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The Shortlist Episode 16: Building (and Implementing!) an Annual Marketing Calendar, Part 2: Proposal Peaks

Middle of Six



How do you make time for internal marketing projects when it feels like your schedule is ruled by proposal deadlines? In Part 2 of our three-part series, Wendy Simmons and Allison Tivnon discuss how analyzing your Proposal Peaks can help get your marketing calendar ready for reality. With the proper tools and data, it becomes possible to visualize your upcoming year, spotting the heavy proposal seasons before they overwhelm your department. By planning around these hot periods, you can go after those extra initiatives and reach your goals with confidence.


CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 2


Podcast Transcript


Welcome to The Shortlist.


We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.


I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.


Welcome to part two of our three-part series, kicking off 2022, about building and implementing an annual marketing calendar.


In our first episode, part one, we talked about the checkup checklist, and now we're gonna talk about how to find your proposal peaks.


We've got Allison Tivnon joining us again.


And before we get into proposal peaks, I want to just remind everyone that Allison is presenting at the SMPS Pacific Regional Conference that's coming up January 19th to the 21st.


Allison, what are you talking about?


In person.


In person!


An in-person event.


You know, it's really funny.


Our podcast today is about all the time in between proposals, and I'm going to be talking about nothing but proposals at the conference.


Yes.


And for those of you who are like, oh gosh, not another presentation on proposals.


This one is geared a little differently because as marketers, we spend all our time thinking about how to write better proposals, but a lot of our technical staff don't.


So this is really geared towards how do you impart to your technical staff all of the nuances and psychological considerations to have in mind when putting proposals together.


Yeah, it's going to be a great session and nice to come out from a different angle and probably arm some marketers with some tools so that they can be more efficient and get their technical staff really contributing to proposals in a meaningful way.


So I'm excited for that upcoming event.


If you haven't registered, there's still time.


Go for it.


Get in there.


Meet your SNPS people in person and get to see some faces that maybe you haven't seen for a few years.


Okay.


So moving into the proposal peaks topic, and you've completed the checkup checklist and you have some ideas of where there are holds or opportunities to spend some more energy and effort to get organized going into the new year.


I can see having the time to strengthen internal systems and double down and process documentation and training when the RFP pipeline is slow.


But how do you possibly make meaningful time for internal projects when your days are just ruled by the next deadline?


That is the question that I think is the riddle all of us try to solve throughout our entire career as a marketing coordinator in this industry.


I think the first thing to do is just to always assume that the RFP pipeline is going to be busy year over year, and that there's always going to be something else coming down the pipeline.


So, the only thing I can recommend is to start visualizing the entire year almost like a chart, like a bar chart in front of you.


In your mind's eye, think through the times of year that just feel the busiest, which unfortunately, you know, we're just coming out of the holidays.


How many of us had a really annoying deadline?


It is so unfortunate that the fiscal cycles for a lot of our clients also tend to fall, say, during our summer vacations or our spring breaks or during the holidays.


But it does feel like that, doesn't it?


And that's not, that is not by chance.


So when you're talking about how am I possibly going to make time for everything else that I have on my plate, the only way that you can truly intentionally do that is to start predicting when you're not going to have time.


You know, I don't know that we have that, that data here at Middle of Six to know what other people's proposal peak looks like, but I'm just curious from your other conversations, what you've seen and does that always prove out that there are true peaks?


Yeah, you know, it's funny.


It started as just a gut instinct, but I've played this out with a few different clients as well as my own firms that I've worked internally at.


And there is a rhyme and a reason to it.


If you work at a firm that is wholly driven by public sector work, it is extremely stark.


And you can you can see when there's peaks.


If you work at a firm where it's predominantly private sector work, there still seems to be a rhythm to it.


It's tied to money, and money tends to have some patterns in it.


Either it's funding cycles that are tied to a calendar year, typically for companies, and for the public sector, it's tied to fiscal calendars, which don't run from a January to December timeline.


It's when the budgets are set, and those look very different for governments versus for private businesses.


And so it's not like there's just a one size fits all.


You can just look at one company's peaks, and that's what yours will look like.


But there are methods and ways that you can go about discovering what yours are.


And it's really funny because once you truly see them, you're like, oh, yeah, I do feel more stressed out that time of year on the whole.


Right, and you can start to anticipate and put a plan in place, thinking about what is coming up, what does that peak look like, and not losing any valuable time when you are in that moment where you're kind of in a valley, and what you could be doing to prepare, you know, whatever it might be, boilerplate or things on your checkup checklist that need to be taken care of.


