Similarly, small businesses without the economies of scale of larger companies need to find the niches where customers value their differentiation. Perhaps the difference is that you have a local presence, or answer the phone. Perhaps you have a subspecialty that doesn’t matter to the broader market, but is critical for certain people. If you march into a (pricing) war of attrition with a larger company, you’re not only going to lose, you’re going to be miserable.

Some small services firms have actually partnered with companies they previously saw as competitors. The small company gets increased exposure, while the big company can solve problems that include the niche they had struggled to serve.

The key is to find the niche that values you what you do. Then charge appropriately. In your communication with customers, whether on your website, in discussions, or in sales proposals, never feel shy or embarrassed about what you charge. Charging more actually increases the buyer’s confidence. Besides, if they balk at the price, they may not be in your target market, or you may be able to arrange a discount (“you can get 25% off, you give us the flexibility to complete this project at any time over the next 6 months”).

How’s the working for Apple, the company that makes most of its money on “post-PC devices”? Gruber’s post was spurred by estimates that Apple makes more money (profit– the real money) from PCs than the top 5 PC makers, combined.

When it comes time for the details, however, it’s hard to know what to write. Then, you fall back on talking about you, your company, your products and services, because you know how to write about those things. However, your proposal needs to focus on the prospect and their problem.

I’ve talked before about the need to ask good, open-ended questions (See How to Write a Sales Proposal in 6 Easy Steps). In reality, that’s only half of it. The other half is writing down the answer! For a long time, I did this in exactly the wrong way. I created prospecting forms with problems that mapped to my services, and if the prospect said something that looked like something on my list, I would put a check mark next to that item. Then I’d go back and write a proposal which was more like a product brochure for everything that was checked off. This is really bad.

The Secret: Take Good Notes

What you want to do is write down what the prospect said. It doesn’t have to be word-for-word, every word, but it should be word for word on the key points.

For example, suppose your prospect says, “the thing that drives us crazy is that we never know which proposal template format we’re supposed to use, so the sales guys make up their own and the customer doesn’t see anything consistent. The VP of Sales hates this. And you end up with different terms on the TPS reports, which drives legal crazy.”

Old me would have checked “proposal templates.”

What you want to write down is something like: “drives us crazy, never know which prop temp format to use, sales guys make up their own. inconsistent for cust. vp of sales hates. different terms on TPS reports, legal hates.”

Notice that I captured the key words the prospect used. Some of them may have to be changed for the proposal (especially for things that drive customers so crazy they end up using expletives to describe them), but you now know exactly what to write about the problem. Naturally, you would ask some more questions after this, to get into the details. Remember, don’t use jargon unless it’s the prospects’ jargon.

When you’re in the problem definition section of your proposal template, you can now search through your notes and describe the problem and its impact in the prospect’s own words. In other words, using the right words. Do the same thing for the timeline and solution. No more guessing. No need to fill your proposal with junk about you.

How to take notes

I used to take notes in Moleskine notebooks, which was actually may favorite for taking the notes. It was easy to draw diagrams, arrows, and link thoughts in a way that’s hard to do on a screen. However, when I went back to read them, I would discover that much of my writing was encrypted by bad penmanship, and it was impossible to search. I still occasionally take notes on paper, but then I transfer them to Evernote as soon as I can.

If I’m on the phone, I use a headset, and then I can type straight into Evernote.

In a meeting, I type on my laptop, if that’s culturally acceptable, or on the iPad, which is slower, but quieter, and I can go fast enough to make it work. (Good abbreviations are really helpful.)

After I get done with a call, I organize the notes as soon as possible, while the conversation is still fresh. I try to group similar themes about problems, impacts, and constraints, which may have turned up in different parts of the conversation. If you’re good at this, you may get to more or less dump your notes into your template and be ready to go. More likely, you’ll need to polish some more when you actually write the proposal, but you’ll have a good head start.

In an ideal world, you’d have someone with you taking notes, so you could focus on the conversation, but most small business owners and their sales leaders don’t have that luxury.

I used to worry that prospects would be annoyed by me taking lots of notes, but they seem to like that someone is really paying attention to them, and writing it down so they can use it later. In many cases, the prospect can’t make the decision alone, so they are trying to help you prepare something that will be convincing to their colleagues. They want you to get it right almost as much as you do.

