Proposals

Hi everybody and welcome to my video series. Today I wanted to talk to you about proposals, one of the most important documents that you could have, but often the most overlooked. 

I just wanted to challenge you to have a think about what’s on your proposals and how well are you winning business off the back of them. 

Are your proposals professional?

When I first started, I was very much like, I’m going to do a professional proposal. You can do it on Canva or PowerPoint. I was never a big fan of sending anything via email or on a Word document. I wanted it branded, I wanted it looking professional. So my question to you is, do your proposals to your clients look professional enough? 

What information do your proposals contain?

My second question to you guys is what information do you have on your proposals that help you win business? I think key information, and one of the things I changed up last year was I would, have this section about your challenges and what you need, and then I would almost like write what they’ve told me from the discovery call onto the proposal to make it a little bit more tailored and a bit more bespoke to make sure that they understand that I’ve been really listening to them.

For me, having a section around what your challenges are and how I can help is important. 

I also include information around pricing. I have testimonials. I have a couple of case studies on there. I have my T&C’s, I have anything that helps me sell myself, but not in a kind of, here’s a 25-page proposal document about how great I am. 

I try to keep it quite succinct 

I think for me the most important things are how I can help you, what you need, here’s some testimonials as social proof from clients that I’ve already worked with, and this is the process of how I work with you. I’ve seen some really great proposals from other suppliers because of my job as I have to review proposals for clients and I love it when they go, this is how we are going to work with you and set it out. I think that’s really important because I think it gives them your potential clients a real feel about how organised you are. 

Tracking success

Do you track your proposals? I track mine in terms of ones lost, won, pending. I want to understand what my hit rate is. I want to get feedback from clients if I don’t win a particular proposal. So I think there’s a whole process around making sure that they work for you, that they contain the right information, and that you monitor how successful they are. That way you can make tweaks to your proposals going forward. 

I hope those tips are useful and help you put a solid proposal plan in place!

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