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hello everyone welcome and thank you for joining us today this segment of our nitty-gritty business winning practices series is Bid And proposal management a topic that is frequently requested by many of you and your organizations thank you for registering and submitting questions in advance we put your questions out to many of your peers to get industry input and best practice ideas to share should you have any questions during the presentation you may submit them in the control panel as we go time permitting we'll get to those during or at the end of the webinar slides and the video replay will be on our website by tomorrow a reminder for apmp members this webinar can be applied toward your continuing education units required for apmp certification I am Mallory price training and marketing coordinator at Shipley and joining me today are Michael Brew senior proposal manager at Shipley Michael brings over 15 years of proposal experience and works with clients from a variety of Industries including energy defense I.T Healthcare non-profit organizations and Academia he is an exceptional Communicator trainer and proposal professional and hills from San Antonio Texas Brad Douglas is Executive Vice President of Shipley's Global Services and and apmp Bellow Brad will moderate today's webinar and provide insights we've gained from proposal practitioners from across Industries and markets so thank you both for joining me and here's a little bit about Shipley I will let you look at it we are a business development training and certification firm we do end-to-end proposal support and Consulting and also we offer free webinars industry insights blogs and many other things so that is just a little bit about us thank you again for being here and for supporting us our agenda today we will discuss common challenges and myths proposal managers face the proposal manager roles and responsibilities some core competencies involved in this role some tools and application best practices and then we'll summarize and do a little bit of q a at the end so I think I have talked enough Brad I am going to pass the mic to you okay all right thank you so much Mallory and thanks for getting this all set up and Michael for joining I just want to take one second and put in a plug for Michael Michael served in the the Army for 21 years he was in several leadership positions including domestic and overseas and Todd at West Point for a number of years and he's he's a sought after consultant Shipley consultant and trainer and has worked as Mallory said in a lot of Industries so Michael we're so happy you could carve out this time and be with us today so thank you for that thanks glad to be here all right so uh I think Mallory said we we have the the ability and and and we we like to reach out when we're going to do a webinar on a topic that's been requested and most of these topics are requested by our clients or industry or others and we like to reach out to our Network which is pretty broad across Industries uh and ask for their thoughts and um when we ask what is the greatest challenges you see as a bidden proposal manager out there in Industry we could almost consolidate most of those challenges to to these two uh categories if you will I think these are the two aspects of bid and proposal management that we heard over and over and over again one is being able to balance balancing the Tactical project management part of the the role with the interpersonal and spending time with both and then the other one that kept coming up was the leadership the holding teams and contributors and stakeholders accountable it's a challenge and so uh when when we had Tom malat our senior vice president of business winning consolidate these responses from people these are the two that kept coming up over and over so as we go through this uh 45 minutes to an hour today keep this in mind that we recognize that these challenges balance and accountability are are really big ones and um Michael I'm going to ask you if you don't mind to address a little bit more some of the other common challenges that we got feedback on that we see out there over and over in industry absolutely if you've been in proposal management at all you know that different Pursuits have different levels of complexity maybe you have teaming Partners Subs maybe you have different amounts of time available but across the Spectrum we see very common challenges technology what will we use what's the best tool we can put to use in our proposal effort review shortcuts we will introduce pink team red team those are words that we at Shipley use but the idea is we get some eyes on our products and make sure they're right but if we shortcut the reviews uh they don't work the way we want them to accountability leadership who's in charge and how do we make sure that that person knows they're in charge adhering to a schedule we've got to stay on timeline getting that taken care of is of print importance very difficult strategic Focus let's make sure that across the proposal we have marshalled all of our points to make sure that strategically we have made the best possible case for us winning this award limited resources a lot of us don't have people just waiting around for the RP to drop how do we make best use of the people of the time that we have uh customer focus how can we make sure that our team understands customer focus and rights with the focus of the customer in mind and finally adopting technology if we've got the right tool that we've selected how do we make sure that people actually use it and use it well those are some of those challenges thanks um thanks Michael we'll be addressing a lot of these as we go forward a little bit more um one thing and I'm going to