Whatever method you use, take good, detailed notes. Then, when you actually need to go back and write your proposal, you don’t have to wonder what words to use or try to remember what the prospect said. It seems like more work at the time, but it will actually shorten your sales cycle, reduce your stress, and improve your win rate.

I was talking to a customer who does consulting, and was happy to have closed a proposal from a new client quickly, and had gone to considerable logistical effort to set up the small project for success. The morning they were supposed to start, the client pushed back the project. The consultant lost the better part of a week for nothing. While we all recognize that there are sometime legitimate crises that require juggling schedule, the consultant wondered what he could have done to make this less likely. “How can I make clients respect my time?”

First, respect your own time. Your time is valuable, whether or not you are currently billing at $500 per hour. You have a finite amount of time, and you never get it back once you spend it. If you recognize your time as valuable, this attitude will percolate through to how your organize your day, and how your interact with prospects and clients. It’s tempting, especially when you get started, to look at a blank calendar, and tell prospects you can meet “whenever, I’m flexible.” Subconsciously, you are telling your prospect, and yourself, that your time is less precious than theirs. Instead, you can ask them to suggest a time. If they give several, pick one. Don’t just say “any of them.” If they want you to suggest, offer “10AM on Thursday”, not “anytime this week.” It’s OK to suggest that “I’m generally flexible Thursday mornings, that’s time I devote to phone calls, just tell me what time would work, so I can block off that slot for you.” Remember also that your calendar is never truly empty, and especially if you don’t have paid work on it, you should block off calendar time to your business development and sales activities.

Next, respect other people’s time. If you have a conference call at 1PM, be on it at 12:59. If you have a meeting somewhere new, plan to get there a little early in case you have trouble finding it, you have to park far away, or whatever. If you commit to delivering a proposal by 5PM on Friday, deliver it by 5PM on Friday. Better, yet, unless they actually want to read it over the weekend, don’t promise it until 7am Monday morning.

While we tend to be really impatient as small business owners, if you slow things down, you can do better work, and generally get more in sync with your clients’ schedules. It also makes it much easier to respect your clients’ time, when life’s little obstacles pop up and your aggressive schedule slides.

Being respectful of your time and others’ conveys professionalism, both to your clients and prospects, and your own subconscious.

Now, let’s talk about a couple of things you can do in your proposals to encourage people to respect your time.

• When you discuss the potential project with your prospect, talk about their timeline expectations. Do they need this done yesterday? Or by the end of the next quarter? When do they want to start? If you know this, you can align properly to their needs. Otherwise, it’s easy to get impatient and get ahead of the customer, and wonder why they don’t seem very committed to their meetings with you.
• Get payment upfront. For a small project like a workshop, get all of it upfront. For midsize projects, get half of it upfront. For larger projects, divide it into milestones, but get one payment upfront. Depending on the client, you may start work while your invoice is in progress, or you may wait until the check clears.
• If you have deep relationships with clients, set up a retainer that will save them money, while helping you manage your time.
• When you just don’t know how much time you need, charge them by the hour. I usually don’t recommend this, and customers who don’t respect your time are the ones who are likely to complain about you billing them if you have to wait around at their offices. Even if you don’t bill by the hour, if you know a client is going to end up taking more time than they “should”, they should get a bigger price.

Lastly, know that some people just don’t respect other people, or their time. Try not to take it personally, but if you have to do business with them, be psychologically and financially prepared. Avoid these people, if you can. There are some people I like talking to, and sometimes enjoy working with, but they are so bad at respecting other people’s time that I don’t work with them anymore.

What are you some of your tips for encouraging clients to respect your time?

It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.

Just kidding.

Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice.

He even provides a list of words and phrases to avoid.

Maybe we should add a “Jargon Alert” to Mimiran to warn you if you’re using them in your proposals?

1. Start at the End

Huh? Don’t worry, this is not a zen riddle, but it can lead to zen-like tranquility, at least compared to the usual stress of proposal writing (and small business running). Rather than seeing the proposal itself as the end, recognize that the proposal is just a step on a path to successfully completing a project.

Start by imagining the end of that successful project.

