A society secretary writes on a Tuesday. Twelve players, four nights, somewhere warm in February, and a budget he describes as \u00absensible\u00bb.<\/p>\n
You build a golf travel proposal with three resorts in it. Three sets of rates, three stay and play programmes, three sets of photographs.<\/p>\n
He replies within the hour. \u00abBrilliant, thanks. I’ll take these to the lads and come back to you.\u00bb<\/p>\n
Eleven days later he has not come back to you.<\/p>\n
When you chase, he says the group is still deciding. Someone wants to look at Portugal. They might leave it until next year.<\/p>\n
You did the work. Three availability requests, three suppliers, three programmes. Three times the effort of a lazy quote.<\/p>\n
That is the part worth looking at.<\/p>\n
First, credit where it belongs.<\/p>\n
Sending three options is not laziness. It is the opposite. It is a refusal to push a client into something, it is respect for a man spending other people’s money, and it is scar tissue from the one time somebody asked whether you had looked at anything else.<\/p>\n
Operators who send a single option because it is the only one they checked do exist. Everyone in this trade can spot them in a paragraph. That is not you, which is exactly why you brought three.<\/p>\n
But three options do not land as generosity. They land as homework.<\/p>\n
You know that one of those resorts has all its courses inside the property and the other one means twenty five minutes of coach every morning. You know which sheet fills first in January. You know which one absorbs a spread of handicaps from 8 to 26 without half the group hating day two.<\/p>\n
He knows none of that. He has three PDFs and a Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n
And when someone has no criteria to compare with, they compare the only line they can read unaided. The number at the bottom.<\/p>\n
You built that auction yourself, and you built it three ways.<\/p>\n
There is a closing question at the end of this, one line, that decides whether he answers this week or in three. It is at the end because on its own it does nothing.<\/p>\n
A client asking for a golf trip is not asking for alternatives.<\/p>\n
He is asking someone with better judgement than his own to choose, and to say why. That is the product. Course access is not the product. Half the market has course access.<\/p>\n
Three comparable options turn a specialist into a brochure.<\/p>\n
There is a second effect that does more damage than it looks. When the three sit at roughly the same price, the client quietly concludes that you do not mind which one he takes. That all three are fine by you. That there is no real reason to prefer any of them.<\/p>\n
If it does not matter to you, it does not matter to him.<\/p>\n
And a trip that stops mattering is never cancelled outright. It gets postponed. Then postponed again, which is the version you never hear about.<\/p>\n
This rarely gets factored in when the document is being built.<\/p>\n
Your proposal is not read in your office. It is forwarded. It ends up in a WhatsApp group with twelve men in it, on a kitchen table on a Sunday night, or in the inbox of a finance director who has never held a club.<\/p>\n
You are not there to explain anything.<\/p>\n
If you sent three equivalent options, that group does what groups always do. Two people back different resorts. One says the third is steep. Someone suggests waiting to see if anything better comes up. The thread dies without a decision.<\/p>\n
Nobody said no. Nothing happened at all, which is worse, because nothing is invisible in your pipeline until the window has gone.<\/p>\n
If you sent one recommendation with a reason attached, the reason is what gets forwarded. And the reason has your name on it.<\/p>\n
The first time, building them.<\/p>\n
Three availability requests, three suppliers on three different response clocks, three programmes assembled by hand, three chases to get answers back. A third of that work is wasted by design, and that is the good outcome, where he picks one of them.<\/p>\n
The second time, defending them.<\/p>\n
When the questions come back, they come back about all three. Every round of questions is another week, and the decision window on a GIT block is not set by your client. It is set by rooms and tee sheets. January is decided in September, not in November, which is the same reason what you can actually promise on tee times<\/a> is worth being precise about early.<\/p>\n This is what the operators who close a group in two emails have in common. It is not a method anyone invented. It is what is left when you take everything else out.<\/p>\n One. The line that carries the reason.<\/strong><\/p>\n One sentence explaining why this one and not the others, written so the client can repeat it as his own.<\/p>\n \u00abI am sending you here because there are twelve of you between 8 and 26, and it is the only one of the three where the 26 does not have a miserable week while the 8 is bored.\u00bb<\/p>\n Nobody forwards a fourteen page PDF. People forward a sentence. Write it yourself, or he will write a worse one for you.<\/p>\n Two. The choice, with a name and dates on it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Not \u00abwe could look at February\u00bb. The 9th to the 13th of February.<\/p>\n A trip without dates is an idea, and ideas get discussed. A trip with dates is a plan, and a plan forces somebody to say yes or no.<\/p>\n Three. A second option that replaces rather than competes.<\/strong><\/p>\n The alternative does not disappear. It moves, and it changes job.<\/p>\n It does not sit beside the first one in the same table with the same weight. It comes after, with a stated and different reason. \u00abIf budget is the thing that decides this, that one works, on the understanding that you lose the two holes on the water and you are on a coach every morning.\u00bb<\/p>\n Now he is not comparing two similar products, which he cannot do. He is choosing between two criteria, which he can do in under a minute.<\/p>\n Four. The reason it cannot wait three weeks, when that is true.<\/strong><\/p>\n If the rooms are on option until the 30th, say so. If those tee times are the last ones before a club event, say so.<\/p>\n And when there is no real deadline, do not manufacture one. False urgency is audible, and it works once per client. Real urgency is a favour: you are telling him something he cannot see from where he stands.<\/p>\n Here is the one I owed you.<\/p>\n Most proposals end the same way. \u00abAny questions at all, just let me know. What do you think?\u00bb<\/p>\n \u00abWhat do you think\u00bb cannot be answered in thirty seconds. It requires sitting down, reopening three documents and forming a view. So it gets answered on Thursday. Or the Thursday after that.<\/p>\n What does get answered quickly is a closed question with a date inside it.<\/p>\n \u00abShall I hold the tee times for the 9th to the 13th until Friday, or would you rather I looked at the following week?\u00bb<\/p>\n Look at what that line does. It does not ask for a five figure decision. It asks for a two second choice between two easy things, and both of them leave you working.<\/p>\n He might come back with \u00abthe following week, please\u00bb. That is a good outcome. You are no longer waiting, you are handling something specific with a date on it, and he has said his first word. The second one is always easier to get than the first.<\/p>\n There is one case, in fifteen years of watching this.<\/p>\n When the client has told you he needs to compare, because he has to justify the choice to somebody else. A committee, a board, a corporate client whose procurement rules demand three quotes.<\/p>\n Then the three options are not a menu. They are paperwork.<\/p>\n And even then it goes out with the recommendation marked in writing, above the table, not below it. There is still one that you chose, and there is still a reason. The other two are there so he can show he did the work.<\/p>\n Outside that case, every extra option in a golf travel proposal is one more reason for the decision to slide.<\/p>\n A client who gets three options remembers that you sent him prices.<\/p>\n A client who gets one recommendation with a name, dates and a reason remembers that you told him where to go. He is the one who calls you first next year, before he looks at anything himself.<\/p>\n The difference is not the courses, or the rate, or the photography in the PDF. It is whether anybody committed to anything.<\/p>\n Choosing on a client’s behalf is uncomfortable. You own the choice afterwards. It is also the thing he is paying for, and the only part he cannot get by typing the destination into a search bar. The same instinct sits behind what to negotiate with a destination once the rate stops moving<\/a>, and behind qualifying an enquiry before you price it<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe four parts of a recommendation that can be forwarded<\/h2>\n
The closing question<\/h2>\n
When three options are the right answer<\/h2>\n
What is left when somebody chooses<\/h2>\n
If you have a group stuck on \u00abI’ll come back to you\u00bb<\/h2>\n