Introduction
I am your potential client, and I’d like to introduce myself. Whether you are a consultant (either on your own or working for a consulting firm), an internal consultant, or a project-oriented employee working within my own firm, I am a reader of your proposal and/or a viewer of your proposal presentation. You are trying to sell me a service, and I will decide, singly or in concert with others, whether you, someone else, or no one will get the work you desire. Likewise, if you are an employee with an idea to sell, I am also a reader of your proposal and/or a viewer of your proposal presentation. You are trying to sell me an idea, and I will decide, singly or with others, whether it is valid or workable or serviceable or fundable. In all of these cases, your job is to persuade me to engage you.
Regardless of your situation, your relationship with me is far different from my relationship to you. You are courting me; I am testing you. You are wooing me; I am assessing you—your abilities, insights, perspicacity, personal characteristics, and desire to support me. I know what you want from me—my agreement that your service or idea is worthwhile and, in many cases, more worthwhile than someone else’s. But I’m not so certain that you know where I’m coming from or what I want from you. So I’ll tell you.
If you’re an outsider, engaging you as a consultant (at least initially) is often viewed by me and my colleagues as a sign of weakness. If I am at all typical of other potential clients I know, many of us share this perception. In my mind, hiring you frequently indicates—or at least suggests—my inability to do my job entirely by myself within my organization. I know all the reasons why outside support makes sense and should add value. At the same time, however, when I’m really honest with myself, I’m not excited by the prospect of engaging you. Rather, I feel worried, threatened, impatient, and even at times suspicious.
I’m worried by the implication that potential changes you propose will indicate that I haven’t been doing my job, or at least not doing it as well as I should. I’m threatened by the possibility of losing control to you, the outsider, and how this could make my position—my power base—vulnerable within my organization. I’m impatient because I’ve tried for some time to address the issue we’re discussing, didn’t seek outside support when the symptoms initially occurred, and now have a need for rapid response. I’m suspicious of your ability to help me because I’ve been burned before, have heard all your promises, and have compared them to the eventual results. You all talk a good game. Not all of you perform as well as you talk. So when I discuss my situation with you, I want you to understand me and what makes my situation unique. It may not be unique to you, but it is to me. I’m looking for assurance that your involvement will make me and my organization significantly better and more competitive.
Therefore, if you are a consultant, I believe that your responsiveness and interest in the proposal-development stage indicate the kind of service you’ll provide if you are selected. As a result, I want you to demonstrate your desire to serve me, your knowledge of my industry and organization, your understanding of my priorities, and your ability to listen, to challenge, and to understand my situation, my needs, and my desired benefits. I want you to prepare thoroughly for your meetings with me, go out of your way to show me how good you are, be specific about how you will help me, share your knowledge and experience from similar situations, and make me feel that this proposed project is important to you and your firm. I want you to begin providing “service” early in the process by offering advice, ideas, and perspective, even if I don’t request them.
When I do make a request, especially one that is obviously a test of your responsiveness, I want you to respond quickly and thoroughly. In short, during the early stages of our courtship, I want to learn, and I want you to establish a sound relationship by providing value. I want you to act as if my situation is the most important one you are addressing. You offer a professional service, and I need to know that you’ll serve me professionally—that is, provide value for my proposed expenditure.
If you do all that, especially over time as we develop a closer relationship, you might not even have to write a proposal, and, of course, you really don’t want to. Proposals take a lot of time, often a huge investment in time. And let’s be honest: Even when they’re well written, proposals frequently don’t win jobs so much as they clinch or lose them.
But the plain truth is that we don’t always have a close relationship and you can’t always sell a job up front. Therefore you need to write a proposal, and you need to learn to write a good one. Hence this book. I’ve written it because I and other potential clients like me have read hundreds of your proposals and heard just as many of your presentations, and although a few are outstanding, most of them aren’t. Many offend with cut-and-paste boilerplate, miss important opportunities to provide value, suffer from poor logic and organization, and focus more on you than on me and my organization. Although some do a few things well, some don’t do much well at all. All can be improved, and I guarantee that I can help you improve them.
I’m not saying your proposal will always win. That I can’t guarantee. But I do promise that you’ll prepare better proposals—because you’ll think more strategically about how to write and present them. Getting you to think and write more strategically, particularly from my point of view, is one of the major goals of this book.
So what do I as a potential client, either outside or within your organization, want from your proposal? Nothing that should surprise you. From my perspective, I want to feel that you and your team can best meet my objectives and achieve my desired results from engaging you. Therefore, I desire:
Agreement on my question, i.e., on the specific question or questions that must be answered to move my organization from our current situation to our desired result
A clear understanding of the benefits I will receive by your answering that question—benefits I will gain during, by the end of, and beyond the proposed project
Clarity on how you propose to answer the question and the way we will work together as you do so
Confidence in and comfort with you and your proposed team
Return on my investment from my actual and/or anticipated benefits
To help you address these desires, I’ve developed the proven proposal-development process summarized in Figure I.1. Although preparing effective and persuasive proposals involves far more than Figure I.1 illustrates (and this book covers much more than the process shown), the following five steps will provide you with a road map for the journey we’ll take through much of this book.
1. Understand the baseline logic. Every proposal situation involves a real or perceived discrepancy between where I and my organization are and where we want to be—between, that is, our current situation (let’s call it S1) and our desired result (S2). The project or ideas you propose will achieve or get us closer to achieving that desired result and therefore begin to or entirely remove that discrepancy. Consequently, benefits (B) will accrue to us. At its fundamental level, your proposal must clearly express the relationship between my current situation, my desired result, and the benefits of my achieving that result. I call this the proposal’s “baseline logic,” represented by the formula S1 → S2 → B. Your proposal (and your project, if you win) stands little chance of success if these elements aren’t clearly identified, logically related, and agreed to. I discuss this relationship in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
FIGURE I.1 A very brief overview of the proposal-development process
2. Construct a logical methodology. To move me from S1 to S2, your document or presentation proposes a series of actions, a methodology, that must clearly and logically communicate how you’ll help me and my organization achieve our objective and desired result. In Chapter 5, I show you a logical framework that will help you thoughtfully develop, organize, and sequence the actions necessary to achieve our objective.
