Is it just us, or is the thought of being disqualified in the pursuit process the stuff of nightmares? Enter the Proposal Strategy and Responsibility Matrix. In this episode, Wendy Simmons and Pursuit Strategist Rachel West break down Middle of Six's pursuit planning document, sharing topics ranging from common booby-traps to best practices, to ensure you and your team are set up for success!
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4
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.
Today, we're chatting with Rachel West.
Hey, Rachel.
Hi, Wendy.
How are you?
I'm doing very well.
How are you?
I'm very good because we are going to talk about something that I love.
It is Proposal Strategy Matrix.
And that probably sounds like a really boring thing to love.
But as a marketer who works on lots of proposals, it keeps us organized and sane.
And before we get into that, I thought it'd be nice if you could tell our listeners a little bit about your background and your role as a pursuit strategist at Middle of Six.
Absolutely.
I would be happy to.
So I have worked within the AEC industry for going on, getting close to a decade and in a variety of different roles, firms of different sizes, different practice areas, ranging from landscape architecture to engineering and everything in between.
And one thing that I have found between all of those roles, something that is just really uniting and really excites me, is the pursuit, which we're here to talk about today.
Yeah.
I guess I'd just like to start with the first real obvious question.
What is a Proposal Strategy Matrix?
So this is a consolidated document that is living and breathing and will be editing and refining throughout.
That helps us provide structure, accountability, and get the team in alignment in terms of strategy that we're going to put forth on a particular pursuit.
Yeah.
So a communication tool that, you know, in our case, we lead developing and share with the team through a kickoff meeting and captures all of the information from the simple basic things, like when the proposal is due and who is going to be submitting it.
Are there hard copies and requirements in that way to the team that needs to be reviewing what that internal schedule looks like and who will be involved at those different levels and definitely taking a dive into the strategy and key messages and what our competition is.
That's just the start of it.
Obviously, there's quite a bit more once you get into the proposal piece, but even if you just mapped out those things, it's incredibly important for the team to be aligned in that way.
That's how we use our strategy matrix and I'd love to dig into each section with you a little bit more.
That sounds fantastic.
When we first receive an RFQ or an RFP, I think one of the number one items that our team does is open it up and read the requirements.
We want to submit a compliant proposal.
Obviously, that's number one, never get disqualified because you missed one little thing.
And the strategy matrix helps make sure that the marketing team has looked over every piece of that RFP or RFQ to find any what I call booby traps, hidden things that are in the back that they didn't mention up in the front, that you want to make sure you've captured those.
And so by reviewing the request for the submittal and placing that information to the strategy matrix, it's a great quality control, quality assurance component where you can scrub the RFP and make sure you haven't overlooked any little detail.
I know it's extra work to put the RFP into the matrix, but tell me where you see the most value in that way.
Oh, I mean, I just see such value in having this communication tool that is, again, living and able to be collaborated within.
I think when you do approach a kickoff meeting, it's so invaluable to ensure that every member of that meeting has hopefully had an opportunity to peruse the request, and I think different people might capture different qualities or different booby traps.
We're really well-versed in that, but there are some things on the contract side that we might not be as familiar with that a project manager or other technical personnel might have a better grasp of.
Right.
So we're going to capture everything we possibly can on this matrix.
And I think most of the time, we will get everything and understand where some nuances are or things that need clarification.
Often when you're looking at a request and you're reading through it, it'll contradict itself.
It'll say that the due date is Thursday, August 5th, but truly that's not even the 5th of August or whatever it might be.
So you need clarification.
You're starting your list of questions to ask either at the pre-submittal meeting or to submit afterwards.
So the matrix is a great way to not accidentally overlook any detail that could be crucial in winning the project.
But we're getting it all on paper for that kickoff meeting to go through in a really organized way.
And we're delegating the responsibility to someone on the project team to ensure that they are submitting those RFIs and are kind of a lead point of contact with the client throughout the process.
So one booby trap that I find that I come across very frequently is the issue of page count and what is included in that and what is not.
