Secrets Behind the Killer Proposal

WARNING: If you only listen to only one episode of 2Bobs it should NOT be this one. In this send up of the ridiculous things people put in their proposals David and Blair give exactly the WRONG advice, hoping you get the joke.

Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, Blair, I've made it a practice in my life to try to trap you as often as possible. I need to go look at my list. I think I've got like six or seven. This could get added to the list. This could very well be something you regret because I was reading through these notes. It was like, "Whoa." Some of this stuff I knew, some of it I didn't.

I don't even know if you have a module on writing proposals, but are you really sure you want to talk about all this stuff? Not only are you giving away a lot of information. The second thought was, "Well, what if clients see some of this and can see through it when they see a proposal that comes across the desk that mirrors what we're talking about?" Are you sure this is something you want to do?

Blair Enns: Do I want to give away all of my best stuff on this free podcast? Is that what you're asking?

David: Yes. You don't have that much best stuff. You really want to give it away?

Blair: Oh, we're going there, are we?

David: Well, David, I have to confess like, this is a topic we've been doing this podcast for five years and it's like, maybe I should do a topic on the killer proposal. Give away like my recipe for the killer proposal. Then I've thought, we already get a lot of reviews on the podcast, people saying I can't believe this is free, and we've talked about, "Well, maybe we should charge for this."

I do have some trepidation around this because I feel like what I am about to deliver here, the awesomeness, the goodness, probably people should pay a lot of money for this, but I'm parking that feeling. I'm going to lean into this and I intend to deliver pure gold for the next 30 minutes.

Blair: It reminds me of when you publish the manifesto you allowed people to read that for free. I don't know if you felt any trepidation, but it clearly didn't hurt the sales of the book because it's been a huge bestseller with many, many printings and, so maybe it's good. Before we dive in here, I do have a question. You probably aren't going to have any real data on this, but I'm just curious.

How many firms do you think are doing a really good job of writing, if we use your phrase, killer proposals? Are most of them or not? Is this a factor in why they're not landing more work?

David: It's a good question. I don't know what the answer is. I'll be shocked if people don't hear something they can't put into practice right away. I think everybody's up for a learning moment here. I'm going to shatter the worlds of a lot of people in this episode.

Blair: If the proposals are just ho hum, they're not very good and they listen to this carefully, which probably will require a couple of listens. What sort of results are you expecting or is that just too specific?

David: What's with the build up here, Baker, come on. I have gold to share. This thing could go on forever because there's so much goodness in this episode.

Blair: Apparently it will, if you just keep avoiding my questions.

[laughter]

David: I am champing at the bit.

Blair: Okay. Before we get into the specifics, what's the context here. Like things around how long it needs to be. Just talk about the bigger context.

David: I'm going to give you basically the anatomy of Blair's killer proposal, all of the elements of your proposal that should be there, that should be in order. Before we get into the anatomy of it, there's two overarching principles. One overarching principle and then what I call the secret sauce. The overarching principle when it comes to your proposal is size matters. Heft is important. The bigger the proposal, the better it is, full stop.

Blair: Wow.

David: Not what you were expecting to hear, was it?

Blair: Well, no.

David: Think of it this way. Page count in the client's mind equals brain cells. The more pages in your proposal, the smarter you appear. Let's just get that out of the way, the bigger the proposal, the smarter you and your firm are going to appear, so size matters. Make the proposal as big as possible. I see some 50 page proposals. I'm not impressed because I used to do 125 page proposals. I think if you're under 75, you're mailing it in. I want people to up their size game. I want them to push past the 75 page proposal barrier and get well past a hundred.

David: People are staying up all night as it is. You're wanting them to stay up several nights in a row.

Blair: It's the best part of this business, David, is there's caffeine fueled nights when you are so excited, you're working on page 142 of the deck that you're going to deliver the next morning and you are just buzzing on this combination of caffeine and gin. This is why we got into this business. Let's just acknowledge that these are the best moments, 3:30 in the morning. We've got to have this thing delivered by 8:00 AM and we are on fire. We live for this. Let's just lean into that.

David: All right, you said two things. The first one was length and whatever we learn here, I'm hoping some of this can be templated because I can't quite imagine starting from scratch and building a bunch of 150.