ask you Michael and and just off the cuff here um do you have any quick tips for helping our proposed because this came up in some of the questions as people registered helping people feel the importance of adhering to that schedule this this seems to be a real challenge is people don't seem to be as engaged engaged like they should be to or they they don't take the scheduled deadlines and Milestones seriously any any quick tips yeah I would say if you're the proposal manager capital P capital M sometimes you're going to have to have uncomfortable conversations and sometimes it means that if the pink team draft was supposed to be turned in at five o'clock Monday at 5 10 Monday you're picking up the phone or going by somebody's desk and saying hey Marcus it's 5 10 10 minutes after this is supposed to have been turned in I'm not seeing your draft in the portal oh sorry boss I had other priorities I had things going on Marcus the entire endeavor this whole proposal is relying on us all staying on timeline and now we can't have you taking us off so you're gonna have to earn some Midnight Oil to get that thing into us in quality shape those are hard conversations we've got to have but if we're going to be good proposal managers we've got to be ready sometimes for those uncomfortable conversations great great thank you it's hard it's hard if we've never done that okay uh Michael now um those several of people on this webinar have uh attended other webinars and we've walked through some common myths so we've updated these a little bit based on some of the nuances going on in Industry Would You Walk us through some of these common myths and and we won't take a lot of time and dwell on why each one of these is a myth because we'll be talking about that a little more but these are kind of interesting and these are myths that we need to help our teams overcome and understand so would you walk us through some of these proposal myths that we see out there sure thing quickly number one you don't have to use the entire page limit when you're writing and Page limited proposal uh you know that gives you an idea of how much heft they're expecting to receive but if you can say it in fewer words do it in fewer words myth number two executive summaries ought not be written at the end instead write them at the very beginning the executive summary right at the beginning really does codify your main points and it gives all of your contributors a good idea of why we should be chosen for this award the third myth proposal managers should avoid writing content at all costs no they can write content too on many occasions I as the proposal manager have also written content I would tell you though that we ought to be very wary of getting stuck of getting mired in content so we don't keep a global look across the entire proposal that's how you might get in trouble good point Michael and you know summer some are in very small companies and organizations where it's a one-person shop in which case of course you know of course we're wearing many hats and we're proposal manager we're coordinator we're volume lead we also have to be the primary writer so uh in small small organizations of course that that certainly applies absolutely yeah myth number four as long as we answer the requirements proposal has a good chance you know compliance is the word we use that we've we've met all requirements we are compliant that is a foundation for winning but it absolutely does not assure you of winning it's just a ticket for entry the best myth we really my friends the two review progress [Music] iteratively throughout it's not just the Milestone review uh that might be too far down the road let's be checking in uh before then make sure that people are on the right path next Engineers technical subject matter experts because they have little to do with the text and and can AI replace their writing uh no we need real people typically we might talk a little bit more about AI later um but we need real people and in my experience it's not uncommon for subject matter experts Engineers technologists should be the people who are writing the sections number seven limit Graphics because they distract from the flow no I I love Graphics Graphics transmit a message they trumpet your main ideas they provide aesthetic interest you know this is me this is uh not necessarily for every proposal manager but I challenge my contributors to try to have one visual element or page what are the major steps what are the major beats you want to make sure your evaluator understands those are the things that get graphics our final one myth number eight reviewers know evaluators uh won't care about spelling grammar typos now it's true I have never seen an evaluation checklist that has a section for typos I've never seen it but you can bet you are transmitting a message if you've got five six typos a page you are sending a message and it's not the message you want to send that's so true yeah you know I like to call these speed bumps you know every time something like this uh you know some grammatical or error or something just you know speed bumps and too many of those certainly has an impact okay great it's good to talk about those challenges it's good to talk about those myths and dispel some of those and that's the goal going forward in the webinar really is help us as bid and proposal managers or potential uh bid and proposal managers down the road understand some of some of these challenges and things that we might need to overcome now this is a lot of information I hope you you maybe print this off later go back to it but often we are asked hey Shipley what what are common routine proposal manager bid manager responsibilities we're trying to create a job description here and we're trying to put