So oftentimes, you can have a request that has a guideline that says, you know, this is only a 20 page proposal, but you have a team of 10 sub-consultants and you don't know whether the sub-consultants are included in that page limit or if they're included in an appendix.
That can be really tricky and oftentimes, it's a great moment to get clarification from whoever is managing the proposal on the client side.
Yeah, so on the page count topic, I've noticed that it's getting better because I think enough questions have been asked, but I'm sure we've all run into, are they counting double sides?
Just sometimes the wording of it, it's almost like a sentence that if the comma is in the wrong spot, it could mean a totally different thing, right?
And that's the case with page counts, right?
So often, I'm just really happy to see that it's 25 double-sided, eight and a half by 11.
To me, that's pretty clear, you know, especially if they say if every printed page is one side, that I'm like, I got it.
And so that's really helpful.
But if it's not clear, this is a good time to ask.
And I don't think you should have any fear of asking.
I don't think it's showing your cards.
It's not real strategy in that way.
Obviously, sometimes we don't want to ask questions because we want to not show our hand.
But a page count, probably someone else is going to ask that question, too.
So you might as well throw it out there and get clarification and move forward confidently.
Absolutely.
And then there are pieces that are also not necessarily included.
A client may not be able to tell you who your competition is, but you might be able to ask how many other firms have been invited to bid and help inform your strategy that way.
Yeah, another thing to look for as you're reviewing that RFP, have they asked for something way in the back, like insurance or bonding requirements, that didn't show up clearly as a deliverable, but depending again how you're reading the request, it's probably safer to either include it or ask the question to confirm, depending on your own deadlines with the team, or if there was some delay, you wouldn't want to not have an element that was required, and then you could be potentially be disqualified or non-responsive.
That would be so devastating.
Oh, I've never had it happen.
Never.
I don't have wood to knock on here, but I hope this never happens in my career.
I've never been disqualified.
I've heard of teams when they have had that happen.
It's heartbreaking.
Even if they are a competitor, my heart goes out to them because I know how much time and effort the team put into it, and usually it's something very, very small.
It's not a big reason that someone might get disqualified and I never want to see it.
So the Proposal Strategy and Responsibility Matrix that we use at Middle of Six is really fantastic, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about it from you, Wendy.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of the things that we like to capture during the kickoff meeting that is on the front page of our Responsibility Matrix is the internal team and the internal schedule.
And that has two components, but it is really helpful, especially if you have a blended team, if you're doing progressive design build, and you've got multiple companies participating in the pursuit to have the names and the email and the phone number.
And we've actually taken it a step further, and we like to ask and then list if anyone is going to be out of the office during the pursuit.
Because, well, maybe I'm sure marketers would not be surprised about this, but have you ever been in a situation where you think, okay, we're going to go and submit, and then you realize the person who you assumed was submitting is on vacation.
And I mean, obviously, it's pretty easy to go to the next backup, but we don't want to have any surprises.
So another element that we have under the internal team and schedule is the actual schedule for the pursuit.
And we work backwards from the deadline.
A best practice we use is that we like to be completed 24 hours in advance.
And I think early in my career, I thought impossible, can't be done, right?
It's always a hair on fire, a mad rush to the end.
But over time, I've learned it actually is possible to be done early.
And while we don't necessarily hold that 24 hours really firm, we like to give that window at the end for additional levels of quality control, just a little bit of space.
I just feel like there's almost nothing worse in the pursuit process than sweaty hands, heart beating, wondering if you're going to get that email out in time down to the last minute.
I just try to avoid that at all costs.
Wouldn't you agree, Rachel?
Oh, absolutely.
And the idea of having, you know, on this consolidated, really concise document, a calendar with all of these dates highlighted as milestones is so helpful.
It's so helpful.
I think a lot of the folks that we work with, too, are very visual.
And it's really nice for them to see tangibly how much time we have until the submittal deadline.
And then from there, other milestones that will happen if we're shortlisted.