Blair: Of course, you're going to want to template your proposal. Of course, yes.

David: That's the first. What's the second big thing you want to make sure we understand?

Blair: Well, the second big thing is what I call the secret sauce. This is like the killer. If you only do one thing, if you only take one thing away from this podcast, it's this one. At the top of the first page, and every page that follows, you put your logo in the top left-hand corner, and the client's logo in the top right-hand corner.

David: Even if their logo isn't any good?

Blair: It doesn't matter because what's going to happen is you stand up in front of the room to do the keynote presentation, you go to the first slide, your logo is there, the client's logos' there. The client's going to look at it and go, "Oh, my God, it's like we were meant to be together."

David: A match made in heaven, really.

Blair: Yes, it's going to just feel like that, what are those? The Bachelorette, it's going to be like that and it's so powerful. Don't just do it on the first page, do it on every page. Those are the two overarching ideas. Number one, heft count. Size matters so make it as big as you can because that conveys intelligence. Number two, use this little secret sauce thing of putting your logo in one corner and the client's logo on the other corner. Those are the two things I want to get out of the way, pretty good stuff, right?

David: It is good stuff. I'm going to need a lot more explanation to figure out what goes in the rest of this thing but at least I have a larger context for it.

Blair: How much time have you got because I have so much.

David: I don't have that much. I'll just tell you that. All right. Let's get to the contents of this thing. What actually do you use to fill this? We don't need to get into spacing and all that stuff but what are some of the things that you need to put in here to fill this in a way that makes it seem not just long but substantive?

Blair: The first thing that you do on the guts once you get inside is you need the client logo wall. You need to take every client you've ever worked with, and especially the big important ones, and you need to plaster that first page with just a wall of logos. I'll just point out here that anybody is pretty much fair game. You've got an art director on your team who used to work on a Microsoft [unintelligible 00:07:33] reseller account. Microsoft is a client, put Microsoft down. You've got somebody who in art school did a spec project on the iPod launch, even though it was just an art school project, it was for Apple. Apple was the client. Put Apple on the wall of logos.

David: Wait, doesn't it have to be a little more recent?

Blair: No, time is immaterial and experience is experience. You're not technically saying these are our clients, you're saying our team has experience with these brands. It's technically true because you have experience with the brand. Some brands we live with every day. I'm sitting here with a YETI coffee cup. This is part of my day, every day. Technically, I have experienced with the YETI brand and that could almost go on the client logo wall.

David: It doesn't matter how long ago, it doesn't matter if it was somebody who did it before they worked for you, it doesn't matter whether it was something like you really had an impact?

Blair: Put it on there.

David: Just put it on there. It's a little surprising to me. What I'm nervous about is what if they ask about what you did for them?

Blair: They never ask.

David: Well, that's good to know.

Blair: It doesn't matter.

David: We got the client, we got the logo wall. How many pages is that typically?

Blair: Well, that's one. That's the one where it's just one and if you want to fill up that logo wall, so when people look at it, it's overwhelmed, "Oh, my God, you've worked with all of the best, biggest companies in the world." If you've been in business for two or three years and you have two or three people, and you can't put Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, all of those on there, then you're just not pushing the envelope far enough or hard enough because you have experience with all these brands. Your people do, you just have to embrace this idea and get them on the logo wall but just one page.

David: I guess if that makes you uncomfortable to do it.

Blair: Then find something else to do for a living. If it makes you uncomfortable, you are in the wrong line of work.

David: Well, I was going to say competition in this game, it probably doesn't bother them. You have to level out the playing field and you follow the same rules they are and if they're going to put a big logo wall up here without any consideration then I guess it's really not fair to deprive your potential client of the opportunity to work for you just because of unfair competition. I get that.

Blair: Exactly. Yes.

David: Okay. How much do we need to say about the team? How does that relate to this?

Blair: Talk about padding your proposal. Team bios is a place where you could get two people per page, so if you've got a 20 person team, that's 10 pages right there. Never double-side your proposal, just like, because that will cut the length in half but team bios, it's really important that you have team bios and I don't care if you're a distributed organization where everybody's a contractor, just list all of your contractors, show the team members and it's really important that you show photos.

David: Modern photos?

