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Indecent Proposals

Guest post by: Paul Newsom

Article Overview: Why submitting sales proposals too early, and relying on proposals to win the deal can reduce your chances of winning.

Indecent Proposals

Proposals have a special place in the mind of most sales people. They are one of the milestones of the sales process and are often the main weapon in the sales armory. They are seen as the 'meat of the dinner'.

Gaining the opportunity to submit a proposal is considered by many to be a major success. Hours of writing and a few candles later, a proposal is proudly submitted. Excitement, anticipation and anxiety reaches fever pitch while we wait for the outcome to see whether the customer will choose the "beef", "lamb" or "fish" from our proposal.

Then guess what, the request comes back to quote a vegetarian option, (because a competitor has suggested this), and back to work we go, developing a winning proposal for the vegetarian. On a bad day, the customer goes for the pork and you miss out. On a good day, the customer dines with you.

Rather than writing your proposal as soon as the client asks what is on the menu and then spending valuable time at the proposal end of the sales cycle, the place to spend your time is doing a good diagnosis and selecting the optimal solution with the client. This is the real 'meat' of the sales process.

For example you must spend time understanding how and why "beef" is the best option for the client, then how they like their beef cooked.

Don't let proposals become a substitute for building trust or do the selling for you, whereby you are over reliant on the proposal to win the deal. Such proposals are easy to pick - they are top heavy in 'about us' capability information that seldom gets read.

Since customers don't buy proposals, (they buy solutions and value), instead build trust through the strength of your diagnosis of customer issues, and use the proposal to simply confirm all that you have agreed. Your two page proposal will then offer only the desired option, and is far more likely to be accepted. It should contain no surprises. Done well, this has far more impact than any hefty proposal, both on your customer and your sales results and the long term relationship.

In selling, the proposal is not the meat, it is the gravy. It is the part which brings the meal together, rather than the main part of the meal.

One of the biggest challenges in sales is working with customers and buyers who ask you to submit a proposal before you know what you are making a proposal for.

If you don't know exactly what you are proposing and why, then you must ask yourself also whether the buyer knows what they are trying to buy, or even how they will decide?

Submit a proposal without prior agreement of concept and we know what happens - the customer does nothing, decides on price alone or you waste time and resource submitting repeated proposals until someone figures it out!

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Article Tags: business proposals, sales process, sales proposals



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