So can you describe how you have mapped out, charted this data?


Is it just Excel?


Are you pulling from reports?


What do you recommend people do based on kind of the different tools that they might have access to?


Well, this one is deceptively simple because I haven't yet met a consulting firm that doesn't have and isn't obliged to have a running record of all of their project work.


We know through our accounting departments exactly when a proposal number is opened, and we know when a project is initiated.


We tend to track those things pretty closely because our staff have to bill by the hour.


That's just the nature of consulting work.


And what that does is it leaves this really great breadcrumb trail that you can follow and you can kind of reverse engineer out what the last couple of years of your life look like if you really wanted to do it.


And I think there is a lot of good reasons to do that.


For this exercise in particular, you just simply need an Excel spreadsheet, just open up a fresh document, and then you go back into whether it's a CRM system like Dell Tech or Co-Central, or you go to your accountant, if you're a much smaller firm and you don't have that yet, and they can run a report or you have an intranet, sometimes the information lives there.


But whatever it is that's unique to your company, there is a place to go to.


Once you go there, all you do is look by January, February, March, and go through and count out the number of proposal codes that were generated in that given month.


So it could be four, it could be 20.


I would put in the priming ones, especially the ones where you are the person that is coordinating and putting that proposal together.


But I also throw in the sub-consultant calls.


If you do a lot of those for your clients, those also take time.


You can delineate those when you get into Excel if you want to code them differently, like color code them when you're going to run a bar chart or a pie graph.


But once you've got those numbers, you just simply go into Excel and you put down the first column row by row, January, February, March, so on to December.


Then you go back to the top and next to January in the cell right adjacent to it, just put in the number.


Okay, we did six proposals in January.


February, we did 12.


March, we did 16.


April, we did six.


And you go down that list until you get to December.


And then you simply select those fields, go up to the chart option at the top of Excel, click it.


I like the bar graph.


I think that's the easiest one to look at.


Click that and all of a sudden, boom, you were going to see months that have the most proposals.


And there's typically three that have the tallest peaks in them.


And I have found in my career the last 13 years, my peaks in the types of work that I do, the types of companies that I've worked in, which have typically been in engineering primarily, some planning, urban planning work.


It's spring and it's in the middle of summer.


So it's March and April, it's June and July, and it is October and November.


And once you see those in stark contrast to the rest of the year, you can say these are not the times to be planning big moves, like blowing up your website or completely rebranding your company.


But you can start to see, okay, we're going to have a lull probably around the end of February, we're going to have another one in August, and we're going to have one at the very tail end of the year, if that's the way your peaks go.


And then now you've got something in your hand that's a little bit reliable and substantial that you can start to use to help you figuring out when you're actually going to get the work done in between those big onslaughts of proposals that you know are going to be coming your way.


That sounds really satisfying and freeing to be able to look at that just right there in a colorful chart and make some planning steps.


When are we going to be thinking about, you know, career fairs or summer sponsorships and events?


How does the holiday gift program, potentially holiday parties or other, you know, employee care elements fit into the schedule?


If you're experiencing a peak in October and November, that might be a really hard time to implement two giant initiatives with client gifts and stuff.


So could you get ahead of it or do you need to just plan to be really ready to jump on it at a certain point of the year?


Well, and another part of it too is that you can start really being thoughtful in your staff resources.


So for instance, my husband, he's a mailman, the cutest, most attractive, most wonderful mailman in the world.


Yes, it's not common knowledge, but people who work for the post office cannot take time off in December.


Oh, yeah.


Unless it's an emergency, you cannot plan a vacation, you can't have a three day weekend, that is not allowed because of course, December is the absolute busiest time of the year for them.


And so it's just an understood agreement.


Yeah, it's a blackout month for taking vacation time.


Now, I'm not saying that we should ever do this.


And we do that in our marketing departments.


But summer is a pretty popular time for people to take vacations.


And if you've constantly felt like at the end of June or in the middle of July that you, as the person who didn't take the vacation, are dealing with like three concurrent deadlines and you are so stressed out and you're understaffed, it's because you are, because there is more work to do and there's less staff to do it.


And you can't tell people that they can't take vacations.


But if you know that you can anticipate that you're going to be busier and you're probably going to be understaffed, that's a really good case that can be made to your firm decision makers that you need to have a contractor that you can reach out to that can pinch hit for you.


And the times when you know you're going to be really busy and you might not have all hands on deck.


Or you can feel comfortable scheduling that vacation in August because you can see, well, historically that has been slower.


We get through this big push.


It's wonderful to get through a bunch of proposals and get some great work done knowing that you have this lovely vacation sitting there in August waiting for you.