Blair: A bit of a hack here is funny photos. You want to have funny photos of all of your team members so them look goofy, maybe pictures from them as kids and then your clients, while they're reading your proposal and everybody else's proposals. They can play this game of trying to figure out like who is this matching to your website so you give them a little something fun to do so pad it with bios, get really personal and make sure the photos are funny.

David: This is where I wish you could have the mouse over effect because that's one of the things I love when I look at websites.

Blair: Oh totally. Yes.

David: It's a kid picture and you don't really know who it is until you mouse over it. It'd be nice if you could do that in that PDF.

Blair: Yes. I love that, and you know dogs, let's just talk about dogs because you don't want to put all the office dogs, like all the people who bring all the dogs, you want to have like one or two dogs so it's like a two dog maximum, but you absolutely, you want to show the character of your firm, the personality of your brand and a lot of that's tied into like the dogs that roam the hallways of the office.

Make sure you get a dog shot or two in there and also like, while we're on the subject of photos and it's not really team, but it's tied to team and culture, you want to show off your culture because the culture of your firm is really important to these companies that are hiring you so you want to show like the espresso machines and the foosball table and everybody laughing and having fun.

David: The small bear fridge in the conference room.

Blair: Lots of culture photos.

David: Probably bicycles hanging up at the entrance.

Blair: You got it.

David: I can see now I'm not quite surprised that this might be 150 pages because we're already at maybe I don't know, 25 and we haven't even gotten into the meat of this thing yet so it's feeling a little bit easier. All right, so what do we do next?

Blair: Next section? Why Us, why you should hire us? We need to go into full persuasion mode here and this Why Us section it breaks down into three subsections. People, Passion, and Process, which as you know is Canadian for process. People, Passion and Process, but you start with a big plea for why they should hire you and then your three reasons are number one, the quality of your people. It's the people that set you apart. Like every other firm out there, it really does come down to everybody gets hired because of the quality of their people.

C-section above.

These are real people pictured in real moments. These are funny photographs of real life and that's because your people are real. Your people get it where others don't get it so at the end of the day, why hire us, because we get it. Look at these people, our people get it. We hire good people. We get good people who get it.

David: How do you not cross the line between desperate for work, which we wouldn't want, but we really want a deep eagerness, "Please let us work on this. Not because we have to, but because we want to."

Blair: Yes, don't worry about that line because that's a second P is Passion. You want to convey that you are really passionate about the client's brand, so just don't worry about crossing that line. Don't worry about being seen as needy. People don't want to work with people who aren't passionate about their brand so it's really important that you communicate that you are more passionate about the client's brand than any of the other firms that they're talking to.

Get some team photos of your team interacting with the client's brand. Again, make sure it's funny because funny photos are always funnier than non-funny photos.

David: It's okay to bring a little bit from your personal life in here. Whatever it is, it's a product and not a service in this case and it turns out that seven of our people use this. It's okay to have pictures of them, funny pictures of them, usually like maybe on a vacation or at home. that's not too personal?

Blair: No a business is entirely personal. There is no line that separates, in your mind, you shouldn't see this line separating business from personal. Don't share intimate photos of well, like if it's a sex toy or something. Use your judgment but absolutely show passion and show how that passion bleeds into your personal life. Because if all things are equal and you got that expert firm over there, but they're not passionate about the brand and we're more of a generalist firm, but our passion is going to be the tiebreaker. People want to work with people who are passionate about the brand that's proven I'm pretty sure.

David: I can see that. There's going to be a lot of meat in here too, but I can see how that would make a difference.

Blair: This is all meat.

David: Oh, even this is meat.

Blair: This is the meat. I am bringing the meat.

David: Okay.

Blair: Then the third section under Why Us is process, so you have to have that slide in your deck that's got your four step proprietary process where each step starts with the same letter. It's usually D and then with the Venn diagram and so you got to show that off because the client's going to look at that and go, "My God, that is brilliant. These guys look like they've like split the atom here. This is really smart." If you want to differentiate your process, have it start with a letter other than D because most of them are like define, design, deliver.

David: Yes. I don't think you'd want to have fewer than four steps. That seems incomplete.

Blair: Yes.

David: Maybe you could add a fifth one.

Blair: You could totally add a fifth one.

