Page 81 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

72 Writing Winning Business Proposals

Insight Objective Planning Objective
Planning Objective
Insight Objective
Determine if XYZ should Develop a plan for XYZ to
Develop a plan for XYZ to
Determine if XYZ should
enter the market. enter the market.
enter the market.
enter the market.

A separa
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5.11
E
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or each objec
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FIGURE 5.11 A separate logic tree is necessary for each objective..
be “interviewed top management.” These results, I think you see, aren’t very spe-
cific. They don’t express a result. After you’ve gathered information, all you have
is a bunch of information. After you’ve interviewed top management, all you
have is a bunch of interviewed managers. Compare these nonspecific actions to
“identify resources and timing required” or “specify capabilities required.” These
actions express specific results, which, as we’ll discuss later in this chapter, are
deliverables: “identified resources” and “specified capabilities.” These are things I
can see; I can visualize a list of resources or capabilities.
Now, let’s examine part of the logic trees that could have been developed by
XYZ’s internal consultants. In Figure 5.12, I’ve included all of the first two levels
and part of the third.
This and any well-constructed logic tree develops your ideas by way of a series
of arguments. In Figure 5.12, several arguments exist that are mutually exclusive
and collectively exhaustive. First, whether XYZ should enter the market can be
determined by three major tasks: identifying market opportunities, specifying the
capabilities and resources required to capitalize on those opportunities, and com-
paring XYZ’s capabilities and resources to the market requirements. Second, the
market opportunities can be determined by identifying the motor carriers’ needs
for the proposed information system, the needs of the motor carriers’ customers,
and the capabilities of XYZ’s competitors. Finally, to develop a plan for actually
entering the market, XYZ needs to know (1) which actions are necessary for clos-
ing the gap between what the market demands and what XYZ can do and (2)
what resources and timing are necessary to carry out those actions.
In checking the logic of your logic tree, use the several requirements I’ve discussed:

◉ Each box must be an action that expresses a result. Therefore, each box must
be phrased as specifically as possible.
◉ Each group of boxes on one level must produce a result, a deliverable, on the
next level. That group and its result form an argument that goes something