together some performance review criteria and so forth so here we've just listed and this is not going to be the same for everyone some of your organizations don't even have dedicated proposal bidman we understand that but if we were to break down responsibilities for a better proposal manager typically these are the primary and secondary responsibilities they would include um and again this is not locked in this is not um in stone but this gives you a feel for how you might craft uh a job description or a roles and responsibilities um uh a racing Matrix of of responsibilities and so forth so you there's a few key words there highlighted that are probably true and common in almost all organizations compliance usually that's the proposal manager's role responsibilities the response Matrix assigning out tasks and and uh what what needs to be done building a schedule these daily status meetings Michael talked about that are regular um down there under secondary responsibilities boy it's part of that interpersonal balance right we've got the Tactical but interpersonally we need to see ourselves as an on-the-field coach you know I'm kind of a sports junkie and what you like is as a a manager of a team a coach of a team is someone on the field soccer field baseball field football whatever it is someone that really becomes your voice and your influence in the trenches and that's often the role of a proposal manager we shouldn't be standing on the sidelines with our clipboard and our headset just directing the flow no we want to be in the game and have that influence so there's there's some uh roles and responsibilities to think about now we've we've uh decided to organize the balance of this webinar around some core competencies that are widely accepted in our our profession and in our Industries and these core competencies are are the same ones that are adopted by the Association of proposal management professionals apmp and many of you are familiar with that Professional Organization and Association if you're not I encourage you to go there apmp.org they provide a ton of information including a body of knowledge that we can draw from as proposal professionals Business Development professionals so these are the four primary core competencies identified for a bin proposal Manager Management professional information gathering and sales orientation proposal planning all that goes in to you know directionally setting up the proposal getting it ready to go all of that planning work working with our sales team our capture team a proposal and Team Management this goes back to that balancing we're not just doing the Tactical keeping keeping tasks we're also managing the people we're building trust teamwork we'll talk more about that we need to be agile and Nimble and then leadership and the interpersonal again being engaging and holding people accountable and providing recognition not just at the end of the day or the end of the pursuit or the submittal date but throughout we know this the best leaders the best managers are those that give regular routine uh praise and recognition for work that's being done along the way so these four competencies are what we're going to base the rest of this webinar today on so this first one is information gathering and sales orientation we have to be uh cognizant of this we have to be good at reaching out sometimes even outside of our comfort zone internally or externally for information we have to get it when it comes to what's our sales message here what really is the the value proposition we're trying to convey so we have to be the ones usually is the bid or proposal manager whether it's our full-time job or not we have to be in a gathering mode ourselves or with our team and we have to assimilate we have to aggregate all of that information that we're Gathering so the more we know about customer insights and hot buttons customer perceptions about us our Solutions our past performance the better understanding our solution the benefits and discriminators what are we going to offer the sooner we know that the better and here you see right out of the apmp body of knowledge one way to do this and to try to assimilate this intelligence this information is good old-fashioned SWAT strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats what are they as they relate to this specific Pursuit and this specific opportunity do we have weaknesses that we need to maybe try to mitigate in our proposal do does our competitor have a major weakness that somehow we could highlight without naming them um strengths we certainly need to emphasize our strength so this becomes part of our role as a bid and proposal managers to gather assimilate and really leverage this information and here you see kind of that that whole concept summarized across the top there's this customer analysis hopefully we might have to do it if no one else is doing it if we've got a capture team or sales team or or someone else that's doing that analysis fantastic but we need that information what are the customer hot buttons and we'll talk more what a hot button is in a moment uh that competitive analysis have we done it uh where do we Stack Up um this capture strategy sales strategy who's who's developing that and then that all leads to bringing that into our proposal so as bid and proposal manager we need to be the ones to evaluate look for gaps in information if we don't have information that we need we need to find it be active in information analysis and apply this into our proposal strategy ultimately into our messaging this is where our messaging becomes compelling when we can tie it back to good information that we've gathered um so Mike I'm going to ask you if you would spend a little time talking about you know we throw this term out there