Page 44 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Aligning the Baseline Logic 35

In proposal situation after proposal situation, I have asked for a plan (e.g., to
improve customer service) only to get a proposal filled with benefits related to
improved customer service. These are benefits I’d receive only after the plan was
implemented. In specifying implementation benefits from a Planning Project, the
consultants placed themselves in considerable jeopardy. Because the proposal is a
contract, I could have made them deliver those “promised” implementation ben-
efits by requiring an implementation phase at a cost to them of several hundred
thousand dollars or more.
Now, as we’ll see in the next chapter, your proposal could—and probably
should—discuss the benefits related to subsequent implementation, especially if
you can estimate those benefits. For example: “Subsequent to implementation,
we expect your customer service to improve by X percent, thereby enabling you
to do good things 1, 2, and 3.” But if those implementation benefits are the only
ones you discuss, you are missing significant opportunities to persuade me of the
advantages of your developing the plan itself. These advantages—learning what
we need to do better or faster, assessing our current organization’s capabilities,
selling the capital requirements to corporate management, evaluating our prob-
ability of success, training our people—provide me and my organization with
significant benefits. With this plan, we can compare our options and decide to
implement, wait, or whatever else may be appropriate given our resources and all
the other plans we are considering in areas beyond the one you are studying.
Here’s a second example of misalignment. Assume again that I know my cus-
tomer service is less effective than is desirable. Again, what I have is insight. In
this case, however, assume that what I desire is not only a plan but also an imple-
mented plan that actually improves my customer service.
Therefore, your project’s desired results and objectives (note the plural) need
to express both your developing that plan and implementing it. Likewise, the
benefits you express need to be those related both to my having the kind of plan
you develop and to having that plan implemented. Again and again, in proposal
situations like this one, the proposals indicate only the benefits of having the
plan implemented. What they fail to do, or at least to communicate to me, is
that the quality of the implementation often depends on the quality of the plan.
Therefore, they miss important opportunities to persuade. They fail to indicate
the benefits aligned with the first objective: developing the plan itself.
To test your understanding of the alignment between the desired result(s) and
the benefits, I’d like you to evaluate the six situations found in Figures 3.7 through
3.12. Each table takes information from a different proposal I’ve had presented to
me. Each table summarizes the current situation, the desired result(s), and the
benefits as they were defined in the proposal. In the S1 column, I’ve included
the three possible current situations; in the S2 column, the three possible desired
results; in the Benefits column, the three kinds of benefits: insight, planning, and