Organizations competing for federal and other customer contracts have seen a major shift in the procurement rules.
Historically the bulk of the effort in responding to request for proposals has been in producing written proposals. Extraordinary energy has gone into telling the right story in the specified 100 pages, or sometimes 10 volumes, with each word carefully crafted and scrutinized to convey the most powerful selling message.
Today that same extra care has to be put forth developing the winning presentation, often referred to as the proposal orals or short list interview.
The objective is to streamline the procurement process while giving evaluators a better size-up means by hearing from those who will actually do the work vs. those who can write superior proposals.
For contractors, producing winning “orals” calls for a very different process from the past written proposal. For many, this is new territory, and some common traps await.
– Ten Traps To Avoid
During A Presentation
From having coached about 200 proposal orals teams to these new rules over the past two decades, here are some of those traps , which many battle-scarred proposal vets will recognize:
o Waiting too long to get started, and underestimating the amount of work involved.
If your team must present on Friday, don’t wait until Tuesday to get started. This is probably the most common preparation mistake and even large firms with ample resources are guilty of this one. The result is predictable , a team worn to a frazzle by 20-hour days, and possibly nights, or a poorly prepared team.
o Assuming this is just like other customer presentations and not preparing the team for the different rules of engagement.
Many highly knowledgeable people have a hard time becoming excellent proposal writers. Now throw in that this is not written, but personally presented , to very specific and often stringent guidelines. Added to that are the pressures of tight deadlines, intense internal scrutiny and, yes, the anxiety of facing a tough, unknown audience.
Perhaps $10 or $100 million is riding on each person’s performance. Don’t send your team into major battle with puny weapons.
– Setting Up A Practical
Schedule For The Team
o Not setting a workable schedule and making sure the team sticks to it.
One speaker benefited from careful schedule adherence. Unlike most of her colleagues, she met each milestone in developing her segment. On the major rehearsal day, she did so well the internal review team was hard-pressed to find fault. She went home at 4 p.m. while her teammates had to keep churning away past midnight.
o Failing to set clear win themes right from the start, and weaving them into all segments.
In coaching teams I always ask what’s the win strategy at the top level and for each section. “Huh?” is often the answer, or “We’re still working on that and once we understand it better, those will come out.” Make sure you’ve figured those out in advance, or consider passing on this one.
o Getting everyone to recognize that selling to the right issues is paramount.
This is an extremely common problem, as many highly knowledgeable people are weak at selling. A retired colonel, previously in charge of the proposal evaluators, said: “One of the standard laments from our people was that the presenters often failed to address the issues on our score sheets.”
– Outline, Discuss Topic
Before Showing Graphics
o Jumping right into graphics before laying out a clear organization.
Back in English class that was called outlining. With today’s wide computer use, most team members are eager to quickly churn out their graphics. The result is often disjointed, with no message clarity, flow or sell. Yes, those painstakingly crafted graphics look nice , too bad most will have to be scrubbed and re-done. That’s not an efficient way to operate.
o Underestimating the graphics load.
With today’s computers, most companies have strong graphics capability.
Yet almost everyone runs into a jam-up when the heavy loads hit. Proposal orals are by nature highly changeable and even good graphics talent can only do so much in a 24-hour day.
o Assuming it’s business-as-usual for getting materials produced.
Here the horror stories abound: color printers running out of supplies on Saturday afternoon and no re-supplies until Monday; untested vendors whose continuing poor quality forces the team to seek better services late in the game; computer systems incompatible with projectors or customer systems.
– Rehearsals Are An
Essential Ingredient
o Putting rehearsals on a “maybe” vs. “must” category.
A common difficulty is getting people to rehearse, either individually or as an integrated team. Not practicing is almost a surefire formula for impending disaster. Following a recent proposal, the program manager told me he’d been resisting rehearsals. “We’d done many presentations before so I didn’t think we needed it. Was I ever wrong! Without those dry runs you kept insisting on, we wouldn’t have come through nearly as well as we did.”
o Not preparing for the informal as well as formal parts of the encounter.
Q & A; , question-and-answer , sessions almost always are included in orals. An executive related how his team was well-honed for the presentation.
“But we did little to get ready for the Q & A.; And that’s where we got killed, as our program manager kept bungling the questions.” On the other hand, another team salvaged a win from a rough presentation by shining during the Q & A; portion.
Current procurement practices suggest that future proposals are more likely to emphasize presentations. By being alert to these 10 common traps, marketing teams can stay on course toward winning bids.
Leech owns the San Diego-based consulting firm, Thomas Leech & Associates.
