Page 101 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

92 Writing Winning Business Proposals

presentations, or does he like written documents?” The internal consultant said,
“He gets annoyed at too many words and things; he likes creative presentations.”
So I put together a presentation with about 25 pages, a little flip-chart thing
that I would put on the boss’s desk, so I was totally in control. It was mostly car-
toons and all kinds of wild stuff, a lot of meaning and very few words. The last
cartoon showed a boat with the captain leaning over the bow. On the captain
were the words “XYZ Management.” In front of the boat were a bunch of ice-
bergs. On the tops of the icebergs, I wrote things like “reduce inventory” or “cut
inventory costs,” and on the bottoms, I wrote phrases like “destroy customer con-
fidence.” At the very top of the cartoon, I wrote, “Our objective is to steer you
through these icebergs, avoid some of them, go right through others because
they are so small that they don’t make any difference, and show you where to set
dynamite charges to get rid of the really bad ones.”
Now the internal consultant asked me for a copy of all this in advance, so I sent
him a letter, giving him the philosophy of what we were trying to do. Word by
word, I explained that whole last cartoon. At the meeting, I flipped through the
charts and when I came to the last one, I said, “It’s sort of like icebergs,” and then
paused. Suddenly, the internal consultant said, “Yes, as a matter of fact . . . ,” and
he just took over, independently quoting right from my little personal letter to
him, which really was the proposal. Now, he looked smart. His boss liked it, and
we got the job. If he wouldn’t have said anything, I would have kept talking. But
we made him part of the creative team without soliciting it. He could be part of
our team, which he wanted to be; he could be smart in front of his boss, and be
selling to his boss. 2

Coaches (at least in their coaching role) are interested in the strokes or recog-
nition or visibility they will get from helping you make a successful sale and thus
initiating a project that proves valuable. They will gain recognition or visibility, get
strokes, or be seen as problem solvers if they have played a part in your selection and
were therefore instrumental in helping to choose the right firm that eliminated pain
or capitalized on opportunity and therefore allowed results to be delivered and ben-
efits to accrue.

A Fifth Buying Role

Would you believe that I might not select you even if your firm scored the highest
number of points on our evaluation scale? Even though you would “beat” the sec-
ond-place finisher by two to five points, you (and not they) would place second;
they (and not you) would win. In many of those situations, you will lose because
a fifth buying role—the ratifier—strongly prefers someone else.