In today’s edition (the first one I think) of Stupid Proposal Tricks, I discuss how to change file names for proposal drafts.
It will help to understand my original working process:
I edit files that include “DRAFT06” in the name.
I zip all the “DRAFT06” files, distribute them to reviewers, and archive them.
I then manually edit every file to change “DRAFT06” to “DRAFT07.”
This is a pain.
So I asked my buddy Google Gemini for help.
“In Windows 11 File Manager or whatever it’s called today, is there an easy way to edit a collection of filenames to change the filename text “DRAFT06” to “DRAFT07″?”
Google Gemini gave me two options, and I chose the first.
“You can run a quick one-line command to swap the text across every file in the folder without installing anything.
“Open the folder containing your files in File Explorer.
“Click on the address bar at the top, type powershell, and press Enter.
“In the blue/black PowerShell window that opens, copy and paste this command and press Enter:
Bredemarket offers proposal services (managing, writing, editing, other). My proposals have won business for Bredemarket clients and for my former employers.
Because it will take time to complete fingerprint Tab A and Tab B, face tab A and tab B, iris tab A and tab B, and so forth.
As experienced biometric pros know, that’s a lot of Tab.
Lots of Tabs. Google Gemini.
I argue with a bot
And in related news, I argued with Gemini.
It argued that any due date extension would be short because the Government must receive proposals before the end of the fiscal year.
I replied that even with the original due date, there’s no way they’d make awards before September 30.
Gemini begged to differ.
The September 30 fiscal year-end (EOFY) deadline is critical for procurement teams even when final task-order awards won’t occur until the next fiscal year:
Obligating the Minimum Guaranteed Spend: Under FAR requirements for IDIQ contracts, the government must obligate funds to satisfy the “minimum guarantee” at the time the umbrella IDIQ contract is executed. For this vehicle, Section B.3(a) specifies a $250.00 minimum guarantee per awarded contractor per track. To count those base IDIQ execution actions against FY2026 appropriated funds before they expire on midnight September 30, the Contracting Officer must sign the base IDIQ contracts on or before September 30.
Accelerated HTRO Evaluation Model: The evaluation structure for 70RDA126R00000001 uses Highest Technically Rated Offerors with Fair and Reasonable Price (HTRO-FRP). Because this is a pass/fail-style technical evaluation without complex cost-realism trade-offs, DHS specifically designed the evaluation strategy to execute initial IDIQ base contract awards within 7 to 10 days of the September 18 submission.
Prepositioning Vehicle Seats for Day-1 FY2027 Task Orders: Establishing the master GWAC IDIQ base awards in FY2026 allows participating DHS components and external agencies to issue task order solicitations immediately when new FY2027 funding arrives on October 1.
Avoiding Anti-Deficiency Act Complications: Funding to stand up the administrative vehicle itself (such as setting up track minimums) must be committed using current-year funds. Letting the vehicle slip into October without awards could create procurement administrative delays or require re-justification under the incoming fiscal year’s budget.
The September 18 deadline isn’t aimed at completing task-order hardware purchases before September 30; it exists so the Contracting Officer can execute the base IDIQ master contracts and obligate the $250 minimums before FY2026 funds expire on September 30.
Lots of awards. Google Gemini.
Could you imagine asking Google Bard a similar question in 2023?
Do you have broad knowledge, deep knowledge, or both?
Knowledge can be categorized into several buckets.
Google Gemini.
Dash shaped. Like the — dash symbol, this professional has broad knowledge of multiple disciplines. However, they do not have deep expertise in any of them.
T shaped. Unlike the dash shaped professional, the T shaped professional does additionally offer deep expertise in one specialty.
Pi shaped. If you look at the Greek symbol π, you see two vertical elements below the horizontal one. This indicates that the pi shaped professional offers broad knowledge plus deep expertise in TWO specialties.
M shaped. This isn’t perfect, but the letter M has three points. (Ignore the fact that two are at the top and one at the bottom.) So imagine the three points indicate three specialties.
Comb shaped. Reserved for the Benjamin Franklins of the world who create governments, fly kites, manage fire and postal departments, write humorous text, and raise hell.
I won’t get into comb shaped professionals here, but when you can get a hold of an M shaped professional, it’s like getting three experts for the price of one.
Professional in what?
M shaped. Google Gemini.
But what type of M shaped professional are we talking about?
An M shaped accountant can guide your firm through the intricacies of accounting.
An M shaped engineer can roll with the frequent changes in engineering, not becoming obsolete like your expert C programmer.
An M shaped marketer can handle anything from demand generation to analyst relations to social media.
And an M shaped productmarketer can deep dive into three (or more) parts of product marketing, including positioning/messaging, market/product/competitor strategic analysis, go-to-market and sales enablement, and pricing/packaging.
Why I am not just an M shaped product marketer
M shaped what? Google Gemini.
I am M shaped, but I am not an M shaped product marketer.
In the wildebeest-populated Bredemarket world, the A in CPA stands for Analysis. The strategic stuff, including the aforementioned market, product, and competitive analysis. In other words, the stuff that can drive your firm to accomplish actionable innovation.
Impossible?
The C in CPA stands for Content. Messaging content. Go-to-market content. Sales enablement content. Whatever type of content you need.
22 types of content.
(Yeah, that’s an old style video, but it works.)
Well, that’s two, but what about the third? That thing that a product marketer should not do because it is not product marketing? The 4 Ps include product, price, place, and promotion.
I was a proposal writer at Printrak until I moved left on the Shipley scale and became a product manager.
When Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit combined to form MorphoTrak, I ended up back in Proposals as a proposal manager. (Where I performed a critically important go-to-market effort, but that’s another story.)
