Proposals – Overloaded with Input

How many people have been through the following scenario?  You are trying to land a large contract, trying to get the proposal written, and everyone and their dog is on a meeting with you to discuss it.  With so many people on the call, you know many of those do not have authority to approve the project but are only there to punch holes in the ideas being generated.

So you arrive at “You want A, B, and C with the outcome being D.” only to get the out of left field questions.   Having been in this business for well over 20 years for varying size firms and clients, I should not be surprised with the questions that come up, but I still do.  This one time the questions pertained to hardware failures so drastic that I wanted to point out that it is not this project in jeopardy from what they are describing but the entire organization.  This is why we have disaster recovery plans.  Just in case that meteorite falls out of the sky right on top of the datacenter, they can recover.

You also have the proposal being approved only to be brought up weekly in meetings trying to still go over it like it has not been written.   You just want to yell “People, it has been approved.  Work is almost completed.  You do not want to change it now and force the whole process to start over which entails a huge bill and delay in implementation.”

In the book I read, Alan Weiss brought up valid points about getting with the economic buyer and trying to limit the large involvement of so many people.

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