David: Definitely not six.

Blair: Well, I don't know.

David: You think six would work?

Blair: Like steps equals smarts? Don't you think?

David: Well, I guess it could.

Blair: It's just hard to find six words that all start with the same letter.

David: That makes sense.

Blair: Then the Venn diagram starts to look really weird, so I think four, maybe five.

David: Well, you've talked a lot about the importance of process and how clients are intrigued. They want to work with you, but they're not sure that however you do things is going to work in their world and so this process side assures them that you can apply a process that you've used many times before which almost guarantees great results at the end of this.

Blair: Yes.

David: That's great. Okay. Where do we go next?

Blair: We've done the bios, we've done Why Us.

David: We haven't talked about the client yet really?

Blair: Yes. This is where we're doing it. Okay. It's called background. Background, this is where you show off your internet search skills like background on the client, so you basically take the brief as they've given it to you, you read it back to them to communicate that, "Okay, hey, we understand you." Then even some like go to the company's Wikipedia page or wherever and just like say, "Okay, so you were launched in 1959. You've been in business for these many of years, you serve this marketplace, revenue is this."

Everything that you can dig up about the company that you were able to Google last night, put it all in there and this is another section where you can really add some heft. You can really just dump, you can just copy paste from Wikipedia and maybe some of their public filings, and you can add like four or five, six pages here, just background on the company and their challenge.

What are we really trying to accomplish with this section? We're already beginning a deep dive and under standing the client. Why do we need this section in here? Is it that we're listening? That we're careful. What are we saying with this section?

Blair: Well, I think we're just showing off our internet search skills, we're showing that, "Hey, we know how Google works," and because they know who they are and we're just proving to them that we know who they are too, they'll just go, "Okay, great. They know who we are. They figured out Google or doc dot go." I think we just need to check that box that we have search skills and it makes sense for the client to keep reading.

David: This would be a place where if you're starting to run out of time, this is where you could plug interns in assuming that they have those internet search skills, obviously.

Blair: Oh yes.

David: To help fill this out while you work on some of the media stuff so that's good. How many pages should we have about the background stuff? Is this in a half a page or longer?

Blair: No, no. I think it's five or six pages.

David: Oh, it's longer than I thought.

Blair: I love your idea of using interns and if you can drop some photos, if you can show a photo of the company's headquarters, something like that, that can take up a quarter of a page right there, so drop some photos in there.

David: Yes. I mean like if you were pitching to apple, you'd absolutely want their 360 degree circle thing, right?

Blair: Yes. Totally. You get this.

David: I love looking at that. All right. We're moving forward it now and at some point we're going to have to start talking about the problem that we're trying to solve. Is that now or later?

Blair: This is now, this is the meatiest of the meaty meat parts right here. This next section is reframe the problem. You got the background and you've read the brief back to the client. Now w need to reframe the problem in our own words. This starts with a slide in the deck that says, "We are living in the blank economy."

David: You fill in the blank, but the blank might change from time to time.

Blair: Exactly. Every proposal needs to have a slide that says, "We are living in the blank economy." The blank, just go on Twitter and see what's trending, like whatever is the hot topic of the day. Today we're recording this in early in 2022. There's just so many things we could fill in the blank. We're living in the crypto, blockchain distributed, autonomous metaverse tokenized--

David: NFTs, maybe even?

Blair: You wouldn't say NFT, but you would say like tokenized. NFT is like, that's just given it all away. It's like, Oh, because when somebody sees tokenized, they're going to go, "Oh, yes, it's those NFTs everybody's talking about." We're starting by reframing the problem saying we are living in the blank economy. That should be that line over top of an image. The image should just say it all. When the client looks at that, they should go, "Oh my God." They have to have heard a little bit about whatever's in the blank, but they can't know too much about it. It's got to be really bleeding edge.

Then you can talk for a few paragraphs about why this is true. You can drop some stats on how much Mark Zuckerberg is spending on this thing right now, or how much like [unintelligible 00:21:30] has like tweeted about this eight times or Andreessen Horowitz has got like ex-billion invested in these types of things.

You provide some background there. When the client sees this, when they read it, they should go, "Oh, I've heard of this." It's really bleeding edge. I'm not fully sure what it is or what it means for us. Then once they're done reading your section, it's like, "Oh my God, I've never thought of it this way before."

