
Do you have staff attending an interview who've never laid eyes on the proposal? Does a key member mysteriously disappear when it comes time to rehearse? Got a 70-slide PowerPoint for a 20-minute presentation? If you're nodding your head at any (or al) of these, start waving those red flags! Join Allison Tivnon and Wendy Simmons as they commiserate, laugh, and offer solutions to the oh-so-common missteps that can derail even the strongest proposal efforts. You can't treat a problem until you diagnose the cause. Tackle all your red flags before interview day and you will greatly increase your odds of winning the shortlist!
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.25 | Domain: 4
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are 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.
Today, we are back chatting with Allison Tivnon, and we're gonna talk interviews and red flag warnings that you might be headed for a loss.
Ah, hi Allison.
Hey there, Wendy.
I don't know about this.
Do we have to talk about early signs you might be heading for a loss?
I can't handle this.
Why would we want to talk about this?
Well, I can guarantee you that for the marketers that are going to be listening to this, they are going to recognize a lot of these red flag warnings.
And unfortunately, for some, these occur, all of them on every interview that they do.
Painful.
But what you're saying is if we like face our fears and our worst nightmares, maybe we can avoid some of them and be more proactive.
Yes.
And you knock out one at a time and figure out how to avoid it happening in the future until you just have a really well-run machine and you're winning every single interview.
I love the sound of that.
Yes.
High hit rate for the interviews.
Well, where do you want to start?
What's the first early sign?
Well, I think that there's eight red flags that can really indicate that you are headed for a loss.
Even one of these could seriously derail an interview.
They're not in any particular order, but I have a feeling our listeners are going to recognize a lot of these.
The first one is key interview staff were not involved in the proposal.
What I mean by this is that you've gotten shortlisted.
You have maybe two weeks to prepare for it, usually one, and you have to figure out who's going to be in the room.
And at least half of the people haven't read the proposal.
Sometimes only one of them has.
It's typically the project manager or person who's working closely with you to make it.
And the rest never picked it up, don't have a copy of the PDF, have no idea what the understanding was.
Maybe don't even really understand what the project is.
Oh no.
Wendy, have you seen this happen?
Well, yes.
I mean, that's why we send out the RFP and the proposal to the whole team, like one minute after it's been submitted, and say, hey, let's start talking about the interview.
Please read the proposal.
That is a really good point.
And some people listening to this might be thinking, oh, I don't do that.
That is definitely something to do.
Make sure everyone who's gonna be at the interview has a copy of the proposal and that they have time to read through it.
And that they're actually told they have to read through it.
Mandatory reading.
Yeah, they have to know what was said in the cover letter and what was the messaging that was sent that got you onto the shortlist.
Who's on our team?
Yeah, exactly.
And guess what?
You were.
So the next one is that you didn't brainstorm potential questions and the answers.
So we know there's almost always a Q&A at the end of an interview.
Sometimes there's only a Q&A.
I've seen that too.
You don't even get a presentation.
You dive right into questions.
If you don't start thinking through right now, what are they going to ask us?
You have to really seriously ask yourselves if you're prepositioned for this, because if you are prepositioned for it, you should know what their burning questions are or their biggest concerns about the project.
And you're not going to be able to address all those in your presentation.
And in fact, you don't want to.
You want to leave some really, really good answers at the end.
You don't want to try and answer all their questions in the PowerPoint, but you need to work through as a group, okay.
They're likely going to ask us about time constraints or disruptions to the schedule based on something else that's going on near the site, or it's an occupied space.
Whatever it might be, think through what you're going to say in response to it.
If they don't ask you, it's fine, but at least you are a little more prepared for the Q&A session when it comes around.
Right.
Calling all principals, BD and project executives.
This is your job to feed your whole team everything you know about the project.
All of that pre-positioning work, all of the concerns, their biggest fears, what their drivers are, help everyone out by bringing that really project specific information to that Q&A.
Okay.
So we've established that everybody needs to know the client and how to potentially answer the questions.
But the next one is really, what are your roles?
What are the speaking parts?
If you don't assign these, it's going to be madness at the interview.
Everyone needs to know why they are going to be at the interview.
What is their specific role and what are they going to be speaking to?
So if you haven't assigned roles and speaking parts, that's a red flag.
The next one on the list is interview content mirrors the proposal.
You have taken the same photos that you used in your layout, the same graphics, and are basically just parroting exactly what was said in the proposal.
You talk about your quals again.
Blurbs that you have as pull quotes are making their way into your script again.
All you're doing is telling them everything that they already know.
That's not the point of an interview.
They want to dig deeper into it.
And in order for that to happen, you have to dig deeper into it first because your presentation comes first.
Okay, so there's three others.
Prep session attendance is spotty, meaning that you send out the invites, everyone's calendars were clear, everyone accepted them.
This is the check-in to talk about creating the PowerPoint.
This is the first rehearsal.
It's the dress rehearsal.
And everyone says they're going to be there.
And then the day and time come.
And, oh, I have another meeting.
Oh, I got to be in my car.
