Like father, like son?

Some readers may be familiar with one of my pet phrases, a ‘Benedict Proposal’. Benedict’s my son: at the age of two, his first ever words were, “Me, me, me, me, me.” And the majority of proposals I see work on similar lines – they’re far more supplier-centric than customer-focused. After all, it’s much easier for a bid team to discuss their own organisation and its capabilities (”Me, me, me”) than it is for them to write about the customer!

The young gentleman in question is now seven – or, as he would phrase it, ‘almost eight’. He’s just demonstrated that his proposal skills are improving with age. His school is running an appeal to raise funds for a major extension to their buildings; to publicise this, they recently ran a competition in which each of the pupils had to submit a picture of a room that should be incorporated into the new block.

Benedict picked up one of the three prizes. His design? Well, the competition was being judged by the teachers. So a picture of a beautifully-designed, comfortable, superbly-equipped staff common room was always going to win, wasn’t it? Particularly when the other kids were all drawing state-of-the-art, Wii-filled play areas!

Talk about producing a submission that hits all of the evaluators’ hot buttons spot on, and differentiates your efforts from the competition! (And no, since you wonder, I didn’t have anything to do with it!).

Benedict and Harry Potter

This article was written by Jon on 26 October, 2007 and filed under Musings. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via RSS or Email.