David: Hang on a second. Let's say you're pitching craft and it's some CPG food product or something. Would you even insert something like we're living in the tokenized economy, if you're pitching?

Blair: Totally you would. Like fractionalized cheese slices. This is just me riffing. I don't actually know what I'm talking about, but I'm just saying, why couldn't you fractionalize and tokenize a cheese slice.

David: Well, that's true.

Blair: Why not? It might sound crazy now, but I guarantee you in six months somebody will be doing it. Don't worry about bridging the gap between the current use of these technologies or ideas and where we're going to be in the future. In fact, the client first reaction should be, "Well, you can't, fractionalize a cheese slice" Then you just want to follow that up and say, "Well, that's what you think now."

This section we're reframing the problem. We're bending the problem to the current like topic dujour, in a way that the client's really not expecting. I'll just jump ahead a little bit here, because the next section is on strategy and this is where we really want to make sure for us to win competitively, we need to get the client to rethink what the problem is and to be thinking along that terms of like this economy.

Here's an example. Let's say the brief is on a website, the client's trying to hire a marketing firm to do a website. If this is the NFT economy, then we need to set up the idea of doing an NFT of the new website, which we'll do in the strategy section. That's where we're going with this. You might be thinking, "Well, why would you do an NFT of a website?" Trust me, it doesn't make sense today, but it'll make sense tomorrow. We fractionalize the website, sell token, give them away and then we're going to set up this idea of a Dam website,

David: Damn as in D-A-M-N or what do you mean by Dam?

Blair: I just made that up, so like a distributed autonomous metaverse website.

David: Okay. Got it.

Blair: You don't even know what that means and you don't need to know what that means. All you know is those three words you hearing a lot these days and we'd be idiots not to be thinking about this. We'll do Dam. That's where we're going with this in the strategy section. In strategy section, we're coming up with something client hasn't thought about, never thought about this before, but in the context of the previous section of reframing the problem, it's like, of course, why wouldn't we do a Dam website?

David: Just like I didn't really know what that referred to. I thought how come I don't know what that, if they don't know what it means, they're probably going to assume that you're smarter than they are and they're probably not going to dive in.

Blair: Exactly.

David: It's almost a way to speed up the whole presentation by throwing things in there that they don't understand them all. You just move on through, because it would be embarrassing for the client to raise their hand and say, "What do you mean by a Dam?"

Blair: Yes. What's a Dam website. Who's going to do that. Who's going to be that idiot in the room. You've got them. Those are the two meaty sections. First you reframe the problem around we are living in the blank economy and then you bend the strategy, the solution to that idea that you planted in the reframe. It's like, this is where we start to give away the free advice on the strategy. The next section is creative. Sorry to jump ahead here.

David: You're excited. That's okay.

Blair: Yes. In for a penny, in for a pound. We've already told them what to do for free because if we didn't tell them, nobody else is going to come up with a Dam website, right?

David: Yes.

Blair: We have to give that away for free because they just wouldn't believe it otherwise. We've got to give that away and then we've got to pay it off creatively. We've already given away the strategy. The idea is we get hired, they sign off on this thing and then we will get paid for the work that we've done so don't hold back now.

David: Don't worry about it. Especially in the first price where they do actually hire you just charge them a whole lot more money than you would to recapture this time.

Blair: They'll understand it. You've already put all this time in, of course you should be paid all that money because you've already done the work.

David: The good thing too, if we flip this over to the client's perspective, they're going to get a lot of really great directions and ideas from let's say there's five firms pitching them. Imagine the power of all of the free insight that comes from those five firms combined.

Blair: 600, 700 pages of awesomeness.

David: Yes. What's different about yours is that you have built it into a context that is almost unassailable with all of the way this is built.

Blair: Unassailable. I like that word. Unassailable.

David: There's free creative because you're trying to just help them understand exactly what's happening. Is there written strategy that's free as well? Specific stuff?

Blair: Everything about the Dam website. Just fatten that up. You could convey that standing in front of the room and just explain it in a couple minutes, but it's not good enough so for every genius idea, you need generally four or five pages of written support. Pull some stats and I rift on what's Andreessen Horowitz doing right now and what's trending on Twitter and just pull some stat and just pad it with stats.

