Proposals in the age of capture

I'm incredibly proud of my fellow SP director Graham Ablett for his wonderful keynote at last week’s APMP Capture & Business Development conference. I've just watched it back for a second time, and it really was a phenomenal presentation (with great work by Andy Walker of our design team, too, to bring the story to life in a very contemporary way). I absolutely love it when colleagues in our organisation challenge and stretch my own thinking with sessions like this.

Now, I’m determinedly a proposal professional – not a bid expert. My passion (and core expertise) is helping teams to plan to develop a winning written proposal - then to bring their story to life in the submission, before turning it into a compelling presentation.

The end-to-end bid process - planning and managing all of the aspects of the overall campaign, from the opportunity being a twinkle in the salesperson's eye to the client signing on the dotted line? It's not really what interests me personally (although there are folks in my team who are great at it, and hugely experienced at leading people on that journey). And, as I’ve said many times, there’s danger in thinking that the “bid” and the “proposal” projects are one and the same: I've seen that confusion lead to far to much chaos and stress over the years.

What Graham did so well in his keynote was to link a number of proposal management trends brilliantly into the broader bid management process - of which "capture" (the latest buzzword in our profession) forms such an essential part.

First: he showed how the finely tuned and highly successful methodology for pre-proposal planning that we first developed many years ago fits alongside capture. In showing how to dovetail this more strategic process for building momentum and competitive advantage from a proposal perspective neatly into more strategic approaches to the overall bid, it felt to me as if Graham nailed a missing link.

And then: on to the very role of the proposal team. We’re long argued that proposal professionals shouldn’t be confined to working on reactive documents (merely responding to client ITTs and RFPs). The best proposal teams and people have the skills - and are given the bandwidth by their organisations - to work on so much more that adds value.

Whether it’s proactive or renewal proposals, birthday proposals throughout the lifetime of the contract (AKA "value reports" in Graham's terminology), or bid collateral to support conversations earlier in the buying process: our skills can at best help our sales colleagues to avoid the slippery slope of competitive tendering – or, at least, ensure that consistent, top-class messaging to the client starts well before the formal process of "document exchange".

Where Graham’s session really struck home was linking this into how and when clients are absorbing information in the era of the pandemic. It’s never been more important to develop bespoke, visually appealing documents with punchier messaging. That includes more creative content - for example, videos and animations, both increasingly critical (and a new baseline standard) in the digital world.

By bringing those perspectives together, I think Graham raised the bar for proposal professionals, making us all think more holistically about the types of output we’re producing – and (wonderfully) validating that our skills feel more relevant than ever in the era of the pandemic. We won’t be going back to 2019, for sure: changes to how and when people absorb “proposal” information within the bid cycle are here to stay. And having the ability to execute and submit this more creative, higher-impact content quickly to the client’s decision-makers, earlier in their decision-making processes, is now mandatory - not merely desirable - for successful sales organisations.

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If you're interested in hearing Graham's keynote yourself, you can still register for and listen to the conference until the end of this month. And he and Lorraine Baird make for a wonderful double-act presenting our online course to help people to prepare for the APMP Capture Practitioner qualification; they've received great feedback from attendees so far!