Proposal War Stories

Every marketer has stories of their worst proposal disasters.  Here's a couple that I hope you find amusing.

In the early 90’s, wanting to keep pace with the quality of our competitors’ proposals, our firm bought one of the first color printers. It used specially coated paper and colored cellophane on three cylinders. It was a thrill to have the ability to produce color documents in-house.

A short time later, I was working on a particularly large document. I decided to use three-ring binders, because of the size of the document, and because I thought the client would be so impressed by our proposal that they would want to keep it on their bookshelf (really!?!).

After we reproduced the sets, we used a drill press in the repro room to bore holes in them for the three-ring binding. By the time we bored through the sixth stack of paper, the drill bit was getting quite hot. Suddenly, we began to smell an odor that you never want to encounter during production of your proposal: smoke!

Smoke equals fire. The proposal was on fire. The hot drill bit had ignited the chemical coating on the color pages. Cut to the end; the proposals arrived on time to the client, but they were a little charred around the binding and smelled a little smoky.

And if you think you’re out of the woods when your proposal is successfully printed, bound, and boxed for delivery, an awful lot can happen between your office and your client’s office. There was another proposal for a project that we had been chasing for over a year. We worked in an office across the street from the City’s contracts department, so when the proposal was finished early, I figured it would be no sweat to deliver; all I had to do was carry the box across the street. I thought to myself, “What could possibly happen?” I’ll tell you what can happen, you can get hit by a car, while crossing the street.

Again, the proposal was delivered on time, a little blood on the box, but still intact.

For every proposal, there’s a story. That’s what makes them memorable and what makes the life of a marketer an adventure. You learn from every one.