Let s Get Personal

Let's Get Personal

I love books. Always have. They're a source of entertainment, information, wisdom, solace, and more. If I'm feeling down, getting my hands on a new book lifts my spirits immediately.

Now I'm lucky enough to live just a few blocks from a wonderful bookstore. In fact, if I stroll up to the end of my street, cut through a lovely neighborhood park, and walk a couple more blocks through the nice, old neighborhood where I live, I arrive at the front door of a store that Publisher's Weekly named "the best bookstore in America."

It's a beautiful place. As you enter, there's a fireplace with comfortable chairs and leather couches to the right. There's a gourmet restaurant to the left where the chef makes dishes from a featured cookbook each week. The staff is friendly, the selection is comprehensive, there's even a solid collection of classical and jazz CDs. For a bibliophile like me, it's a little slice of heaven.

So where do you think I bought most of my books last year?

That's right: Amazon.com.

Why? How could I betray my neighborhood store this way?

Well, for one thing, I can go to Amazon pretty much any time, day or night. And I can shop in my underwear (or less), if I choose to. (I'm pretty sure if I tried that at my neighborhood bookstore, they wouldn't be happy about it.)

But the biggest reason I buy more at Amazon is the personalization of the experience. When I enter my local store, the employees may look up and smile (or not). But they never greet me by name, and they have no idea what I bought the last time I was there. On the other hand, when I go to Amazon, I'm always greeted by name and they have several suggestions for me, many of which are pretty darn interesting.

Now I know Amazon's apparent personalization of my shopping experience is just a form of collaborative filtering using database technology in a Web-based e-commerce application. But it still seems more personal than the store does, and it has created a level of expectations in my mind that a traditional retailer will find hard to match.

What does this have to do with your proposals? Simply this: If your proposal isn't at least as personal as the Amazon Web site, you may actually alienate the customer. It will look like boilerplate.

Consider these two examples:

A company that advertised itself as the world's leader in customer relationship technology asked us to review their proposals. They were losing a lot more than they were winning, and they thought we might be able to tweak the message a little. When we looked at the executive summary to see how they were approaching the customer, we saw a revealing pattern. The first word of the first paragraph was their name—not merely printed, but an actual reproduction of their bold logo. The first word of the second paragraph was the same logo. And the third paragraph, the fourth, and so on. For four solid pages. Nothing in that executive summary focused on the customer. In fact, it looked like an exercise in egotism. How personal was that experience for their prospective customers? What kind of attitude did it communicate?

In another case, a company that provides integration services for enterprise resource planning software asked me to review their proposals and train their sales force. They sent half a dozen sample proposals so I could prepare. One of the samples was a fifty-page proposal for outsourcing help desk functions. But the proposal began with the vendor's history, then presented their vision statement and their mission statement, then went into their quality philosophy, then discussed their affiliations with major software providers, and on and on. It was all about them, not the customer. In fact, the customer's name didn't even appear until page seventeen! Unbelievable.

If you submit a proposal that is filled with boilerplate text that focuses on yourself, you are giving the customer an impersonal experience. You are delivering a document that fails to acknowledge the customer's unique needs, values, or interests. Your self-centered proposal communicates to the customer that the information they shared with you during the sales process has made no difference to your proposal at all. Ultimately, you are undercutting the notion that you are offering a solution. Instead, you are providing the customer with a generic experience that suggests what you have to offer is a commodity—it's the exact same thing for everyone.

This is particularly damaging if you or your colleagues have done a good job of establishing rapport with the client and if you have taken the time to uncover and articulate the client's needs during the sales cycle. To do all that work and then submit a proposal that is not based on those insights inevitably creates doubts in the client's mind. "What's going on here? Who am I dealing with?" they wonder. "If I choose these people as my vendor, will my future experience be more like what I saw during the sales process, which focused on me and what I need, or more like this proposal, which is just a bunch of boilerplate and bragging?"

Today, in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, Andersen, and other debacles, customer expectations for honesty, clarity, and credibility are higher than ever. A salesperson who communicates with customers as individuals wields far more power and influence in today's marketplace than the well-oiled front-office marketing machine. People buy from people, and they always prefer to buy from people they trust. We just happen to live in a time when customers have more options than ever and when they have been conditioned by experiences online to expect personalized treatment.

So what does this mean for you and me when we write proposals?

• Delivering big slabs of boilerplate may be worse than delivering no message at all because the boilerplate will sound "canned" and will undercut the rapport we've created with customers. I saw a demonstration of a proposal tool that claimed to help salespeople write better proposals. One of its first options was to "retrieve" the executive summary. I started laughing out loud, because there is no way a single executive summary will work for all customers.

• Effective proposals are built from a combination of content and insight. You must have something worthwhile to say, and you must say it in a way that shows customers that it's relevant to them. This is not as hard as it sounds, and if you make the effort you will differentiate yourself from your competitors in a way that creates a dramatic and positive impression on the customer.

• Effective salespeople do not deliver one message over and over. They do not treat customers as demographic units. They engage in conversations, they listen, and they view customers as individuals. They create proposals that communicate clearly and specifically to those individuals.

In short, delivering boilerplate proposals and sales letters can put the cold, clammy kiss of death on your sales process. Starting your proposal with your company history or descriptions of your products alienates the reader. Failing to focus on the customer's needs and objectives right in the beginning of your proposal undercuts all the carefully managed, consultative sales methodology that you followed. When you're selling a really big opportunity, you need a really good proposal. A price quote, a bill of materials, a technical spec, or a marketing brochure just won't do the job.

So let's learn how to create a proposal that will do the job. Let's learn how to write a winner.