Coordinating and Uncoordinated

The Sales Team continue to amaze with their unwillingness to take ownership of the RFI response that needs to be issued this coming Friday.

Let's be clear here: this is an RFI, a Request for Information. The Client is asking for capability statements and indicative unit pricing. All of this is standard Sales material that they regurgitate at each and every meeting they have. There is no demand for a solution, which is where I would need to pull my finger out, so all I am here to do is to run the process and coordinate the necessary activities.

Today was the day that our draft response was reviewed. The idea was that each of the questions and answers was presented on screen and the answers were to be honed to an incisive and inviting statement.

Sales were represented by an AVP, a Sales Director and a Sales SME. The first response was read out and ...

... we were literally deafened by their silence. After an embarrassingly long pause they contributed nothing; not even "that's fine". Eventually one of the other attendees stammered an observation in the hope that they would get the idea of the meeting.  Over the next two hours the Sales AVP realised that that he was going to need to work for a living and actually engaged, but his other two guys were hopeless.

Sorry, I just had a image flash though my mind of me standing in the dank, bilges of a large ship and seeing water pouring through a hole that shouldn't be there.

Away from work, the weather had been much better today and I spent the first hour of the evening mowing the lawn to transform last week's crude crop into something more akin to coiffured elegance.

Later in the evening 30% and I attended our second Pilates session. Once again we were stretched and twisted and once again we ended up sweating buckets as we contorted on rubber mats in the Village Hall.

There were a couple of exercises that my left hip simply would not perform and my inability to rapidly tell left from right produced a few moments of chaos too. The Instructor, however, is a patient soul and says that we are both doing well.