And you can go guilt free and feel really good about it.


So yeah, that's great.


The planning can work both ways for what you can accomplish at work and also what you can accomplish for a little bit of self care and rejuvenation.


And it's really great when you're trying to think of having a marketing retreat.


The worst is when you've actually found the date, you've rented out a room, you've got everyone together at great agenda topics.


And all of a sudden, one of your members has a proposal that they have to work on and they're on their computer and really unhappy and just not present because they had to do the work.


They had to do the proposal.


And so trying to time your retreat or those big all hands on deck meetings, just during a time of year when they're not going to be slammed or proposals is a really good way to ensure that it's going to come off the way you want it to and people are going to really be able to be mentally present and all in for those conversations.


I'd like to circle back if we can just for one thing that popped into my mind as you were talking through delineating between when you're providing a resume or you're not the prime on a pursuit and that's a smaller effort but still an effort.


From the general contractor perspective, what that can often look like or maybe specialty contract or trade partners, it might look like the difference between a design build or design assist proposal where you're doing everything, you're definitely the prime progressive design build where you've got your architect partner integrated, a really major effort.


And then on the other side is, oh, they're submitting a bid or a price or if it's like just negotiated work where there's no qualifications needed, you're in the position to win the work.


The developer just needs to know what your fee is and some general, I don't know, contract information or just some details lined out, but you're still maybe putting resumes together to show them that this is the proposed team, whatever that might look like.


Those are two levels that are very different, but I like the idea of seeing that on the spreadsheet too, shown as deep blue for those big efforts and maybe the lighter green or something where you're like, yeah, we submitted also in addition to our 47 proposals, we submitted 80 sets of resumes or whatever that might be.


So good to see that level of detail, maybe no matter what part of AEC or the built environment your circle is in.


I'm a big fan of patterns because once you can see the truth of the level of effort around something, you can decide, do we need to make the process around it better?


Like on that point of resumes, resumes are something we bang our head against the wall with all the time, whether it's because the bio is just not good enough and we know it, but we don't have time to go back and really make it better, or the project descriptions are just not keeping pace.


Like it's two years out a day and there's so much work that that person has done since then.


It's just for some reason not reflective on their master resume.


A lot of times for something that should be as simple as going in, grabbing the master resume, deleting out the stuff you don't need, keeping the stuff you do and sending it out the door.


It can be a three or four hour exercise of going back and going into systems and trying to find the latest project descriptions or chasing the person down to hear from them.


What are the best projects to show for you, for this client?


And if you have enough instances of that, it's good evidence that it's probably a great time to bring on say, a marketing intern to come in and help you update all of those resumes so that the process is quicker and you have more time to work on other things.


So Wendy, I know that we do a lot of proposal work here at Middle of Six, but our proposal work is all over the place because it's tied to other firms and their particular proposal peaks, all of which are probably slightly or very different from each other.


So we don't seem to have the same pattern of peaks as in-house marketers do.


And I'm curious, you've been doing this now for five years, going on six, and I've been here for one so far.


I'm starting to get the hang of it.


But what are the strategies that you have implemented here to help yourself and the staff stay on top of the internal and external marketing needs of our firm, while also helping our clients with their proposals?


Oh, I love this question.


And you're so right.


We don't have the same patterns.


I think that our graph is a little more steady for that reason that you mentioned where we are working with the architects and the engineers and the contractors, or maybe the developers way on the front end.


And because of that, it blends quite a bit.


And so we don't see that big push if we were only just working for one of those disciplines.


But we have to be able to communicate and we have a growing team and very complicated deadline structure, I guess you could say, because we pride ourselves in being available.


You know, you can't really be an on-call resource if you're not available.


So it like defeats itself, right?


So how do we plan and communicate and understand what people are doing internally?


And do they have capacity to do more work?


What's that next thing?


We absolutely cannot drop the ball on a current deadline that we have.


Even a lot of our internal deadlines are very fixed to important deadlines or launch dates.


So those don't feel flexible really from my perspective.


And I can see how the team manages it too, that they really respect the internal deadlines just as much as for our client work.


So getting to your point about or your question about what strategies do we use, we adopted OneNote and Teams about two years ago.


And it was great because it was before the pandemic hit, when we really did switch to very much remote work, and that works well for our team because so often we are just kind of working with clients.


So having the digital version of what we used to have in the office on a whiteboard, mapping out deadlines and current project lists and all of the proposal tasks that would just kind of be fun to draw on a board and figure out who's doing what.


