Mentor's Corner
Toolkit for Consultants: The Importance of Polish

By C. Thomas Tyler, Chief Technology Officer of The Go To Group, Inc.

Most lovers of technology intrinsically believe that something should work before we bother to make it look good. At one point, I accepted that as almost axiomatic. However, as I have been dealing more successfully with clients, making larger sales for bigger projects, I am beginning to realize how misguided that belief can be in our world of selling IT products and services.

Like many ICCA members, I’m at least part Geek. Geeks love to understand how things work, and love to make them work. I have often said, “I see beauty in functionality.” When something works well, it is good, right? If it looks good, so much the better, but that doesn’t really matter as much, right?

WRONG!!!

The polish matters – a lot. Polish helps get clients to accept higher prices or rates. Polish improves a client’s perception of the quality of work you do for them. Polish gets you closer to the stream of positive emotions and perceptions that leads to sales, and at higher priced sales.

Polish and Prettiness in the Prospecting Process

Earlier in my consulting career, I often initiated relationships and proposed entire projects with just text emails, capturing requirements, providing level of effort estimates, pricing, and the like. Quite functional, and you can make sales that way, but it’s not at all pretty. It wasn’t pretty because I didn’t value prettiness. I didn’t value prettiness because I didn’t think my clients valued it. But I failed to realize, humans value prettiness, in a very innate and undeniable way. While we’re using our left brains, actively thinking about a product’s features and functions, our right brain is quietly but powerfully chiming in with an, “Ooh, I like that” based purely on aesthetics.

Now, how do we apply these vague concepts into a practical, structured process for getting sales? Nowadays, I have a more formal process for initiating work with clients. It involves sending formal proposals to prospective clients as attractive PDF files, based on nice-looking Word document templates with company logos and nice-looking formatting. In addition to pure aesthetics, there is also some polish in the very structure of the proposal, which ensures that each prospect sees a healthy dose of targeted marketing, in addition to the nuts and bolts of cost estimates and lists of deliverables. The template structure of the proposal helps outline the work to do for each project, and also instills discipline into the sales process.

You might think following such a formal proposal process is only worth it only if you’re pitching a BIG contract, offering months or more of continuous work. But no – I recommend this be SOP, and apply it to contracts as small as two days (with exceptions for cases where a standard price list, product brochure, or service offerings brochure will suffice). Appling a consistent and polished process to even small projects, such as assessments, is powerful marketing in and of itself. You want prospects to like what they see, and to immediately realize that you have the structure and discipline necessary to handle large projects, even though your initial engagement may be tiny.

What should a Proposal look like?

Distinctive. Colorful. Well structured.

Distinctive

Don’t have a nice looking logo? Get One! Don’t be afraid to invest a bit in getting some help from a graphic artist if you lack art talent yourself. Getting a logo that fits can turn into a project, one many consultants enjoy and take pride in. But whether you enjoy it or not, it is helpful and important to a good logo that can readily be incorporated into a variety of electronic formats (Headers/Footers on proposal docs, for example).

Colorful

You’re going for a Wow effect on the initial ¼ second viewing after opening your proposal. That gets the positive emotions going even before they have read a single word. Make it look good, but make sure your efforts to make it look good don’t distract from the readability or printability of the document. Aesthetically pleasing headers and footers should suffice.

Well Structured

A proposal should include several sections, intended to fulfill functional and marketing objectives. You should define a structure that suits your business and takes into account your clients’ expectations. Common sections include:

• Project Overview – Detail who provided input to the overview, perhaps starting the section with something like, “Based on conversations with Joe Schmo at Company X …” or “Based on discussions and meetings held on site at the White Plains, NY office of Company X on August 18, 2006, …”. This should define the scope of the project to a level of detail that the proposal can eventually be referenced in a contract. In cases where the client has only a vague scope of work in mind, be sure to fluff up this section with lots of details of things you might explore.
• Project Budget and Deliverables – The usual nuts and bolts go here.
• Assumptions and Considerations – List here any assumptions you have made, and highlight project risks.
• About My Company – Have an overview of your company, perhaps a few paragraphs. Customize it each time to emphasize aspects likely to be of particular interest to the current prospect.
• Relevant Experience – This is where you describe any experience you have that’s particularly relevant to the project at hand, work done for similar projects elsewhere. Links to any published articles of interest are especially helpful here.

Polish in your Work Product

Often, developers think, “I’ll get it to work first, then, if I have time, I’ll go back and make it look good.” Low-rate contractors can do that, but if you want to be an overpaid consultant, you need to think differently! Start with the polish first! As a trivial example, I put a fair amount of effort into establishing templates for Perl scripts. The templates contain built-in structure for documentation, plus niceties like copyright and a common look and feel for processing command line arguments. I start with the polish first, with a well-documented script that doesn’t do a darn thing, but looks very nice. Then I show it to them and promise to make it work …and people love it! And they inherently trust that, if it looks good, it can be made to work.

Polish after the Job is Done

Where a project took months of work or just two days, I am now taken to providing a write up of what has been done, with a summary of what was done, pointers to files of interest, etc. This is especially important if you’re providing services, since it helps provide a tangible, visible encapsulation of your efforts. Just as with the polish at the beginning in the prospecting process, add polish at the end with a summary write up.

In fact, don’t consider a job done until you provide the finishing polish. When you’re calculating the time it will take to do a project, be sure to account for the time it takes to do summaries write ups into your pricing, be it fixed-price or estimates for time & materials work.

Git R Done!

Of course, it takes time to get your various templates together, and it’s not easy. You need to be prepared to invest time building up your sales proposal templates, various code and script templates, brochures etc. It’s the sort of thing that evolves over months and years. But Git R Done, get some experience with it, and you’ll be amazed at what a difference the polish makes in how you and your work are perceived and valued.

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By C. Thomas Tyler is the Chief Technology Officer of The Go To Group, Inc. and the Former President of the ICCA Greater Boston Chapter. He can be reached at Tom.Tyler@Go2Group.com or you may view his website at www.Go2Group.com