In your bigger opportunities, it's time to write fundamentally different proposals

Hello Sales Reset Community

What do you hope to achieve when you send a proposal to your customer? What’s your goal?

I’m guessing that you hope your customer will accept your proposal and send you their purchase order!

But how often does this happen?

The evidence is clear from a growing range of B2B selling situations. More and more stakeholders are involved in every significant buying decision.

This new reality means it might be time to change the goal of your initial proposals, especially in your more significant opportunities.

Through this week, I suggest you take time to choose what sort of proposal to send in each of your opportunities:

1. your typical proposal: seeking a decision to purchase

2. a co-creation proposal: seeking a decision to develop a proposal together

I’ll explain the differences in this week's newsletters and help you make better choices.

All proposals or just some?

Most sellers work with a range of opportunities of different sizes.

Your most minor opportunities almost certainly don’t need a co-creation proposal. If your customer only wants a price for a repeat purchase, that’s probably all they need!

As a rough guide, I suggest you prepare a co-creation proposal for the top 20% of your opportunities.

Why invest your valuable and limited selling time collaborating with customers?

Let’s assume you’ve identified one of your top 20% opportunities.

Why invest your valuable and limited selling time collaborating with customers?

The answer is probably obvious to you. Your proposals will become more compelling when you identify and engage more stakeholders in their development.

You’ll uncover a broader range of priorities, needs and implications of your proposed investment.

When you collaborate effectively with these stakeholders, you will more accurately clarify the outcomes your customer needs.

Why should you invest your precious selling time to collaborate with more stakeholders?

You’ll become increasingly skilled at investing your limited selling time in the best opportunities.

Some people reading this newsletter can set a realistic goal of transforming win rates from 1:5 or worse to 1:2 or better!

But first, you’ll need to identify and successfully engage with these additional stakeholders. You’ll need their permission to schedule time in these busy people’s calendars.

To gain their permission, you’ll need to sell the benefits of collaboration to them.

That’s why you’ll need fundamentally different initial proposals, especially in more significant and complex selling situations.

New goal for your initial proposal

Instead of writing your proposal to get their purchase order, here’s a different goal:

This is a genuinely different goal!

If you adopt this strategy, your proposals will be VERY different.

Instead of being all about what you’re selling, you will create a proposal that seeks to communicate the value of their collaborating with you to co-create a proposal.

Instead of closing to win their business, you will be closing to win their readiness to work with you to develop the best possible proposal for what you’re selling in their unique circumstance.

Time for action conclusions

In your mid-week newsletter, we’ll examine the differences between typical sales and co-creation proposals.

But for now, take a few minutes to look at some of your recent and current proposals.

Now that you know about this idea of co-creating collaborative proposals, which of your current opportunities deserves this approach?

I’ll be hugely interested to hear your feedback on this big idea.

Just hit reply to send me an email with your observations.

Have a great week!

Peter Button