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From Accountingnet.ie In Practice
In today’s economy, sales people have to write more proposals, and better proposals, than ever before. As the industry has become more competitive and complex, customers have become both more confused and more demanding. As a result, they are likely to listen to a presentation, nod their heads, and mutter those dreaded words, “Sounds good! Why don’t you put that in writing for me?” WHY DO CUSTOMERS WANT PROPOSALS? One motivation is that the customer wants to compare offers from various vendors to make sure they buy the highest value solution based on your differentiators and value proposition. At a simpler level, they may just want to compare prices, clarify complex information, and gather information so that the “decision team” can review it. And let’s face it, sometimes they just want to slow down the sales process and they figure that asking for a proposal will keep the sales rep busy for a few weeks. Whatever the customer’s motivation, the fact is that proposal writing has become a common requirement for closing business throughout the entire business world. Today, people who sell everything from garbage collection services to complex information technology installation have to create client-centered, persuasive proposals. WHAT GOES INTO A WINNING PROPOSAL? So why is that the vast majority of proposals start out with the vendor’s company history? Does the author believe there is something so fundamentally compelling about their origins that clients will immediately be persuaded to buy? And why is that a huge number of proposals focus entirely on the vendor’s products and services, but never mention how those products and services will help the client solve a business problem or close an important gap? Does the proposal writer believe that facts alone are enough to motivate a prospect to say “yes”? Winning proposals must be client centered, not company- or product-centered. Most people buy because they’re looking for solutions to pressing problems, additional resources to close gaps, or the means to cope with difficult issues. What this means is that a proposal is not a price quote, a bill of materials, or a project plan. Each of those elements may be part of a proposal, but they are not sufficient to make a persuasive, client-centered case. In our experience, there are four categories of content that proposals must contain to maximize your chance of winning: 1. Evidence that you understand the client's business problem or need. 2. A compelling reason for the client to choose your recommendation over any others. 3. A recommendation for a specific approach, program, system design, or application that will solve the problem and produce positive business results. 4. Evidence of your ability to deliver on time and on budget. These are the essentials. Every scrap of data, every figure, every paragraph in your proposal must contribute toward providing one or more of them, because they directly address the three key factors on which every proposal is evaluated:
SOME TIPS FOR MAXIMIZING YOUR WIN RATIO But there are two other principles that can push it even higher. In fact, one way to remember these is to recall that there are two “P’s” in successful proposal writing:
PERSONALIZATION. Customers expect more today. Why? In part, because they have been trained to expect more because of the business community’s emphasis on excellence in customer service, focus on “total quality,” and increased competitiveness of the market. But perhaps the single biggest factor in raising customer expectations has been the growth of the Internet. To give you an example from my own experience, I live within a few blocks of a bookstore that was named by Publisher’s Weekly “the best bookstore in America.” If you love books, this place is heaven! Marble and wood. Leather furniture. A couple of cozy fireplaces. Live music in the evenings. A gourmet restaurant attached to the bookstore. Huge selection. You name it. And to walk there, I cut through a city park, walk along a nice residential street, and go through their door. So where do you think I bought most of my books last year? That’s right—Amazon.com. Why? Well, for one thing, I can shop at Amazon in my underwear in the middle of the night. I haven’t tried it, but I doubt I can do that at my neighborhood store. More importantly, whenever I log on to Amazon.com, I’m greeted by name and the Web site says, “Here are some books you might enjoy.” And more often than note, they’re right. When I go to my neighborhood store, they almost never remember my name, they don’t know what I bought recently, and they don’t know what kind of books I might like. That’s the magic of personalization. Even though I’m interacting with a database, it feels more personalized than it does when I’m in a brick-and-mortar store interacting with flesh-and-blood people! Well, what does that mean for your proposals? It means you can’t give them boilerplate. It means you have to include their name and their company’s name throughout the proposal. It means you have to acknowledge that you have listened to them and remember what you learned about them from previous interactions. Here are three conclusions that emerge from the reality of heightened customer expectations:
Use the customer’s language and refer to issues from their business and their industry. If you use the jargon they use and if you show familiarity in the cover letter and executive summary with what’s going on in their business and industry, they will assume that the entire proposal has been personalized to them. Unfortunately, most sales people resort to “cloning” as a means of getting their proposals done quickly. They borrow a proposal that somebody else has written for a different client, use the Find/Replace function in Microsoft Word to change the client’s name, and print it! That’s about as personalized as a can of spinach. (Plus they run the risk of having the wrong client’s name show up somewhere in that proposal. You can imagine what that does for rapport and credibility.) The primacy principle. What is the “primacy principle”? It’s the tendency we all have to judge future experiences based on our first one. You might call it the principle of first impressions. For example, if we go to a new dry cleaner in our neighborhood, and they end up losing a couple of our shirts or blouses and are rude to us, we’d have to be masochists to go back. It may be that they are normally very efficient and polite, and a combination of circumstances conspired to produce a negative impression on us. But we’ll never know. We’ll never go back. Research indicates that the primacy principle is so strong that it takes at least seven positive experiences to overcome a first negative impression. (Or, conversely, seven negative ones to overcome an initial positive experience.) So what does this mean for proposals? It means we must put the things up front in our proposal that the customer cares about the most. It means don’t send a boilerplate cover letter. Don’t write an executive summary that’s all about you. And don’t call your proposal something generic and pointless, like “Proposal.” Do people actually make these mistakes? Absolutely!
What the primacy principles tells us that it’s vitally important to understand the client and then structure the message correctly. Put the need that the customer think is most important first. Put the goal or outcome they want the most first in your list of outcomes. And structure your substantiation in terms of the things that matter the most to the decision maker:
Don’t guess! If you don’t know what the customer cares about, ask them.
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