You Ask, I Answer: How To Write Sales Proposals?

In today's episode, Kate asks, when you write proposals, do you spell out everything or do you try and keep things simple and streamlined? We're debating whether our proposals should be super detailed or templated to make things fast and easy. It depends. Generally speaking, when I write proposals, I start with a template because otherwise I'll forget things, just to be perfectly honest. Or you set expectations improperly.

So it's strategy, tactics, execution, and payment, or step for short. So strategy is like why are we doing the thing? It's sort of like the executive summary. Tactics are what are the things that we're gonna do, and then uh execution is how we're gonna do the thing. And so all the detail really is in execution.

Budget, time frame, deliverables, prerequisites, fees, out-of-pocket costs, all those things that someone can look at and go, okay, I know what's supposed to be happening. And the one the things that I think are the most important are uh obviously budget and time frame are important, but the deliverables and the prerequisites are where I know I've gotten into trouble a lot in the past, and also clients have gotten into trouble where they didn't realize that there were expectations that were incumbent upon them. So having those deliverables and those prerequisites are super important. The prerequisites are here's what we need to do the job. If we don't have these things, we can't meet the time frame.

And so being very clear, you know, we need access to your Google Analytics or access to this data or an hour a week with stakeholders, whatever the thing is that you need to get the job done, being super super clear about that. And it's I think it's great to be detailed in the prerequisites so that uh you can later go back and say we did or we did not get the thing done. The uh deliverables are also we have to be very, very clear. And the deliverables are what are people doing, and again, one of the little tricks that I find so important with deliverables is making sure that both parties have deliverables, so it's not just your agency that is um writing out the proposal and saying, here's what we're gonna do, is here's what everybody is doing. If you're, for example, doing a Google Analytics or Google Data Studio dashboard project, you know, one of the deliverables that the client would be responsible for would be what metrics matter to your organization, what are the key outcomes that you care about?

Um, without that information, you can deliver a dashboard, but it's not going to be what the client wants. So having having things spelled out for everybody involved in the project really is uh the value of a great proposal. The template that we use and the structure that we use is more than anything, it's a compendium of uh lessons learned, everything that's gone wrong in the past right so that we cover all the bases um I remember you know back in the old days I used to uh use a template provided to me by the company I worked for and there was always stuff that was unclear about billing or there was always stuff that was uh missing from a proposal particularly with it was a collaborative proposal with another team and we always got burned we always got burned on something either uh somebody didn't have uh the data that they were expected to have uh team members were not available that should have been and so especially for any kind of collaborative effort a templated proposal uh that clearly spells out expectations is essential it's almost like a project management plan in a lot of ways if you think about a proposal as a project management plan it becomes a lot easier to write because you're like okay I need to to put these things in you know one of the things that I'm considering putting into proposals is spelling out in writing these are the stakeholders you know these are the the people who are the the points of contact so that again it's super clear your participation is expected on this project or it's not uh either way it's very clear who's doing what when you look at a project management plan there's time there's resources there's owners who owns what um and all the expectations are spelled out. Now, how detailed do you get on a proposal? You get as detailed as you need to be in order to demonstrate your expertise, is how I feel about it.

In that a proposal that's too short and too vague obviously burns you on the project management side, but it also makes you look generic, right? If you have a methodology that works for you, you know, your whatever your strategy tactics and execution are, spill out as much of it as you feel comfortable without giving away any proprietary, you know, uh um intellectual property, but spell out as much as you can so that it it clearly demonstrates um why somebody is hiring you. Because one of the things that happens is that scopes of work and proposals get circulated internally around a company, and they will get into the hands of people who did not uh sit on the input call, did not sit on on the sales pitch if you're pitching, and as a result, they're looking at this for the first time trying to evaluate you as a company. This is especially important if your point of contact is not the decision maker. Um you want to be as as detailed as possible to distinguish yourself from other proposals that may be in the mix.

And to quote uh my friend Tams and Webster, artfully restating the problem in great detail is a fantastic way of demonstrating your expertise and your understanding because that's how you know, well, that's how you prove to a client that you know them, that you know what you're talking about, you've seen this problem before, that you can deal with this problem on their behalf. So, in the strategy section, that's typically where you'd spend a lot of time artfully restating the problem, the challenge that you're trying to solve, so that when a client picks up and reads it, they're like, Yep, that's me. That's that's exactly what I want. I want someone who to fix this problem. This is my big problem.

And then the tactics and execution detail to what you're gonna do to solve that problem and how you're gonna do it. Now, can somebody steal that? Of course they can. Um but they would anyway. I wouldn't be s so terribly concerned that uh someone's gonna try to do something nefarious, because if they are, they are.

There's not much you can do about that. B here's an example. If I say uh I'm gonna do an attribution analysis for you, I'll say we're gonna use it do an attribution analysis, and we're gonna use uh machine learning algorithms of our choice. Now, do you need to know whether and does this belong to the proposal whether we're gonna use Shabley game theory versus Markov chains? No, that's a level of detail too deep, and it wouldn't be helpful for the for the most part, unless your client contact is an engineer, uh, is an AI engineer.

Um but for most people, just being able to say, yep, we're gonna use machine learning algorithms, and we'll choose the best algorithm based on the condition of your data and stuff, uh, is enough detail. And yes, they could absolutely find the the data science team in their own company and do it themselves, but if they were gonna do that, they would have already done that. They don't need a proposal from you to tell them to do something that they already know how to do. More often than not, they're hiring you because they don't have the bandwidth to do it as much as they might like to. So that's how we do proposals.

Your mileage may vary, your company may vary, uh, things will vary, especially based on how many lawyers are involved. Um, I do strongly recommend that you have a master services agreement in place so that scopes of work and proposals can be short, shorter. You don't want to have to put you know 48 pages of legalese on a proposal. Um make sure that that's in place first. If you have follow-up questions about this, please leave a comment in the comments box below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.