17 Gathering and Tailoring Reusable Content OMETIMES WE HAVE TO DEPEND ON OTHER PEO- ple and it's frustrating. As proposal writers, for example, we often have to turn to subject matter experts or salespeople for the content we need. As sales professionals, we often need colleagues in marketing or the pro- posal operation to find specific content that we can use in making our case to a prospect. The first problem with this situation is that people often don't write very well. If you are asking them to create something from scratch, what you get may not be usable. A subject matter expert may answer a techni- cal question in an RFP with a torrent of Geek. When subject matter ex- perts write, they often don't have much sense of how to communicate to non-experts. They don't have any real experience in developing cus- tomer-oriented content. What to do? Give them a form to fill out. That will simplify the process for both of you and will reduce the amount of rework you end up doing. If you need a subject matter expert to describe the features of a new product, for example, and you want to make sure he or she doesn't just describe the technical aspects of those features, consider using a page like the following: Feature: Why it matters to a customer: (Greater reliability? Increased through- put? Reduced maintenance costs? Etc.) S Name: Description: Function in the system: American Management Association www.amanet.org 181