• What results did your customer achieve?
• How did you help?
• What pitfalls do you encounter along the way?
• What did you and your team do to make the project successful?
• What did your customer need to do?
• How long did it take?
• How much did you charge? (And when did you get paid?)

Thinking this way helps you consider obstacles, customer obligations, and other prerequisites to success that you might be tempted to overlook when you are trying to crank out of proposal by the close of business on Friday. You might think that raising potential problems would slow down the sales cycle or make the customer less likely to choose you. I did. However, the opposite is true. Prospects want someone who understands what it takes to achieve success, especially someone who knows what common problems they might face, and what they can do to handle them. You don’t want to go to the heart surgeon who promises that you’ll be back in the office the day after your heart surgery.

If you really don’t know what the end of the project means, you might want to talk to someone who has been in the kind of situation you’re facing before and can paint a picture for you. If not, your step 2 will be pretty sparse, but that’s OK, you can flush it out in step 3.

2. Define a Proposal Template

Based on your vision from step 1, create a template for a proposal for your ideal project for your ideal customer. For example, you may have proposal templates for “Creating an E-Commerce Website in Drupal”, “Building a Prototype iPhone App”, or “Landscaping for a Modern Hotel.” Whatever you think your core business is, create a proposal template, if you haven’t already.

You may actually want to create multiple templates for different types of projects, but start with 1.

This template can guide you, especially when the customer is not sure how to proceed. When customers provide their requirements and constraints, you can integrate them into your template, perhaps even change the template around to meet their needs, but you have it to guide you.

What should be in the template? Keep it simple. Most proposals I see are stuffed with self-important nonsense that does nothing to help the customer understand how you can help them. (Confession: I’ve stuffed more than my share of self-important nonsense into proposals.) Get rid of big “About Us” sections. Make the proposal about the customer, not you. You are the supporting actor, not the star. You’re needed to make a great story, but the spotlight falls on the customer and what they are trying to achieve. Here’s the 3 part template outline:

Opening: Why?
So the template needs to start out with the problem the customer needs to solve, why it’s important, and what’s the impact.

Remember, we are setting up a story here. The opening of the movie sets up the drama. Please don’t start by copying and pasting the “About Us” section from the customers website. They know what they do. Start with why some part of what they do isn’t good enough yet. The reason you’re in the picture. This should be a simple paragraph, perhaps with some bullet points about the impact and/or what they hope to achieve. This makes it easy for busy people scanning the proposal to get anchored in the big picture.

I also like to add a paragraph about why the customer wants help from me or my team. Because I’ve done this before? Because they have tried to solve the problem for years and realize they need outside help?

Solution: Who? How? What? When?

The next section lays out how you will help them solve their problem. What are the major milestones or deliverables? When do they happen? Who is responsible (including people on their team)? Are there obstacles you are likely to encounter? Checkpoints along the way? Put them in the timeline. If it’s helpful, you may want to include a diagram to help explain how the solution works.

Price and other Matters: How Much?

After you have spelled out the problem and solution, state the price. (I have lots of other pieces on how to price your proposals.)

In your template, state the ideal price for your ideal project. Don’t be shy. If it is appropriate to the value you create, it’s appropriate. Also state when you get paid. (For short projects, I like to do 50% upfront and 50% on completion. For longer projects, I break it out into milestones, always with some payment upfront and some upon completion.)

Also define your ideal terms. Some people like a proposal without any legal terms and conditions, followed by a separate contract. Personally, whether I’m the buyer or the seller, I’d rather see everything all together. Your legal terms should be simple enough for a non-lawyer to read and understand– you’re trying to be reasonable and protect both sides, not pull any kind of legal gimmicks.

Put a place for you and your prospect to sign.

How long is all this? About 3 pages. A page for a nice logo or two and the situation summary, a page (maybe 2) for the solution, and a page for fees and T’s & C’s. Depending on how you break your pages, it may end up at 4 or 5 pages. Yes, I know there are some situations that require 10 or 20 pages. Aim to make it short, though. Don’t feel like you have to write an 8 page proposal when a 3 pager will do. (Again, I have done this. I thought it made me look more “professional.” Instead, it resulted in a terribly written document that did not respect my prospect’s busy schedule.)

If you have supporting documentation, technical specifications, or other details that someone on the buyer’s team needs to vet, but will not be read by the buyer, link to them.

