The risk isn't in overhyping

This is a recap of the most valuable ideas we talked about in December 2023.

For the busy pros, it starts with:

• A bit about technology (especially artificial intelligence) in proposals
• One key idea for doing better in our profession
• The proposals billboard of the month

Then, for the geeky pros, I've included a compilation of the rest of the topics.

The Proposals Tech Bit of the Month

As you can probably guess from me being an engineer who ended up loving proposals—weird, I know—freelanced as a proposal manager in high-tech and founded DeepRFP; I like technology.

Duh!

But one thing is liking technology that has proven to work, like liking electricity or computers, and another much different thing is liking trying technology that still hasn't proven to work.

The latter is a hard-to-manage tendency because of two things:

• You don't have time to try every new tech and gadget out there
• Many of them end up not working, so trying equals wasting time

Peer, I've had many of these in proposals. Since I started my career, I've tried:

• Speech recognition tools to speed up bidding and office work—failed after dozens of hours sunk mainly because of two reasons: tech not being up to the challenge (my strong Spanish accent may have played a role ??) and the thinking process not being as fluent (typing paces my brain better).
• Software personal assistants like MS Cortana—found it not good and helpful enough after many hours of setting up and trying.
• All shorts of version-control tools—obscure field this one—just to stick with the MS Word "track changes" functionality and having to remember clients to keep it ON every day. Still do the "version in the copy name" trick, just in case.

Hundreds of hours trying, proving what works, and discarding the many failed ones.

The last one, of course, is AI large language models. I started playing with these almost three years ago, sinking many hours with incapable versions to finally see the potential that made me invest in the first DeepRFP prototype.

Side note: just in case you wonder, I bootstrapped DeepRFP.

And, after all this experience, I can tell you one thing:

?? The risk isn't in overhyping a technology; it is in missing the magnitude of the change it can make.

When you think about it, I may have "wasted" hundreds of hours getting into tech that wasn't up to the hype, but that has been in exchange for not missing the biggest change of them all.

Because, make no mistake, AI is far deeper and more powerful than "just another technology for proposals".

How can I help?

?? Insights, here jescartin.com >>

??? Tools, here DeepRFP.com >>

The Proposals Tip of the Month

When I started freelancing full-time as a proposal manager/writer, I landed a client in the B2G organizational coaching space.

Small WOSB firm led by a strong woman with high business standards who used to write the proposals herself. Let's call her Patricia.

You know, until that collaboration, most of my clients in the SME space were okay with almost any type of proposal. The quality level was up to me; they're busy business owners with no bidding knowledge, so they just trust you. I kept my quality standards as high as the projects allowed, yet this position was comfortable.

Patricia's projects, however, were different; she wanted to outsource the proposals' heavy lifting but remain on top of things, and her reviews were ruthless.

What seemed to be stressful news turned out to be one of my most extended collaborations—an ongoing workload that was a blessing in those first years—and definitely one in which I learned the most about effective selling and proposal writing.

Yesterday, I was reminded about a lesson from this time: what's a 1-0-1 in proposals, yet I see many peers overlook.

?? If it's going to be an empty statement, fix it or delete it.

That's one of the rules that helps the most when selling through proposals—shocker, that's what we do!

When addressing some requirement, or a pain point you know they have but don't know how to put in words, tell them the why, what, and how, or what others like to call the benefit, the feature, and the proof.

If you leave out any of those three elements, that's an empty statement, and it'd be much better just saying nothing.

Nothing destroys your authority as much as having a proposal with plenty of empty statements, sometimes even parroting back the RFP.

Patricia made me understand that, then requested changes every time one went in through the rush. To be honest, her high standards played an important role in all my future wins.

The tricky part here is that sometimes you don't have the feature or the proof to support a statement, often because an SME (or a client) didn't provide enough details.

I share things like what I do in these cases where the team inputs are so bad that you can't avoid empty statements, my step-by-step process to first gather the relevant details, and then my workaround when you don't have it.

?? Tips like that one here ?

The Proposals Billboard of the Month

Upper management shocker.

Before the rest of the recap, 15 seconds

As promised, below is the rest of the month's recap, but if you're reading this, you must be in proposals, so give me 15 seconds because being on this list interests you.

Every week, I send two emails to the pros on this list ?? jescartin.com , one on how to do better at proposals and one about proposals technology.

The coolest thing on this list is the emails, yet the hundreds of proposals pros on it also get exclusive access to top proposals stuff for free.

Like what?

Like these:

?? Top Jobs in Proposals—fully remote positions with salaries disclosed at companies with excellent ratings—featured in the emails.

?? Exclusive access to The AI in Proposals one-pager—a 5-minute read about the status of artificial intelligence in bidding that I keep up to date.

?? Exclusive access to the GPT use cases in Proposals?compilation—the most practical AI uses that proposal pros and businesses can implement today.

?? Exclusive DeepRFP trials .

One-click on, one-click off.

Easy, because we already have hard jobs.

Check it out! ?? jescartin.com

The rest of the recap, below:

• I shaved my head
• I had to remind them again
• Confession time

I shaved my head

and I plan to keep it like that.

Don't worry; I'm healthy. It's just that it was time to start a new chapter (and get a professional headshot, by the way).

Embracing change is one of those mindsets I've found most fruitful to cultivate. That idea that no matter what we want or how comfortable with something we are, there is a myriad of things we don't control, some impacting our status quo at different levels.