Part 1 of this book, then, focuses on what I call the “logics” of proposals: the logical relationship among the current situation, desired result, and benefits; and the logically constructed methodology you will use to help remove the discrepancy between where I and my organization are and where we want to be.
The Preface of this book mentions that the difference between winning and coming in second is often only two to five points on a hundred-point scale, and understanding proposal logics may get you only some of the points you need to win. Why not all? Because I and others buy for psychological as well as for logical reasons. Accordingly, Part 2 focuses on what I call the “psychologics” of proposals. The next two steps in my proposal-development process address these psychologics.
3. Reconcile different perspectives across multiple buyers. Writing Winning Business Proposals assumes that most of your proposal situations involve what is called a “complex sale.” A complex sale exists when you sell to multiple buyers, each of whom may play a different role in evaluating your proposal. Each may have a different perception—sometimes slight, sometimes significant—of the problem or opportunity and of the benefits that will accrue to their organization, collectively, and to them, individually, from solving that problem or realizing that opportunity.
Too often, proposals are unsuccessful because the writers assume they are selling to organizations rather than to individuals. Although an organization can be in a problematic situation, different people within the organization often have different points of view of the current situation. What to one person is eroding profits might be a lack of productivity to a second and poor customer service to a third. Each “buyer,” in short, has a different agenda, a different critical issue, or at least a different slant on the issue that must be considered. I’ll help you explore these persons as individuals who play different roles on the consultant-evaluation committee and have different buying criteria. I discuss these roles in Chapter 6.
Once you’ve understood the individual players in the selling situation, you need to create a framework, a mosaic, a collage, to understand their similarities and differences. A successful proposal has to address these differences in one document or in one presentation. Addressing different perceptions is a major challenge. You need, for example, to know each buyer’s hot buttons: their individual desires and concerns that must be addressed during the project. You need to understand the benefits that will accrue to each, once the proposed objectives are achieved. But, just as important, you need to understand how each buyer’s hot buttons complement or conflict with the desires and concerns of other buyers. In Chapter 7, I discuss these matters as well as proposal evaluation criteria and counters to the competition.
4. Crystallize and develop key proposal messages and themes. To be most effective, your proposal (spoken or written) needs to communicate several essential messages that clearly differentiate it from competitors’ proposals and convince me and the other buyers that you have heard and understood the issues from our respective points of view. These messages, which characterize our story and our needs, are called “themes.” They come from your analysis of our individual hot buttons and our collective evaluation criteria and from your counters to your competition. Once you have identified your themes and developed them, you will have generated much of the persuasive content to incorporate into your proposal. In Chapter 7, I discuss themes and the themes-development process in detail.
5. Weave the messages and themes throughout the proposal. All the logical and psychological strategy must be applied, of course, and the chapters in Part 3 address this application. Just as Beethoven repeated his musical themes throughout his symphonies, you want to “play” your themes throughout your proposal. By weaving your web of persuasion, you can communicate why you, and not someone else, can best support me to achieve my desired result. In Chapter 10, I discuss the important concept of persuasion slots, those parts of your proposal that contain your themes and other selling points. Chapters 9 to 13 discuss major parts of the proposal where you discuss your understanding of my situation, your proposed method for addressing it, the benefits to the buyers of your doing so, and the like.
Each of this book’s chapters introduces you to important concepts and strategies, which are then applied in a work session. I’ve written the work sessions from your point of view, so that you can see how the strategies are applied as you develop your proposal step-by-step. That is, the work sessions (which are based on a real-life case) allow you to experience and practice the concepts laid out step-by-step in the chapter preceding it. I can’t tell you how important this is: Do not skip the work sessions; they bring the concepts to life.
Before we begin our journey together, I have to let you in on a little secret. There are no rules for writing; there are only strategies. No rules. Not even that subjects and verbs should always agree. Not even that sentences (like this and the previous two) shouldn’t be fragments.
Rule-bound writers are limited writers. Having been told never to begin a sentence with but, they never do. “But why not do so?” I ask, if the situation suggests that you should. Consequently, rule-bound writers have fewer options to choose from, fewer possibilities to consider, fewer arrows in their quiver or weapons in their arsenal. Your challenge now is to persuade me, your potential client, using all the tools and techniques at your disposal.
Writing always involves choices, always decisions among options, and the more options you consider, the better your chance of selecting the most appropriate one for a given situation. Even the rule-bound writer has made a decision, but what I call a “nondecision decision,” an unconsidered one. I’ll show you how to make better decisions, thoughtful ones, considered ones. And remember that what worked well in one situation will not necessarily work as well in another. Even if the questions are identical. Even if the industry issues are identical. If preparing winning proposals were that easy, there’d be no need for this book.
I’m willing to teach you if you’re willing to learn. I challenge you to think hard about the concepts presented. Some of them will make almost immediate sense because they will provide guidelines for what you already know, and these frameworks will allow you to use your knowledge more consistently and effectively. Other concepts will be more difficult to master, because proposals are difficult to master. I’ve spent over 30 years trying to master this beast called proposals. I’m closer to doing so than I used to be, and, if you work with me, I’ll help you get far closer than you’ve ever been.
Let our journey begin!