... speak my words

The last element of Cicero's formula is vital . You need to use words the customer will understand. And if there's a discrepancy between the language your audience uses and what you use, you should drop your own usage and mimic the audience. Your readers will understand more, feel more comfortable with your proposal, and be more likely to adopt your recommendations.

Analyzing the Audience

Cicero has given us the word: You must consider your audience when writing proposals. It's crucial. Ignoring or misunderstanding the audience dooms hundreds, probably thousands, of proposals to failure every year, proposals that otherwise answer the needs or solve the problems of the corporations soliciting them.

The problem is that most people write proposals under duress. And most of us, when we're feeling stressed, will do something we're confident we can do well. In the case of proposal writing, we'll create the kind of proposal that we would like to receive and we'll include the kind of content we're confident we can do pretty well. If we are technical and detail-oriented by nature, we will create proposals that are technical and detailed. But how likely is it that the client will have the same attitudes and personality traits that we have? And even if the client does have a similar personality to ours, how likely is that he or she will be comfortable with the same language we are?

As Cicero has indicated, then, to write a winning proposal, you need to consider three key factors about the audience:

Personality type ("think my thoughts")
- Detail-oriented
- Pragmatic
- Consensus-oriented
- Visionary
Level of expertise ("speak my words")
- Expert
- Informed
- Familiar
- Unfamiliar
Role in the decision process ("feel my feelings")
- Ultimate authority
- User
- Gatekeeper

To appeal to and hold the interest of this broad spectrum of readers, you must balance many presentation skills, providing enough technical data to please the highly informed, detail-oriented customer, but not so much that visionaries will be bored or the uninformed audience intimidated.

Adjusting for Personality Type

The first factor about your decision maker is his or her personality type, by which I mean the individual's preferences regarding information gathering, information analysis, and communication styles. In fact, there are two questions to ask: What kind of personality type does my decision maker have? And what kind do I have? I guarantee that if you don't consciously think about the customer's personality, you will inevitably create a proposal that is exactly the kind you would like to receive.

Among the various tools available for analyzing and categorizing personalities, one of the most useful is the Myers-Briggs [Personality] Type Indicator. It is used by career counselors, family and marital therapists, educators, and many others to help people understand themselves and others better. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-reporting test that indicates an individual's likely preferences on four pairs of opposing personality tendencies: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling, and judging /perceiving.

The first pair has to do with the way people prefer to interact with the world. When you're on a plane, do you hope that no one sits next to you, or do you welcome a bit of interaction? Would you rather read a proposal or watch a presentation?

The second pair indicates the two general ways people prefer to gather data. Some people, the "sensors," are oriented toward facts by their nature. They tend to be very literal in their use of words. They need to look at all the details before reaching a conclusion. Their opposites, the "intuitives," find details boring and distracting. They prefer the big picture and appreciate the value of the generalist in an organization. Intuitives are often keen interpreters of nonverbal messages.

The third pairing , the thinking/feeling dichotomy , focuses on how people prefer to make decisions. Thinkers look at issues objectively, reaching conclusions based on what is logical and fair rather than on what makes people happy. They find logic, facts, and technical detail more credible and appealing than emotion. Feelers, by contrast, consider a good decision to be one that builds consensus and harmony. They often make decisions by asking how any given course of action will affect the people involved. They would consider service and quality issues to be as important as price.

The final pairing, judging/perceiving, indicates how a person prefers to organize his or her time. Judgers prefer punctuality, structure, order, and closure. As a result, they are more likely to reach decisions quickly, to adhere to a schedule, and to be decisive . Perceivers prefer to "go with the flow." Spontaneity and flexibility are more important to them than organization or structure. They do not feel much inner pressure to reach closure or make decisions.

