I just sent this email to a client and thought you would benefit from it also.
This problem is the #1 plague on 6-figure consultants and experts that is keeping them stuck in low-six-figure hell.
And it’s preventing you from truly scaling your business, talking with better clients, closing bigger deals, and landing exponentially higher fees.
Listen in to what I typed in response to a client who wanted me to review a “proposal” that should never have been a proposal — it should have been a CONVERSATION:
There’s nothing wrong with this proposal — it’s more about your process.
Unless I am mistaken, one or more of these things are happening with all these proposals and all these prospects:
1. Too much surface-level conversation with not enough discussion of why they need the training and what outcomes they’re looking for — including deeper outcomes, radiant consequences, who else is impacted by the outcomes, etc.
2. Proposals driven by what the client is asking for rather than proposals driven by what YOU feel they really need to create the outcomes and solve the problems that they are telling you about.
3. Not enough discussion of options, fees, and potential recommendations BEFORE the proposal is written, so that you are sending things over the transom that they have not heard before and with pricing that may surprise them because not enough discussion of budget has taken place before seeing the proposal.
4. Not enough creative brainstorming with clients about what small-medium-large options might be that would spark their imagination to think “beyond the RFP” and get you out of “vendor” mode.
5. Too much focus on the details of the deliverables which only commoditizes what you do and makes you VERY easy to compare to other vendors instead of challenging their thinking, relooking at their requirements, and recontextualizing your services — to expand what you can do for them — to get them thinking in a much larger way about their problem and possible avenues to fix it that work better, last longer, and would be more than a transactional “quick fix.”
So — what I am saying is — the problem is not in the proposal — it is in everything that came BEFORE.
That’s the email I sent her.If any of this sounds familiar to you, will you hit reply to this email and give me a quick AMEN?
– David
David Newman :: Do It! Marketing
Marketing for Smart People… Like YOU!
p.s. If you don’t know how to sell, it doesn’t matter how great your proposals are. And if you do know how to sell, you typically don’t need to write proposals. Bold statement? Crazy? Maybe — maybe not. More sales insights coming your way in the next couple of emails :o)