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O P I N I O N
It’s not personal. It’s business. In the AEC marketing world, proposals are usually treated as business as usual, but I believe we need to make them personal.
I will be celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary on June 1 (I married young, by the way). My love, loyalty, and commitment to my wife is confirmed, without a doubt, by the fact that I have sat down with her to watch (and enjoy, but let’s keep that a secret) the 1998 Warner Bros. hit You’ve Got Mail more than 25 times. Tom Hanks’ character is the head of a multimillion dollar bookstore chain that drove Meg Ryan’s local, independent children’s bookstore out of business. While trying to court her, Hanks’ character explains that what happened wasn’t personal, that it was business. She replied with, “Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.” This piece of dialogue has always stuck with me.
Javier Suarez SALES STRATEGIES
development), and a big picture “ultimate” goal (financial, social, sustainable, environmental, etc.). It is this “ultimate goal” that often gets lost in the shuffle and becomes a wasted opportunity to make the submittal “personal.” Take, for example, a high school renovation/ expansion project. A sample of the client’s benefits “In the AEC marketing world, proposals rule the land. They are usually treated as ‘business as usual,’ but I believe we need to make them personal.”
In the AEC marketing world, proposals rule the land. They are usually treated as “business as usual,” but I believe we need to make them personal. One of the best, tried and true techniques to tailor proposals is the IFBP process (Issues, Features, Benefits, Proofs). In the IFBP process, benefits is the coveted “so what?” moment in which we drive the content to talk about the client’s goals. After all, we are always reminding practitioners (and ourselves) that “it is about them, not us.” Client benefits have multiple layers, including: project (solution to a particular problem), business (cost savings and/or set-up to make money moving forward), department (improve standing within the corporate structure), staff (professional
See JAVIER SUAREZ, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER March 21, 2016, ISSUE 1144
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