hot buttons or we we often use the term you know discriminators or differentiators would you walk us through exactly what that means just it might this might be refresher for some but to help us understand what we mean by hop buttons and and differentiators yeah there's aim Brad I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding the customer who is the customer do we know them who makes the decisions um then what do we know about them what does the customer need in order to get achieve the goals they want to achieve what's affecting them what's in their environment what are their uh what are the birds in their side what are their key concerns those hot button issues um and then do you know what in what important decisions they've got coming up now I will acknowledge that for most proposal managers they're not interacting with the customer on a week by week or month by month basis but we should understand who our customer is we should know what their most important things are on the right hand side you see this like Bullseye diagram and the customer got issues 10 issues if they didn't have issues they would not be sending out an RFP are you with me they got issues that they want you to handle well some of those issues are motivators some of them close them to move in the center there is a basket of hot button issues those are things they're most concerned about the things are keeping them up at night do we know what those hot button issues are do we know what's absolutely crucial to them and at the very bottom of the slide if you don't know ask someone at your organization maybe it's you maybe it's somebody else should be in communication should have been in communication with our customer and uh proposed manager you are liberated to raise that hand and say hey I'm supposed to be helping him a proposal here but I don't know anything about our customer who's been talking with him who knows them who knows what their most important hot button issues are if we don't know those we need to go back to the drawing board and figure that out you know let's talk a little bit about win strategy so wind strategy is those things I like to say it's those things that make us the best choice for this award so uh we're going to align what we know intelligence wise with that win strategy picking up from our strengths weaknesses opportunities threats those major themes so what do we know about our competitors about our customer about ourselves let me make sure that that aligns a little bit of incentives second bullet let's continue to review that change competitors have dropped out and as customers change their minds about things we've got updated one strategy let's make sure that we are looking at our win strategy through the customers online and then our final bullet on this slide let's make sure we understand the benefits we provide the features of our solutions that provide those benefits and discriminators we've got a lot more in our uh day-long and Plus classes on capture that talk about these things but kind of just sum up this slide I would say this as a proposal manager it is with some frequency that I'll come in as a Shipley outsourced person to a client and I'll say hey everybody I'm glad to be here to show The Proposal manager for you very excited now I've read the RFP I've read your previous proposals I've read other materials you provided me can you tell me in you know succinct terms why we should be awarded this contract what makes us better than all the competitors and sometimes this is the response um it's a little uncomfortable and and then someone will say well because we're awesome yes we're awesome but what are those things that make us awesome what are those things that distinguish us from everybody else that set us apart from the crowd those components comprise the win strategy Michael um thank you um one of the recurring questions that was submitted uh when people registered had to do with more of the quick turn response proposals which are more like q a type proposals is there a place for win strategy even in those I mean can you can you um incorporate this principle even in the kind of the quick turn rapid turnaround proposal responses well 100 yes Brad if you don't know why you should be chosen if you don't have a good idea of the thing or things that separate you from the crowd then we really got to hit the pause button and inquire about those things it may simply be a 30 minute exercise between us and a couple of people in our company to discern what those things are I would say more often in a really healthy environment these win strategy components come about after weeks months even years of really good solid capture yeah yeah and you just answered you know one of those myths um is it's not good enough to just answer the question you know and answer the requirements we've got to separate ourselves just like you said and so that that addresses that one uh one myth that we talked about earlier great thank you thank you for that all right um the next competency well let me pause Mallory are there any questions that um either have been submitted or that were submitted prior that that you think we ought to address before we move to this next competency area I'm actually one did come in early on when we were talking about the myths um so Michael um we talked about the myth of page count is there any competitive advantage to writing less than the page limit what are your thoughts that's a great question I always like to put myself in the position of the reader of the evaluator uh in fact if you're taking one of our powerful proposal writing classes then you'll probably have had an exercise that puts you in the place of the evaluator I love that exercise because it really does solidify the other perspectives so if you're