Many owners and salespeople dread putting together sales proposals.
They spend hours crafting proposals that ultimately never lead to business. This is entirely avoidable: Following a proven five-step checklist for creating sales proposals lets you guarantee your proposals will create value for your prospects -- while enabling you to close bigger deals.
The following five guidelines will help you avoid these.
Step 1: Keep The Proposal High Level
The more complex your proposal is, the less likely your prospects are to read the entire document.
In fact, prospects will feel like you’re giving them work to do if you hand them a 40-page proposal to review. Keep your proposal as short as possible.
If your proposals are currently hovering around 20 pages, can you cut your next one down to 15? How about 10? The fewer pages the better (as long as you’re including all the necessary details that create value for your prospects).
Step 2: Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
Every prospect wants to feel special. When you use boilerplate lines in your proposals, your prospects feel undervalued and disrespected. It’s OK to use the same basic template for all your proposals, but tailor the language and details where appropriate.
In addition, you don’t want to make it difficult for prospects to figure out which information is actually important. With that in mind, only include information that’s relevant to the specific prospect.
ConnectWise Sell Tip: Arm yourself with quoting templates that can be completely customized for your company; templates in which you can create personal videos, rich product data/images, and interactive experience. ConnectWise Sell can do this for you. Plus, it can offer professional design help and a guided selling experience to perfect your style.
Step 3: Highlight Expected Solutions
What should be the main focus of your proposal? The answer is simple: Outcomes. Unfortunately, one of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is focusing on the features and benefits of their product or service.
Instead, center your proposals around what your offering will help the prospect achieve, including specific outcomes and how you plan to make them a reality.
Step 4: Present Options
Present three different options.
The old-school single-option proposal is outdated and ineffective. If you want to close more sales, present three different options in your proposals.
By including three proposals at different price levels, you’ll enable your prospect to weigh the options with you, rather than weighing the options with one of your competitors. In addition, you provide context by offering solutions to your prospect’s deepest frustrations at a lower-end price, a mid-tier price, and a higher-end price. You’ll be surprised at how many prospects choose your premium option.
ConnectWise Sell Tip: By empowering sales reps to generate quotes customers can interact with, ConnectWise Sell frees your sales team to produce more quotes. Instead of quoting, waiting for feedback, and re-quoting, clients can upsell themselves with just the click of a button
Step 5: Be Responsive
Your quotes should have life. Interaction adds breath to otherwise stiff quotes. Show you’re easy to work with by creating a responsive design. Simple, interactive dropdowns can put your customers in a position to select and adjust options to fit their unique needs.
Let your customers’ capable fingers select the quantities and options they need. By putting clients in control of their own proposal destiny, you will achieve a higher state of selling. And to go that extra mile, enable clients to e-signs their approval.
All that added interactivity could add up to a lot of new business for your MSP business.
ConnectWise Sell Tip: Every quote built on the ConnectWise quote and proposal platform is delivered virtually via Order Porter, which empowers clients to easily select what they want, and e-sign to order.
