Writing a proposal for management with NABC.

One morning, while you are taking the elevator to get to your office, you meet the CIO, you have 3 minutes time-window where you have the attention of CIO and you need to convince him about an idea you have. What would you say ? In which order you will discuss your ideas and arguments?

We all see that scene in movies where the corporate-fox-hero meets the CEO and 3 minutes later  he gets out of the room with a big smile on his face. They never show what happened in between. Well this article is about Elevated Pitch.

We Developers, always have a hard-time explaining ourselves in an executive sort of way.  One of the biggest mistakes: we start by explaining an approach to a problem only us are aware of.  We always assume that everybody is aware with our everyday work problems and challenges.

Elevated pitch used in engineering commercials, speeches and seminars to capture attention and provoke actions.  Also In today’s sort of hierarchical organizations, could be used in writing internal project proposals or sell  new ideas to management.

A Pitch is:

To attempt to sell or win approval for; promote;advertise:

to pitch breakfast foods at a sales convention.

NABC framework

Need, Approach, Benefit and Competition . Exactly in this order you should organize your pitch.

Need

What is the problem? what are you talking about? Why the audience should listen to you.

A lot of people have problems that they suffer of, but never thought of them as problems. They mostly take it for granted  and never consider a solution or change. The objective is to make them aware of that problem and how much they are loosing by not acting about it, and eventually that a feasible solution is available for them if they reach out and grab it.

This is very important, it is the HOOK that should capture the attention of your audience. Of course you have to be very much aware of your audience and what they care about.

It goes like this :  We are spending 80% of out department time in maintaining periodical  jobs or <use-your-imagination-here> .

Don’t forget to be prepared with proof in case you are asked about your data. A smart person will ask you something like this : How did you know that 80% of your department’s time is consumed in maintaining periodical jobs?

Approach

Now you can talk about your solution, but not so much into detail, remember that some people don’t have time, and they are only willing to spare few minutes of their precious time and brain power for you.

You need to explain only an overview and leave the details later. Don’t take it for granted that you have a YES just yet.

It goes like this: We need to automate production with some batch processing tools. and according to my survey the best one I found was product XYZ. Or we need to develop our own.

Benefit

Here you can talk about blue-skies and green-lush-fields. You talk about how the world will look like after the approach is applied to the need mentioned in the first point. Some people take the discussion form the other end and explain that all doors of hell will break loose if their approach is not implemented. Anyway it depends on you and whom are you talking too. Again you have to be aware of your audience and how to Hook them up.

Money is important, so here you could mention cost and saved expenses.  sort of a short feasibility study.

It Goes like this: we could reduce our time for operational activities to 20% and direct the saved 30% towards enhancing production and performance tuning. Of course one the most important things everybody cares about today, is: Money. If you can convert the benefit into money it would be great. (don’t forget to have proof of your claims ready in case someone questions your numbers).

Competition

Usually when someone is making a speech or a presentation at the end, some time is left for Q&A (questions and answers). and one of the most questions that follow after such a speech is:

“What about using solution X or Y ? have you considered they could be a better approach to solve your problem or satisfy your  need?”

In this section you pre-answer those questions by providing the other alternates you have considered and why you are not favoring them as an approach. It proves you made your homework.

Also in this section you could provide numbers about costs or problems of other alternatives.

Conclusion:

One of the mistakes I used to do before I was introduced to NABC, was start with the approach and benefit with the assumption that everybody is aware of the problem.  NABC is there to help avoiding the problem self-expression.

In Conclusion:

• Follow NABC in order.
• Be aware of your audience.
• Do your homework.
• Prepare proof for your arguments.
• Don’t be single minded, consider other alternatives.
• Don’t assume that everybody already knows everything you know. Wear your audience’s shoes, put on their hats or even wear their coats, do what ever it takes to know what will hook them up.
• Be optimistic all the time: Don’t be intimidated by negative reactions, mostly it is just a way to test your confidence.
• Be professional, don’t impose an approach that doesn’t make sense.
• Educate your audience about the subjects they lack without them having to ask about it.

NABC is just a framework. Don’t impose it just use it if it is helpful to you. In other words, just let it flow.

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