a reader of a proposal do you want to read crawl through slosh through more texts that just doesn't say anything it doesn't provide any more value you just gotta get through more pages no no one wants that and so if you can compellingly persuasively comprehensively compliantly answer the mail with a few less Pages than the page count I would say your reader your evaluator will appreciate it and the points will likely reflect now caveats let's let's let's be um aware a page limit does help us understand the expectations so if you've got a hundred page limit and you submit something that's 20 Pages um you're probably not giving your customer the the links the amount of detail that they're expecting Michael that's that's it is such a great topic and there's a whole lot of things that go into strategically page count because one of the key elements to consider and this is what we cover more when we're talking about actual writing is what is what do those pages look like the format the layout the the emphasis techniques used the headings the white space so um it's not only about page count but it's about you know if if it's five pages of thick 20 line paragraphs and that's it anyone's going to gag on that um so it's page count it's page layout it's design using emphasis techniques that make it easy to evaluate and and Michael I will just agree wholeheartedly with what you said if you can say it in a a half a page less more power to us as long as we're compelling and concise and answer them out great question thanks Mallory for that all right let's let's go to this next competency bid and proposal planning uh this is where we see in in our profession sometimes we are lacking um we think we we can get the RFP we can shred it we can parse it out we can build a compliance Matrix and there we go and and that's enough planning but there's there's to do it right and to do it well there's a little bit more to it than that and granted this is sometimes there are short quick turn three day five day seven day proposals and not all this planning is going to be able to be really comprehensive it's going to have to be shortened so in the spirit of best practice out there um there's this this principle of leveraging a proposal management plan A playbook of sorts uh you can we can abbreviate it PMP proposal management plan or Playbook oh why do we do this because it provides the team with the big picture there there's there's enough information there where our team understands what we're trying to accomplish here uh it keeps management and contributors informed if we've got this Playbook conveys and manage helps us manage tasks expectations quality standards for our proposal going forward having a Playbook or a plan provides consistent information and strategies to the team we've got to have this visible out on teams or SharePoint or whatever platform we're using make it available having a plan ultimately even though it it seems like it's extra work it actually reduces redundancy in waste and rework if we don't have the plan if we don't have a Playbook then we're going to have these false starts and we're going to burn people out and we're going to frustrate people so we we can't emphasize this enough have a proposal management plan or Playbook keep it current keep it complete and I would also add here keep it visible keep it current and where people can see that proposal management plan fundamental information what should go in this Playbook well first you have to adapt it to your environment what works within your organization in keeping people informed about the plan the progress uh here's here are some ideas of maybe what should go into this proposal management plan or Playbook we need a customer profile Michael talked about this what's the big picture the key issues hot buttons do we have a competitive assessment do we know why we think we're better than the next organization Staffing enrolls responsibility that's nice to publish these to get these into a plan and a Playbook where people can see them oh this is what Michael's doing as the proposal coordinator oh this is what Mallory's doing as the desktop publisher uh Define up proposal operations explain to the team what type of contract is this is this a low price technically acceptable contract uh is this you know is there a small business component to this what type of contract are we dealing with uh printers print information operational information locations building security does everyone have the right access to to gain entry if they need to get into a building so these this is fundamental information that should be included in our proposal management plan and this this was some of your questions as well what can we do what can we do has been proposal managers to help our team be more efficient well here create a plan make it your own scale it size it to fit your organization what else might it include it should certainly include a compliance Matrix a list of requirements from the solicitation that we need to absolutely be sure to respond to the proposal schedule an annotated outline a Content plan what's what's the plan for each section each volume we should as proposal managers if this is a detailed proposal we should put together a writer's information packet what kind of style sheets are we looking for what are the best practices for customer focus what's your page limit on your section what help the writers along proposal strategies and themes do we have some major themes we want to emphasize Michael talked about the executive summary we may not write the full executive summary early on um it may be a proposal manager's job might be a sales person or capture manager's job but we should at least have a bulleted out draft and and Michael talked about the key points this helps drives