The answer may surprise you. And it could cost you.
 
Is the U.S. Postal Service still in business? Aside from the lifeline it’s been tossed by Amazon, you’d think it were. Sidewalk mailboxes are a thing of the past. Post offices have had their hours curtailed and their staffs pared—if they’re even still open. 
 
The one-word reason? Email. 
 
But you knew that. You knew that the advent—indeed, avalanche—of instant, not to mention free, written communication caught the postal system unawares, and they’re still reeling from the onslaught. 
 
So paper mail is dead. Along with printed mailers. Brochures. Leaflets. Paper. Ink. Staples. Glue. 
 
Right? 
 
Not so fast… 
 
Their business isn’t your business
 
A lot of people will jump to these same conclusions, because they’ll base them on the same parallel. The same assumption. 
 
But that assumption is a dangerous one. In short, it’s wrong. 
 
Comparing your marketing outreach to the death throes of the postal service assumes that you, and they, are in the same business. You’re not. You’re in the business of purveying your products and services. They’re in the business of delivering letters. Volumes are down, so they’re suffering. 
 
But your prospects aren’t disappearing. Nor are their intrinsic needs and predilections. That’s the big difference. 
 
You’re not the postal system. So don’t think like them. 
 
Here’s another, and perhaps easier, way to think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer. If you’re a customer of the postal system, you want to send something—like, perhaps, an invoice—as quickly and cheaply as possible. It may well be that you don’t need to send something physical anymore in the age of email, and so you pursue other options. 
 
But if you’re a prospect of your business, then things differ. That prospect wants to learn about you. They want to know what makes you better—or, even better, best. Why should they choose you over competitors? What kind of impression do you make with them?
 
Ta-dah. That’s the answer to the headline of this article. “Are brochures dead?” No effing way. 
 
Tactile sensations
 
We have a client that has put together incredibly sophisticated, beautiful, and expensive print brochures for its prospects. They’re so elegant, so valuable-looking, that virtually no recipient treats them as junk mail. It’s a little like those charities that send you a glassine envelope in the mail, and inside it, you can see that they’ve pasted a nickel there. Have you ever tossed that piece into the trash without opening it? Granted, that’s a different approach, but the goal is identical: You want the prospect to open the piece. 
 
Now that’s a concern of direct mail. It’s not the case with, say, a brochure that you’ll hand out at a trade show, or a leave-behind you’ll bring to a meeting. 
 
Yet there’s a factor that all of the above have in common. It’s their physicality. 
 
At this point, we can trash email to our heart’s content. It can include photos—gee! But you can barely control the very font in which it appears on the recipient’s screen, not to mention the layout. And since it’s an email, it will be no different than any other email in their in-box. 
 
Now switch to that printed piece. What size is it? What’s its form factor? Does it fold out? Does it include a cool little Easter egg inside, such as a gatefold? Does it have pockets for inserts or business cards?
 
And what does it feel like? Is it glossy? Silken? Linen-finished? Have you used spot varnish, so that certain sections artfully reflect the light while others absorb it? Have you employed metallic inks? Foil embossing? How much does the thing weigh? 
 
And what’s it look like? Does it employ an Apple-like indulgence of white space (we wrote an entire article on that topic which you’ll like)? Did you use big photos that bleed right out to the edge, and pull you, viscerally, into the content? Does the copy on one page entice you to turn to the next one—and are you pleasantly surprised when you get there? What fonts did you agonize over and finally choose? 
 
Every single one of those details is immediately apparent to the recipient. It can make or break your brand. 
 
In other words, it was all worth the effort.
 
The payoff
 
Here in the 21st century, awash with email, PDFs, websites, and social media, we at Copel Communications still do a surprising amount of work, every day, that eventually makes its way to a client’s prospect or customer by way of a printing press. Yep. As in “Gutenberg.” 
 
Our are clients ignorant? Are they throwing away their money? Are they failing to capture any ROI on these endeavors? Are they wasting their time, resources, and expense, on us? 
 
Heck no. They keep coming back for more. 
 
Brochures aren’t dead. They, and the power they provide, are simply overlooked, by far too many people. 
 
Need help with that next challenge, whether in print or online? Contact us. We’d love to put our skills and experience to work for you. 

Do you know the “Tupperware trick”?
 
A proposal, by its nature, is something you do on spec. You’re taking a gamble. You’re risking the time and effort you put into it, on the hopes that you’ll win and bring in new business. 
 
You knew that. 
 
But what you might not know is that there are ways to boost your proposal-writing efficiency and effectiveness, at the same time. And yes, Tupperware (a.k.a. little plastic containers for kitchen leftovers) will help you with this challenge. 
 
Step 1: Make the go/no-go decision
 
You’re not always asked to submit a business proposal. Sometimes, you’re responding to an RFP. Other times, you may be asked, but not be so sure you want to respond. 
 
This all leads to the crucial go/no-go decision. Here, you must decide whether to even draft your proposal in the first place. You must decide if the investment of time and effort will produce what you believe to be acceptable odds of winning. 
 
When we talk about “odds,” that’s necessarily squishy. But here’s what isn’t: The quality of the proposal you create. It’s got to be a stunner. Second-best won’t do. It won’t win. It won’t reflect well on you. It won’t get you invited back for future projects in case you don’t win this one. 
 
So the quality of your proposal is non-negotiable. It’s got to be great. That becomes a real factor in your go/no-go decision. 
 
Fortunately, as we’ll explain below, you can actually respond to more opportunities than you do now if you can cut the time and effort required for a stunning proposal. It’s simple math. 
 
