Welcome to the Machine... The Proposal Machine
Posted by ablack on Mar. 17, 2015 / Subscribe 0
I've been doing proposals for more than a few years now. When I think about it, it feels like an eternity…like decades. Wait a minute, it has been decades! Decades of staying late at the office, missing weekends with my family, skipping outings with my friends, neglecting holiday gatherings, foregoing countless hours of sleep and medicating myself to counteract the effects of long-term anxiety. For the most part, I have come to accept my role in this industry and have even come to terms with the notion that I will never be as respected for my professional acumen as my technical counterparts. I realize that as a marketing professional for the industry of A/E/C, I may never be able to fully disengage from the task of proposals. But for Pete’s sake, does it have to be the ONLY thing that people think I'm capable of doing?!?!
About five months ago, one of my company’s out-of-town managing partners visited our local office. This was a company-wide traveling assignment intended to deliver “state-of-the-company” updates. While he was in town, he made the rounds. He was sure to visit every single partner and employee for at least 20 minutes individually. Not surprisingly, I was the last one on his list. He started out with some tedious chit-chat (the awkward type that prompts you to burp-puke in your mouth and then forcibly swallow it) and it was my overall impression that he didn’t really know what to talk to me about. Then he said something that I will probably never be able to forgive OR forget: “so and so says that you are really great at proposals.” REALLY?!?!? After the years that I have invested in the company and all the OTHER things that I’ve accomplished for and with them, THAT was all he could come up with.
On the outside I was genial enough, appearing ever appreciative of the compliments from “above.” But on the inside I couldn’t help but think to myself “I am a proposal machine…they flow out of me like beef from a meat-grinder. I am the mechanical apparatus that executes the process.” In other words, working on proposals has been a necessary part of my daily functions in A/E/C, but I wouldn't exactly call it a great achievement or anything. Telling me I'm great at proposals is not what I would consider a compliment at this point in my career, especially when I spent four years (okay, five years) of my life going to school to become a marketing and communications professional.
Yes, it’s true that proposals are a necessary part of a marketer’s role within this industry. But it’s also true that A/E/C focuses a great deal more on this “end game” than on ANY OTHER areas within the marketing spectrum. In fact, proposals dominate an A/E/C marketer’s time to the detriment of everything else. All the things that set the stage for a firm to be viewed in the best possible light by major decision makers - everything that influences positive impressions of a firm leading up to or separate and apart from a proposal - are virtually ignored.
But why is that? I used to think that it was because proposals are the most tangible deliverable with the most obvious link to measurable revenue; the metrics practically report themselves. But after years of speculation on this particular topic, I think the real reason behind why marketing professionals have been dubbed the “proposal grunts” in A/E/C has more to do with two central issues:
- First and foremost, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature of marketing. When I talk to industry principals about what it is they think that marketing can actually do for their firms, they struggle to come up with anything OTHER than proposal work. There is this supposition that marketers would have nothing to do if it weren’t for the endless onslaught of deadlines.
- And second, there is an overarching aversion to the concept of marketing as an ACTUAL profession, one that in most industries requires a degree. We are constantly being referred to as “overhead” by technical colleagues, categorized as “non-productive” by accounting staff, and excluded from “big-picture” meetings regarding strategy. We are viewed as the lowest man on the totem pole.
