Use your “first draft proposal” as an agenda to explore implications

Hello Sales Reset Community

All this week, we’re looking at the powerful idea of co-creating proposals with your customers.

Should you expect to co-create proposals for every selling opportunity?

No, we don’t recommend investing the time and effort required to co-create proposals for your smallest or transactional orders.

However, when your customer has unique and specific needs, it’s probably a great use of your time to co-create proposals with your customers.

The practical recommendation in our first newsletter this week was simple. Ensure your customer expects to be involved in proposal co-creation!

The second recommendation is also very straightforward.

Use your “first draft proposal” as an agenda to explore implications

This week's first newsletter recommended that you prepare a “first draft proposal”. We suggested you arrange a meeting to review this first draft proposal while you’re still meeting with your customer.

Let’s imagine you’re in one of these meetings.

Hopefully, you listened carefully to your customers during your first meeting and asked them some great coaching questions to help them better understand their situation.

And you’ve included all the best parts of that conversation in your first draft proposals.

What are the chances that your customer has thoroughly considered all the implications of everything you discussed?

Zero!

There’s no way your customer could have thought through every significant implication of their proposed investment.

And this is where we begin to see the power of co-creating proposals.

Your first draft proposal becomes a valuable agenda for your customer to reflect on the implications of what you’re proposing.

Using your proposal as an agenda for your meeting, you should continue coaching your customer while listening hard to capture all the best bits.

If you’re stuck for a coaching question, pick a key aspect of your proposal and ask, “What are the implications of this part of the proposal?”

Then, incorporate all the most significant insights and ideas into the next version of your proposal.

How many times should you repeat this co-creation process in an opportunity?

There’s an easy answer.

Repeat this co-creation exercise 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.

We hope you’re having a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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