Manage-Wise

Green team reviews

“How do you always seem to create outstanding, creative proposals?” I asked a partner in a consulting firm that has won many assignments from and completed great work for us. “Can you keep a secret?” the partner replied. “Probably not,” I said, “especially if my organization could use that secret to make our own proposals to our potential customers more effective.”

“Okay,” she responded. “It’s not really a secret, but we have found a wonderfully effective process that uses firm’s collective knowledge to great advantage. Harnessing our collective strength, our collective wisdom, multiplies our ability to ‘work smarter.’ And this ‘secret’ can also work to improve your own selling opportunities. Our process is based on four assumptions.

Proposal inquiries

“First, proposal inquiries are an opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship, an opportunity to learn, to educate, to persuade, to sell—from the moment you first meet us until you make a final consultant-selection decision. This context drives us to look for opportunities to share our perspectives, capabilities, experiences, and qualifications throughout the business-development process. We view every interaction with you and your colleagues as an opportunity to suggest value—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—that could benefit you and your organization now and in the longer term.

“Think about all the logical and psychological factors you discuss in your book, including the anecdotes about selecting a car mechanic or a roofing contractor. Well, we apply similar concepts to selling professional services to both existing and potential clients. We view every step, each interaction, in the selling process as an opportunity to build a relationship that will make you feel better about us and the value we can provide.

“Second, there is significant competition for your work because you are considering other well-qualified consultants, either individuals or firms, and each desires your business. We assume that our competitors will work as hard as we will to win. We like solving challenging problems and helping clients implement measurable change in their organizations, but we know that others may be as capable as, or even more capable than, we are for any particular issue. We know that you have many good choices among consultants and that many of them can do high-quality work.

“Third, a proposal opportunity must be viewed holistically, as a series of interrelated events and behaviors, any one of which would be the difference between the few evaluation points separating winning and losing. We do all we can to meet our commitments, whether it’s arriving on time, listening empathetically in discussions, asking insightful questions, sending information you request, or meeting promised deadlines during the proposal-development process. We come as prepared as possible and try to put ourselves in your shoes.

A final analysis

“Therefore, our selling team debriefs frequently as we speculate about why certain responses were made to our questions and why you asked the questions you did. We also extensively research your issue, your organization, your markets, and your competitors. We work hard to demonstrate how much we care about you both collectively and individually. If we didn’t care, we couldn’t do our best to identify how we might be able to help.

“Finally, we look for any opportunity to provide benefits to you during the proposal-development process. These benefits are almost always insight-related as we share our knowledge about and experience with your current situation. During this time, we are particularly sensitive to our manner: how we do and say things, how we related to you and your team, how we share our perspectives to answer your questions.

“We keep reminding ourselves that there are no right and wrong approaches or answers to business development. No ready-made prescriptions to apply. No rules about how to play the game. Everything is situational, dependent on your specific issue, your history, your people, your timing, your priorities. This dependency is one of the reasons why our work is so fascinating. Nothing is black or white, only varying shades of gray.

“In a word, our secret is collaboration. We put collaboration into practice for your benefit, and of course our own. We have developed a process, a technique, for working jointly to get many of our best minds (even those not directly involved in the proposal effort for your firm) involved to help us review and improve our selling efforts with you.”

During the rest of our conversation, I learned that the partner’s firm does considerable business with the U.S. government, including the U.S. Army, which uses a technique called “A Red Team Review” when it considers whether to invest in a new weapons system.

deBono review

The premise of a Red Team Review is this:

Before submitting a proposal, you increase your odds of winning if you determine your strengths and weaknesses and then identify and implement actions to leverage the former and eliminate the latter.

The consultant’s firm borrowed and modified the red team concept and applied it to its own selling and proposal-development efforts, but it changed the color to green to accord with one of Edward deBono’s colored hats. According to deBono, difference colored hats can be used to signify different style of thinking. By focusing on one aspect of thinking at a time, you reduce confusion in your mind among multiple objectives. In his book Six Thinking Hats (Little Brown, 1999) deBono suggests that you and your team choose one of the six colored hats to wear at a particular moment. You figuratively put on a “different hat,” and then everyone plays the role defined by that hat. In this way, individual egos are protected because everyone is wearing the same color hat. The hats allow you to think and say things that you might not otherwise think and say. They are a liberating device.

According to deBono, the green hat represents new ideas, new concepts, new perceptions. It encourages the deliberate creation of new ideas, alternatives, and more alternatives. In essence, it seeks to identify new approaches to a situation. Green is deBono’s color for this hat because “green is the color of fertility and growth and plants that grow from tiny seeds.” Green is they symbolic color for the thinking hat specifically concerned with creativity, new ideas, and new ways of looking at things, escaping from the old ides in order to find better ones.

DeBono suggests why green hat thinking is so difficult, for me as a client as well as for you:

For most people…creative thinking is difficult because it is contrary to the natural habits of recognition, judgment and criticism…The brain is designed to set up patterns, to use them and to condemn anything that does not “fit” these patterns. Most thinkers like to secure. They like to be right.

Creativity involves provocation, exploration and risk taking…you cannot order yourself (or others) to have a new idea, but you can order yourself (and others) to spend time trying to have a new idea. The green hat provides a formal way of doing this.

Excerpt from ‘Writing Winning Business Proposals’ by Richard C Freed, Shervin Freed and Joe Romano. Reproduced with permission © 2005, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 250. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com