It’s no real surprise then that A/E/C’s marketers have been so marginalized. We have not been afforded regular opportunities to prove our actual worth or even sharpen our skills in other marketing areas…like planning and strategy, market research and consumer trends, branding and messaging, campaign development, etc. These items are incredibly important to a firm’s overall visibility and represent a MASSIVE slice of the comprehensive marketing pie. Not surprisingly, though, they are continuously overlooked or sidelined as menial tasks to be squeezed in to a marketer’s spare time…if A/E/C marketers had any spare time between proposals, that is. Ugh…proposals…
They have become the bane of my existence. As awful as it sounds, proposals have come to dominate so much of my life now (both personally and professionally) that they have actually made me physically ill. Basically, stress levels build until the perfect storm of long work hours, sleep deprivation and the office “bug” finally grinds me into a beefy pulp. As soon as I recover, the cycle starts all over again; chuck steak…grind…package…repeat. Each day is like a clone of the last, slowly degrading with every copy that is made. Am I even awake? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I now have dreams filled with large ticking clocks that pierce my ears and give me vertigo; sometimes it’s a front-desk clerk whose time-stamp shatters the silence and makes my stomach churn…“ka-clank!” Like scenes from The Wall, where an endless stream of people with blank faces line the hallways to submit their proposals. Welcome to the machine…
I used to have really vivid dreams though; like technicolored dreams. I held aspirations of changing the world, of doing something remarkable, of doing something that MEANT something. And I was going to do it through marketing. That’s how I was going to make my mark. But with the ideals of my college days FAR FAR behind me, it seems that “my mark” is now only worth the last proposal that I completed. Ostensibly, in A/E/C, dreams are a luxury reserved for technical people well on their way to partnerships and presidencies, or those few and far between marketers who have both the talent and shrewdness to venture out on their own (and it has to be said that those people are incredibly gifted, incredibly gutsy and wholly deserving of our applause...read On Being a Consultant). But by and large, the rest of us will forever be stuck under the thumb of proposals and all the connotations that come with working on them. By and large, there are no Chief Marketing Officers in this industry and at this rate, there never will be.
So why am I bothering to bring this up at all? Because I'm TIRED of being useless every weekend because all I have the energy for is sleeping; because I’m tired of missing my kid’s soccer practices because another BIG proposal deadline is closing in; and because I’m tired of A/E/C companies asking for so much from their marketers while thinking so little of them and offering even less in return. I bring this up for the benefit of all the marketers reading this; it’s not too late for us to collectively do something about the situation. We have power as a group and we don’t have to subscribe to the “take-it-or-leave-it” mentality that has historically governed our profession in A/E/C and consequently kept us small.
Now that I think about it, this might be the perfect time to take action or be demanding. So many companies are looking to fill marketing positions right now and there are so few of us marketers left to actually fill them (following the decimation of our profession during the Great Recession). Maybe the post-recession years represent our greatest chance to tear down these walls and escape the machine. Perhaps a full-fledged A/E/C marketer’s revolution is in order…
Whatever stage you are at in your career, I urge you to STAND UP for what the marketing profession actually STANDS FOR. If you’re searching for a new spot to “hang your hat,” be sure to find out if that firm has any non-technical principals on their team, and what the career path is for the non-technical staff there. This is a good indication of how they view and value their marketers. If you want to stay put with your current company, then insist that professional development opportunities be made available to you; ones that not only develop a broad range of marketing skills, but also teach you about other aspects of the company. And if your firm doesn’t offer those opportunities, then make sure to carve out some time (and money) in your life to develop them for yourself. But don’t pigeon-hole your potential and don’t let others pigeon-hole you either!
I suspect that A/E/C could and WOULD reap amazing bottom line benefits if firms would let their marketing people get down to what they're really good at…MARKETING, in all its glory…not just proposals. Then again, this would require that A/E/C give weight to the idea that someone categorized as “overhead” might actually have insight into (or have something of value to add to) the bottom line. But because most firms don’t really understand what it is that marketing does (or can do), marketers are kept busy doing the overly-simplified tasks that ARE understood by firms. Then when those same firms don’t get the results that they had envisioned, marketing is blamed for being ineffective, thus reinforcing our position at the bottom of the totem pole. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby companies don’t think enough of their marketers to invest in them any further. There have been a few interesting reads on this topic as of late:
Why Managing Partners Don’t Trust Their Marketing Departments and What to Do About It
Why Your Marketer Doesn’t Understand Your Business
That being said, I hope that after reading this you share it with your marketing friends and industry colleagues, and if you are really brave then share it with your boss. But more importantly, I hope that you take all of this to heart, because marketing in A/E/C won’t change if none of us are actually willing to DO or SAY anything about it. The reality is that if we don’t make a concerted effort NOW to stand up for ourselves and point our careers in the directions that we REALLY want them to go, then we will be no better off than we were before…proposal machines, grinding out chuck, day after day after day after day after day. I know that I am not alone in this sentiment; there are a lot of us in marketing that feel this way...especially post-recession. And it would be a real shame to sit silent through the best years of our careers when we could have been fighting for our DREAMS.
About the Blogger: Anonymous Beat Blogger is your typical over-achieving under-appreciated marketer. This person has always been a realist, but thanks to the Great Recession and A/E/C firms everywhere, they now regularly traverses the space between comatose and temporarily insane.
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