our strategy and communicate our strategy having at least bulleted out executive summary as part of our Playbook we talked about team roles and contact information and then file management how are we going to manage all of the moving Parts uh to this particular proposal so those are the types of things that should go in a plan or a Playbook and Michael I'm going to pause any any additional thoughts on this that you'd like to pass along manager should take some time at the very beginning before kickoff to help draft these things you kind of alluded to it earlier but I want to reinforce that uh to hold the kick off we'll talk about kickoffs if you call the kickoff and say we're going to give you a bunch of stuff later on be prepared there's a waste of a kickoff and so uh to put these things together ahead of time if you take 10 of your allowable time to put these artifacts together in the PMP or the Playbook is that the best practice great thank you so kind of uh trying to my mind thinks in little categories right here buckets and so just to kind of bring this home as key points to this competency of planning you know create that compliance Matrix of course create an annotate an outline you know how are we going to respond to this generate a response uh Matrix that goes along with compliant who's going to do what um make contributor assignments out there and then track and keep track of people's assignments like Michael said you may have to make the tough call you know on uh on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning when people start missing their deadlines and so that's the way it is now uh this is simply just a a screenshot okay this is just a Nick cell this is an example of a very simple proposal manager workbook that you could create in your organization something like this you know what what do you want in your playbook in your proposal management plan and can we get it into one and that this can be done of course this can be done in teams in SharePoint or any kind of software but this is just Excel this is just a simple example of a cover sheet to an Excel workbook and across here you see partial this isn't all of them but you see the tabs so there's a tab for the proposal outline there's a tab for the compliance checklist there's a place where you could track assignments and due dates where you could maybe do a better comparison where do we stand against other bidders so we just wanted to show you that this isn't rocket science you as proposal manager you can put together a plan you can put together a Playbook whether it's in Excel or online on on SharePoint teams other project management software tools there's a ton of them out there but the key point is to do it and to apmp says best practice is we have to be good at that competency planning all right now building the team the next competency the bin proposal Team Management how do we build this team might be small might be larger how do we gain trust in this team so Michael you mentioned kickoff and thank you for doing that would you talk us through uh the kickoff and then some of the routine regular follow-up that should happen by The Proposal manager after the kickoff absolutely hey Michael you're fading in and out a little bit I don't know if you're moving to and from the mic but just wanted to know it was a little bit of fading in and out exercising while I'm talking just kidding okay okay so it's very typical for proposal manager to prepare a proposal kickoff that really does set the tone for all that comes later whether that's a week or a month or three months so we want to make sure it goes right here's some things to think about we want to build a cohesive team and make sure that the people who are on the team understand who they are we want to share information about our opportunity about the strategy we're taking to address the opportunity we want to make sure we inaugurate effectively all of our contributors action we want to uh coordinate everything that'll come afterward and then we want to make assignments provide tools equip and enable our people to do good work the kickoff is so crucial to the rest of the proposal index now once you do kickoff I would tell you that for my experience the proposal manager's job is so much easier in fact if you take you know several days for a couple of days not two percent of your time to do the proposal management Playbook you put together those important artifacts well once you've done that and held the kickoff that is really taking the load of your work up but you've got to got to keep your eyes still on the maintenance on the standard one really good way is through regular stand-ups I like to do mine daily that's not daily do what makes sense but you can't just let things Coast from proposal kickoff to painting right first of all keep chickens short but they're ID 15 minutes 15 minutes only let's go through that second bullet let's review the tasks review the equipments review the status check in or are there any issues are any Show Stoppers if there are let's discuss those and next one determine the path forward maybe we'll have to schedule a different time if it's going to take longer than about 30 seconds for us to to figure out then I say let's go ahead and schedule another meeting for that what are the commitments what are the deadlines we'll need to get uh you know socialized maybe there's some collaboration to go on then during our stand-up maybe it's collaboration that needs to go on afterwards and then any preparations that need to go on uh for upcoming milestones awesome and uh I just want to comment that the beauty of these status regular status checks is technology um is so so helpful you know we think uh those of us that have been around for a while you think back to you know how we used