  Following the ideas behind the Feynman approach, a variational wave function
is proposed for the Fr\"ohlich model. It is shown that it provides, for any
value of the electron-phonon coupling constant, an estimate of the polaron
ground state energy better than the Feynman method based on path integrals. The
mean number of phonons, the average electronic kinetic and interaction
energies, the ground state spectral weight and the electron-lattice correlation
function are calculated and successfully compared with the best available
results.
