Analyze your personal goals

PERSonaL GOals, finally, include all the outcomes that affect the decision maker's own career, income, or prestige. If the decision maker owns the company, there may not be much difference between personal goals and business goals. But in a typical situation, the decision maker may be looking for an opportunity to be a hero, to climb the corporate ladder, or simply to avoid making a career-damaging mistake. As we noted above, the most defensible goals are those that are organizational in nature, so be wary of making somebody's personal agenda the basis for your proposal.

Social goals

Social Goals can be directed either internally or externally. Internal Social goals might involve enhancing employee morale, reducing turnover, increasing the Professionalism of the company's sales representatives, raising awareness among all employees on issues of diversity, and so forth. External Social goals may focus on relationships with Customers or on relationships with suppliers. For Example, a company may want to increase brand recognition, change consumer attitudes, reduce the number of calls to Customer support, increase the company's share of the Customer's total spending, or capture a greater share of existing markets, among other Customer-focused goals. Social goals involving supplier might include supplier certification, integration of data systems, or development of long-term contracts.

Technical Goals

Technical goals typically adress problems in the infrastructure. For example,a Technical goal might be to automate a labor-intensive process, to provide greater flexibility or modularity in system design, or to enhance quality through the use of automated inspection technology. Our I.T.manager who wants the solution to be microsoft compatible is looking for a technical outcome. Do you know much about microsoft appliances? Well, it's possible of course, that a "technical" goal may have nothing to do with technology. Instead, it might involve implementing quality management methodologies or achieving standards of compliance. For example, a factory might need to reduce emissions of volatile nitrous oxides in order to meet regulatory standards. How they achieve compliance may not matter to them, so long as they can avoid having their plant shut down and fined.

Replace the concept of Business goals with mission objectives

BUSINESS GOALS might include such issues as increasing market share,increasing net profitability, reducing overhead, Creating differentiation in the market place, or reducing unit cost of manufacturing of appliances and other things. Business goals can often be translated into financial measures, although not always. If you are proposing to a government agency, replace the concept of business goals with mission objectives. Most government agencies or departments have a clearly defined mission, and your recommendations should be focused on helping them achieve that mission faster, safer, more completely, or more economically.

What are the goals that the monitoring system must deliver?

As you gain insight into the customer's desired outcomes, resist the temptation to take the first thing your customer contact says as the one,true goal for this opportunity. Sometimes this contact is thinking about Personal parochial interests and not looking at the larger, organizational objectives. For instance,suppose you are talking to I.T.manager and you are learning more about the reasons why this person's company wants to develop an in-house test bed for monitoring engine performance,you know how important it is. You ask question #3:"What are the goals that the monitoring system must deliver? How will you know that the system you purchase is the right one for this application?" And the I.T.manager says, "The system must be compatible, it won't work here."Now,do you think that's the most important goal for the entire company? Or does it perhaps reflect the I.T.manager's anxiety about not being able to support an application that doesn't work in corporate-approved platform and doesn't match the skill sets of his or her employees?
Always push for deeper insight into the goals. In fact, I urge you to analyze the situation in terms of four overlappingareas:Business, Technical, Social, and Personal.

The three criteria your results and outcomes you're noting should meet

* They must be measurable or quantifiable
"Improved efficiency" is not an outcome or a meaningful goal, because you can't measure it. "Reducing system downtime by 20 percent" is a measurable result, assuming there are reliable baseline statistics available.
* They must be organizational in nature
Perssonal or political goals are not the kinds of outcomes that can be quantified or used in a proposal. Results and outcomes are important and defensible if they benefit many people across the organization, not merely one decision maker.
*The results must come as a direct consequence of the impact your services or solutions have on the customer's business operations
There must be linkage between what you specifically are offering (not what everyone who is submitting a proposal is offering, but rather the specific elements of your recommendation that differentiate you from your competition) and the specific outcomes the customer seeks. If you "own" the outcomes in the buyer's mind, you probably own the deal.

What goals must be served by whatever action is taken?

Before you can figure out what to propose,you must know how the client will judge Success. What is the client trying to accomplish and what is he or she trying to avoid? Delivering the right results through your solution is usually more important than quoting the lowest price . In fact ,it's the definition of value.
Compelling value usually comes from a solution that goes beyond merely solving the problem to deliver important improvements. Understood in this sense, results are improvements in an organization's ability to achieve its objectives and function efficiently and profitably.
Ultimately, you have to ask the customer what he or she values. When you look back on this project,what do you hope to see as a consequence? How will the organization be better than it is now? What measures will you use to determine whether or not you got good value for the money?
As you question your customer about how he or she will measure Success, make sure the results and outcomes you are noting meet three criteria:

What makes this problem worth solving ?

What makes this need one that is worth addressing?
Try to look below the surface. Ask yourself why? Why now? As we said previously, there are all kinds of problems and needs that every business confronts almost daily. Most of them will never get fixed,because there just not important enough. So what makes this situation one that can't be ignored? What makes this the right time to take action? Who in the organization is being affected by the problem? What corporate objectives are being blocked? What outside pressures are making this problem something that cannot be ignored? For example, if we go back to our sample problem statemen from above, here are some questions we might ask:
Why does the FAA need a course on customer service and total quality principles? Why do they need it now? Why do they want to combine those two topics in the same course? Why is the course intended for both hourly and management staff? To what extent have recent changes in the aviation industry contributed to the need for this training? We are going to be asking more questions in the next post. Remember to leave a comment to my post, you are welcome.

Ask yourself these questions

(1)What did we sell or propose to provide?
Starting from your own products and services is usually comfortable and easy. Just don't stay theree.
(2) Why did the customer need that service, product, or expertise?
Looking back at previous opportunities,you probably have a better insight into what was going on than you did at the time you wrote the proposal. What was the real reason they were looking for the particular solution you
provided?
(3) Why couldn't the customer wait?
What made this need urgent? Was there a compelling event looming in this customer's business life cycle that had to be addressed? Was there a competitive situation which the company could not endure? Was there a market opportunity?
(4) Why couldn't the customer solve the problem internally?
And what was it about the solution that made it necessary to go outside the company to contract with your firm to get it? Specialized expertise? Speed of delivery? Equipment? Perhaps this isn't part of the customer' core business competency?
The goal here is to understand the problem, define it accurately, and use it as the starting point for what you bid.

One way to start recognizing customer needs

A web search might turn up press releases and news stories that suggest what the problem is.Sometimes a visit to web sites run by your prospective client's competitors will be revealing.The competitors may be hinting at weaknesses or problems that your proposal is intended to fix.
How else can you find out what the customer's needs are? One way to start recognizing customer needs is to work backwards from existing projects or contracts you have with similar companies for similar products or services.In other words,if you have written this kind of proposal before,perhaps reasons that drove that opportunity are relevant in this new opportunity.