The Value of Your Proposals to You

Look at your proposals broadly as part of your overall sales and marketing activities, rather than narrowly as the formal means of responding to a specific request. Seen that way, a proposal can help you build your business in several ways, including some that extend beyond the immediate opportunity to which you are responding.

The obvious: helping you sell. The proposal's most important job is to help you sell something. (In the nonprofit realm, it should help you obtain funding in support of your mission and objectives.) To go a little further, though, a high-quality, carefully constructed proposal can help you:

• Sell on value instead of price: Use your proposal to move the decision maker's focus away from price and toward such measures of value as lower total cost of ownership, higher reliability, direct customer support, documented technical superiority, or some other message that separates you from your competitors.

• Compete successfully without having personal contact with every member of the decision team: You may never have the opportunity to meet every member of the team in person. A good proposal can speak to each member of the team, helping make your case.

• Demonstrate your competence and professionalism: It's probably not fair and it's definitely not logical, but almost everybody does it: We judge a vendor's ability to deliver goods or services from the quality of the proposal they submit. Our conscious, rational mind tells us that spelling and grammar have nothing to do with the ability to provide help desk support for our PC users, yet we find those misspellings and grammar mistakes raising doubt and uncertainty in our mind.

• Offer a bundled solution: The customer may ask you for a proposal for basic bookkeeping services. In your proposal, though, you can add a brief description of your ability to provide tax preparation, too, as part of a total solution. That will increase the size of the deal, it may differentiate you from other bookkeepers who submit a proposal, or it may just make the customer aware that you also do taxes. All of these are good things.

• Sell the "smarter" buyer: Smart buyers want to gain as much as possible while spending as little as possible. If you don't show them what they gain by choosing your recommendations, they will inevitably focus on the other half of the equation: spending very little.

• Sell a complex, technical product to nontechnical buyers: Speaking the buyer's language is an important part of winning his or her trust. A flexible proposal process can help you communicate effectively even if the customer lacks in-depth knowledge of what you're offering.

The proposal as a marketing tool. Think about your company's image. What do your clients think of you? What do prospects who have never worked with you assume about you?

Try this exercise. Take a clean sheet of paper and list all the characteristics, traits, or attributes that are typically associated with your company. List them all, positive and negative. Be honest, but be fair. (I find that people are often extremely hard on themselves and their companies, demanding a level of perfection that their own customers don't expect. Try to get out of your head and see things the way a customer or prospect probably does.)

A typical list might look something like this:

• Expensive

• High-quality vendor

• Reliable

• Difficult to deal with/bureaucratic

• Good product knowledge

• Innovative, willing to come up with new solutions (for a price)

• Financially stable/solid

• Lots of experience

• Significant local presence

• Not interested in small jobs or small clients

Obviously, this is a mixed list, as virtually any company's would be. The question is how to use your proposals to capitalize on the positives and to minimize or overcome the negatives. One of the negatives on the list is the fact that clients perceive your company to be expensive. Doesn't it make sense to issue an unsolicited letter proposal every time you have a price reduction? In particular, you might want to target current customers whose costs can be reduced if they adopt the recommendations you're proposing.

One of the positives on the list is that your company has a significant local presence in your market. Why not play that up in each proposal you submit? Remind the decision maker that he or she will be dealing with a vendor who can respond to problems or concerns immediately, in person, rather than in a day or two or over the phone.

Each proposal should also emphasize and promote your perceived strengths and offer evidence, if possible, to overturn preconceptions about your weaknesses or shortcomings. Even if you don't win a given bid, you may have a positive impact on the decision maker's assumptions about you and your company. Over the long term that can be extremely valuable.

Influencing clients. Good account management requires you to think about the future of your business relationships, not merely the immediate opportunity. Reacting to a customer's problems or needs when the customer brings them up is all right, but it's not nearly as effective as working with the customer collaboratively to develop a business direction.

Each time you write a proposal, think in terms of your long-term plan for a given client. Where do you want the relationship to be in six months? In a year? In five years? What intermediate steps are necessary to get the relationship there? Perhaps you're currently providing system software to the client, but you'd also like to take on developmental projects. Or perhaps you are currently providing call center operations on an outsourced basis, but you'd eventually like to expand that to include outbound telemarketing and help desk functions, too. By keeping those long-range objectives in mind as you write each proposal, you may be able to spot leverage points. If you have a choice between two or more equally legitimate solutions, recommend the one that will move the business relationship in the direction you want it to go.

In other words, start looking at your proposals as tools and opportunities. Rather than seeing them as a kind of test that's been set up by clients to exclude you, look at each business proposal as a means of accomplishing your objectives. That's the real challenge you face—not merely getting the proposal done on time so you can check it off your list of sales "activities," but making sure that when it is done, it accomplishes exactly what you want.

Of course, it's one thing to recognize the challenge. It's quite another to know what to do about it. That's the topic of Section 2.