It’s a bad idea to deliver a completed proposal in person.
I know that flies in the face of what you’ve been told, what you do, and even a positive experience or two you’ve had, but it’s an overwhelmingly bad idea.
Now I guess you’re going to want to know why.
- Timing: This delays receipt and acceptance. You have to produce a convenient date for you and the buyer, which could take a week or a month. If something emerges in the interim or during that meeting requiring an adjustment, then the delay becomes even longer.
- Temperature: You allow the process to cool down considerably. The next day (which is why I’ve advocated speed and FedEx or electronics) the buyer is still enthused, very conversant, and convinced. As the days grow long you reach the December of the (northern hemisphere) year: cool and icy conditions.
- Intermezzo: Restaurants often provide an intermezzo, or palate cleaner, between courses, to remove prior tastes. You don’t want that course served here. Too many interferences can surface that neither you nor the buyer had anticipated (or had anticipated as much less of an issue) the longer you take to get there.
- Crowds: There is at least an odds-on chance that, because you’re coming back to present the proposal, the buyer will invite in (or others will inveigle in) random colleagues and subordinates, who may well pose objections and resistance the buyer had underestimated. It’s unlikely that the buyer would invite this cabal to review a written proposal received the next day after your meeting.
- Production: It’s often assumed that the presentation of a proposal requires PowerPoint, handouts, models, and at least three trained seals. Why are you there with merely a 2.5-page proposal that is totally clear and crisp?
- Questions: As long as you’re there, the buyer is going to utilize the time to explore every nook and cranny. There will be minor questions that become major pains, semicolons that require more than a short pause, and suggestions for amendments and redaction.
- Negotiation: It’s much tougher in person than on the phone for most consultants to steel themselves to reject requests for fee compromise. When the buyer says, “I love Option 3, but the price is a tad high,” on the phone you can reply, “That’s why we have Option two!” But sitting on a couch, drinking coffee, with the buyer smiling and winking, how steeled are you going to be? After all, if this isn’t a negotiating document, then why have you returned in person to discuss it at all?
And there is the rub.
Once you show up, especially after more than a couple of days—and it’s often more than a month in many instances, given travel and other priorities for both parties—the dynamics have changed. There are new priorities, views from precincts not reporting in previously, less intimate familiarity with the details, less fervor about and belief in the ROI.
Your proposal is copyrighted, and you’ve stipulated within it that it’s not to be shown to anyone outside of the organization—thereby preventing, one hopes, the sharing of contents with competing consultants. But on top of all of that, you have a trusting relationship with the buyer.
Therefore, your written proposal should be sufficient for you to place before the buyer without the potential negatives of setting up and conducting a personal meeting for discussion and acceptance. And don’t forget this:
- Returns: Any changes, additions, or deletions agreed on in a personal meeting must be changed, usually through more than a hand notation but rather with a new, altered proposal, which will take more of your time to create and return and have accepted. And the buyer just may suggest that you return in person for a “final” discussion with the amendments.
Digression About Trust
When a buyer says, “Great proposal, it’s made it to the short list,” or “We’re now looking only at you and one other firm,” or “Someone else is 25 percent less expensive making it a harder choice for me,” you do not have a trusting relationship with the buyer.
The relationship you develop, coupled with conceptual agreement with its inherent ROI, should place you in a completely different category from competitors. Hence, the time required to develop that relationship actually results in faster, higher quality business.
If I—as an economic buyer—trust you and believe in the goals we’ve mutually established, then someone else’s lower price isn’t going to be even a vague issue. Don’t rush the proposal creation, but do rush its delivery.
- Expense: The client isn’t going to be paying your expenses in 98 percent of these excursions, so that you may be spending thousands, which reduce the margin of the project by increasing acquisition costs considerably. The idea is to reduce acquisitions costs! (And if you aren’t successful in obtaining the project—which in best cases will be at least 20 percent of the time—you’re incurring tens of thousands in unnecessary reductions to your bottom line annually.)
So, to be or not to be?
Not.
Near the end of this famous Shakespearean soliloquy, Hamlet observes:
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
You don’t want to “lose the name of action.” You’re going to accelerate the process (or at least maintain the current velocity) ironically by staying away. Educate the client about this near the end of your conceptual agreement meeting. “If we’re agreed, I’ll summarize this in a brief proposal, get it to you tomorrow, and call you Friday at 10 for your choice of options and terms. There’s no need to take up any more of your time until then.”
So let’s turn to Friday at 10, when you do need to “show up.”
Two golden rules:
10. You’re most influential when you’re not there with the proposal.
11. Don’t fix things that are working just fine.