Page 305 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

296 Appendix G

technical—and a key element of the psychologics is your buyers’ hot buttons,
which I have defined as an individual’s desires or concerns that can affect the
engagement. In Scenario 1 above, as in the ABC case, hot buttons are not often
written and not always articulated. You have to intuit them, ferret them out, read
between the lines of the spoken.
In RFPs, your buyers’ hot buttons can be identified thematically as repeated
words and phrases that express their desires or concerns. Here’s an example:

A European office of a major consultancy, call it ACME, was doing poorly, and
many of its consultants were on the beach. A nearby teaching hospital had
issued an RFP to 15 firms, but not to ACME, which had no health-care practice.
Hearing about the RFP by chance, ACME decided to bid, for two reasons. First,
many of its currently unengaged consultants would acquire important expe-
rience in proposal writing. Second, the office’s strategic direction involved
establishing a health-care practice; if, by chance, they were awarded this
lucrative contract (more than US$1M), they would be able to hire sufficient
experts to build a practice.
In reading the RFP carefully, ACME’s consultants noticed a subtle but fre-
quent refrain suggested by phrases like professional development and
knowledge transfer. Recognizing that a hot button can be addressed by
changing the project’s methodology and/or its project staffing, they built into
their methodology significant training and knowledge-transfer components,
and they included in their project staffing two U.S. subject-matter experts
who would relocate during the entire engagement.
Several years and millions of dollars of follow-on work later, ACME asked
why their initial proposal was accepted. Because, they were told, none of the
other 15 bidders had proposed a methodology with such a comprehensive
professional-development component. This hot button had been expressed
in the RFP; ACME had not made it up. But everyone else had failed to see it.

In just a minute, we’ll analyze in some detail how one consulting team
responded to an RFP, but first some caveats. When reading an RFP, it’s impor-
tant to think of yourself as an anthropologist and to consider the RFP document
a cultural artifact. You need to ask, “Whose culture?” and “Whose artifact?” That
is, addressing possible hot buttons could create serious problems if:

◉ The RFP was written by lower-level staff whose desires and concerns are dif-
ferent from those of the buyers.