How to write proposals that convince people you never meet

Hello Sales Reset Community

Last week, we looked at how you can coach your customers.

Your coaching goal is to enable your customer to think more deeply about what they hope to achieve when they spend their money. Your job is to help your customers define the outcomes they need.

Then, you can connect the outcomes they need to your products and services.

This week, we’re exploring how to make those connections by co-creating compelling proposals that convince the people you never meet.

How you'll improve sales results this week

• Easy forwarding of your proposals to colleagues

• Recommended B2B proposal structure

• Potential challenges of writing great proposals

• How to practice writing better proposals this week

• End of Week - Reflective Practice

Easy forwarding of your proposals to colleagues

Business-to-business (B2B) selling differs greatly from business-to-consumer (B2C) selling.

One of the biggest differences is the number of people who can be involved in decision-making. With B2C decisions, it’s often just one person or maybe two people making the decision. With B2B selling, there can be lots more people involved!

Let’s look at one key implication of all these people potentially having an interest in your written sales proposals.

After you’ve had your meeting with a customer and you’ve submitted your proposal to them, how easy is it for them to share your proposal with colleagues?

Here’s the big idea. It’s your job to make it REALLY easy for them to forward your proposal. Ideally, your proposal will require zero additional explanation.

If you get this right, it means that your proposals will convince people you may never meet.

Recommended B2B proposal structure

We recommend the following structure for your proposals. This structure will make it easy for people to forward your proposals to their colleagues.

• Title—Your proposal title should create a great first impression and ideally focus on the proposal's outcomes for this specific customer.

• Summary - Busy, senior people are unlikely to read your whole proposal. They’re more likely to read the whole of your summary. Write this summary of your proposal last.

• Background - Briefly explain what has led to this proposal and the elements of the current situation.

• Outcomes - These are the outcomes you helped your customer to define with your coaching.

• Recommendations - Briefly explain the products and services you recommend to achieve their desired outcomes.

• Investment - Provide sufficient details about the costs of your products and services.

• Return on Investment - Demonstrate how your recommended investment will pay for itself.

• Next Actions - Clarify who will need to do what and by when to proceed with these proposals.

• Appendices - If you need to include detailed specifications, use clickable text links to online resources or put them at the end of your proposal. This will make your proposal faster and easier to read.

Potential challenges of writing great proposals

Here are some of the challenges you might face writing proposals in the way we recommend.

• Good conversations with customers - Creating good proposals is impossible if you haven’t led effective conversations with your customers.

• Time - You can save time by starting with standardised and automated templates, but you’ll still have to invest significant time to develop compelling proposals.

• Writing skills - How good are your writing skills? The good news is that the quality of your writing will improve with practice. You should take full advantage of the growing range of AI writing tools.

How to practice writing better proposals this week

Here are some suggestions to practice and improve your proposals this week.

1. Review recent proposals - Review some of your most recent proposals. If your customer forwards your proposals to colleagues you’ve not met without further explanation, would these colleagues be convinced to proceed?

2. Keep the proposal in mind when speaking with customers - Whenever you’re in a selling conversation, always keep in mind what you’ll need to prepare the most effective proposal.

3. Seek feedback - Look for ways to get feedback on your proposals. Ask your sales team leader or a colleague for their observations about your proposals. (If you’re a member of our Sales Reset Together community, you can take advantage of our confidential video proposal reviews.)

End of Week - Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this Weekly Sales Reset valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Community of Practice

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