Yeah, that visual of seeing, here's where today is, here are these drafts, here's the deadline.
You know, you can, I don't know, it just sticks in my mind a bit more.
So working back from the actual submittal deadline and then doing our best, as long as we have the normal amount of time to complete the response, going back from that 24 hours, typically, we'd like to have three drafts feels good.
We do like the pink team, red team, gold team review.
And so it's similar in that way.
But often if a client of ours isn't familiar with that nomenclature, we just use draft one, two, three.
So how we start off after the kickoff meeting is putting together a storyboard draft.
And that draft is something that is very basic.
It's taking for account of the page in each section, mapping out very roughly.
It can be as simple as a gray box or something to say, hey, we're going to have this graphic here or this org chart here, making a place for everything.
And again, it sort of helps with that compliance.
We've got the page limits accounted for any attachments that need to be included, and we're making a map for the team to understand.
And then we basically stage the drafts two or three days apart.
And we really like that consistent cadence of having a draft every few days, where it's moving forward.
I know personally for me, it can be really hard to issue draft one or two because I think it's not perfect.
I need more information.
We're doing everything we can to get it in there.
But I think for the whole team, it's much better to just get it out, get eyes on it, have people the opportunity to comment and provide more information or be inspired by something.
And so you have a little more road in front of you.
I agree completely.
It's so helpful.
I think it's so impactful to have a road map.
One time someone I was working with said to me, this is probably a common phrase, I just hadn't heard it, but a big idea too late is not a good idea.
And that sticks with me because it's hard if you're, especially if you're at the end of the line, if you're the graphic designer or doing QC on a proposal, having a big idea at the 11th hour is so painful.
You want to do everything you can to help improve the strategy.
And I think that's why a lot of marketing people end up working till one or two in the morning the night before proposals due because it's just those polishing elements there.
But that's why doing that storyboard draft and looking at draft one and two early allows the team to think of those big ideas at that point and try to get them into play.
Absolutely.
All the ideas just start to marinate and you have more time to develop a really effective strategy.
Yeah, there's a little bit of training that goes on there with your team as well.
From the marketing perspective, I would say encouraging people to think, what have we not done in the past that we want to do?
Or is there any feedback we receive from a debrief that we want to implement?
Or anything like that, like start those conversations early and then not avoid them at the end so much as, hey, that time of invention and wonder is sort of early in that stage.
And from there, we're polishing and kind of change the focus and train the team to be creative and come to the kickoff meeting with ideas.
Quick aside, I am so terribly sorry.
I have a doggo in the next room who is just dying to get in.
And you might be hearing a little bit of his bumping around on the feed.
No, no, no, it's fine.
We love dogs.
Dogs can bump around on the feed all they want.
So we have a section on the proposal responsibility and strategy matrix that's called win strategy and key messages.
It's arguably the most important part of this document.
Rachel, how do you approach filling that in?
And I think this is something that we want to drive home with our marketing team and with our technical team and everyone involved in the process as early as possible and have as many people contribute to our big overarching message.
And typically, the way that I like to approach this is to have the team really think about what our key differentiators are.
It's great if we know who the competition is.
That's always really helpful and puts us one step ahead in the sense that we can start to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of both our competition and internally.
So this is just really great opportunity to synthesize what we're all thinking and determine what our overarching strategy is for the win.
Yeah, I like to actually leave this section blank and go into the kickoff meeting with an opportunity for the team to download everything they know strategy-wise.
But I almost prefer the blank box here and opening the conversation up.
And then in the marketing team can bring their perspective, like here's some feedback we got.
We know we're up against this competition.
You know, here's how we need to differentiate ourselves.
But having the rest of the project team talk about things from the construction or design side, what they know about the owner, and they just live and breathe that every day.
And I love hearing that from them first.
So all of the other part of the matrix that we've talked about usually comes pre-populated by marketing.
We have filled it in the RFQ.
We've got it in there.
We've made some assumptions.
We've put in some dates.
You know, we've led that piece of it, but this is a great spot to facilitate a conversation.
