Page 52 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Aligning the Baseline Logic 43

it includes an unaddressed or unsolved problem and its effects but also because it
lacks benefits (such as, in the ABC case, consensus among the management team).
By checking the alignment of the overriding problem’s effects and the benefits,
you can generate a good deal of additional content to be used in your situation and
benefits slots. You can use the alignment as a powerful discovery process to deepen
your understanding of my problem or opportunity and the benefits that would
accrue from your helping me solve or realize it. Just as important, the benefits you
decide to include in your proposal will look all the more beneficial if they are com-
pared to my current lack of benefits, as demonstrated in Figure 3.17.
My guess is that you could have generated Figure 3.16’s information in about
five minutes. In 15 minutes, you probably could fill several pages of effects and
benefits, identifying them through the process of alignment. Nevertheless, nearly
every one of those effects and benefits would need to be red flagged. In the phone
call to arrange our meeting, you mentioned four items that I appeared to ratify.
Everything else is your conjecture, and even those four items might be as well.
My focus during our phone conversation was on scheduling the meeting. I might
have been “nodding my head” at everything else. In a brief phone call, I certainly
could not have thought deeply about your four items. They might just have been
interesting enough for me to accept a meeting.
So everything should be red flagged, and that’s a good thing. Now you have talk-
ing points for our meeting. You have points for discussion, items to be confirmed
or rejected. During our meeting, you will have caused me to define more precisely
my current situation and the potential benefits from improving it. You will have
added value, a “richness” of logical thinking, in the business-development process,
even though before the meeting I had no idea that you had already begun to “write”
your proposal.
One last point about alignment: Once you’ve aligned effects and benefits, you
are not finished with all the alignments we have discussed. Unless you wish to
throw logic to the wind, there is no end to the iterative alignment process, on the
Logics Worksheet and in your head, until your final proposal has been submit-
ted. Every element of the Logics Worksheet is logically related with every other
element. Therefore, when you change one element, that change cascades through
the entire system (like altering a cell in a spreadsheet), potentially affecting every
other element and providing you (and potentially me) new points of view through
informed discussion. That discussion adds value, building our relationship and
demonstrating your qualifications long before the proposal might be due.
You should be realigning constantly, after every discussion with me and my
team and after every discussion between you and your team—whenever new infor-
mation must be added to the Logics Worksheet. As a result of this iterative process,
you may well differentiate yourself from your competition because it shows me
you really are thinking about me and my organization’s situation and needs.