Is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) Really the best?

Among the various tools available for analyzing and Categorizing personalities, one of the most useful is the Myers-Briggs [Personality] Type Indicator. It is used by career councelors, family and marital therapists, Educators, and many others to help people understand themselves and others better. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-reporting test that indicates an individual's likely preferences on four pairs of opposing personality tendencies: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.
The first pair has to do with the way people prefer to interact with the world. When you are on a plane, do you hope that no one sits next to you, or do you welcome a bit of interaction? Would you rather read a proposal or watch a presentation?
The second pair indicates the two general ways people prefer to gather data. Some people, the "sensors," are oriented toward facts by their nature. They tend to be very literal in their use of words. They need to look at all the details before reaching a conclusion. Their opposites, the "intuitives," find details boring and distracting. They prefer the big picture and appreciate the value of the generalist in an organization. Intuitives are often keen interpreters of nonverbal messages.
The third pairing, the thinking/feeling dichotomy, focuses on how people prefer to make decisions. Thinkers look at issues objectively, reaching conclusions based on what is logical and fair rather than on what makes people happy. They find logic, facts, and technical detail more credible and appealing than emotion. Feelers, by contrast, consider a good decision to be one that builds consensus and harmony. They often make decisions by asking how any given course of action will affect the people involved. They Would consider service and quality issues to be as important as price. Do come back for the analysis of the final pairing. You are welcome.

Adjusting for personality type

As Cicero has indicated, then, to Write a winning proposal, you need to consider three key factors about the audience: 1. Personality type ("think my thoughts")
*detail -oriented * Pragmatic * Consensus-oriented * Visionary 2. Level of expertise ("speak my words")
* Expert * Informed * Familiar * Unfamiliar 3. Role in the decision process ("feel my feelings")
* Ultimate authority * User * Gatekeeper To appeal to and hold the interest this broad spectrum of readers, you must balance many presentation skills, providing enough technical data to please the highly informed, detail-oriented customer, but not so much that visionaries will be bored or the Uninformed audience intimidated. Adjusting for personality type; The first factor about your decision maker maker is his or her personality type, by which I mean the individual's preferences regarding information gathering, information analysis, and communication styles. In fact, there are two questions to ask: What kind of personality type does my decision maker have? And what kind do I have? I guarantee that if you don't consciously think about the customer's personality, you will inevitably create a proposal that is exactly the kind you would like to receive. Do not forget to come back for the next one "MBTI" Indicator

Analyzing the Audience

The last element of Cicero's formula is vital. You need to use words the customer will understand. And if there's a discrepancy between the language your audience uses and what you use, you should drop your own usage and mimic the audience. Your readers will understand more, feel more comfortable with your proposal, and be more likely to adopt your recommendations.
Cicero has given us the word: You must consider your audience when writing proposals. It's crucial. Ignoring or misunderstanding the audience dooms hundreds, probably thousands, of proposals to failure every year, proposals that otherwise answer the needs or solve the problems of the corporations soliciting them.
The problem is that most people write proposals under duress. And most of us, when we're feeling stressed, will do something we're confident we can do well. In the case of proposal writing, we'll create the kind of proposal that we would like to receive and we'll include the kind of content we are confident we can do pretty well. If we are technical and detaile-oriented by nature, we will create proposals that are technical and detailed. But how likely is it that the client will have the same attitudes and personality traits that we have? And even if the client does have a similar personality to ours, how likely is that he or she will be comfortable with the same language we are? Sign up for my newsletter.

How to Understand the Customer

What does your Customer care about? What matters? If your proposal is screen of all submissions with the goal of eliminating those that are not appropriate, that person is looking for reasons to disqualify or reject proposals. Of course,the reasons have to be "safe" and defensible, or for a lack of fit with engineering, legal, or contractual specifications.
If the decision maker or recommender is a hands-on user of your product or service,that person is probably most concerned with the reliability, user-friendliness, and productivity of what your're offering. The person wants to know if it will it make life easier or harder. Will it work with existing systems or equipment? Will it require changing familiar and comfortable habits of work?
Finally, if the decision maker is the Ultimate authority, the one who controls the checkbook, the one who says yes or no and who can overrule the recommendations of other members of the decision team, that person is probably looking at bottom-line issues of cost, productivity, return on investment, or other measures of business performance.

