3 Words Most Proposals use Incorrectly

Optimize23 Business Writing. We’re absolutely delighted to have you join us today. If this is your first session, welcome. And if you’ve been with us since eight-thirty this morning, well, fair play, and we’re delighted to have people join so many different sessions. We’ve gotten great feedback, so thank you to everyone who has followed us along throughout today. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we start.

This is the start of our real proposal writing section. The rest of the day is very heavy on the proposal writing side, with lots of insights from industry and lots of good takeaways for any proposal writers, proposal managers, or anyone in that space.

I’m going to point out the attendee chat. We’ve had some really good feedback in the attendee chat all day long, so feel free to use it. Let us know where you are coming from and how many sessions you have enjoyed so far.

Feel free to post any questions or insights in there. We’d be delighted to have them.

Now without further ado, I’m going to pass you to Jeff Goldfinger. Jeff is not unknown to VisibleThread. He’s done presentations with us in the past. We love having him as part of our presentations and webinars. He always provides great insights, and this is a topic that I know will get people really involved. So, Jeff, without any further ado, I’m going to pass it over to you.

Thank you. I appreciate that introduction. Now, I just have to live up to it. I also want to thank VisibleThread for giving me this opportunity.

Welcome, everybody. I’m coming to you from Valencia, Spain, the San Diego of Spain, as I like to refer to it. I live here because, at my age, any country that encourages a midday nap is my kind of place. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

The title of this session is “The Three Words Most Incorrectly Used.” My name is Jeff Goldfinger. I am the founder of Xtra Mile Training and Development.

Just briefly, I hope you all read my bio. I’m a retired naval officer. I used to fly airplanes on carriers in the Navy, then worked in industry for a decade or so, and then started my own business training company, including proposal writing training, public speaking, and regular sales and business development consulting.

I’ve led, contributed to, or consulted on countless proposals, and that’s where this title comes from. I’ve been on proposals that have totaled over two billion dollars in wins. I led proposals that garnered over six hundred million personally, and I’ve been on teams that achieved over two billion.

This really goes to the heart of what I attribute some of my success to. Let’s start off with a little story. Three umpires walk into a bar, and someone asks them how they call strikes and balls.

The first one says, “I call them as I see them.” The second one says, “I call them as they are.” And the third one says, “They ain’t nothing till I call them.” So, the question is, who’s right?

Who’s got the correct interpretation?

Well, that’s the subject of our talk today, and I’ll answer that towards the end, so please stay tuned.

My purpose for you, and the purpose of my company, is always about learning how to outcompete in a highly competitive marketplace, for the purpose of growing your revenue to ensure your organization’s survival.

My tactical purpose today is to give you some words about words that are directly applicable to proposals and indirectly applicable elsewhere in your life. Hopefully, you’ll see that.

Let’s get started. Some words that work. This is Frank Luntz, and I love his book and the title of his book.

Some of you may know him as a political pundit. I don’t want to get into his politics. That’s not what we’re here about today. I really just like his focus on the notion that it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear that matters.

Let’s try a little test. Back in 2000, and Frank tells this story in the book, in the U.S., the incoming Republican administration in Congress wanted to fix the estate tax. They wanted to get rid of it. If they couldn’t do that, they wanted to increase the amount because it hadn’t been updated since the eighties.

Initially, the Democrats said no way. They don’t own estates.

So, here’s my question for you: what comes to mind when I say the word estate?

Put something in the chat box, just the first image that comes to mind when I say the word estate. Okay? We’re not going to do a poll. Just put it in the chat box or the Q&A. It doesn’t matter. Just put it somewhere.

Micheál, if you want to read out a few of the answers, that’d be great.

No. We do. We have debt tax, home debt, debt, mansion wealth, debt tax, large home, all assets, money, lawyer, property, property, networks.

Alright. Good. The one I was looking for was the most common answer, which is mansion.

Right? Everybody thinks that an estate is something like Wayne Manor from Batman, with a manicured lawn. Right? Democrats were saying, “We don’t own estates like this.”

So, what happened? Many of your readers responded with the correct answer. They changed the narrative. They changed one word. From “estate tax,” they renamed it to “death tax,” and the return on investment was nine times.

