Page 127 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

118 Writing Winning Business Proposals

WORK SESSION 6: Identifying Hot Buttons and
Evaluation Criteria, Countering the Competition,
and Developing the Themes for ABC

You understand that before you can develop your themes, you must identify the
buyers’ hot buttons and evaluation criteria as well as determine how you will
counter your competition.

Identifying Hot Buttons

You know that hot buttons involve the buying team members’ desires or concerns
about the project and therefore have to be addressed by the way you and your
team propose to conduct the project. You also know, because consultant Gilmore
has told you and because you’ve seen it over and again in discussions with
Gilmore and in his notes, that one of the hot buttons is thoroughness. Armstrong
said the study needs to be “thorough and convincing.” Anil Gupta said the same.
Morrison hinted at the same. Given these repetitions—hardly coincidental, you
believe—it’s quite likely that Armstrong first sang the tune and that the others
joined in the harmony.
That tune probably sounds good to the others, but for different reasons based
on their buying roles and even their personalities. For Armstrong, thoroughness
is a means by which he can achieve his goal of remaining competitive and per-
suading Consolidated to provide the capital funding. So thoroughness to him has
an economic-buyer, bottom-line meaning. For Morrison, however, because he’s
a technical buyer and because of his background and temperament, thorough-
ness may mean something quite different: perhaps the logical rigor required in a
project of some complexity, a project whose alternatives are being advocated, he
believes, without a comprehensive analytical basis. Those alternatives, according
to Morrison, need to be examined thoroughly and convincingly, ideally by using
his distribution model.
So as you develop your hot buttons, you try to remember that the roles indi-
viduals play on the selection committee influence their expectations and thus the
hot buttons themselves and how they are construed. You also realize that detect-
ing hot buttons is something of an art because you’re not necessarily dealing with
hard data but with feelings, desires, perceptions, and hidden agendas. You have
to try to get below the obvious and into the personalities, the “inside the buy-
ers’ heads” issues, and the psychologics, because hot buttons almost always have
emotional content.
For example, Armstrong said something to Morrison, who remarked about
it—almost as an afterthought—to Gilmore. You missed it when the two of you
discussed his meetings as well as the first two times you went through Gilmore’s