to have to do this just through uh conference callings or getting on airplanes and and flying you know but the technology we have at our fingertips now for doing these status checks and we'll talk here in a moment about more formal team reviews uh as proposal manager but um technology is really really enabled us and uh it's probably a topic for a different day but you see one of the bullet points here um something kind of new to some of us and maybe most of us in as a proposal manager is we we need to understand what are the rules of engagement for our company our organization to use um some of the artificial intelligence tools out there the the large language models and platforms that are out there what can and can't we do what should we do and shouldn't we do and again this is a topic it's a Hot Topic and I'm sure you all have been attending sessions or reading up on this but we I just want to say as proposal manager but you know on the larger scale organizationally each company really needs to Define this and establish guidelines and do's and don'ts this is a this is a big deal we're now gaining access we all of us we're gaining access to content from multiple sources that is at our fingertips almost instantaneous and it can be used for good and evil it can be used for correct and Incorrect and our company our organization needs to establish guidelines and policies and processes and then we as proposal managers we've got to manage to that um maybe your organization is going to say hey let's let chat GPT do a first cut at this particular question or this particular requirement in the RFP and then we'll we'll collaborate with the the solution architect the technical architect the SME and we'll refine it as we go that might be fine but it might be not not you're probably reading as I am some of the legal implications of using this type of information how much of it becomes plagiarism how much isn't we've got to make sure if we're working in classified areas with government procurement boy we've got to be super careful with our information on our data so again I I I kind of went on down on the tangent here but please the the topic today is Bid And proposal management we've got to know the rules we've got to know our company's policies and procedures and guidelines on this and then we have to implement and stick to those we we can't go off willy-nilly uh all enthusiastic about a new source of uh content okay another topic for another day uh so Michael talked about the kickoff being critical it is he talked about these regular status checks and Milestones with individuals or small teams those are vital those are so important but we also need periodic Milestone team reviews where we get the team together and we actually see where are we at how are we doing as far as compliance as far as when strategy are we compelling are we differentiating all of those things so proposal manager if you if that's your role and your responsibility be consistent in these team reviews help people know what to expect so what what's our role we have to plan and prepare we've got to do this well don't go into a team review ad hoc unprepared you will lose ground and you will lose credibility for the next proposal you work on we need to facilitate with confidence we should have an in briefing for each team review know where we're going what we've got discuss it as a group report back when we when we get offline and and everyone goes their own way we need a summary of that team review and that has to be sent out and distributed and so we got a debrief we might have to debrief and update the executive team the leadership team hey how we doing you know we got 17 days until submittal well how we coming so prepare conduct and respond don't this goes back to one of those common challenges don't shortchange these don't shortcut these reviews and whatever we call them whatever you choose to call these reviews embed them in your schedule so if you've got a 30-day response period and you're building out a schedule as proposal manager when in those 30 days do you want to do the first team checkup often industry calls that a pink team we're checking up on our strategy are we directionally headed in the right way so whether we call this a win strategy check a pink team review these are this shows some of the inputs to that review and what ought to come out of a review like this okay if we've got 30 days boy we we should be checking the near final draft at some point many in our industry call this a red team review we've got the near final proposal ready we're gonna part of that review we're going to simulate the customer we're going to do a simulated evaluation score an assessment and we're going to see where we're at gold team is kind of a final approval review the final sign off have we made all the changes we need to made and updates taking care of all the Amendments and then we should now never forget about the post submittal team review what did we do well you notice on the left hand side there talks about internal successes internal problems internally what did we do well what kind of customer feedback have we received from our capture activity our pre-proposal activity our actual proposal response and anything after evaluation notices and things that we have to respond to so these are just a few of potential team reviews when we have you know adequate time at 30 60 96 month window that we need to build into our schedule as proposal managers and then the final competency that we wanted to touch on today aligning with the apmp competencies is leadership and interpersonal attributes and we've talked a little bit about this but Michaela if you don't mind just talking a little bit with us about the importance and I think this plays to your your career background and