What do I mean by that? The floor of the estate tax before this change was $650,000. After the change, it was bumped up to $5.5 million. You’re talking about a ninefold return on investment by changing one word.

If you take nothing else out of this whole talk, understand that when it comes to proposals, literally every word counts.

Let’s talk about what kind of words we’re going to use. For the rest of this talk, I’m going to discuss something called speech act theory that started with British philosopher J.L. Austin in the mid-fifties. It was picked up by American philosopher John Searle. You can see some stuff on YouTube about him.

Where I learned it from was one of Searle’s minions, a guy named Fernando Flores. What’s a speech act? A speech act is something that not only presents information but performs an action as well. The three words I’m going to introduce you to today are some of the most important speech acts common to every proposal.

So much so that if you think about those of you who come from a STEM-educated background, you all probably know about the periodic table of chemical elements.

Dr. Fernando Flores, in his book “Conversation for Action and Collected Essays,” talks about six particular words that are in his periodic table of linguistic elements.

We’re only going to cover three of them today because we don’t have time for all six, but all six are present in every proposal. We’ll do three of them today. Depending on how it goes, you can always invite me back to do the other three.

Alright. The first one is called an assertion.

An assertion is something factual that everybody agrees on.

So, what’s an example of that? Let’s say you go to buy a car and walk into a car dealership. One of your concerns might be the car’s mileage and energy efficiency. Here, we find a car that gets thirty-six miles per gallon or almost eight liters per hundred kilometers. That’s how we measure it in Europe.

What we have here is an assertion of fact. The salesperson says to you, “this car gets thirty-six miles per gallon.”

We all have a common definition for the words thirty-six, miles, liters, gallons, how to test it, etc. Any independent third party can test this on a track to verify if the dealer is being truthful with us. If the dealer is truthful, we call them sincere.

That’s as opposed to someone who just tells us what we think we want to hear without any care for the truth. That person is what we call a bullshitter.

And that’s not my term. That’s Dr. Harry Frankfurt’s. He is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA.

He wrote a book called “On Bullshit.” It was a twenty-eight-page essay that he published in the Princeton Review. You can actually buy it online. I bring dozens of these to class and hand them out as prizes.

This book spent over twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. I find it humorous that he wrote a follow-up book called “On Truth,” which never made it that big. So, what is it about the bullshitter?

The bullshitter has no care or concern for the truth. In Frankfurt’s own words, “the bullshitter is neither on the side of the true nor the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth as a liar does and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

This is one of the things I noticed when I first started in the proposal business. Now I know you all would never do this, but I used to see a lot of BDBS in the early proposals I worked on.

The reason I bring this up is that when we talk about assertions, my goal for you is to understand that every assertion of fact should be sincere. It should be independently verifiable and true.

And let’s not take the George Costanza approach.

This is yet another political pundit from the US. Let’s see if the video plays properly.

Can you get it to play, Micheál?

“Truth isn’t truth.”

Alright. “Truth isn’t truth,” Rudy. Okay. Let me tell you about some truths that are no longer true. For example, the Earth used to be considered the center of the solar system.

Bloodletting used to be an acceptable medical treatment, and it used to be true that there was only one galaxy, the Milky Way, until Edwin Hubble in 1929 proved otherwise.

So, what then is the characteristic of what we call a truth or an assertion?

The characteristics of an assertion are that there is universal acceptance of the meaning of the words. Right?

For example, miles per gallon. We know what all those words mean. There’s near-universal societal agreement on it as a fact. Again, it used to be a fact that the Earth was the center of the solar system for thousands of years until mathematicians like Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei proved otherwise.

It is independently verifiable by a disinterested third party. So, somebody else can go out and test the car for its energy efficiency.

Many astronomers have tested the theories of Kepler, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton, and they all came to the same agreement.

So that’s what makes something a true assertion.

I said near-universal societal agreement because we still have flat earthers out there. Yeah?

Alright.

Why is this not… There we go. Alright. So, I want to do this: instead of waiting until the end to answer questions, if you have any questions right now, I can probably take one or two of them.

Any questions about what an assertion is or how it shows up in proposals?

Typically, you will see assertions in compliance matrices or descriptions of your product or service. You’ll talk about its height, weight, width, etc. How many flux capacitors you have connected, all that. So, any questions so far, Micheál?