Step 2: Define the challenge
 
Naturally, what the client needs will vary. That said, the challenge will fall within your wheelhouse. So you’ll need to define it in terms of discrete jobs and outcomes. Will it take five steps, or 50? How many resources are required? How long will it take? Will you need to bring in partners? Vendors? 
 
The answers to all of these questions will factor into your pricing. But don’t worry about that part right now. It’s easy to plug in the numbers when you’re almost done. 
 
Step 3: Search your library
 
Here is where we will—finally—uncover ways for you to become more efficient and effective; it’s also where we’ll reveal the “Tupperware trick.” Ready? 
 
We’re going to assume that you’ve already written lots of proposals before, so you have plenty of material to work from. We can also assume, pretty safely, that this is how you’ve been going about the task of generating new proposals, too: You start by scouring your files for proposals that are similar, and then cobble together a new one based on the relevant portions of the others. 
 
That is fine. It’s a good way to start. 
 
But it’s only a start. It needs to be optimized. 
 
We were recently called in to help a client develop a modular proposal library. “Modular proposal library” is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a nicely polished collection of proposal elements that you can assemble, Lego-like, with minimum time, effort, and customization required. Done right, it yields really sharp proposals that you can crank out with surprising speed. 
 
Of course, you say, that’s what you’d like to have. You’d certainly thought of doing it before. 
 
But then again, of course, you haven’t. It’s a challenge unto itself. It’s, frankly, why we were called in on this recent assignment. The client didn’t want to do it themselves. 
 
But you can. Just imagine: If you had a killer modular proposal library at your disposal right now, you could go after—and win—that much more business. Why not do it? 
 
The trick is knowing how. And thus the Tupperware solution. 
 
Step 4: Pare and consolidate
 
It’s really more of a Tupperware analogy than a solution. It goes like this: 
 
Think of the finite cabinet space in your kitchen. Think of the leftovers you need to pop into the fridge every night after dinner. Now think of your inventory of Tupperware: Odds are, it’s a motley collection. Some pieces were originally part of a matching set. Others were scavenged from deli-counter purchases or Chinese take-out. You may have a total of, say, 25 pieces. And those 25 pieces may span about eight or nine different sizes and shapes. 
 
Naturally, your inventory of lids will not total 25. It will be higher or lower, leaving you with orphaned containers, or orphaned lids. But that’s the least of your worries. 
 
The biggest problem here is inefficiency. Let’s say your average container holds 10 ounces. So, with 25 pieces, you’ve got a total capacity of 250 ounces. But since all of these pieces of Tupperware are different sizes and shapes, none of them nest within each other. They thus sprawl across a couple different cupboards, unnecessarily. 
 
What’s worse, when it’s time to save some leftovers after dinner, you need to hunt. You have to go through all 25 pieces to find one that’s an appropriate size. And then you have to hunt again through all your lids to find the one that fits the container you chose—assuming you have that lid in the first place. If you don’t, you need to start over. Hunting. Twice. Again. 
 
See how closely this compares to your business-proposal challenge? 
 
Incidentally, here’s the actual-kitchen-Tupperware solution: Decide on the minimum number of sizes you need, which would probably be: small, medium, and large (the last of which you shouldn’t really need many of, because “large” assumes that no one ate anything in the first place). Then go out and buy, say, ten apiece of each size.
 
What will this give you? 
 
Well, let’s assign some numbers here. If the small’s hold five ounces apiece, the medium’s hold ten, and the large’s hold 15, that’s (10 x 5) + (10 x 10) + (10 x 15) = 300 ounces of total capacity. 
 
So now your capacity has increased by 20 percent. Sure, it requires five more pieces than you’d had before—but here’s the important part—it now takes up a small fraction of the volume in your cupboard. Each size nests perfectly, so you only have three stacks: Small, Medium, and Large. And assuming they’re the same shape, you can nest the small’s within the medium’s, which in turn nest within the large’s. Meaning that you’re down to one stack. That’s 300 ounces of storage in a tiny, tiny amount of space. You can stack the three sizes of lids the same way. 
 
More importantly, this ends all of the “hunting” when it’s time to save leftovers. You simply need to decide which size you need, and then use it. Done. Just like that. 
 
And there’s one other big thing you need to do, which may be difficult or easy for you, depending upon your personality: You need to discard all of those old pieces of Tupperware. They served their purpose. They now are done. Don’t get sentimental. Chuck ‘em. 
 
The similarities between the Tupperware exercise and the creation of a killer modular proposal library are both manifold and stunning. You need to throw out what’s less than perfect. You want to cull the best of the best. You want to organize it so it’s ready for easy assembly at a moment’s notice, with zero “hunting.” 
 
All of these activities have very straightforward computer-based analogs. “Organizing” is simply clearly-named folders and sub-folders. The “best of the best” is basically just an assembly of Word docs—the fewer, the better. “Discarding the old Tupperware” means dragging outdated docs to an “Archive” folder. (You thought we’d say “Trash,” didn’t you? Nah. We’re not that radical. You never know when one of those old files might help.) 
 
When we created the modular proposal library for our client recently, we purposely created an oversized Word doc, with modules within it. It worked like this: When the client gets a new opportunity, they do a “Save as…” on that Word doc, and then go through it and simply delete the sections that aren’t applicable to that particular proposal challenge. All that’s left is some customizing at the beginning and the end, and determining (and plugging in) the appropriate price. What used to take hours, now takes minutes. 
 
Serve up a winner
 
Does all of the above require effort? You bet it does. This won’t happen on its own. But once it’s done, it pays for itself again and again and again. 
 
Now you know how to do it. So get started! And just in case you’d rather offload this challenge to a pro, contact us. We’d be delighted to help.