So true.
There's a place for it later on, but it can also be a great spot to put scoring criteria, just as a reminder if they're ranking the team really, really high or some other element that might be a stretch for your group, so that everyone notices that, hey, these are where a lot of points are going to be important to grab.
Look, they have safety on here, which is important, but they've only given it a small percentage of points because they're going to judge your team in a different way or whatever it might be.
I mean, those are important strategic items to take note of with the team and make sure you're guiding them towards those high value areas.
I think back to scoring criteria.
It's a really interesting point to start to think about where your team's weaknesses might be.
I know we love to think about our strengths, but it's really important to see where our blind spots are as well.
With the scoring criteria, you can find really wonderful opportunities.
For example, if the prime firm doesn't necessarily have the strongest experience, we can absolutely have a consultant or sub-consultant who makes up for that experience gap, and we can really highlight that element of their qualifications.
Yeah, that's so smart.
Sometimes a weakness can just be a perceived weakness, but if they, for some reason, think that maybe you're not as technologically savvy as the competition, even though you may be, that can be a great place to note that you want to make sure all of your building information modeling images are in the proposal.
By proving, yep, this is what we do, and here's how we've done it before, that can take care of or check the box on a perceived weakness.
Yeah.
Sorry, doggo.
I'm going to kick him out.
Let me just do that really quickly.
He's so loud.
Now we dive into the real substance of this proposal matrix.
Wendy, I would love an overview of this section and how we break down the proposal questions.
Right.
A proposal matrix, you could think this is actually what we're talking about.
We've already spent whatever talking about the stuff in the beginning, the strategy piece.
But here we are, the matrix of questions that are asked in the request and who is doing what.
And this could capture all kinds of things.
I'm going to tell you what we focused on most often.
So we look at each section or question number kind of depends on how it's all organized.
And often that section or question will have points associated with it.
So we put those in the same column.
We say, OK, section one is worth 25 points.
And I just love seeing that right there front and center.
So the next thing that we cover is the topic or the question.
And we don't necessarily include the full question from the request because it's available there.
And I think you're probably familiar with a question could be a half a page long.
And that doesn't really help the team to have all of that crammed into a tiny table.
But you can pretty easily summarize what the question they're asking is, what's the big topic, and then it could even be a bulleted list of they want an overview of the team, they want the org chart, they want the resumes.
That's enough to sort of capture everything that's required.
The next column is graphics and ideas.
And so this is a place that we may populate with a few things based on past experience.
It's also a good spot to note the page limit because just as a reminder, when you're putting that storyboard together, if there isn't a page limit, you may say, I'm only going to use five pages for this based on how you're mapping it out.
We also capture graphics in this area.
So thinking through, is there an org chart?
Do we want to have site logistics plans?
Are there master plan, example drawings, or other images that we want to put in there?
This is a great place to sort of brainstorm what might go in that area.
And I think of those as being long lead items that you want to communicate and brainstorm with the team early.
You don't want to, again, leave that too far to the end because we may not get the quality or the number, the quantity of things that we want in that area.
So definitely mapping out graphics and keeping graphics top of mind are super important.
This is such a wonderful opportunity to have the team start to think about the kind of key concepts and strategies that we'd like to present for each particular section.
Also on this part of The Matrix, this is where we get to the responsibility component.
We have columns for lead and when a draft is due and when the final is due.
Depending on the makeup of your team, that might be all marketing led with a little bit of review and input.
It could be very much on your technical operations side to develop the content.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer in there, but the most important part is that you're communicating it.
Again, really depends.
But I like that idea that we're getting accountability, you're getting a name in that spot, and then attaching a date that everyone has agreed to.
Yes, this is when the draft is due, here is when the final is due.
As a rule of thumb, it's great if we have a place for technical team members to start.
Boiler plate or some narrative that is as far along as we can possibly take it, and then have the technical teams really invest their time and energy into making it as project-specific and technically accurate as they possibly can.
Sometimes boilerplate can be a dirty word.
