditional and modern storytelling techniques can enhance your proposals

Although the term storytelling has become a business buzzword in the 21st century, the art of storytelling has been around since our ancestors lived in caves and drew on their walls.

Stories have the power to entertain, educate, preserve culture and instil moral values through accounts of imaginary or real people and events. Stories also have the power to sell. You only need to look at an experiment called the “ significant objects experiment ” where a hundred cheap objects with an average value of $1.25 were sold for a total of $8,000 simply by adding a story to each.

While stories are common in the world of business to consumer marketing and sales – from the smouldering romance of the Gold Blend adverts of the 80s and 90s and the long-running Oxo family - stories in business to business sometimes need more thought. Let’s explore how the components of a story can help shape our creativity when writing a business proposal.

Along the way, we’ll call on a few experts including the folk on the Pixar movie team - renowned for consistently making brilliant stories.

Got the plot?

A plot is a sequence of major events leading from somewhere to somewhere or something to something. A plot often relates to a problem that needs to be solved or a quest for a physical or emotional goal. The cause and effect of each major event drive the story forward.

German writer Gustav Freytag developed a 'Pyramid' to describe five stages of a plot, to which most stories conform - the Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action and Denouement. He felt this would engage and hold the audience's attention.

Pixar has a tried and trusted formula (below) for outlining a plot – by filling in the blanks, you can tell just about any story:

“Once upon a time there was…Every day…One day…Because of that…Because of that…Until finally…” Pixar urges us to focus on a core idea (a mother lode) to hang everything on. We can add sub-plots, but they should relate to the main plot – perhaps be a deeper dive to develop aspects of the storyline. Avoid parallel plots (like solving a crime alongside an affair between two of the characters), which only serve to dilute the main story.

Turning to our proposal, our plot is getting our customer from a problem or ambition to an endgame or vision where they have achieved their desired outcome or result. The major events are the points in the journey we will take them on to get from start to finish – maybe checking their needs, then creating a solution, then implementing the solution and realising the benefits. We can use sub-plots to enhance different aspects – for example, our commercial and technical plots.

Character-forming

Characters in a story are real or imaginary. They play out the events and triumph or suffer in the causes or effects.

To bring characters to life, their personalities need developing. Perhaps they are heroes or villains, larger than life or shrinking violets, dazzlingly handsome or sorrowfully ugly. As they unfold, we will learn to love them or loathe them – the best characters evoke strong emotions.

Few of Pixar’s characters are humans – they are toys, cars, insects, fish, to name a few. They are all vividly brought to life and, without noticing, you become absorbed in their worlds and their struggles and victories.

When they are reading our proposals, our customers need to be entertained and influenced to love or hate the characters. We need to know our customers and what they care about, so we can write for them.

We can make the features of our solution the heroes, and the features of our competitors’ solutions the villains. But to be heroes, our features need to be developed from flat, one-dimensional characters into endearing multi-dimensional characters by matching them to a customer requirement and bringing out their benefits and value.

Theme-time

The theme is the message or purpose of the story, a point or lesson which the audience can recognise – not necessarily straight away, but by the end.

Although Pixar’s movies have big, colourful stories, there is always a theme underneath. “Finding Nemo” isn’t just about the adventures of a father clownfish dashing around the world’s oceans to rescue his kidnapped son – it’s about parenting. The “Toy Story” trilogy isn’t a bunch of toys rollicking around – it’s about loyalty, handling change and doing the right thing. Remember the old end to many a tale: “…and the moral of the story is…”

Andrew Stanton, one of the Pixar team, talks about needing a strong theme. And that’s what we need in our proposals. Our themes create the compelling reason why the customer should choose us and not our competitors.

Business coach and storyteller John Bates has a great piece of advice: “Give us what matters to us. Pick three points and don’t cram unnecessary information in. Bring just the key things to the top.”

Hurrah to Andrew and John. Proposals that cram in every differentiator or Unique Selling Point in a pile it high fashion, won’t cut it. You will confuse and alienate. Between one and three themes, carefully crafted to express benefit and value for the customer, then woven through the proposal will beat a shedload of bragging any day.

A healthy dose of empathy

For a story to stick, we need to identify with the plot, the characters and the theme. Soundbites from Stanton - “make me care”, “tell it from the heart”, “create wonder” – emphasise the point. Pixar suggests empathy is the “third level of liking”. The first two levels are superficial, based on physical attractiveness and positive personal traits. True empathy comes when you engage more deeply and get under the surface, possibly even sharing and supporting each other’s challenges.

Remember that buying is as much about emotion as it is about logical argument. As Bates comments: “None of the facts and figures matter until you have some sort of emotional connection.”

So, we need to create empathy on the page through emotional connection. Connect on the first two levels by using your customer’s name (or “you”) often and explaining “what’s in it for them” by describing the outcomes they will achieve either personally or corporately.

Mirror your customer by using their language and playing back any discussions or diagrams they have shared with you.

Show you care by writing from the heart and making strong, positive commitments about getting things done. Reinforce this by showing vulnerability by being open about any risks and issues you or they face and how you will deal with them together.

Get away from dull business-speak when you can by using vibrant, action-based language and images. And share stories of how you’ve solved similar problems before.

Beginnings and endings (and the middle bit)

Both your “once upon a time” and your “happily ever after” need to be captivating. Stanton suggests making a promise at the beginning – one that you can come back to at the end. Freytag introduces us to the terms exposition (introduction) and denouement (resolution) – solid front and end anchor points either side of a roller-coaster of a story. Strong beginnings and endings make your story complete and fulfilling.

In your proposals, remember to get to the point at the start. Don’t waffle around with please and thank you and how delighted you are to be submitting a proposal. Instead, tell them how you will solve their problem and what the outcomes will look like. Do this in the executive summary and each section of the proposal. At the end of the executive summary and each section, summarise and bring the customer back to outcomes for them.

The bits in the middle are where you paint the picture of the journey you will take together to get from problem to outcome, developing your characters and themes. Ensure you have a logical and balanced structure throughout your proposal.

There will be times when your customer makes it hard to set out your story in a format and structure that suits you. But don’t forget, you can start a story in the middle and then fill in earlier and later gaps. Whatever constraints your customer puts forward, these are simply like the obstacles in the movie that fox the protagonists and cause some action to get back on track.

A cautionary tale

On my journey through the lands of storytelling, I have found some techniques that don’t quite suit the world of proposals. The two that get a thumbs-down are:

Stanton: “Give them 2 + 2 instead of 4” – meaning that you need to make your audience work hard. Sorry, no. Our job in a proposal is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to find what they need and want. They are time-poor and will much prefer the company that gives them great sign-posting.
Bates: “People don’t connect with your success, they connect with your mess” – akin to “bad news sells” (but good news doesn’t). Although proposal best practice does counsel us to explain how we will address relevant weaknesses, and we know that the best relationships are built on sharing and resolving challenges, we don’t want too much negativity in the document.

There are probably more, but we want to end on a positive note.

And finally…

My narrative ends fittingly with a denouement – interestingly a word that translates as untie, rather than tie up (all the loose ends). The overriding conclusions from my storytelling journey on this occasion are: one, check you’ve got the component parts of the story covered, and two, stay focused.

Am I telling you anything new or different? Possibly not – the proposal suggestions are best practice, and I always counsel clients to work out their approach before they write. But I hope this blog has reinforced why we do what we do and, perhaps, how to think of things in a fresh light.