This brief summary of the Myers-Briggs approach does a disservice to a subtle, nonjudgmental, and extremely rich method of discussing personalities. Combining the various traits outlined above yields sixteen different personality types. For a proposal writer, sixteen different types is a bit unwieldy, however, and it's pretty difficult to get your customer to take the Myers-Briggs test anyway. The point I want to make is that the various combinations of these tendencies do identify useful distinctions that we can use to help us modify the way we deliver our message. And we can reach conclusions about our customer's preferences without obtaining a detailed, clinical picture.

The kind of information you need is the kind you can garner from commonsense observation. What is the person's manner of speaking? Curt? Detailed? Emotional? Look at his or her office. How is it decorated ? Are there schematics of jet engines on the wall or pictures of the kids ? Golf and tennis trophies or Sierra Club posters ? In your conversations, what really seems to matter to this person? If you had to list the ten things your customer is most passionate about, could you? If not, start paying attention and asking. Learn about your decision maker as a person so you can communicate with that person as effectively and comfortably as possible.

The crucial personality characteristics that you need to consider when looking at your decision makers are (1) how they prefer to gather data and (2) how they prefer to make decisions. You might find it useful to set up a matrix based on those variables and position your key decision makers as accurately as you can within one of the four quadrants. (See Figure 6-1.) For example, some decision makers prefer for the information they receive to be factual, logical, empirical, or sensory in nature. Others are more prone to receiving information emotionally. In MBTI terms, this is a difference between thinkers and feelers. In terms of the second characteristic, how they prefer to make decisions, a useful distinction can be made between people who are prone to take action quickly and who want you to be brief (judgers), and people who are more passive and want you to be thorough (perceivers). When we combine these two characteristics, we get four types of decision makers.

Analytical	Pragmatic
Facts, accuracy Detail oriented Charts, schematics	Bottom-line driven Values brevity Prefers graphics to words

Concensus seeker	Visionary
Feelings, values Concerned about people Responds to color	Concepts, big ideas Long- term view Loves "splash"

Figure 6-1: Four Personality Types and Their Preferences.

Analytical or detail-oriented decision makers approach experience rationally and logically. They tend to dislike emotional terms and inexact language. They value accuracy and thoroughness. They want a lot of detail and substantiation. "How can I decide anything until I know everything?" they might ask. For them, truth resides in facts, procedures, evidence, or formulas, and they want to know how things work and how a decision can be logically justified. When they read your proposal (or watch your presentation), they constantly evaluate it even while they are in the act of perceiving it. If you are more of a bottom-line, pragmatic kind of decision maker, you may find their methodical approach frustrating, even irritating . That's a mistake. Be patient with their careful approach, demonstrate competence, back up everything you say with solid, factual evidence, avoid the use of hype or marketing fluff, base your persuasion on accuracy and logic, and to the extent possible minimize their sense of risk by offering guarantees . Use words and phrases that are likely to trigger a quick, positive response from an analytical decision maker, such as factual, proven, demonstrated, tested , detailed, criteria, objective, analysis, principles, methodology, and experienced . Remember, though, that words alone won't cut it with these customers. They will want the words to be backed up with proof. Thus, merely saying that "we offer a wide selection of precise gas mixtures" may not be enough. Instead, get more specific: "We offer seven classes of calibration mixtures, ranging from EPA protocol certified mixes designed to meet the most stringent monitoring requirements to instrument calibration mixtures intended for the laboratory."

Pragmatic types are results oriented. They focus on bottom-line issues. They want action. For them, the dominant issue isn't accuracy or thoroughness, it's impact. They want to know, "What have you got? What'll it do for me? How soon? At what price and at what payback?" They may become impatient with detail and want you to be concise , focused, and business-like. (Can you see how a proposal written by an analytical person might alienate a pragmatic customer?) Like the analytical, they tend to be suspicious of emotional appeals. They want you to focus on facts, ideas, and evidence, not feelings or people. They admire precision, efficiency, and a well-organized delivery in both written and oral communications. Words and phrases that are likely to have positive connotations for the pragmatic decision maker include planned, completed, mission, core competency, return on investment, competitive advantage, fixed, productive, total cost of ownership, and guaranteed .

