Skilling up and a new way to implement best practices in proposals
Javier Escartin
?? Figuring out AI in proposals so you don't have to. I believe we, the proposal professionals, have to lead this revolution so AI works for (and not against) us. Grab your free tools and insights below ??
This is a recap of the most valuable ideas we talked about in April 2023.
For the busy pros, it starts with:
Then, for the geeky pros, I've included a compilation of the rest of the topics.
The Proposals Tech Highlight of the Month
91% of companies hiring want pros with AI tools experience
In April, ResumeBuilder surveyed 1,187 business leaders and found that, of those currently hiring, 91% want workers with AI* experience.
* The survey was referring to ChatGPT, but besides a particular brand or tool, what businesses really want is professionals who know how to unlock the value these AI large language models (AI LLMs) can bring. Reply for the survey link.
That itself already tells us something very important:
?? We all should skill up.
But there was more.
The survey surfaced two key findings that got my attention (verbatim, these are not my words):
Wow! Some bold statements here! ?? Let's see.
First, you may ask: what's a prompt engineer, and what that means in proposals?
A prompt engineer works on getting the most out of these AI LLMs by training and adapting the models and designing how to communicate with them to serve a specific business function—say, proposals.
Second, what business leaders envisage doesn't have to happen, but it signals the type of questions being asked on boards.
This is a discussion for another day, but here's a highlight of my take:
It all will be about whether a particular company wants to bid for more RFPs. If so, keeping and elevating your team with AI is the wise move. This scenario requires visionary leaders and motivated pros.
For anyone in proposals, I've put together two free, no B.S. docs:
?? The AI in Proposals one-pager: a 5-minute read about the status of artificial intelligence in bidding that I keep up to date.
?? A new and better compilation of GPT use cases in Proposals: the most practical uses of AI Large Language Models (not only ChatGPT) in RFP analysis and proposal management & writing.
Where to get these for free?
The Proposals Tip of the Month
Saying 'We can do it' isn't a winning ticket.
I know, it's almost impossible you didn't know this because you show you care about our profession by reading this.
And that's proposals 101.
? Want to craft a proposal that truly captivates? Understand their ultimate goal. Dig deep for their express and implied needs. Solve their core struggles. Prove your prowess with hard data. And lastly, flaunt your track record of past wins!
However, let's be honest, when was the last time you didn't get the time to kick off a proposal that way?
I constantly struggled with this in almost any proposal before transforming my freelancing business—more on this coming to the newsletter soon ??. The last one just a couple of months ago.
And after having struggled myself, and the many chats I have with pros every week, I've realized that the main factor for this deficiency is, unsurprisingly:
?? Lack of time.
Almost every team I meet knows what they need to do, but then you have extreme workloads, bad deadlines, poor upper management, and a myriad of limiting factors that end in "we don't have time for that".
But you know what?
The fact that it's indeed the lack of time is what makes me so optimistic about the future of our profession.
Because we're about to lower the time-demanding tasks drastically, so proposal professionals can focus on what makes wins possible.
Including all the 101s that you know, but ditch once you see how close that deadline is.
Let's be honest, what I have for you isn't magic, but it's a good place to start without needing approval for those +$100k/year investments.
Easy, because we already have hard jobs.
?? DeepRFP.com
The Short Video of the Month
AI in Proposals is a thing!
DeepRFP's proposals joke of the month
I often ask DeepRFP to write proposals jokes.
(I'm so glad it's much better at managing and writing proposals! ??)
Here's the best one of the month:
Isn't it funny how in proposals we're all rushing around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying we're too busy to try something new? It's like someone hands you a magical time-saving device and says, "Hey, this thing will cut your work in half!" But instead of grabbing it with both hands, you're like, "Nah, I'm too busy running in circles to stop and use that!"??? That's us, stuck on the hamster wheel, passing up the express lane because we're too busy to take a shortcut. Makes perfect sense, right????
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 demos.
One-click on, one-click off.
Easy, because we already have hard jobs.
Check it out! ???jescartin.com
The rest of the recap, below:
How I'm saving 44h per proposal
When I was full-time freelancing as a proposal manager in the traditional way—without AI tools— my projects' effort breakdown looked more or less like this:
Let's put some absolute numbers as an example.