Yeah. Let’s take a look. Any questions in the Q&A chat or the attendee chat?

We have one we’ve been asking all the speakers, Jeff. It’s kind of a general question. It’s not specific to this, but in regards to proposal writing, do you have one piece of advice for any writer out there right now?

Yes, the one thing is what I said earlier: every word matters.

We tend to gloss over it, especially in those last twenty-four to forty-eight hours before the deadline. Everyone gets in a rush and little things get overlooked. Remember, the goal of a proposal evaluator is not to grade you well. They want to eliminate as many noncompliant proposals as possible to narrow it down to the one or two or three that they can compare against and make it look like a fair and open competition.

So don’t get caught up with the wrong words that make you noncompliant.

How’s that for an answer?

It’s a great answer.

We have a couple now specific to assertions. So yeah, can assertions also be considered claims?

Yes. An assertion, a claim, a fact—yes, those are all the same. They have the same strength of what I’m trying to point out: something that’s verifiable, with near-universal agreement, and is either true or false.

Okay. Alright. Good. What else?

One from Jessica. How does an assertion compare to a proof point in a key message?

A proof point is the same. A proof point—thank you for that question because you’re actually getting one slide ahead of me. I’m going to compare assertions with what are called assessments or opinions, where your opinion has to be grounded with a proof point, and the proof point is an assertion. So yes, you’re absolutely right. Proof points are assertions.

We’ll take one more, and then I’m going to move on.

Yeah. Sure.

How do you encourage your master-level BDBSers to stick to metrics, i.e., tracking and providing or handing off information to writers?

That’s part of the skills I’m hopefully imparting to you today: question everything. Learn to recognize the difference between a sincere assertion of fact and BS. And so, it’s very simple to say to them, “Hey, where did you get that info from?” Right? Or “Where did you hear that?” This way, you can ensure accuracy and reliability in your proposals.

You know, can you show me the proof, the independently verifiable truth to this? It doesn’t come off like you’re challenging somebody. You can say, “We’re trying to make sure that we can include the proof point in the proposal. So please, can you provide me the independently verifiable information?”

I hope that answers the question. I’ll be able to tie it in better in the next section. So, alright, let me move on.

For those who haven’t watched Ted Lasso, spoiler alert.

Hit the video.

The great Roy Kent.

You’re old now and slow, and your focus drifts, but your speed and smiles were never what made you who you are.

It’s your anger.

That’s your superpower.

But that anger doesn’t come out anymore when you play, but it’s still in there.

Alright. So, we noticed some different words here: old, slow, focus drifts, anger, still in there. These aren’t assertions of fact.

Right? Like, who gets to determine the universal agreement on what “old” is? This is what we call an assessment.

An assessment is neither true nor false because there is no universal definition. Rather, it’s either grounded or ungrounded. Apologies for the formatting—an assessment is somebody’s opinion. So, assessment, opinion, speculation, those are all the same. Assessments are either grounded or ungrounded. So, when you say, “you’re old,” well, in relation to what?

He was in his thirties. Well, he’s not old compared to me. He’s a young kid. But in terms of the league, he’s old for the league.

So, you always have to ground it in the perspective of the domain you’re working from.

Notice the reason Nate was calling Roy old and slow. It was to predict the future for a helpful purpose, trying to get him to be better on the pitch. And it’s domain specific. Again, he’s old for playing football, maybe not so old to have a family.

Alright. Here’s an example. I served in the US Navy. If you were to ask my colleagues, “hey, was Jeff a good naval flight officer?” Sure. He was very reliable. He was an excellent naval flight officer.

But if you ask my kids whether I was a good father, that’s a different assessment. They’d say no, he was totally unreliable.

I missed out on a lot of their activities when I was out to sea.

The thing to notice about assessments is to avoid opining for the sake of opining. Only give an opinion when it’s helpful by noticing the past to predict the future.

Also, sometimes people make an assessment but make it sound so strong that it comes out like an assertion. This ties back to what Jessica asked earlier. Someone might say, “We have the best flux capacitor on the market.” They say it with such conviction that it sounds like a true statement. No, it’s just an assessment that still needs to be grounded.