Consensus seekers sincerely want to understand your message. They listen carefully , but in the process they are likely to focus on how everyone else is likely to feel about the decision rather than the details or facts. They value close working relationships, and want you to be dependable and reliable. They need to feel comfortable with you, your ideas, and the level of acceptance from the rest of the team before they will make a decision, and hate feeling pressured or rushed. Your personal interest and commitment to successful outcomes are an important part of your overall persuasive message, so back up your recommendations with your own assurances of support and follow through. Consensus seekers typically have a low tolerance for risk, so provide brief but compelling evidence and offer guarantees where possible. (Social proof is more likely to be convincing to this kind of decision maker than technical proof, so great references and testimonials are important.) Consensus seekers often have flashes of insight into you as an individual and into your meaning, and they're likely to pick up inconsistencies between your apparent message and your hidden intentions. Unfortunately, they're also likely to garble technical or factual data, make erroneous assumptions, or introduce unwanted emotional messages. Trigger words and phrases for this type of decision maker include reliable, flexible, consensus, adaptable, easy to use, widely accepted, loyal, and adaptable .

Visionaries are the entrepreneurial types. They manage their lives, their responsibilities, and others on the basis of instinct and intuition. They tend to have strong egos and to believe that their ideas are fundamentally sound. They're the opposite of the detail-oriented types, in that they leap over logic and facts in quest of transformation and action. They're easily bored with technical data, but they love to be involved. On the downside, they have a hard time hearing or giving credence to any message that goes counter to their own assumptions or biases. They really aren't that interested in your product or service. What they're interested in is whether your product or service can help them accomplish their plans. They want you to be excited about their ideas, too, and to show that you are committed to them. Detail, routine, procedure, and process are not what they're about. Keep your proposal brief; make it interesting, colorful , and professional. Visionary decision makers want to know how your recommendations will move them closer to achieving their dreams. They also want to know who else is using your product or service, since they like to be associated with leaders , innovators, and winners. Visionaries fall into the category of customer that Geoffrey Moore has called the "early adopter," and they can be very helpful to you if you are going to market with something new, because they often will make a decision quickly even if there is little in the way of evidence that what you have actually works. Words and phrases that may work well in proposals aimed at a visionary decision maker include innovative, ingenious, creative, original, breakthrough , future, trend setting, and even cutting edge .

These four broad personality types and their characteristics are summarized in Figure 6-1. Notice that the most difficult challenges will be between those personality types who are positioned on opposing corners of the diagram—a pragmatic selling to a consensus seeker; a visionary selling to an analytical; and vice versa.

Sometimes a person's job requires him or her to act like a certain type of person even when that's not in alignment with his or her genuine personality. A high-level executive almost always has to think "pragmatically" and a person with technical responsibilities may have to adopt an "analytical" approach. Should you write to the "real" person or the "role" person? The answer depends on whether you're trying to inform or persuade. Information will be most acceptable if it's structured for the role; persuasion will be most successful if it's pitched to the real.

What about situations where your proposal is going to a team or committee? What then? Write a different proposal for each member of the team? No, of course not. Instead, accommodate the different types of people who are likely to be on a team by structuring your proposal in two parts . The first part, which includes the cover letter, title page, table of contents, and executive summary, should be written for a pragmatic decision maker. Keep it short, focus on business issues, emphasize payback or ROI, and minimize the amount of jargon or technical detail. The second part, which consists of your substantiation, will contain technical details about your product or service, detailed timelines and project plans, and your "proof statements"—case studies, references, testimonials, and awards, your answers to the RFP's questions, and other detailed content. This part should be written to appeal to the analytical decision maker. What about the other two types? Consensus seekers tend to get overrun in team processes by pragmatics , and visionaries are lousy team players by definition. So unless you have very strong evidence to the contrary, you don't need to worry much about those two when you are proposing to a team.