98 Proposals and how to write them

Okay... we are having a bad year, at least some of us are. The recession is hitting us and many areas of the economy are tightening their belts. In order to succeed we have to work harder to produce the same results, but to improve our results we will have to work smarter.

It is no longer good enough to let the customer know how much your products or services are and expect them to beat a path to your door. This is just not going to work. We need to be selling all the way and this includes how you get your price to your customer.

One of the many gripes I have with traditional selling is the way we send out “Quotations”.

A Typical quote will look something like this:

Quotations

Specifications: Details of the product offered, such as size, shape, design, etc.
Price: The current price offered. This section may also include some additional savings for bulk purchase.
Delivery: The lead time or delivery details.
Terms and conditions: This is the small print and will contain a large variety of disclaimers and legal conditions protecting the vendor.
Limitations: Finally, the quotation is finished with the limitations, for example that it holds good for only 30 days.

Does any this sound familiar? I am not suggesting that it is wrong; it is just less likely to get the desired effect. I accept that many of the items above have to be in the quote but I recommend a different approach, a proposal.

Proposals

Proposals tend to be more in line with the customer whereas quotes seem to focus on the product and the price.

A typical proposal should include the following:

The customer’s objectives: The first thing the customer should read in your proposal is an outline of their own requirements. The customer wants to know that you fully understand their problem or need before you tell them how you are going to meet or solve it.

Your recommendations: First come the customer’s problems or needs, next you offer your solutions (benefits).

Summary of additional benefits: Once you have told your customer how your product or service solves their problem you may want to include additional benefits of your product. Be careful, these must be benefits and not features. Make sure items mentioned here really are going to benefit the customer and are not just “nice to haves” of no value to them.

Financial implications: Once the customer can see that your product or service will really work for them, tell them how much it will cost. Be careful to include the cost as well as the financial benefit to their business. For instance, show the return on their investment, or the profit to be made from selling your product or compare the savings they will make using your service against those made with the present one. Always look at price in terms of improved efficiency, increased production, improved safety, reduced costs, etc.

Your additional information: Finally, you can attach additional information for your customer at the end. This will include the dimensions or specifications of your product or service, any legal obligations, etc.

You will see that proposals are much more effective than quotations because they focus on the customer and their problems rather than on your product or company.

Of course some of you will be thinking that we have to send the customer the standard quotation form because it contains our standard terms and conditions, “the legal stuff”. Okay… I can understand that, however there is nothing stopping you putting a one page proposal in front of the quotation. This is more work of course, but it is much more likely to bring in the business.

One last word on proposals. “If you want to win…take it in!” I was sitting with the members of a small company last week who were complaining that they were not getting enough people to say yes. They would e-mail 2 or 3 large proposals each week but not getting the answers they wanted

After some discussion I realised that although these proposals were often for business worth more than R300,000 they would rarely take in the proposal and present it to the decision maker. Frankly they were losing business because of this approach. “If you want to win…take it in!”.


To read more articles in the Richard’s Review series have a look at the blog www.richards-review.blogspot.com.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains these final two paragraphs