Chapter 2: A Good Proposal is Hard to Find

Overview

A while back I was invited to speak at the annual sales kick-off meeting for a major software corporation. The morning of my talk, I waited in the ballroom, where breakfast had just been served to 450 salespeople, while they went off to hear the president present the "state of the business" address. After that, it was my turn.

As I sat quietly, sipping one more cup of coffee and gathering my thoughts, a fellow came bustling into the ballroom. He glanced around at the dozens of empty tables, spotted me, walked over, sat down, and said, "You're late for the meeting."

"No, sir," I replied. "I'm the next speaker, so in a way I'm early. But why aren't you in there?"

"Oh, I'd like to be, but I'm waiting for a limo. I have to dash off and close a deal."

My eyebrows went up. "Congratulations. Must be an important deal."

"It is," he said. "It's worth about four million dollars. But before you get the wrong idea, I'm not selling anything. I'm buying. I'm the vice president of purchasing, and I have to go sign papers to bring this to closure."

I was scrambling around, looking for a business card, in case he had any money left over, when he asked me, "What is the subject of your talk?"

"Sales proposals. How to write them."

Suddenly this rather charming and interesting person went through a metamorphosis right before my eyes. He grabbed a fork, pointed it at me, and practically snarled as he said, "Listen, you tell our salespeople that if they produce the kinds of proposals I get, I'll make sure they get fired. You tell them that! I get proposals for deals like the one today, deals that range anywhere from half a million to ten million dollars. And what are they? Nothing but a bunch of product sheets, line item pricing, and boilerplate. There's no ROI, no calculation of the total cost of ownership, no analysis of the payback, nothing I can use to make an informed decision. What a waste!"

I didn't have the heart (or the guts, since he was holding that fork) to tell him that his company's salespeople were producing virtually the same thing for their customers.

Not that they were all that different from the vast majority of firms. In the course of a year, we see thousands of proposals from hundreds of companies. Very few of them produce a persuasive proposal.

Most of them start out focusing on themselves, on their company history, their product, their technology, their mission, or some such thing. In fact, proposals are often fatally damaged by one or more of the "seven deadly sins" of proposal writing.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Proposal Writing

1. Failure to focus on the client's business problems and payoffs—the content sounds generic.

2. No persuasive structure—the proposal is an "information dump."

3. No clear differentiation of this vendor compared to others.

4. Failure to offer a compelling value proposition.

5. Key points are buried—no impact, no highlighting.

6. Difficult to read because they're full of jargon, too long, or too technical.

7. Credibility killers—misspellings, grammar and punctuation errors, use of the wrong client's name, inconsistent formats, and similar mistakes.