3. Do Your Research

Now for the important part. Talk to your prospect.

Actually, that’s the wrong advice. Listen to your prospect. Hear what they are really saying. Don’t try to jam their words into your solutions. Ask them to describe their problem. Don’t lead them, let them lead you. For example, don’t ask “what benefits to you think a proposal automation application would have?” Instead, ask “Why are you looking to improve your proposal process?” You will uncover so much more information, and have a much deeper understanding if you let them lead. There’s a little bit of jujitsu here– the less you try to “sell” in these discussions, the easier the sale becomes, because you will actually know what their problem is, and how to solve it. For many small business owners, this jujitsu comes easily, because they are domain experts who are better at solving problems in their area of expertise than in selling.

Note that your template helps guide your research. Start at the high level, then when you have covered the general picture, you can ask more detailed questions. Be as open-ended and non-leading as possible. Here are some questions to help you get started:

• Why are you pursuing this project?
• Why now? What happens if you don’t do this?
• How have you dealt with this in the past?
• What do other people in the company think of this?
• How does this fit into other company priorities?
• Why did you come to us?
• How do you plan to measure success?
• What obstacles do we need to avoid?
• How do you envision us working together?
• How do you approve projects like this? (Note that we are not asking typical sales questions like “do you have a budget? What is your budget?” We are trying to get a much higher level view of what the prospect needs to proceed. We can later drill into budget, risk, legal issues, training, or whatever else is a potential deal blocker.)
• Who else should I meet with to get gain additional perspective?
• What should I make sure I include in my proposal?

(For a great introduction to asking open-ended questions, check out Barry Rhein’s Sales Challenge, a free online exercise that will change the way you think about selling. Spend 10 minutes doing it, if you haven’t already.)

While you’re discussing, take notes. This is one of the biggest changes I’ve made in my personal sales process. I used to think that spending lots of time taking notes was impersonal and rude, and I thought I could remember everything based on a few high level bullet points. Now, I think it’s rude to turn around a proposal that doesn’t reflect what the prospect said, that requires lots of revisions. I take lots and lots of notes. It’s great if you have a colleague to take notes for you, but if not, write it down. You can even stop to say “let me make sure I got that right, you’re having a problem getting TPS reports filed on time?” Make sure you use note and understand the prospect’s terminology. You can use their jargon in your proposal, but not yours.

If your prospect never brings up price, you need to bring it up. You don’t want to write a proposal for a Ferrari for a customer who can only afford a Honda, and you don’t want to pitch a Honda to someone who wants a Ferrari. Unless it’s a very simple deal that allows for upfront pricing, I don’t want to commit to a price. However, I’m happy to say that “in the past, we have done projects like for between $50,000 and $250,000. I know that’s not a useful range, but here are the things that impact which end of the range we’re on. How does this fit with your needs?” Note that we are focused on what they need to do, the value we bring, not the price.

When you get to actually writing your proposal, having detailed notes makes all the difference. Which takes us to step number 4.

4. Fill Out Your Proposal Template

When they ask you for a proposal, and before you create one, ask them to set up a time to discuss it. Get it on the calendar. If they can’t do this, it’s not high enough priority for them, and not high enough priority for you to take the time to write a proposal. Knowing how things go, this appointment may get rescheduled, but it’s better than having no commitment to followup. (Thanks to Louis Bernstein at InsideSales.)

Now you’ve got a proposal template and detailed notes, you need to combine them. I usually do this by organizing my notes into the general outline of the proposal template.

Organize notes into the general outline of the proposal (situation, solution, pricing).

Within those sections, organize and highlight key points. For example, the prospect may have highlighted 5 potential benefits, but “turning around all sales proposals in 24 hours” might have been critical, while “better pipeline reports” might have been “something we’d like to get, but isn’t really driving the project.” Make sure you focus appropriately.

If you’ve done the previous steps thoroughly, you have a simple transcription exercise. I have put together proposals that were not only accepted, but highly complemented for being “spot on” in 20-60 minutes, once I put in the work on the previous steps. Remember the jujitsu. In other cases, it may take hours, especially if some of the details of the solution are not obvious. The point is, you are not staring at a blank screen, wondering what to write. I have got panicked calls on Friday afternoon from customers trying to send a proposal before the end of the day, wondering if they should be pitching an onsite visit or a remote project. Or whether they should pitch a $10,000 project or a $100,000 project. My response: “Don’t panic. But I can’t help you. You need to ask your prospect.” If you’ve done a good job with your research, you already know this answer. If you don’t, it’s perfectly OK to go back and ask more questions. Better to bother your prospect with a 5 minute question, than make them read through a proposal that you’re going to make them reread anyway after you revise it.

