The first thing to get right when starting to co-create proposals with your customers

Hello Sales Reset Community

On a scale of 1-5, how convinced are you about the value of co-creating proposals with your customers?

1. Nah! - the idea of co-creating proposals sounds too complex and time-consuming!

2. Possibly…I can see some value in involving customers in developing proposals, but I don’t know how it would work in the real world.

3. Yes, but I can’t: I’d like to involve my customers in co-creating proposals, but I can’t because of my company’s policies and processes and my lack of skills.

4. I always try to co-create proposals because when customers play an active role, proposals always become more compelling.

5. I'm totally convinced. I always co-create proposals with customers because it increases the likelihood of winning the business and makes customer success more likely.

As you might imagine, we’re convinced about the value of co-creating proposals with customers at Sales Reset. 😀

There’s one foundational thing to get right when seeking to co-create proposals with your customers.

Customers need to know you expect to co-create proposals with them!

It might sound obvious, but you must take responsibility for ensuring your customer expects to participate in co-creating proposals with you.

For many reasons, most salespeople do NOT seek to co-create proposals with their customers. Reasons include:

• Proposal Templates: Proposals might need to be made using a precise format and required templates, and co-created content is not allowed.

• Automations: Many sales teams seek to automate proposal writing to save time.

• Seller-Centricity: Many sales processes are still rooted in a conventional focus on the seller’s priorities, not the customer’s unique circumstances and needs.

• Collaboration Skills: Many salespeople have not developed the facilitation and collaboration skills required.

Whatever the reason, most customers don’t expect to co-create proposals with salespeople.

Many customers are unaware that co-creating proposals is possible. They believe their role is simply to decide how to respond to your proposals!

You’ll need to explain that you hope they will collaborate with you!

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.

Join us in our FREE Workshops this week

Join us on Tuesday, November 5th, at 4:30 pm UK time for this week’s Sales Reset Stories Workshop. We’ll share stories about co-creating proposals with customers.

Learn from the experiences of our community members. They’ll be happy to answer your questions. We’d love to hear your stories and learn from your experience of co-creating proposals.

This Thursday, November 7th, we’ll meet at 4:30 pm UK time for our first monthly LIVE! Practice Workshop. You can join us to practice your skills in small group role-play.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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