When I started Bredemarket, some of my most lucrative work was proposal work for SMA: The Program Lifecycle Company (got the new branding in!) and other Bredemarket clients.
Then when I joined Incode as a Senior Product Marketing Manager, I was performing all sorts of tasks outside the traditional PMM bounds, including a bunch of proposal writing.
When I returned to Bredemarket full time I returned to some proposal work here and there, including some big wins that I still can’t talk about yet.
Chasing the Revision. Google Lyria. Public Domain.
There’s a reason.
People don’t act.
Perhaps tiny startups are all too willing to act, to the point of moving fast and breaking things. But executives at more established firms become well versed in loss aversion.
“Loss aversion is a cognitive bias where the emotional impact of a loss is felt more intensely than the joy of an equivalent gain….
“According to the original research conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the pioneers of loss aversion, the torment of a loss can be psychologically twice as powerful as an equivalent gain. This discrepancy often motivates the choices we make, leading us to cling to what we already have rather than try to acquire new objects or opportunities. Simply put, it’s better not to lose $10 than to find $10.”
Once you look at it dispassionately, you realize that loss aversion makes no sense from an economic perspective.
But corporate leaders are loss averse anyway.
Why?
Four reasons for loss aversion
Here are some reasons for loss aversion.
Reason 1, Product unreadiness
Executives may panic because the product on the floor is nowhere near the one in the product marketing materials. The product on the floor is buggy, and that amazing new capability that the marketing slick discusses isn’t even in the code yet.
And I can tell you from personal experience that this isn’t limited to product marketing.
When I was writing and managing proposals for automated fingerprint and biometric identification systems (AFIS and ABIS), the product usually wouldn’t hit the “factory acceptance test” phase until a year after I wrote the proposal.
Sometimes the agency explicitly asked whether feature 129 was in your code today. If it did, then you had to be honest and say whether it existed, or whether you’d have to add it in a future release in the next year.
Sometimes the agency didn’t ask, so you took a different approach with your answer.
Same with product marketing. If you are writing the data sheet in September, but you’ll show the product at a trade show next March, then you write the data sheet as if it were already March and the amazing new capability was already in the code.
If everything goes well.
“But John,” you’re saying. “Isn’t it dangerous to write about things that are 6 months or a year in the future?”
Think about it. Even if a prospect sees the data sheet and gets really really excited, the prospect couldn’t buy it that day even if they wanted to.
First, you’re not selling it. (Well, probably not.)
Second, even if you were taking pre-orders, the prospect probably won’t buy it that day anyway. It will take months if not years to line up the budget and all the approvals, and the prospect may be forced to go to competitive bidding anyway, which tacks another year on the timeline (at least for complex offerings such as AFIS and ABID).
In summary, some “future present tense” writing probably isn’t going on hurt you. Don’t be scared to tell your prospects where you’re going. At least that’s my view.
Reason 2, Compliance and legal exposure
Google Gemini.
Now I’m going to contradict what I just said.
Because there are some times when you CANNOT go the future present tense route.
You can’t say that your algorithm ranks high in NIST FRTE 1:N testing if you haven’t submitted your algorithm to NIST.
You can’t even say that you’re doing business in the United States when you’re not.
If there is a legal requirement and you claim to meet it, make sure you do.
Reason 3, Positioning ambiguity
I’m old enough to remember Shimmer, the Saturday Night Live “product” that was both a floor wax and a dessert topping.
But for most products you have to decide on positioning and messaging, and there may be known consequences if you get it wrong.
Certainly for the products sold by Bredemarket’s clients, products with critical security, privacy, and legal implications. If you say something stupid such as “Our facial recognition product provides all you need to arrest bad people,” you will be in BIG trouble.
Now I’m not denying that product positioning is critically important.
I’m just saying that it shouldn’t take two years to create your positioning and messaging.
And don’t be afraid to iterate. Get something out there and tweak it later during the next review cycle. (You ARE setting regular review cycles for your positioning and messaging, right?)
Reason 4, Fear of firing
Are you afraid of losing your job? Join the club.
I like the way Google Gemini put it:
“In risk-averse corporate cultures, a failed campaign carries higher personal downside for an executive than the neutral outcome of waiting a few extra weeks.”
But I have learned the hard way that you don’t have to fail to lose your job. You can lose your job for a myriad of reasons, including office politics, a worldwide pandemic, or the need to boost short-term profitability. Or no reason at all; some companies terminate employees and can’t say why.
Pausing a risky go-to-market initiative does NOT guarantee that you will keep your job.
But doesn’t loss aversion reduce risk?
Let’s go back to the beginning of this post. Loss aversion seems so attractive because it prevents you from losing $10.
So it avoids risk, right?
Um, no. Loss aversion is risky.
It introduces the risk of not gaining $10.
Or gaining a lot more than $10, according to this article that was republished on (checks notes) Yahoo! Finance.
“Back in 1998, two individuals, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who were unknown to the technology company offered to sell their little startup to AltaVista for $1 million so they can resume their studies at Stanford….
“AltaVista turned down the offer to acquire the company. Similarly, Yahoo wanted its users to spend more time on its own platform, contrasting PageRank, which sends a user to the most relevant web site.”
So Page and Brin kept working, along with Eric Schmidt, and their startup Google started doing pretty well.
So much so that in 2002, Yahoo! came calling again.
“Yahoo had another opportunity to acquire Google. In 2002, Yahoo’s CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
“The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google’s price tag of $5 billion.”
In case you didn’t know, Bredemarket is based in California.
No video this time. Just audio. (I wrote this BEFORE upgrading my WordPress plan and storage space.) Audio about content-proposal-analysis services. “Pet Sounds” it’s not.
“Beyond the Blue Horizon.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.
For more information and to book a meeting with Bredemarket (there’s only one of me):
