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After spending countless hours over the last week thinking about, researching, designing, paper prototyping, and generally becoming an online proposal, a thought occurred to me, "Is the Independent Consultant (i.e. my audience) ready to walk away from the Paper Proposal?"  It’s not an easy question.

On the one hand, there’s no shortage of griping about the current proposal process, and rightfully so.  It’s a time sink, no matter how you look at it.  No one I know looks forward to creating or adapting pages after pages of Cover Sheets, Self Promotional Marketing Pieces, Tables of Contents, Executive Summaries, Project Scope Statements, Approach Summaries, Deliverable Overviews, Pricing, Discounting, and the kicker, Terms and Conditions associated with the proposal.  You might not have to add each of these to every proposal, or you might be lucky enough to leverage boilerplate language for a bunch of the pieces, but any paper pushing is too much paper pushing for most.  Next in line you get to deal with the inevitable discomfort associated with putting yourself and your hard earned prospect at the mercy of a couple of bound pages.   It would be one thing if the waiting was short, but everyone knows yes’s never come fast enough.  How long do you have to wait before you burst through your Client’s door demanding a response?  Polite email and phone follow-ups can only sustain you for so long.

On the other hand, the upside of so much time sunk into the development of your paper proposal is that it might be quite good.  If nothing else, every word that jumps off the page reflects you, your business, and your blood, sweat and earnest brain strain.  Some of you might even say the paper proposal is a differentiator for your practice.  You’ve read Allan Weiss’s "How to Write a Proposal That’s Accepted Every Time" 15 times, and can’t wait for the Client to utter the magic words "Shoot me over a Proposal".  Even if you haven’t had the chance to get your own Ph.D. in proposal writing, others amongst you might rightly appreciate the opportunity a paper proposal presents to express yourself in another medium to your Client.  Some things are easier said in a logo, a page layout, or a well-crafted paragraph.

My new perspective is one of fascination.  I don’t know if we can put any more thought into ways to make the proposal process better by bringing it online.  Even Dr. Weiss would be proud of our efforts to focus on the collaboration and communication between the consultant and the client above all else, taking advantage of the online world to promote a highly interactive process.  Having said that, I’m sure once we release it you’ll give us plenty of good recommendations for improvements, and I look forward to the learning.  But what I’m really anxious to find out is how many amongst you will be able to once and for all leave the paper behind.  Mavenlink is going to let you choose whether or not you want to attach that paper beauty, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll decide.