>My advice to Pat stands as originally written. Find someone who actually has the power to influence the final decision. Spending three days persuading middle-level, or maybe even non-technical, contacts, even with good advice such as that copied above, may prove useless. Then again, if the company is small enough, I may be off-base here. It depends on so many factors.

Understood. Management needs to appraise prospective solutions before they make a decision. They may not care about the nuts and bolts of the solution as long as they are confident that the provider can and will deliver. Management also seems to put a lot of weight in something written down in the form of a proposal. They may even prefer to read over a short, consise and to-the-point blue print of the prospective provider's understanding of their requirement, before a meeting. Nothing fancy - no power point presentation with details of screen layouts and so -on. Just a few sheets of simple text explaining the offer. The secret to getting management's ear is being able to comunicate a plan to implement what they need to save or make money for their company (get them promoted or bump their Christmas bonus).

We need to be sensitive to the fact that companies get burned a lot. In many cases, there may have been a succession of consultants (as well as in house attempts) to solve the problem. I once asked an associate: "What is a consultant?". He replied that a consultant was: ".. someone who told you they were a consultant." Management needs to feel confident that their problem can be solved. The person that offers them that "confidence" will be the person that gets the job. But you're right - underlings are just protecting their turf, so you got to get managements attention. It's always easier to get them to look at a simple written proposal first, rather than an immediated face to face. Besides, the act of writing the proposal also give the prospective provider a chance to understand what needs to be done.

So use the first tier (the mis/it people) to get an idea of what needs to be done. Then write the proposal and have it forwarded to management with a PS requesting a meeting. AND always, make everyone you commumicate with, feels like they contributed.
RANT OFF
Terry