I've heard executives often say, I just don't want to use the same old boilerplate, whatever.
And I get that for sure, but there's some value in boilerplate from my perspective that in a section in content that you have written and developed and put the energy into making it really good, really concise, and probably some strong graphics that go with it.
If you were to hand that over to someone to write from a blank page, you know, they're really starting over and probably don't have that clear line of thought of the process, and it has not been gone through the wringer for copy editing.
There's a lot of reasons why good boilerplate is very, very valuable and it should be part of your toolkit.
Don't be afraid of boilerplate, but use it in a really smart way and make sure that what you are using for boilerplate is your best version.
There's always ways to tune it up and make it better.
And anything that's not your best version is an opportunity to get it there to be the best version.
And it can be just a really good point of reference to use before, you know, really starting to tailor proposal content.
But as we talked about in the beginning, this is really a communication tool.
So it doesn't do people a lot of good to have it shared in a meeting and then disappear into email.
You probably already have some tried and true communication systems in place.
On our matrix, we do include a box that says, what are your communication preferences?
If we don't ask that question, we're going to make some assumptions and maybe not be in alignment with how they like to receive information or the frequency of updates.
And so when we share a link to the shared document, then we will pull it up live in our kickoff meeting.
And as long as people are meeting virtually, gosh, it's amazing, right?
Because they can see it right there on the screen.
They can access it through the link.
And I've had clients just typing notes as we talk.
You know, they may be adding someone's email address or correcting the spelling of a subcontractor.
These are little details that are so valuable.
This collaboration to make sure right the first time and having that shared document just makes it so easy.
And then following up after the meeting with, hey, this is all up to date now.
Here is the link.
So it's right at the top of your email.
And it's just really a great time saver and helps make sure the accuracy of the information is distributed throughout the project team.
Real time updates are really fantastic.
I think they've been such a game changer in this process for us.
All right, we have a listener question.
It's a really good one.
I think it will apply to a lot of people out there, those in smaller firms or maybe who are doing more quick hit projects.
Question is, are proposals are so quick turn?
Does it make sense to spend time creating a proposal matrix, or should I just start working on the proposal?
Strategy is really the key here, and we do encourage you to think about that, whether it's in the form of a responsibility matrix, or something a little more casual and nitty-gritty.
Yeah, absolutely.
Something that I've experienced is often the amount of time you have to respond to the proposal matches the amount of effort.
That's not always true.
Sometimes there's a little bit of a scramble, or maybe you receive the request late in the process, and so you're starting behind.
But let's set that aside and just assume that, you know, for a really massive infrastructure or progressive design build pursuit, you're probably going to have several weeks.
So if you really are looking at something that's very quick turn, my thought is that the proposal is also scaled to match that.
So for you, thinking about that, you probably don't need a four-page proposal matrix.
What about a one-pager or a half a pager that, you know, could be stapled on the front of the RFQ that can be your checklist?
What are the internal deadlines?
Who's going to be delivering it from your team, whether it's email or in-person?
What's the key overriding message or main strategy that you want incorporated into that proposal?
And then who's on point for which section?
That might mean if you're a single marketer with a lot of quick-turn proposals or because of the way your departments are structured, that's all you, but that's fine.
At least you know that and you've gone through the effort to look through the request and find out if there's anything that you need support from or you need to tap for a complete response.
That was a fantastic deep dive into Proposal Responsibility Strategy Matrix.
I feel like we need to publish this PDF at some point, no promises at this stage, but we talked about so much and it felt like such a visual tactile tool.
So we'll see if we can put something like that together.
But it's been really good and I'm glad people are thinking about how they're mapping out their pursuit strategies and getting help from the team so that they can put their best foot forward, get all of those great ideas and make a winning pursuit effort.
That's all fantastic.
Rachel, thanks for your input and for being part of our pursuit team and jumping in there, kind of helping our clients.
And I guess we'll see you next time when we've got the next pursuit topic on the list.
I'm looking forward to it, Wendy.
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 Alison 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.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
See you later.
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.