So don’t let them get away with that kind of BDBS.

If you don’t have the grounding for something, be upfront about that. Say, “it’s my speculation that that’s the worst thing on the market,” or “it’s my speculation that Jeff is an unreliable naval officer.” I don’t have any grounding for it. This way, you let people know you’re open to changing your mind.

Alright. Those are the first two speech acts: assertions and assessments.

I’m going to skip the questions and pick it up in the next section. Now, we’re going to talk about declarations, the third of the three speech acts. There are two types: verdictive and operative.

A verdictive declaration is when someone with authority decides about something. A courtroom is the perfect example of this. Go ahead and play the next video if you would.

“Mister Prada, the state would like to dismiss all charges.”

The district attorney had the authority to declare that he was dropping the charges. So that’s a verdict of innocent, essentially. Alice Cooper in his famous song, “School’s Out for Summer,” wasn’t quite the authority, but we kids believed him. Anyway, school really is out for summer.

The minister at a wedding declares, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Notice that declaring someone married is neither true nor false. It’s not an assessment.

It’s bringing forth something new into the world. The reason is there is no universal definition of what marriage is.

There are straight marriages, gay marriages, common-law marriages, polygamous marriages, and polyamorous marriages.

So here, I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry.

This was two guys getting together to trick the system to get health benefits. Their vows were different from the vows my wife and I had.

Quick shout-out to my cousin, Shelby Adamowski. She played their daughter in the movie. Shelby’s quite a bit older now. Anyway, here’s an example of the point I’m trying to make.

This movie is about a young journalist in New York City, Anton Yelchin, who has an affair with a married French diplomat’s wife. It’s called “5 to 7” because their vows allow adulterous affairs only between 5 to 7 PM and only if their spouse knows about it.

A believable premise if it’s a French couple. Not exactly the vows my wife and I share, but the point is when you bring something new into existence, when you declare a product in your proposal, you must tell people what the vows are of that product.

Here’s a case where Cessna and FedEx renewed their vows. They partnered on a project. It’s important to know what their vows are. When we put in proposals, “hey, we’re teamed with Acme Radars,” what does that mean? What does teaming mean?

There’s no universal definition for that. So, we need to explain what our vows are in the teaming agreement. When there’s a verdict that you’re ISO 9000, that is a verdictive.

Then there’s operative. I’m going to start moving faster because this is taking longer than I expected.

Our products and services that we make up, we declare them into existence. This is something I saw in my dermatologist’s office: the Hyfrecator 2000. Wonderful. You have one of those? Great. What is that? Here’s another one, the Town Square Diner, a progressive traditional Jersey diner.

What the heck is progressive traditional? You don’t usually see those two words side by side. Antique tables made daily. What are those vows?

These vows mean they make tables so sturdy they’re going to last until they’re antiques.

ChatGPT. Well, that’s a little confusing. I thought selfies were designed not to be taken in a studio. I guess that’s probably why they went out of business and the space is available.

Alright. So, some other made-up declarations: your products, your services, your titles, these are all just made-up definitions. The question is, are your vows properly articulated?

Have you described your benefits, features, functions, and values? Have you described the roles that each person plays? Okay? Alright. So that concludes the discussion.

Back to our three umpires. I promise to answer the mail. So, the first one is an assessment. The second one is an assertion.

The final one is a declaration.

All three of them are correct depending on how they’re used in their proposal.

Here’s a real-world example. So, a website. Micheál probably didn’t know I was going to do this, but you can all do this with your own website.

Here we have assertions. This is what VT Docs does. It strips out statements from a document.

These are assertions of fact that any independent third party can verify.

Here we have some assessments. Trusted. That’s an assessment. That’s an opinion. Trusted in what domain?

What’s the grounding behind that trust? Does it really empower program managers? What’s the grounding behind that?

Then there are declarations. The company name, VisibleThread, is totally made up.

Why VisibleThread?

Why VT Docs?

What are the values behind the features, functions, and benefits of VT Docs?

Alright. So key takeaways.

Sprinkle assertions throughout your proposal, but make sure they’re truthful and verifiable. Don’t be a bullshitter. Make only grounded assessments with truthful assertions, and declarations should always be accompanied by your values, features, functions, and benefits, describing what you’re bringing into existence.

