If you are making a paper-based proposal, whenever possible, make a formal in-person presentation of your proposal. This gives you the opportunity to stress face to face the important features and your unique abilities as a supplier, to make sure that the proposal has been delivered into the hands of the right people and, if they are not the ultimate decision-makers, that they have the information to act as your “champion” in the organization and help “sell” your offering.
There is a formal structure to a good proposal presentation, one that covers all the bases and is tuned to the needs and expectations of the prospect. The presentation is made of a series of steps that lead to the close.
How much time to devote to each step depends on where you are in the sales cycle. If you are early into the cycle, take the time to go through everything. If you and the prospect already know quite a bit about each other, then highlight in detail the steps that need to be covered and touch lightly on those that don’t…but make sure that the whole path has been illuminated from start to stop.
It is often wise to hold off handing out the proposal until after you have made your presentation because almost every prospect will pick it up and begin reading it on their own. When that happens the chances increase that important parts of your presentation will get lost or glossed over in everyone’s rush to find “the bottom line,” the cost. This is especially damaging if cost is a big factor because you lose the chance to sell yourself as a valuable “solution provider” and must afterward be content to be just an inexpensive “supplier.” The whole proposal helps you sell your added value, that which makes you worth the extra few pennies over the lower-cost offering so you want to make sure the entire message gets presented. You want to stay in control.
The Table of Contents provides a good outline. Or, you can go through and highlight key points you want to cover and code them as to strength and urgency of delivery during the presentation. Sant ProposalMaster generates a set of PowerPoint slides of the key portions of the actual proposal so everything, including customer names, is in the slide presentation. This is handy if you are dealing with customers who have conference room facilities and a projector you can plug your laptop into for the presentation. If you’re not using Sant, you can still generate a set of slides covering the key points.
Clients and prospective clients will generally agree to respond to questions (you’re trying to collect lots of affirmative “yes” answers) and listen to success stories having to do with similar problems or situations. Getting prospects to agree that they have this problem and want that result, coupled with agreeable examples of how you have solved similar problems generally leads to a signing.
Finally, one last hard-earned word of advice. Always make sure your proposal contains a table of contents and is page-numbered throughout. Some years ago I made a proposal presentation to the Chicago office of a large publishing company after which the proposal was forwarded by the local manager to corporate headquarters in Houston. We were one of the more expensive suppliers but we had features that offered a faster pay-back…we really were a better deal. What we didn’t know was that the job was “wired” in the Chicago office to go to a supplier who had hired a relative of the local executive. We learned later that our proposal arrived in Houston without the page on return-on-investment. With no table of contents and lacking consecutive page numbers to indicate the missing documentation, our proposal failed to prove we were a sounder investment.