Oh, I can't make it.
Or they just don't show up.
If you have spotty attendance and you have people that are just consistently no-shows when you're trying to prepare for interviews, that is a serious problem.
And that gets to the second one that's kind of coupled with that, is that you didn't rehearse.
How many people have gone straight into an interview without really running through the PowerPoint together?
Yeah.
And just kind of getting comfortable and connecting and having that team chemistry.
I mean, it's kind of cringy thinking about not having some time to huddle and get your brains aligned before you go and present.
And I think some of the reasons why our teams maybe avoid rehearsal is stage fright, or just trying to not make fools of themselves in front of each other.
There's a real fear of that, of falling on your face.
And they think, oh, I'll just I'll pull it out when I need to right in the moment at the interview, and it's going to be great.
But the odds of that happening are not very good.
It could be a train wreck if you don't rehearse together, especially if you have a whole lot of people that are going to be passing batons back and forth that are gonna be flipping through the PowerPoint together and trying to figure out who's gonna talk to this slide, who's gonna talk to that slide.
You have to dial all of that in way in advance of sitting down.
Otherwise, it's gonna come across as silted, unnatural, and you might be clashing on things and not covering the topics in the way that you want it to.
And then the last thing is a bloated PowerPoint.
And boy, do we see this?
You end up with a 70 slide deck and you have a 20 minute long presentation.
You have slides that have 10 to 15 bullets on them or content that is so small that you can't really read it.
All you're doing is distracting the selection committee from what you're saying to them.
They're not scoring you on how many slides you had in your PowerPoint.
They're scoring you on are you able to articulate and connect with them in a way that is going to resonate.
They're not going to be looking at your PowerPoint slides and reading them one bullet point at a time.
And oh, please don't do that either.
Who was it?
Mark Twain who said, if I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter story.
I think that we end up just trying to have it be all things because we don't make in enough time thinking through the script itself and how we're going to speak to the slides.
But really be careful with how many slides you're putting in there and try and put some guardrails around it and say, you know, for each section we're going to cover, we're only going to have X number of slides or the cardinal rule is we never have more than.
Of course, you have to break them every once in a while, but at least making your team really cognizant of the fact that this thing is getting overloaded will keep you from making one of those crucial mistakes that can really turn things upside down when you get into the room.
And going back to your earlier point about the Did Not Rehearse, if you rehearse, you get to work through some of those things and you get some feedback maybe from your marketing team or other people to say, wow, you're really cramming a lot into that PowerPoint.
That's a bit more than we can cover in this time.
I mean, you just get to work out those kinks, so those two go hand in hand.
Yeah, and a lot of times the slides can be collapsed down.
There's a lot of redundancy that can get pulled out to make for a much sleeker, sharper, more impactful PowerPoint.
Okay, those are all awesome tips, but I feel like there's one big one that we skipped over at the beginning and we have to hit on it.
It's super important and there's some good stuff.
So why don't you share this little bonus content?
Oh, and this is a big bonus.
Didn't start preparing for the interview during the proposal stage.
This is a game changer.
If your firm doesn't weave this in as part of their proposal process, you are going to be lacing up your shoes at the starting line when other firms are already running down the track.
The reason why is that by the time you get to The Shortlist, you have so much less time to prepare for the interview than you did for the proposal.
If you think about it, if you really pre-positioned, you've been preparing for that proposal since way before the RFP even came out.
And so, now you've got a week, maybe two, to prepare for an interview.
And how do you differentiate from all of the hard work and thought that you put into creating the proposal?
A lot of firms just decide, well, let's just regurgitate what we had said in the proposal.
We talked about this briefly with the interview content mirroring proposals, but this goes even deeper.
This is the fact that if you can't crack open what makes an interview different from a proposal, you're going to have a really hard time differentiating yourself from everyone else in the room.
So we did not spend enough time preparing for the interview during the proposal stage, but no problem.
We got this.
We can just recycle what's in the proposal, put it on some slides and call it an interview, right?
Right, Allison?
Well, no, we can't.
Remember, we cover that interview content mirroring proposals is bad, but we all do it because we're so pressed for time.
That being said, we're always going to be pressed for time.
So how do you avoid just simply recycling what's in the proposal?
Well, there's four fundamental things that we can do differently during the interview that build off of what we did in the proposal.
It takes a lot of the guesswork out of things.
So I'll run us through each one of those.
So number one, value propositions.
We hear this term so much in marketing, and hopefully you have woven those in to your proposal.
Now's the time that you need to really make sure that your team knows those value propositions backwards and forwards.
You have to embed them into your presentation.
You have to keep them front and center in your mind during the Q&A.
Value proposition is really the why you, and those are the things that you're gonna want to extract out of the proposal and reuse over and over.
You can recycle those because they're the winning message.
So make sure that they are woven throughout your entire PowerPoint or presentation and all of your responses throughout the interview.
The next thing is the schedule.
So how many times have you been putting a proposal together and you have this giant Excel document that's been sent to you or something out of Bluebeam and it's like, here, put this in.