And when one of these unavoidable changes hits one aspect of your life, like your public image or your job, resisting won't help.

However, accepting something inevitable is the easiest scenario. The art is in detecting early signals and working through a path forward to be ready when it hits.

Well, not only to be ready, but to benefit.

Let me share some personal examples to illustrate the idea better:

I was working full-time as an employee when I landed my first position in proposals—they called it business development because it sounded sexier—and started to get many signals of two things: how transferable our profession is—I was in Aerospace but understood how similar those tenders were no matter the industry—and how "remotable" it was (and still is).

At the time, it wasn't obvious, but I started to work on actions that allowed me to benefit first by quitting my job and becoming a full-time freelance, but even more when during COVID everybody realized that hiring a fully remote freelance working half a day ahead (for my main market at the time, North America) was a great idea. I had the knowledge and the processes to benefit greatly from this change.

Did I have a clear plan? Nope.

Did I do things that felt aligned with what was going on? That's all I did.

How my bet with AI-powered tools goes is still to be seen, but I've been picking many signals since about three years ago, and doing what I feel puts me in a better position to embrace change.

I think you should do the same because the signals are getting stronger. You know, the fact that version 1.0 of this technology can read, parse, and write, as well as your junior colleagues, tells you something.

?? An easy way to start embracing the change ?

I had to remind them again

After a few months out, I'm back taking calls, and I'm noticing something new.

A new type of "lead" if you will, one that fits into the following category:

Bidding consultant tasked with a market study on AI tools for proposals. Or the close relative: proposal consulting firm doing a market study to pitch their clients on AI tools for bidding.

This signals that AI—in proposals and everywhere else—is in the agendas of C-suites across the globe. But that's not what I want to talk about.

The usual suspects' names pop up in these calls, and you feel they're trying to put you somewhere in a benchmark matrix.

Trained or fine-tuned? Embeddings or direct context? Custom or out-of-the-box? Long-form or questionnaires? Jargon.

And the more I have this type of conversation, the more I realize the following is so true and what matters:

Yes, get the best tech you can afford, but keep in mind that 80% of the return on investment comes from your people learning how to use it—and actually using it.

Effective adoption trumps edge technology every time.

And that's why my recommendation always defaults to the idea of starting as soon as possible with something easy and focusing your effort on learning and implementing it.

Even if you happen to have $100k/year to spare on the latest artificial brain for bidding, if that means waiting a year between budget approvals and complex developments, you'll be better off grabbing a $5k/year tool and starting learning and rolling today.

That's what I believe, anyhow, and why DeepRFP is positioned the way it is.

The easiest way to start getting quick wins today, while you build the know-how to navigate what's coming.

?? An AI tool kit specifically designed for bidding and proposals

Confession time

I've just agreed to manage a new proposal for an old client personally.

To be honest, I didn't want to.

I sort of have the slack, although it is going to stress my schedule big time.

It's well paid and how I like it—fixed price, win bonus—so the effective working hourly rate is going to be in the low hundreds (mid if we win). Not bad.

Yet I wanted to say "no" because DeepRFP is so demanding, and I can think of dozens of things I would prefer to do with that time, some of them business things that will help scale.

So, why did I take it?

Because I truly believe that to figure out this revolutionary tech, you need to get dirty, see what works, and come back with smart solutions to real problems.

And despite being tempted to be only a "small tech founder"—the easier path from where I'm at—I keep consulting as an strategic decision, to gain the insights no one is gaining in our slow field, proposals.

Did I say slow?

Yes, I get it, we all feel the pressure of deadlines, wicked RFPs, shameless SMEs and uncommitted subcos, yet the fact that writing proposals cannot be considered "slow pace", doesn't mean the field itself—the industry, the profession—moves slow compared with other business areas.

One example: about a year ago, OpenAI and Microsoft launched a new tool called Copilot (the software development assistant, not the MS 365 Copilot of your home PC), and it became ubiquitous among coders in a matter of months.

That's fast-paced and great news because we, in bidding, can see what's happening, learn, and then bring home what works. Let others do the trial and error, then take advantage.

I guess we can say proposals is slow, and smart!

By the way, some analyses suggest that software engineers enhanced with these AI tools are 55% faster at writing code, and now they focus on creative problems instead of mundane work.

Can you see a similarity with proposals?

I not only do but experience it firsthand in my consulting. That's one of my strategic assets, worth the struggle of combining a tech business with a freelancing operation.

I'm benefiting from this, and so you can because once I discover what really works, I share it.

?? Insights on how to do better at proposals and bid tech

Thanks!

And this is it for this edition of this?newsletter.

I you don't want to wait a month to know what's going on in proposals and tech, join us on the hottest list in the space.

Let's talk proposals and tech! ?? jescartin.com

Besides the valuable updates, tips and ideas, you'll get access to top proposals stuff such as:

?? Top Jobs in Proposals—fully remote positions with salaries disclosed at companies with excellent ratings—featured in the emails.

?? Exclusive access to The AI in Proposals one-pager—a 5-minute read about the status of artificial intelligence in bidding that I keep up to date.

?? Exclusive access to the GPT use cases in Proposals?compilation—the most practical AI uses that proposal pros and businesses can implement today.

?? Exclusive access to DeepRFP?trials.