Proposals and Passion

Defending a proposal in front of the client is exhilarating, though it took me a while to experience it first hand. Doing back office pre-sales and proposal support for years, I could never experience the sheer high of seeing my proposal flower beautifully in a defense meeting. Of course, sometimes, these meetings end up in crash landings and disasters. I keep wondering what makes some proposal defense meetings work and why sometimes these meetings fail miserably.

Proposal defense is as much about the hard facts being presented as the passion with which the presentation has been prepared and presented. It is thus not very different from a theatre or musical performance. We then need to think of how to maximize this passion. Passion cannot easily be faked. Passion comes from being intimate with a subject, in this case the proposal. You cannot get intimate with a proposal without having first spent quality time together with the proposal.

The bid manager alone cannot get intimate with the proposal and hope to demonstrate this passion for the proposal to the client. Each member of the proposal team has to show his/her intimacy with the proposal, in their own separate distinct ways. This is why it is not such a great idea to have a Senior Executive, who has no clue about the contours of a proposal, attending a proposal defense meeting. Everyone in a proposal defense team has to have spent quality time together with the proposal getting to know her nuances. This sort of immersion in a proposal's content, debating its various merits and demerits, understanding each other's feelings for the proposal and the solution being proposed, challenging and sometimes getting truly confrontational in picking holes in the proposal - all contribute to forming this passionate view of your proposal, your solution.

Once this penance of intimacy with the proposal for a substantial period of time has been fulfilled, the client will surely see it on the proposal defense day effortlessly. Words will flow beautifully, ideas will string together symphonically and then the proposal will truly come alive...and the client could begin liking the proposal naturally and you for creating it...The customer will want to be on your side, and the rest is easy.