David: So far the one thing we haven't talked about and I'm thinking that the person on the other side of the table is also thinking the same thing. It's like, "Okay, this is impressive, but it's also terrifying. How much money are we talking about here?" You want to wait until this point to talk about it?

Blair: Yes. You want to leave price until right at the very end. Whatever else you can come up with to fatten up the deck and to get some distance between the genius ideas and the price, go ahead and do it because by the time they get to the price, you want them to be overwhelmed. They are so impressed with the thinking, the ideas and the background of the team and your passion for their brand and all the logos you've worked on and all the clients you've worked on. They are so impressed, at some point, if you leave it late enough, the price will not matter. Just push it back like last page, second last page, just bury it in there somewhere.

David: If you think about the fact that they've already gotten attached to a bunch of the team members because you've shown them pictures of them having fun with their kids, they are getting some attachment to these people and they want to keep this up. They want to make it possible for this great firm that's enthusiastic and passionate to keep having a job really. Maybe it's just subconscious, but there's got to be some of that in here.

Blair: No there's science there. Loss aversion bias kicks in. They start to imagine, "Well, what if I don't get to work with these amazing people?" They just can't bear it so as long as you leave the price late and don't make the number too big in terms of the font size, it shouldn't really matter.

David: Are you prepared in this sort of scenario, if they're so inspired, they want to move ahead right now. Is that okay to let them do that?

Blair: Yes. This leads us to the last section of the proposal, the signature page. Now I know there's a whole bunch of stuff in here that might make the lawyer scratch their head. Why would somebody ever sign this thing that's not really a contract.

David: It's got pictures of foosball tables in it. That's what they're going to think.

Blair: You really, the last thing is you want to put a place for the client to sign and they don't sign them very often because they're doing a lot here. We're doing a lot of heavy lifting in this document, but just in case, when this really works, the client is like, "I don't care what the price is. Where do I sign?" I'm not saying that happens a lot, but you, in that moment you want to make sure there's a place for the client to sign.

David: A full signature? Initials isn't enough?

Blair: No. Full signature and maybe copy some legalese from the internet and just paste it in there so it looks formal. I don't, if you can take it to the bank but a signature is good, just put a place to sign.

David: Yes.

Blair: Then have a place for you to sign and make sure you've already signed it. "Hey, this deal is done from my point of view, it's already done, you just sign here."

David: Wow. I wonder if they are more likely to sign if you're the first presenter or the last one, but man talks about a high. You're walking out of this thing, and not only did the presentation it went longer than the allotted time because they were into it.

Blair: Yes, because the deck is so big.

David: Then it's not only it went well, but they actually sign the thing, and you're walking on air back to the car or the tram or however you got there. That's pretty cool.

Blair: Yes. I'll just throw in one more little, I almost don't want to give this tip away, but I've only used it once. It worked great. It's not legal in every jurisdiction, but when you're stapling the deck together between the pages, you could insert the odd $100 bill.

David: Wow.

Blair: Check your jurisdiction.

David: Yes. I know it'd be fine in Tennessee. I don't know about BC.

Blair: Yes, I haven't tried it in BC because I live here, you don't do it in the legal jurisdiction that you live in just in case but just think about it. Just an idea it's a possibility again I've only done it once.

David: If they don't react well, just say, "Oh, sorry. I don't know how that got in there." You can just say, it was a mistake in the pile, your kid was helping you late at night. They were excited about this like you were and all that.

Blair: Yes, you got it. Plausible deniability right there.

David: That's it.

Blair: That's 30 minutes of gold, I think.

David: This is going to be-

Blair: The best episode ever.

David: Yes, exactly. That's what I wanted to say. I've been surprised at some of the ones that have been the most popular

Blair: Where we've just mailed it in and it shoots to number one.

David: Who's We? Who have you gotten in your pocket?

[laughter]

Blair: This is great. This is exciting.

David: I feel great.

Blair: This could be the best work we've ever done.

David: All I can say is just thank you. I kind of need to take a walk after this or have a cigarette or something.

Blair: It's been my pleasure, David.

David: Thank you, Blair.