And you look and cringe like, oh my gosh, this does not look anything like the rest of the proposal.
I wish I had time to make this more beautiful.
I wish I had time to make this more visually appealing.
Well, now you have a little bit more time.
So really put that in your head when you're putting your proposal together.
If there are pieces of it that you're like, I just wish I had had a little more time with this.
Put that aside for when you're preparing for the interview.
I just want to add a different take on this too, Allison, is you can actually be thinking about this in the proposal stage.
I've encountered this plenty of times where we think, hmm, we have the start of a site logistics plan, or the outline of a schedule, but we need some more information.
But then between the time the proposal is submitted and the interview, you may have several weeks or a month.
That's a great opportunity to take those preliminary items and take them a step further or have it designed or 3D rendered.
I mean, you could just up it.
And so don't be afraid to put some things early in the proposal that aren't totally fleshed out yet because you have this next opportunity in the interview stage.
And it could be the schedule, it could be a process graphic, it could be a communication flowchart, those little bells and whistles that you've already got it, you've got the content there.
It's just a chance to make it pop more.
The third thing is dig deeper, dig deeper on the stories.
You've covered the basics in your proposal.
Now you want to dig into each project to find the anecdotes, those experiential stories for your team to tell.
This is where you really want to show the heart.
You've demonstrated that the, maybe the technical tasks or the schedule and phasing or certain key elements were highly relevant to their project.
But what you really want to dial into now was the boots on the ground.
What was it like in the day to day of getting that project done?
You want them to think about it in terms of the wins that you had on that project and the hard times and how did you overcome them?
These are often stories that you just don't have time to write to when you're putting a proposal together or you don't have the space or it's just not going to sound as good if it's just written down.
These are the things that are going to make your team members really come to life as they were a part of that project.
They really did encounter those difficulties and now they're going to speak to exactly how they got through them.
Or a place that I see this really easy to implement is when on the interview agenda, they've asked you to hit on your project experience.
But you've really given a great overview of that in the proposal round or in the qualifications package, so you don't want to necessarily just rehash here in a bunch of banks or high rises or schools.
How about weaving those stories like Allison was saying into your introductions and the overall kind of why message and then throughout as examples.
So opportunity for stories to show up throughout the interview, and it checks the box on experience and what you're bringing to the team.
And speaking of the team, this is another area to really shine in an interview.
They've seen your headshots.
They've read the bios and the resumes.
Now is the time that you get to humanize yourself to the selection committee.
Be loose.
Be happy to be there.
Share the highs and lows of the jobs that you've been on in a way that really shows them that you know what you're doing.
You love what you do.
Talk about their project and why you're excited about it.
This is your chance to really connect with them.
So you don't have to recycle what's in the proposal.
You have to be in the room as a human being, and you have to demonstrate to them that you would be one who would one, be able to do a really, really good job at pulling off their project on schedule and on budget.
But two, they'll be enjoyable to work with, that you'll be responsible and trustworthy.
And at the end of the day, you're simply their peer.
You are someone that is in this with them, and you have demonstrated to them that you are as committed to this project as they are.
Definitely such a more like vibrant, living, interesting element of the pursuit process, the interviews.
And I think that's why we love them so much.
I mean, proposals are great.
They're really important.
You know, I get why that's the world we live in so often, but when you move into the interview stage, now we're talking humans and showing experience and being real, and that's where it just kind of all comes together.
Allison, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on the red flags.
In agreement, yes, I think we can all have had that experience of having one or more of those show up as you start preparing for an interview, and maybe by looking at them so simply laid out there, we can be proactive and be incentivized and motivated to not have that happen when we get into the interview prep stage.
Otherwise, it's just frustrating, and all that hard work we did in the quals and proposal round is kind of, you know, what is the word?
Frittered away?
Or whatever.
That's probably not the word.
But you get what I'm saying, right?
I mean, why work so hard early on to not be as focused and intentional during the interview stage?
Oh, I know.
Maybe your whole team needs to have some ownership in this, too.
It's not just marketing driving it.
But at least if you're looking at these different buckets and if you can recognize those red flags, you can bring it to the attention of the team and hopefully improve on the next one.
Think of how much time and effort and money and resources that you have spent on the proposal and all the prepositioning to get to this point.
You have made it to The Shortlist.
Show up to the meetings, rehearse, read the RFP, just really have your head in the game.
These are not hard things.
There's some psychological barriers sometimes, or time management issues, avoidance behaviors.
I think as marketers, we have to kind of see these red flags before they happen and start thinking through how we can approach our technical staff and gently kind of turn them in the direction we need them to go so that every single person is truly aligned and calibrated and ready when they enter into that room together.
If you go into that room prepared, you go into that room with an authentic, enthusiastic, I'm happy to be here energy, you're going to win it more often than you're going to lose it.
If you go into it without those things, you're going to lose it more often than you win it.
So absolutely, Wendy, this is a great discussion.
Thank you so much for having me.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Our producer is Kyle Davis with Digital Marketing and Graphic Design by the team at Middle of Six.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
We'll see you next time.
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.