For a 100h proposal ?? 20h - 70h - 10h
Now, with the new operation—driven heavily by AI tools—the breakdown is looking like this:
So, I've just started with this, and proposals are already taking me 56% of what they took me before.
Let me repeat that:
? I'm saving 44h out of 100h per standard proposal. And this is the first project under the new operation.
Call me an optimist, but I think this will get closer to the 70% mark.
To learn more about how I'm doing this—processes and tools—sign up for the jescartin.com newsletter.
Wedding planning and (biz) proposals
Let's start with a random fact:
?? The number of possible seating plans for 107 people attending a wedding with 11 tables (of ten-people capacity each) is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Yeah, that's true. Seriously, that's a fact.
So, the question is.
?? How on earth do people manage to plan weddings?
First: because, fortunately, most people are not math geeks. ??
Second: because we have constraints.
In the case of weddings, social and relationship constraints eliminate possible scenarios quickly—for example, you may want your friends from crazy time in uni together and likely not at your parents' table (it'd be fun, though!).
In proposals, we have all types of constraints you're very familiar with: deadlines, page limits, RFP guidelines, and so on.
These are gold for optimization and efficiency.
Counter-intuitively, constraints make proposals easier—especially their execution—by reducing possibilities.
Ok, Javi, but if that was true, constraints wouldn't feel as annoying as they are.
Fair enough.
The bad news is that some constraints create more work, depending on where you start. For example:
Imagine an RFP that asks for a 1000-words project management plan.
In principle, that's great because it's eliminating the possibility of wasting a week in putting together a 30-page PMP—which is something you could consider if the RFP wasn't giving you that limit.
领英推荐
However, you may alread have a PMP that's 5000 words long, so that restriction is, in this case, giving you more work.
The good news is that we have a new ally for +90% of these silly restrictions that eat our time: AI! ??
?? Given an arbitrary restriction and your particular situation, there's a way to save 80% of the time using AI large language models.
On why proposal managers are the elite
The satirical Peter Principle—coined by professor Laurence J. Peter in the sixties—says that:
In a hierarchical organization, employees doing a good job are promoted until reaching a role in which they don't perform well.
In practical terms, that means that any position with an upper category that follows the career path naturally it's filled by someone doing it badly.
By the way, to give proper credit to this idea, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset voiced the same sentiment in 1910 with a Greco-Latin touch:
Every public servant should be demoted to the immediately lower rank because they were advanced until they became incompetent.
Now, once more, Proposals is different.
Why?
Because there are not that many positions above "Proposal Manager" that follow naturally, which means that exceptional and highly performing pros are still in these roles.
Sure, there are cases where a PM is promoted to lead a business bidding function—if you're one of these, I root for you, although chances are that you're not as good at doing that as managing proposals—or even rare cases where someone goes to upper management in a business development, sales, or marketing function—in these cases, being as good as in proposals is unlikely.
I'm not saying these opportunities shouldn't exist. Actually, it's good news this is happening.
If we're going to have a VP of Business Development or someone leading a large bidding function, it's better if one of us takes the role.
And the really good news is that most of you are peak performers because the hierarchy proposals pros are in isn't compatible with the Peter Principle.
?? You're amazing.
? With the help of AI tools, you'll be a star: DeepRFP.com
What's your proposals' price of anarchy?
I'm happy because today's email is as canonical as it gets. It contains:
?? A challenging thought that leads to an ?? actionable tip in proposals that leads to a ?? description of what I can do for you for some money (what weird people call "sales" ??), ?? all topped with the usual Top Job in Proposals and DeepRFP's Proposals Joke.
A home run before the weekend!
?? Technically, the Price of Anarchy is a measure of the gap between the cost of cooperation (centralized decision-making) and competition (everyone tries to maximize their outcome selfishly).
Practically, it's a metric of how much better the perfect top-down coordination is than the selfish free-for-all alternative.
In even more practical terms, sometimes coordinating has significant advantages and sometimes it doesn't really improve that much the results.
Now, let's talk about proposals—that's what we do here, right? ??
