Sep 28 • General discussion
How To Get Your Business Proposal Accepted Every Time!
Is it necessary to write a proposal for customers before you begin working with them on your "productized service" or a physical product?
If you do, what is your proposal's success rate? Is it more than 90%? If not, you should reconsider what your proposal should say to your potential customer.
Most business owners and salespeople, understandably, focus on themselves when writing proposals. As business owners, we believe our company is fantastic. And we want to tell people how great our business is, which is a very noble thing to do, but from the perspective of a potential customer or client, they're not so interested in our business, our credentials, what awards we've won, what certificates we have, and how long we've been in business, especially if you've already had an initial discovery meeting with them.
They want to know if you understand them. Do you understand the issues? Where are they doing business? They want to know that you understand their business or problems and can demonstrate that you have a solution for them.
So, what constitutes an effective proposal?
An effective proposal includes using a good template and demonstrating that you understand the issues. So, after having an initial discovery meeting with a potential new client and asking them questions about what's important to them.
What are the problems they're having?
What do they require help with?
What are their desired outcomes and objectives?
And then, when putting together a proposal, it's critical to basically throw back or incorporate those words. So, as they read the proposal, they think, Yes, this is fantastic. You understand both me and the business.
So, while we want to write about ourselves, the client wants to read about themselves, which has a lot to do with our brain's original reptilian part. It's very me-centered and we focus, so that's what we need to focus on to catch their attention and demonstrate that we truly understand what they want. My suggestion is to keep your proposal to two pages. So it's really short and succinct, but it just shows the person you're pitching to that okay, yep. You're going over all of the points, you understand everything I need, and it makes it very easy for them to decide that yes, they do want to work with you.
So what does the template look like?
I start any proposal with, “to recap what we discussed” and then follow the topics below:
The topics are :
- The first thing you do is do a situation assessment. So, you basically tell the person where they stand.
- Then you have your goal. So those are the expected results, and you can have both concrete and abstract results.
- The next part is about value. So that's about how much it's worth to the client to reach the goals. What are the risks of not taking your proposal and doing nothing or going with someone else?
- Metrics are the next topic. So, measuring progress from the client's point of view. So, what do they care about? How would they define success?
- Next, we'll talk about timing, which means the start date, the end date, and any tasks along the way.
- The next point is about accountability. So that means both sides are responsible. So, that's a big deal. You need to state what each party must do to make a success of any project such as that emails are answered within 24 or 48 hours and calls are only made during work hours. So you can be as detailed as you want, and that can also protect you and help you know what your responsibilities are. I also think it's important to put the responsibilities back on them, and to include things like the nature of the collaboration.
- Next credentials. Now, you can put this in if you want to, but you don't have to. I usually don't put in passwords, but you don't have to. So, if you wanted to say a little bit about your business and, say, some of the awards you've won or other things like that, you could do that here, but I don't.
- Terms and conditions. So that includes fees, other terms and conditions, inclusions, exclusions, things like that.
- Last acceptance, which is a signature, put your price in there as well and and any deadline for accepting the proposal.
I recently dealt with this with a client on my Soar to Scale Programme. One of the growth levers they were attempting to pull was an increase in their proposal win rate, which was currently around 50%. And I asked them, "How did your proposal look?" How long will it take? They replied, "Oh, it's probably about 12 pages." That's a lot of information for a company to sift through.
So I took this 12-page proposal and condensed it down to two pages, based it on the template above, and used the different headings. Then I had a little training session with the sales team about this new process and just told them, "Hey, this is what we need to do. This is what we concentrate on during the initial discovery process. It's all about knowing what's important."
And about two weeks ago, my contact said called me, and she said, "We've pitched that new proposal three times, and he said we've got them all." We've got three. that's a 100% success rate where they previously had a 50% success rate. Early days, but it's looking good for the future.
If you feel you'd like someone to look at your proposal template and help you improve it's success rate - contact me
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How To Get Your Business Proposal Accepted Every Time!
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