experience leadership and accountability certainly if you've worked in an environment where accountability was not well-defined you know the frustrations well in a proposal The Proposal manager is the person who's in charge if there's one person who's leading this entire Endeavor it is the proposal manager each section author they're looking at their own stuff they're not looking at the entire Endeavor people above you at the highest you know the higher levels of executive leadership in your company they're not looking at the proposal you are looking at the entire thing and so it's on you proposal manager to Foster that culture of accountability clearly defining results making sure that we're all aligned around those results that third Bill making sure that we have instilled the accountability making sure that we've got those results and that last uh bullet making sure that when there are changes because there will be we've got the resiliency to take those in and modify I love this quote creating accountability requires doing the job and delivering the results are one and the same they're the same thing creating accountability means a job's not done until the result is achieved excellent this is a big deal you know in our you know in all of our circumstances sometimes accountability gets fuzzy um this is one of the dangers of artificial intelligence actually is some people are going to tend to push off accountability to well uh you know chat GPT or this or that said so they said this so it's got to be true it's got to be right and so managing accountability there's just a lot of moving parts and again this is probably a a topic for another webinar discussion but Michael uh thank you for bringing bringing this to our attention and it's it's something we probably all need to up our game on a little bit and then the final part of this leadership and accountability and competency is this idea of make sure we we try to instill this in our everyday routine who can we recognize today who could we recognize for a job well done for Progress they've made is it one person a day is it two or three people a day is it at least one person a week you know what what can we do to build recognition and reward into our our daily routine as proposal managers so recognize good performance the core team do it ad hoc recognize our subject matter experts uh it doesn't have to be monetary recognition at all you know sometimes that's a gift card is appropriate sometimes it's not um build a spirit of transparency make sure people are recognizing each other bank performance is a good performance in writing email publicly of course hold Victory parties if we submit on time if we win the award even if we lose you know what what have we learned and can we still recognize all of the effort that went in uh again I'm kind of going back to the sports junkie you know there's a local college team that won a football game last week and and or two weeks ago and they didn't win by that much of a score and the team went to the locker room and everyone was hanging their heads you know they were all down in the dumps because they didn't Crush their opponent well come on that that's not the culture you want if you win you win and recognize good performance and hold that up and and make it part of your standard so um we're up against the the uh hour mark and Michael I can't thank you enough um for um responding to so many of the questions that came in and handling these topics sharing your your experience with us all of you thank you for joining here's um and this is a handout by the way for those of you that are are still hanging with us there's a little handout of what we would call a notional this is just notional but a proposal manager roadmap so if you're looking to put some kind of structure in place of how you work through a proposal response these are just some general tasks and Milestones that you can think about as a starting point you know that we we see all the pre-proposal planning here on the left hand side you see a timeline across the bottom you know is it 15 days 30 days 60 90 days where some of these team reviews might fit in into a framework so if you don't have some kind of process some kind of road map some kind of proposal management plan well defined use this as a starting point you know and plug in the tasks and and the Milestones you want to achieve into your own roadmap when time is short if nothing else make sure you read the solicitation the tender or the RFI the RFP whatever you build a compliance Matrix of some sort make sure you know what you're responding to develop some sort of outline don't just start writing what are our win themes how are we going to win this deal create a first draft review it get some input collaborate revise make sure we're focusing on the customer in our proposal and get the right approvals sometimes this hangs us up we didn't leave enough time to get management approval and now we're submitting something that's that's second rate so make sure we've built in time for that final approval so we can submit with confidence and then do a win loss analysis so again thank you so much for joining us some additional resources there's the apmp body of knowledge there's the Shipley resources playbooks and guidebooks that are available and then we've addressed questions as we go so thank you our next two webinars that will close out the year are listed here we invite you to go to our resources tab on our website these are free we try to keep them as informational as possible and we we do these within the hour structure about every six or seven weeks so thank you so much Michael any last word I love it thank you so much Brad it's a wrap okay great everyone have a great rest of your day wherever you are thanks for joining us thank you