In principle, proposals have a very high price of anarchy, only capped by the $ amounts of contracts being lost.
Basically: if you have no coordination (aka Proposal Manager), proposals won't be submitted or won't be compliant. The odds of leaving an RFP response uncoordinated and winning that contract are, obviously, extremely slim.
Yet, coordination has a cost, and not only monetary—bidding professionals burning out is one—so we all could benefit from a lower price of anarchy.
The actionable tip must be obvious by now:
?? Study your proposal management process and identify tasks that you can let loose to focus on strategy and ensure compliance.
The funny thing is that this tip would have been the same two years ago. However, today is different because we have a new ally: artificial intelligence-powered tools.
How so? These tools can be used to eliminate the need for key players to don't act selfishly.
Some examples:
And this is indeed excellent news because it means you can focus on what makes you win.
?? Where to start? ?? jescartin.com
Silliest tool saving crazy amounts of time
Do you know that moment when someone makes you realize something simple but highly effective, and you can't understand how you didn't think about it before?
Lately, it happens to me almost weekly ??
Let me share a story!
About a month ago, a peer emailed me about a problem she was facing.
One of those bidding problems that are as silly as it can get, but you need to overcome them because that's how proposals are.
As always, everything started with an RFP. In this particular one, procurement set word limits for every response piece.
So our peer ended up in a situation where she had most of the content she needed from past proposals but in way longer forms than the current RFP required.
You know how it goes:
A time-eater task you need to do to ensure compliance, yet it adds nothing to your winning.
Until a year ago, she had only one option: someone (usually that means you ??) does these summaries and spends hours in unproductive, demoralizing, but required work.
Nowadays, however, you can email me, share your pain, and get an AI tool optimized for that particular use case in a couple of weeks.
And this "simple" tool, which I haven't thought of, is now one of the DeepRFP tools that save more time for our pros.
Bingo!
The tool is—unoriginally—called "Summary to Word Limit" and it's available as part of DeepRFP for Pros tool kit.
Why I'm turning my proposals business into this
Five years ago, I quit a corporate job with a fancy name that was 80% about managing bids and started freelancing as a proposal manager.
That was my main business until just a few months ago when DeepRFP and this AI wave took off.
I don't have much time to freelance the old way now, which is a pity because that's a profitable business.
Which brings me to what I wanted to share today.
During these five years, I've considered scaling up that business many times, yet I never found the agency model attractive. I don't have anything against that—I get it's the most natural way to scale a freelancing business—it's just that I don't find it personally appealing.
Now, however, I believe there's an opportunity to scale a business like this by using AI tools smartly.
So, instead of closing it, I've decided to turn that business into an:
"As Automated As Possible" proposals shop—I agree, I have to find a better name for the category ??
And I'm going to share what I learn with you and the pros on this email list.
To be honest, I still have to figure out many things.
For now, it'll be a side gig that serves as a playground to design use cases that we can then feed into DeepRFP. I'm confident this will lead to valuable learnings on bringing AI to proposals that we can all benefit from.
Wish me luck and stay tuned!
To the moon with this ??
It's becoming an excuses buster.
There's a well-studied fact in psychology called "priming".
In technical terms, priming in this context refers to the psychological phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, often in a subconscious manner.
In plain terms, priming is when something you see or hear changes how you react to something else without you even realizing it.
As you can imagine, this has a role in sales and proposals, especially with all those little things that influence the state of mind of procurement people when reviewing our bids.
You already know details are important—sleek graphic design, easy-to-read content (format and style), proven statements, jargon alignment, etc.—and these not only have a direct effect but are also "priming" them to evaluate in a certain way.
? Given the same technical and pricing facts, these details can result in lower/higher marks, part of that due to the priming effect.
Among all these things, one element keeps being underrated by professionals everywhere.
Cover letters.
In particular, the opening paragraph of cover letters, which represents:
I know what you're thinking.
You rarely have time to stop and think of something creative. Deadlines are close, and when you're writing cover letters, it's in a rush. Copy/paste and move on mindset.
I get it.
However, technology is not leaving much room for these excuses. Here's one example I used the other day:
I would copy the result here, but it's better if you try it yourself.
How?
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 tools.