How did you get on co-creating proposals with your customers this week?

Hello Sales Reset Community

At the start of this week, we began to look at the powerful idea of co-creating proposals with your customers.

In our weekly Sales Reset Stories practical workshop on Tuesday, it was great to hear one of our community members speak about the situations where she had tried co-creating proposals. We were particularly interested to hear that her focus on co-creating had changed her mindset going into the meeting.

Our first recommendation this week was to ensure that your customers expect to co-create proposals with you. We suggested five steps to start co-creating proposals in the real world:

1. Tell customers what to expect: Early in your selling conversation, use all your selling skills to secure their engagement in proposal co-creation.

2. Arrange the date and time to meet and review your first draft proposal while you’re still with them.

3. Prepare and send your first draft proposal, reminding your customer about your meeting arrangements to review the proposal.

4. Meet and collaborate to co-create the next version of your proposal.

5. Repeat until your proposal is sufficiently compelling to win the business.

Our second big recommendation was to use your first draft proposal as an agenda in a meeting with your customer to reflect on the implications of the proposals.

This co-creation process can continue until you have co-created a sufficiently compelling proposal for the customer to proceed. 

If the process stalls before your proposal becomes sufficiently compelling, consider withdrawing and spending your limited selling time on a different and better opportunity.

How did you get on co-creating proposals with your customer this week?

Here are some questions to help you reflect on your experience of co-creating proposals:

• When did you actively co-create proposals this week? As you reflect on this week, what were the situations where you proactively co-created proposals?

• What were the most valuable aspects of proposal co-creation? Now that you have one or more situations in mind, what did you and your customer find most valuable about the way you were collaborating to co-create proposals?

• What could you have done differently and better? What aspects of co-creating proposals could you have done differently and better?

Here we are at the end of the week.

Our final recommendation is to review your pipeline of opportunities to clarify where you might achieve more with better proposal co-creation.

• What is your best current opportunity? How might a greater focus on proposal co-creation enable you to accelerate progress with this opportunity?

Have a great weekend!

The Sales Reset Team

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