The Merry-Go-Round Summary and Analysis

The word processing involved in every pitch book development is phenomenal. Each step of the way, documents are sent to the department, returned to the associate, reviewed, sent to the vice-president or director, revised, returned to word processing, and on and on and on. This continual receipt and return of documents occupies forty to fifty percent of an associate's time during the pitch development process, and woe be unto any associate who made enemies in that department. Most word processors were "wanna be" actors, singers or dancers, and were paid $20 an hour to perform tasks they neither liked nor attacked with gusto. To illustrate the merry-go-round of word processing, review and revision, Rolfe and Troob give an example of a pitch book development for a telecommunications company, as follows:

Once the data was in, the various parts of a...