“Yep!” Preparing proposals is enough to make most people cringe. They take too long to prepare. They’re absolutely boring to write and a real pain in the neck.

Sound familiar?

Having said all that, proposals have an enormous bearing on whether or not someone is going to buy from you, so it makes sense to ensure that your proposal sells. The only problem with doing that is “normally” to create a really “flash” proposal takes time and that’s something that most people simply don’t have to spare.

If you’ve tried proposal templates before in an effort to save time, you’ll know that unless it easily customisable, the document comes out looking like an unpersonalised template which can leave a bad taste in your prospects’ mouths.

Inside this article I’ll show you how to create a winning proposal that can have a dramatic effect on your conversion rates and then how to create a “template” so it looks as if you’ve written it from scratch for
each individual prospect.

5 reasons why proposals are so very important

Some sales people think that because they’re great at selling face-to-face, they don’t need to put a lot of time or effort into their proposals. That’s where many of them come undone.

Unless your prospect hands you a cheque “on the spot”, there’s still a chance they won’t purchase from you.

After all, once you’ve left their office, and a day or two passes, that’s when the excitement levels start to fade and the fears and concerns start to rise to the surface.

1. The competition: There’s a fair chance that your prospective client has approached one or more of your competitors too so you’re not the only company in the running for their business. Sure, your face-to-face presentation may have “wowed” a prospect but if you’re the first person they saw, who’s to say that the other sales people didn’t do just as good a job at “wowing” them.

2. Selling to those visual types: For visual people, it gives a visual representation of your selling argument in its entirety so these types of people are more likely to take in what’s written on paper than what is explained to them.

3. Long lead times: If the decision making process takes some time, it’s naturally important that your proposal re-sells them on your product and business to jog their memory.

4. Convinces the “non-present” decision maker: In many situations, there’s a fair chance that all the decision makers may not have been present at your initial sales presentation. A proposal that epitomises “salesmanship in print” does the selling for you so the decision maker doesn’t need to rely solely on the feedback from the person you made direct contact with.

How to re-use your content without the text looking like it’s regurgitated and unpersonal

As I mentioned above, to achieve the most powerful results, the message needs to look like it’s personalised to that particular business YET if you were to do that, there’s a good chance you’d spend all your time writing proposals.

So, what’s the answer?

Your proposal master document will be made up of three types of information:

1. 100% templated material: You can develop a set structure for your proposal with set sections and some of these sections can be re-used verbatim time and time again eg. case studies.

2. Then there are other sections which, utilising macros built into your word-processing program, you can select from depending on the type of client. Depending on your macro programming skills you can actually have multiple-choice tick-boxes that you check and the copy that relates to those tick boxes is then automatically inserted into your document.

3. Totally personalised content. This applies to specific figures, strategies and ideas that you may include at the beginning or the end of the document to add to the sales appeal.

Creating the “meat”

As with a verbal sales presentation, your written sales presentation should have a beginning, a middle and an end.

The beginning addresses the prospect’s situation, thanks them for the opportunity and identifies with their specific needs.

The middle includes all the selling information about your product/service and company and …

The end includes the “move forward” strategy including an action plan and “the next step”.

It should also address the 6 questions of selling:

“Who, What, When, Why, Where and How”

… or more specifically:

What products and services do you sell?

Who is your target market?

Why do they need your product and your company?

How can you prove that your product or service fulfil their needs?

When do they need to make a decision?

Where can they get it? What’s the next step?

When creating your “template” document, answer each of these questions in detail.

1. The products and services you sell

List each product. The easiest way to do that is to (in the first instance) create a table like the one below and list the following elements against each product or service. List as many as you can think of.

Also list things like:

How does it compare with competing products

If selling services, what process do you go through to ensure the client receives results?

Once you’ve done that, then turn this information into sentences within block of text that talk about the product, and list the various benefits in order of importance.

This information can either be used in whole or you can create programmable functions that enable you to select the benefits that are most important to a particular client. (If you’re working with MS Word, we can help you do that in an effective manner.)

Create a table with the following headings:

Product

Feature

Advantage

Benefit

Investment (price)

What do they receive for their money

2. Who is your target market?

Some businesses sell the one product to different target markets with different sets of needs. Others sell a range of products with one target market for each type of product. Then others still have a broad range of products and services with a variety of target markets buying a variety of their products.

By articulating which target markets you sell various products and services to, you can then match various benefits of your products to best suit the unique needs of your various buyers.

For instance, let’s say you’re a business forms printer and you provide an in-house design and film preparation service, short turnaround times, precision quality and a great price. Some types of clients are more likely to be interested in the precision quality than the price and viceversa.

3. Why do they need your product and your company?

What are their buying needs? ….

Kris Mills has created a program called Tenders and Proposals that Sell which addresses the art of creating winning tenders and proposals in much greater detail. For more information on the program, simply click here OR if you would like assistance preparing a winning tender or proposal visit the Words that Sell website.

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