Our greatest assets and passions can sometimes inhibit our ability to connect with the people whose approval and support we need to advance our ideas and proposals. We can easily forget that approvers or sponsors are not experts in our specialties nor share our passion for our specialties. But, there are opportunities to connect with them through shared objectives and interests. Shared objectives and interests can include increasing revenues and profits, expanding the customer base or increasing customer satisfaction. Leveraging these shared objectives and interests are essential to gaining support, sponsorship and approval for our proposals and ideas. I would like to share an experience in my career that demonstrates the need to make this connection.
At one time in my career, I was responsible for the evaluation and presentation of investment proposals for approval for a business engaged in the manufacturing and marketing of consumer paper products. The Research & Development and Engineering groups developed a new technology that would significantly improve the quality of our products versus products offered by our competitors. This technology would also provide this product quality improvement at a lower cost of manufacturing than the technology that we were using. I worked with a team of representatives from Research & Development, Engineering, Marketing and Finance to prepare a presentation to the Vice President/General Manager of the business group. He was the person whose approval we needed for funding and assignment of resources to implement the product quality improvement. We, the team, thought that we had developed a great presentation. We just knew that our presentation would wow the General Manager with the technology and get the company noted in trade and industry publications for our significant and innovative breakthrough. We were hyped and went to the presentation confident that the General Manager would quickly approve our proposal.
Well, we bombed. How could this have happened? How could he not approve something so innovative and was such a breakthrough? The Vice President, Finance for the business group attended the presentation. He came to the team's rescue. He introduced us to the 7 component technique. He reminded the team of the responsibilities of the General Manager and that his approval of our proposal would be based on how well we connected the proposal to his interests. The General Manager was responsible for business profits, cash flow and return on investment. In the words of the Vice President, Finance, "connect your proposal to the things that got the General Manager promoted or keeps him from being fired". Based on his advice, we revised our presentation around concise and simple statements focused on the perspective of the General Manager. These statements were developed based on the Subject, Need and Idea components of the General Manager's train of thought.
- Subject (the message and opening statement): We have an investment proposal that will increase business profits by 20%.
- Need: This investment will reverse the decline in our market share and product quality.
- Idea:This technology investment will deliver the product quality improvement, while lowering our manufacturing costs.
When we made our opening statement (Subject), the General Manager moved forward in his chair. After hearing the Need and Idea, he said "This is innovative". He asked questions that were right from the list of questions that we thought he would ask. (We developed that list based on the interests of the General Manager.) He actually made the presentation to himself for us! He asked a member of the team for a pen, signed the proposal and congratulated the team on a job well done.
When presenting proposals and ideas, how you present is just as important as what you present. What is the information, how is the train of thought.
Linwood Bailey
Principal
Fields of Success
Career Management Partners
