So ... What Is a Good Proposal?

Seems like an easy question. I think most of us agree that "one that's done" isn't an adequate answer. But after years of working in the proposal field, I'd have to say that most businesspeople probably don't have an answer.

For one thing, they tend to confuse proposals with other kinds of documents. Or they fail to understand the proposal's purpose. Or they lose sight of their audience and start writing to themselves.

Some salespeople, even sales managers, treat the proposal as a checkbox item on the overall sales process diagram. Did demo? Check! Submitted proposal? Check!

If that's the attitude you take, the document you deliver may actually end up doing more harm than good. Although good proposals by themselves seldom win deals, bad proposals can definitely lose them. Treating the proposal as a nuisance or a pro forma submission that doesn't really matter can raise doubts in the customer's mind about your commitment and competence. It can throw obstacles in your path and prolong the sales cycle.

So before we define what a proposal is, let's make sure we know what it's not:

It's not a price quote. If all you tell the decision maker is the amount he or she has to pay, you've reduced what you're selling down to the level of a commodity. You've said, in effect, "All products or services of this type are basically the same. We have nothing unique to offer. Choose based on cost." Unless you are always the lowest-priced vendor, that's not a strong position to take.

It's not a bill of materials, project plan, or scope of work. In technical and engineering environments, people sometimes take the attitude that if they just explain all the details of the proposed solution very clearly and accurately, the customer will buy. Actually, giving customers a detailed bill of materials or project plan may have exactly the opposite effect. You've just given them a shopping list so detailed they may decide to do the job without your help. Ouch!

It's not the company history, either. Oddly enough, a sizable number of the proposals we see start out that way. Why? From reading dozens and dozens of these things, I can assure you most company histories are not very interesting.

Here's the bottom line: What is a proposal? It's a sales document.

What is its job? To move the sales process toward closure.

That's it. Pretty simple. It's safe to say that if the proposal doesn't do that job, it's a lousy proposal. And if it does do that job, no matter how, it's a good one. I truly don't care if you write proposals in crayon on the back of a grocery sack; if you've got a high win ratio with them, good for you.

However, over the years we've found that there are certain specific kinds of content that need to be in your proposals to maximize their chance of winning. And we've found that certain structural formats produce better results.

A good proposal helps you make money by convincing people to choose you to provide the products and services they need. The proposal positions what you have as a solution to a business problem, and helps you justify a slightly higher price than your competitor by showing that you will provide superior value.

To do the proposal writing job well, you need to make sure that your proposal is persuasive, accurate, and complete. Unfortunately, lots of proposal writers invert the order of those qualities, producing proposals that are bloated with detail and scarcely persuasive at all.

In my experience, no one buys based on the "thud factor." The biggest proposal does not automatically win. But thousands of people succumb to the delusion that if they throw everything they have into the proposal, the sheer length of the document is bound to impress the customer.

Just the opposite is true. A study we conducted presented a group of evaluators with three proposals. One was twenty-five pages long, one was about fifty pages, and one was nearly one hundred pages. We told the evaluators that we wanted them to look for certain factors in the documents, but in reality all we wanted to see was which one they picked up first. Overwhelmingly, they reached for the short document before the other two. Wouldn't you?

Why does that matter? Because evaluators are inevitably influenced by what they have already seen as they look at other proposals. Let's suppose they picked your proposal up first, because it was concise. And let's suppose you did an excellent job of showing that you understand their needs, are focused on delivering a big return on investment, offer a realistic solution, have plenty of credentials to prove you can do the job on time and on budget, and have differentiated yourself and your offering from your competition. How well will those other proposals stack up, especially if they're bloated and unfocused?