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The following is a great example of a garbled message:
Before they were one of our clients, a Houston-based audio/visual company was invited to provide a proposal for the expansion of a medical facility’s television distribution system. The company devoted a significant amount of time researching the medical facility’s physical layout, investigating possible hardware vendors and verifying delivery dates of the proposed hardware. The technical solution the audio/visual company proposed involved increasing the number of Intermediate Frequencies in the video distribution system. In their proposal, the term Intermediate Frequency was abbreviated as IF. The proposal was delivered to the medical facility’s purchasing department and the salesman expected a quick approval based on the competitive price.
A week went by with no word from the purchasing department. A follow-up call yielded bad news; the contract had been awarded to another company. A post-mortem was scheduled to learn what went wrong. During the meeting the purchasing agent explained that the audio/visual company’s proposal was disqualified because it was not definitive enough. When queried what he meant, the purchasing agent explained, “The proposal said if-this and if-that.” “We requested that you spell out your exact design.”
The salesman for the audio/visual company was red-faced when he realized that the buyer, who was non-technical, got the abbreviation for Intermediate Frequency confused with the word if. Our client learned a valuable lesson: The use of industry jargon is very dangerous – especially with non-technical buyers. In this case, a $15,000.00 sale was lost.
Berlocher &
Company can help your company avoid costly writing mistakes. Call us today!
Proposals can be thought of as “silent sales people” who stay behind after the sales presentation is finished. Well-structured proposals help win business by driving home key messages about your company, its products, and its services. Poorly written proposals lack clarity, persuasiveness and a call to action; their key messages are garbled. As a result, marginal products presented in high-impact sales proposals often beat superior products presented in shoddy or mediocre proposals.