Is Your Sales Proposal Customer Focused?

Sales proposals are very often the most boring documents ever written.  Sales and bid professionals spend a huge amount of time and money producing this garbage, and inextricably they keep doing it.  Times have to change.  Here’s some thoughts.

Proposals Should Be About The Customer

You'd think this is obvious.  But when you look at most sales proposals, it isn't.  A book that’s stood the test of time is Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People’.  He’s big on how listening to people and caring about them makes a big difference.  One of Dale Carnegie’s famous quotations is ‘The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most’.  So true – and that includes sales proposals.

Does Your Solution Address The Problem?

Your sales proposal should focus on the problem the customer has agreed they’re trying to solve and then on how your solution addresses that problem.  Please – no generic bullshit – rather tightly crafted stuff that’s totally specific to the customer.  Every single feature you describe must be entirely in the context of how, specifically, it benefits this customer.

The Simple Test

We’re customer centric, right?  So we’re creating a specific solution, just for our customer.  By definition, the sales proposal should be all about them, shouldn’t it?  So try this simple test.  Print out and look at your last sales proposal.  Put the pages into two piles.  One pile of ‘about you’ pages and one pile of ‘about the customer pages’.

In a recent sales coaching bid workshop, we did exactly that.  There was a huge debate about what was ‘about the customer’ and what was ‘about us’.  A particularly thrilling series of complex network diagrams were deemed to be ‘about the customer’, because they were the network design being proposed.  Eventually we agreed they were about the bid team’s sales proposal, so they went on the ‘about you’ pile.  Amazingly, we were left without about five pages on the ‘about the customer pile’ and about 500 on the ‘about us’ pile.

What Happens If You Can’t Do That?

If you can’t write a sales proposal that’s totally specific to your customer and totally about your customer, frankly, you shouldn’t be writing it.  If this is some blind RFP process you’re responding to and the customer won’t talk, you can be pretty certain they won’t buy either.  If the customer won’t help you define the problem and the solution, how committed are they to solving the problem?

If that’s the case taking the brave decision to 'no-bid' is going to save you, the bid team, your company and of course the customer a great deal of time and money.  It’s estimated preparing a sales proposal for an IT outsource bid is now costing well in excess of £250,000 ($400,000) in the bid team’s time.  That’s a very big investment to be making unless you’re pretty certain of winning.

Working Out The Pain Chain

Developing the value proposition for your sales proposal can be facilitated by working out the pain chain.  A pain chain follows a problem and its impacts right through an organisation and it's a very useful tool to have when you're writing a sales proposal.  Read more about the pain chain.

Adopt An Easier Writing Style

So many sales proposals are written in that stuffy, presumptuous style -   ‘XYZ Corporation is delighted to be able to submit this proposal to ABC Corporation’.  If that doesn’t guarantee heavy eyelids, nothing will.  Keep it tight, keep it light and keep it interesting.  Yes it may well form a part of the contract later, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring.  Use lots of pictures and diagrams to illustrate your points.  Make sure you caption every illustration – research shows people skip blocks of text but do read captions.

The Outcome

You’re aiming at producing a proposal that’s about your customer, their problems and how your solution addresses their problems specifically.  You’re trying to do that in a way that’s readable and understandable.
Anything else doesn’t qualify as being called a sales proposal.

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