Notes and Citations

Preface

1. The term buyer refers to decision makers or decision influencers—those people who must agree that you are the right choice to support them in a proposed project. Therefore, a buyer is your potential client, whether that person exists within or outside your organization. Chapter 6 examines this concept of buyers.

2. Throughout this book, the terms proposal-development process and business-development process are often used synonymously. In conventional usage, the former term is viewed as less comprehensive than the latter because proposal-development process usually refers to the set of activities that begin with composing the proposal document or presentation. However, my conception of “the proposal” is much broader. Proposal includes the set of activities beginning with the first discussion between the consultant and potential client and ending with your potential client saying “Yes” or “No.” That is, “the proposal” is not the document itself but the entire courtship.

Also note that above I have used the term potential client rather than client. Even if you have worked for your “client” on dozens of projects or engagements, for this project he or she does not become your client until the project has been authorized. By using the phrase potential client, you will constantly remind yourself that the proposed engagement has not yet been sold.

Chapter 1

1. A great many people and a great many textbooks on writing confuse proposals, which propose a method for answering a question, and recommendation reports, which provide an answer to that question. That’s why I’ve written Appendix D, which discusses these two different kinds of documents and gives you some pointers on writing reports.

2. From here on, I will use small caps to designate generic structure slots. That is, I’ll refer to the methods slot either by calling it that or by writing it in small caps: METHODS. I’ll refer to the methods section either by calling it that or by writing “Methods.”

Chapter 3

1. As indicated on the Logics Worksheet, Implementation Projects do not have an overriding question.

2. I recognize that in many of your past projects, you have used more than one, two, or three objectives. Logically, however, as we have seen in Chapter 2, you can have at most three objectives. If you have more than one objective for each desired result, the other so-called objectives are likely deliverables or benefits. If you receive an RFP that specifies a whole host of objectives, you might very well use all those objectives in the final draft of your proposal. However, to make certain that you provide a logical foundation for your proposal and project, as well as a sound methodology, be certain that, in your thinking and in your prior drafts, you use the process described in this book.

3. You might be interested in reading “Deliverables and Benefits” at http://mhprofessional.com/freed.

Chapter 5

1. I should have written the word objective(s), since depending on whether your project takes me one step along the continuum or more than one step, your project will achieve one objective or more than one. But I’m getting tired of writing the word that way, and you’re probably getting tired of reading it. So from here on, I’ll occasionally use the plural objectives even when I might also be referring to the singular. What this loses in precision it gains in lack of distraction.

2. The Pyramid Principle is a system for logical thinking and writing developed by Barbara Minto when she was at McKinsey. Minto’s methods have been taught to major consulting firms and other businesses around the world. For a fuller explanation of pyramid logic, see Barbara Minto, The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, and Problem Solving, Minto International (1996). Minto is primarily a logician, believing that logic alone is sufficient for persuading readers. As demonstrated throughout the psychologics part of this book, you need to be more like a rhetorician, for whom logic is, of course, necessary but certainly not sufficient. Logic and rhetoric as well as grammar were “the three ancient arts of discourse,” the foundational courses in the medieval university’s liberal arts education. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Beginning with the next chapter, you will be focusing on those means, the ends of which will be a proposal that sells.

Chapter 6

1. Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman, et al., The New Strategic Selling (New York: Warner Books, 2005).

2. Glenn J. Broadhead and Richard C. Freed, The Variables of Composition: Process and Product in a Business Setting (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 52–53.

3. As with the Logics Worksheet, the Psychologics Worksheet as well as its individual cells can be downloaded from http://mhprofessional.com/freed.

Chapter 7

1. See Appendix E on writing effective sentences for a discussion of this important technique.

Chapter 8

1. DeBono’s website calls him “the leading authority in the field of creative thinking, innovation, and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.”

2. You can download a handbook for conducting 40-minute Green (or Red) Team Reviews from http://mhprofessional.com/freed.

Chapter 9

1. So that you don’t get tired reading them and I don’t go nuts writing them, for the rest of this chapter, I will refer to the Story/S₁ Component as the Story Component and the Closing/S₂ Component as the Closing Component.

Chapter 10

1. I pronounce it “pipped.”

2. Broadhead and Freed, The Variables of Composition, 58.

Chapter 11

1. Why is it so often the case that the consultants (or associates or whatever the title might be) are assigned to write the qualifications section, even though they know next to nothing about the prospect’s situation? Here’s at least one reason: The partners or vice presidents don’t believe that section is particularly important. They believe that prospects don’t even read that section or, if they do, that their eyes glaze over as they read because all the qualifications sections pretty much sound the same. And in some, maybe many, but certainly not most situations, they may be right. However, I’ve asked more than three dozen people to rate the importance of qualifications sections. Before they were hired by a consultancy, half of them worked in organizations where they had to evaluate consultants’ proposals. The other half worked as consultants from the get-go. More than 80 percent of the former believed qualifications sections were important. Of those consultants who had never evaluated proposals on “the other side,” less than a third believed qualifications sections were important.

Chapter 13

1. I hope you’re wondering why this chapter on fees follows the chapter on benefits, especially after I argued that ending a proposal with a benefits section is almost always more strategic than ending with one on costs or fees. Here’s the reason for this chapter’s placement: You need to have some idea of the potential client’s benefits before you can determine your fees, using the variety of possible approaches discussed in this chapter.

2. Also see the lead-qualification criteria in Appendix H.

Appendix F

1. This appendix is adapted from Richard C. Freed, “This Is a Pedagogical Essay on Voice,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7, no. 4 (1993): 472–81.

2. Broadhead and Freed, The Variables of Composition, 103–4.

Appendix G

1. Given the rapid changes in Amazon’s rankings, the results you see will likely be different from those I saw, though equally instructive.

2. Those buyers performing the procurement function are classic technical buyers. They focus on the measurable, quantifiable aspects of your proposal, namely price, using metrics like return on investment (ROI) and/or return on consulting investment (ROCI).