5. Collaborate to Refine Proposal

Send your proposal to your prospect. If you know it’s rough, mark it as “DRAFT” in big font. If you think it’s ready to sign, make it look like it’s ready to sign. If you’re used to using Word and sending an email attachment, you may want to try using Mimiran to send and close online. (Yes, of course it’s a blatant pitch, but it’s also what I use for my proposals, and it’s so much better than the 1990s way.)

If you send your proposal with Mimiran, you’ll know when your prospect has read it. This takes a lot of stress out of the whole process, and makes it more efficient to follow up (you did set up an appointment time, right?). You can even address small issues while on the phone (“I addressed your comment about the vagueness of the deliverable in week 4– can you go back to the solution section and see if I got it right?”) and close, sometimes while on the phone. Even if you have have to go back and forth a couple of times, that’s OK. The more work you do in your pre-proposal discussions, though, the more the easier and the shorter this phase will be.

6. Sign and Celebrate

While signing the proposal is only one step on the path to the end goal (remember step 1, “start at the end”), it’s still worth celebrating. Personally, I have a wee dram of whisky and toast, not to the signing of the proposal, but to the project ahead. You can high five your colleagues, go to the driving range, call your mom, it doesn’t really matter. Do something small but meaningful.  Then, send a nice hand written note to your prospect. And get ready to get to work.

Following these steps, I’ve spent less time writing better proposals, that are more likely to close more quickly, and more help me deliver better results. It’s win-win-win all the way around. I’m not a sales guy, and I’ve never had any formal training on writing proposals. If I can do it, anyone can.

In addition to a more modern look, you can now enjoy:

• Better fidelity when pasting from Word (note the Paste from Word) button.
• It’s now much easier to add rich content (check out this FAQ article on Embedding Video in a Proposal).
• Easier to see the Merge Field drop down.
• View blocks of html elements.
• A nice carat insertion tool that makes it easy to position your cursor, especially in hard to reach places (see first circled area below).
• You can stretch out the editor to see more of your proposal on the screen (see the second circle). You can also edit in full screen mode.

More questions (and answers) will be coming. Let us know if we missed your question.

Note the support website is just a click away in the Help menu in the Mimiran application itself.

But wait, you object, you *are* writing it for the right person. It’s all about them. Their problem, and how you can help them solve it. The challenge is that unless the buying decision is made 100% exclusively by 1 person, there are other view points that may not be in your proposal. This is actually worth repeating: unless 1 person is entirely responsible for the buying decision, with no need to check, review, corroborate, or discuss with another human being, you have to address more than 1 person’s needs in your proposal. So if you are only writing for one person, even if that person is the ultimate decision maker, you’re still “writing for the wrong person.”

For example, you might be selling to a small business owner. The owner says she has total control over the decision. And she does. But she needs to make sure her sales staff and IT person are on board. Unless the owner does a great job gathering their needs before your conversations, you won’t have enough information to know that the sales team considers mobile access non-critical, but really needs support quickly approving discounts.

To avoid this pitfall, always ask your “decision maker” questions like “who will be impacted by these changes? How do we need to address their concerns?” A quick chat with the IT person and the head of sales could have resolved that before your proposal got relegated to a black hole.

Often, you don’t need to address the whole proposal to the whole committee. You may have a section for “Systems Integration” to address the concerns from IT. Or a training subsection to address roll out concerns.

Think about the decisions you make at your company. Even in areas when you have responsibility and ultimate authority, you confer with your colleagues both to make sure you are considering all the angles, and to build support for whatever change you are trying to implement. So when you are working with a prospect, help them help you by covering the bases their colleagues find important. Your proposal will get passed around to them, and if they don’t like what they see, your contact won’t sign. Like so much of selling, it sounds like more work in the beginning, but you’ll be able to write and close your proposals much faster.

You can still have Mimiran send the email for you, of course.