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A large part of the budget selling strategy may be determined by the nature of the budget review
audience, whether it is one person or a group of people. Information that may prove essential to the
successful budget approval effort includes:
• Strategies that have succeeded or failed in the past.
• Pet peeves or special likes of review members.
• A variety of other committee characteristics.
Make a Professional Presentation
Not all managers approach the budgeting process with the same level of enthusiasm. By the time
budget review arrives, some managers just want to get it over with. Such an attitude can easily show
during the budget review process. Review committees may interpret it as disdain for one‟s job and
one‟s management function in general. Often the result is unfavorable action on the budget proposals
under review.
A professional presentation includes:
• Enthusiasm and polish.
• A neat, concise, and understandable budget proposal.
• Ample supporting documentation.
• A willingness and ability to answer relevant questions.
Quantify the Material
Because most resource allocation decisions are in some way affected by their cost-benefit
relationships, it is necessary to quantify both the costs and benefits of virtually all budget proposals.
Cost estimation is seldom easy, but it is usually far easier than the measurement of benefits. Even in
the private sector, benefits are not always easy to measure in terms of the corporate goals of
profitability and liquidity. In the not-for-profit sector, benefit measurement is even more difficult. For
example, how does one measure the benefits of 20 new park rangers, 10 new police cars, or a
decorative fountain in the city park? Obviously the quantification process would be different for each
of these, and direct comparisons could be inconclusive. Yet, such comparisons may be necessary in
arriving at final budget allocations.
It is easy to dismiss the value of quantification when the resulting numbers are hard to compare
with other budget proposals, or the numbers are hard to verify. Nevertheless, some quantitative
support typically is better than mere general statements about the desirability of the budget proposal.
Budget salesmanship should be approached with the same ingenuity that is found in the external
marketing effort. If certain budget proposals have benefits that are difficult to quantify directly,
various types of statistics might support the projects in an indirect way. For example, if a police
department wants to justify 10 new police officers, it might offer supporting statistics on rising
population in the community, rising crime rates, or relatively low per-capita police cost ratios.
Although none of the suggested statistics measures direct benefits, they may be more useful in
swaying a budget review committee than a vague statement about the value of more officers. Statistics