If you wish to persuade me you must think my thoughts

Old Cicero doesn't cut us any slack here. This is mandatory. Not "it would be a good idea if" or "beneficial results may derive from..."No. You must. And he's right, because what he goes on to emphasize is the necessity of developing your persuasive arguments from the client's perspective. One of the keys to thinking like the client is to try to see things from his or her point of view. In fact, that may be the fundamental key to all persuasion: getting outside your own head and away from your own interests and trying to get inside the decision maker's head. You must think my thoughts.
To think the thoughts of your client, you need to watch for clues regarding his or her preferences in terms of receiving and processing information. The challenge you face as a proposal writer is twofold: you need to know what your own preferences are, since you will tend to write a proposal that you would like to receive; and you need to know what your Customer's preferences for receiving and processing information are, since you want to adapt your own style to match his or hers more closely. We'll look at specific ways to do this shortly.

The Cicero Principle

The essence of Client-based persuasion can be summarized in the words of the Roman orator and statesman Cicero: "if you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words." This is great advice, so excellent that it is the basis for this entire blog posts. When we break it down, phrase by phrase, we can see just how profound it is. IF YOU WISH TO PERSUADE ME.............
Why do you wish to persuade anybody of anything? Basically, you're hoping to influence their behavior,thinking, or attitude. If the context of the persuasion is sales like the best Auction sales, here you're trying to motivate the audience to purchase your product or service.

Where to Put Your Client-Centered Insights, Not a direct Promotion.

The whole proposal should be oriented toward the client,we are not talking about promoting your products now. But it's particularly important to put as much of your CLIENT-CENTERED insight up front as possible. That means including the client in your cover letter, title page, and executive summary.
One simple way to check whether your proposals are client centered or self centered is to count how many times your company's name appears in the executive summary compared to the Customer's name. The Customer should appear at least three times more often, because a good executive summary will focus primarily on the Customer's business situation, their needs, their desired outcomes, and how your SOLUTION will match up against their expectations. If it's all about you, it's a bad executive summary.

The last six of the Twelve questions for developing a consultative proposal

6. How inclusive (or limited) is this proposal? Could it be focused more narrowly or expanded to include more? Should it be? 7. How can I prove my claims, particularly regarding potential ROI or competitive superiority for my products or services? What kinds of evidence will this client find convincing? How can I illustrate or support my claims? 8. What might an opponent say against my proposal? What aspects of my recommendations might provoke resistance or disbelief? 9. Does this proposal clearly suggest that some sort of action must be taken? Does it indicate the consequences of inaction? 10. If the proposal includes a prediction or estimation of results, how accurate is this likely to be? What is it based on-factual data,observed trends, comparisons to other situations,intuition,or what? Am I guaranteeing results? 11. What are the total costs for this client to undertake the course of action the proposal recommends? Does this include both time and money costs? Are these costs linked to a calculation of return on investment, payback period, total cost of ownership, or some other measure of value? 12. Does my proposal involve the coordination of large numbers of people or resources? If so,does the proposal make clear how this coordination effort will be managed? Register or follow me to recieve my updates it's free.

Twelve Questions for Developing a Consultative Proposal

Lets take the first six of the questions this time:1 What must I establish about myself and my company so that the client will believe what I say? 2. What is the key recommendation I am making? How does this recommendation address the client's needs? Have I substituted my own sense of what the client ought to do for what it thinks it needs? 3. What specific opportunities for improving the client's productivity or profitability am I presenting in this proposal? Have I demonstrated these opportunities in enough detail that the decision maker will find them credible? 4. What are the meanings of the key words I am using? Will the client understand them? Have I minimized the use of jargon? 5. How can I contrast my proposal with other, similar proposals?(Try to anticipate how the competition may bid and -preferably without disparaging or naming names - ghost the competition by showing the weakness of those approaches and superiority of yours.) 6. How inclusive (or limited) is this proposal? Could it be focused more narrowly or expanded to include more? Should it be?

Accept the need and study the client's situation

Respond to the client's definition of the need,but also offer an alternative perspective. You could discuss the situation frankly in the executive summary as a way of introducing your proposal. State that while you are fully prepared to respond to the statement of work as written in the original RFP, and included a response that proves you can do exactly what the client has asked for, your analysis has led you to develop another approach to solving the client's problem. You can get affordable e-books here that will boost you more. In addition,because this alternative approach will be less costly or more effective (or both),you feel obliged to at least present it as an option.
One other technique is to offer a phased approach to solving the total problem. This is reasonably safe approach to take, particularly when the client has not misdefined the need but simply has not requested the total solution that he or she needs. By structuring your proposed solution in terms of phases, with which phase priced separately and each phase requiring a joint review of progress and commitment to the next phase, you provide a structure in which the client can change direction without scrambling the budget or losing face.