Well, that had to go into a digital, much more easy to share realm.


I'd recommend using OneNote if you haven't explored it.


It's very helpful.


You can search all kinds of topics.


It provides a lot of, I guess, transparency for the whole team.


If you think about how a lot of times, I mean, back, we used to use maybe Word documents in Excel, and they would be stored in files, and you would say, yeah, I created this spreadsheet or I have this idea for this thing.


I've mapped it out in Word, whatever it might be.


I mean, there can be some uses for those tools, but right now or for the last two years, we've actually moved almost all of that into OneNote so that people can do their own search, find what you're looking for, collaborate.


Their notes are just highlighted in there.


It makes it very easy to see what they've touched and what they've added to.


It creates a really living environment for us to share ideas.


And as part of that, communicating our capacity.


We have a table and we talk about the current projects.


It's not that different than if you're running a fairly large marketing team.


You would need to look at what proposals are in house, what's on the radar, what are we working on, what are those internal deadlines, who needs to be involved.


That's all captured in a way that we can look almost like on a dashboard.


I love that we do that on Mondays as a team.


And it's great to talk about your week just out loud for yourself.


To like, wow, I got a lot going on.


Or, oh, I actually have some capacity.


Having those conversations together, it just builds an appreciation for the work that everyone's working on.


But it also gives you your chance to say, look, I know you have to work on that thing internally and you have this other task that you're working on for a client.


I could totally take that on for you, so you can get that other thing done.


And then you're really working as a team to make sure that you're accomplishing everything, both client-based, internally, externally, for the firm, for the clients, and doing it in a way that is still possible in a virtual environment, which is something I think we've gotten really good at.


We've had to with the last year, so have a lot of other firms too.


Right, survival here.


You have to figure out new ways of doing things, even if they're really simple.


Communicating with your team doesn't seem that difficult to do, but honestly, communication is one of those areas where probably the root of any issues that you have, right?


If a ball gets dropped or something didn't happen on time or it goes in the wrong direction, it's a communication failure.


So the more we can dial in those processes is better.


I also want to just mention the other thing.


I guess it's a strategy or a tool that we're using, and I don't see us really ever going away from this, but it's another product of the pandemic that we started having a daily huddle.


It started out as 15 minutes, just a quick touch base.


It was almost like, hey, how's everybody doing today?


Remember those moments when it was so stressful and it was so much uncertainty and all of that and we were just watching the news?


Well, we needed to check in just on a personal level and say, how's it going?


Here's what you need help with, what can we do?


That sort of thing.


But it has evolved into a daily 30 minute meeting.


I'm not a huge fan of just reoccurring meetings.


They just don't jive with my style.


But at the same time, there's been so much value for us just popping on the screen, seeing each other's faces.


We can talk about work or questions or how do you do this?


Does anyone know the tool or the shortcut?


I can't find this thing.


Can someone help?


It can be that.


It could be I'm overloaded, I need a little assistance or I have capacity, send me something.


So it's a great way of balancing workload.


And sometimes we talk about what's on TV, or did anyone catch this thing or what were your Halloween costumes like?


We got to see this now, please.


And all of that has just been incredible for making sure that we're just communicating up to the minute or up to the day at least, but it feels very timely, like, what's going on?


What do we need help with?


And having the resources of your whole team.


Yeah, and occasional visits of everyone's dogs into the shot, which is nice too.


Yeah, everyone needs to see a little cute dog face or child face in their team meetings on occasion.


All right, so here's our listener question for this episode.


My company wants to completely redo our website, but even the thought of it is giving me anxiety.


How do we possibly do this with proposal deadlines always seeming to get in the way?


Oh yeah, well, anytime your firm says let's blow up the website, you're probably going to grow some gray hairs and lose some sleep.


I think that we are kind of out of time for the podcast, but this is a perfect question to lead into the third segment of this little series that we put together for the beginning of the year, which is how do you plan out an annual marketing calendar that takes into account the very important proposal work that you do throughout the year, as well as the other to-dos that you have on your plate, both big and small and mega, like blowing up and rebuilding a website.


So while we're not going to get into it at this moment, stay tuned for part three when we're going to dig into it in detail.


That's awesome.


You know, the short answer is create a annual marketing calendar where you can plan those big things, the small things, all of it.


Basically those rocks we were talking about.


The long answer, we will just dig into in part three or in our next episode.


The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.


Kyle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Allison Rose.


If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.


If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.


And follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.


Thanks so much for listening.


We hope you'll tell your friends and colleagues about the show and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes.


Until next time, keep on hustling.


Bye.


Bye.


The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.

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