Take your time. After this session, there’s a little bit of a break. So, there’s a bit of a buffer here. Absolutely. Take your time to work through your conclusion. Or if you want to take questions, we can do that. Yeah.

Let’s take a question or two then. So, a question on assertions, assessments, declarations, or how this all fits into a proposal. Go for it.

Perfect. Feel free to use the attendee chat to ask any questions to Jeff or the Q&A. I’ll keep an eye on those. Jeff, is there always a particular one that catches people out? Which is the most common?

Yeah, declarations are probably the most common. So, for any of you who attended my last talk on in VisibleThread, I talked about narratives and showed an example from the movie, The Princess Bride. There’s a famous scene where Wesley is lying on the bed, and Prince Humperdinck comes in. Wesley says, “A duel to the death,” and the prince says, “No. A duel to the pain.”

The prince asks, “What does that mean?” Wesley starts describing it, and the prince goes, “Okay, I get it. You’re going to cut off my ears.” Wesley says, “No, you don’t get it,” and goes into a diatribe. Now, I’m not saying you should hold a sword to your evaluators in proposals, but the reason I bring that story up is because that’s the most common mistake people make in proposals.

They declare something into existence without fully explaining it, like a state tax, and the reader plants their own image because the writers didn’t take the time to properly explain what a duel to the pain means. It’s important that you clearly define your declarations, so the evaluator doesn’t make assumptions.

That answer your question?

Absolutely. And a follow-on question from Aaron: What are the characteristics of a declaration?

The characteristics of a declaration involve describing the features, functions, benefits, and all relevant details.

There’s a more philosophical way to talk about it: the description, the meaning, the relevance, the value, and the purpose (DMRVP). That’s a longer lesson for another time, but the point of a declaration is to describe it in such a way that the evaluator understands its full meaning and why it’s valuable.

The same goes for a service. I hope that answers your question, Aaron.

That’s fantastic.

Jeff, if anyone has any more questions for you, they can put them in the attendee chat, and we’ll get to them at the end. Maybe, Jeff, you can work through your takeaways. Does that work for you?

Yeah.

Let me summarize it.

Alright. I started by saying that I fulfill all my promises. Here are the promises I made to you at the beginning.

If you found that I gave you knowledge that will help you outcompete and grow your revenue, please do a couple of things.

Thank the VisibleThread organizers for arranging this talk. They put in a lot of effort to schedule this event and contact all of us presenters.

For me personally, connect with me on LinkedIn and YouTube. If you just go to LinkedIn and type in Jeff Goldfinger, I should come up first. I don’t think there are many other Goldfingers on LinkedIn.

I also have a YouTube channel called The STEM Signal, where I help STEM-educated people learn how to increase their career signal among the workplace noise. If you’re interested, let Micheál know that you’d like to get in touch with me, and he’ll provide your contact details to me.

My flagship product is called Tell It Like a Top Gun. I used to be a weapons school instructor in the Navy, and I give you the skill set to stand up in front of a room full of Mavericks and be convincing in a public speaking setting. So, that’s all I have. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it, and I look forward to getting in touch with each one of you.

Back over to you, Micheál.

Jeff, thank you so much. That was fantastic. You’re getting lots of strong praise in the attendee chat. People really loved your references and video clips. Lots of people calling out for more Princess Bride comments. Thank you so much.

No, you’re fantastic. We look forward to working with you again, Jeff. Please connect with Jeff on LinkedIn. If anyone wants to get in contact, feel free to work through us, and we’ll pass on your details.

Alright. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

Absolutely. What’s up next for the rest of the audience?

There’s a little bit of a break. We’re starting again in about twenty-five minutes. Our next session is Narrative Alchemy. It’s all about the magic of proposal writing. We’re talking about storytelling.

Rachel Charlton is the CEO of Sticky Communications. She works with many AEC organizations.

She has a wonderful presentation on storytelling.

Please check it out. We have a full lineup of presentations on proposal writing, from an article proposal writing panel to a session with Shipley to AI and proposal writing. We have a lot on the schedule. Please come back after lunch. We’d be delighted to see you again. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to get in touch. Thank you so much and see you at two o’clock.