Why Your Prospect Doesn’t Want to Read Your Proposals

You’ve just put a ton of time and energy into creating a proposal for a Very Important Prospect. You send it over (and if you use Mimiran to send your proposals, you’ll get notified when your prospect is reading it, and even what sections, so at least you’ll know *if* they read it). Now, if they’ve read it, did they want to? Did they enjoy it? And why does this even matter?

If a prospect has asked your for a proposal, they have a problem that’s important enough for them to want to solve. They are busy, and don’t even want to waste time on proposals for problems that aren’t important. So you’re in a good spot. Then you send over a colossal proposal, with fancy boilerplate “About Our Team” section, and pages about how your process/technology/gizmos are totally awesome. There’s legalese, details about scope, and an executive summary longer than a Warren Buffett contract. Your prospect finally gets to read the proposal, perhaps in the evening after all their meetings are done. Zzzzzzzzzzz.

The thing is, most proposals are boring. Awfully boring. They take something the prospect is really motivated and passionate about, and drain all the fun out of it. (It’s likehigh school science class.)  Then you wonder why the prospect is hesitant to sign. A good proposal makes the prospect excited. This problem that they have been trying to tackle is now solvable. That’s exciting. Let it be exciting.

You still have to cover the basics, have the appropriate legal clauses, etc, and you don’t want to over-promise, but it doesn’t have to be boring. If your prospect is Frodo, trying to sneak the Ring of Power into the heart of Mt. Doom, and you are Gandalf, the guide and expert who will make it all possible, don’t make your prospect watch 4 hours of “the making of” before they get to the story. This is the way a lot of proposals work. All about us, and not enough about the customer. Let them get to the story, where they have a problem, they get help, they solve problem.

This is more than just wanting to sound fun and hip. As much as we like to pretend that we are rational beings, for the most part, we’re not. We make a lot of decisions based on feelings, then use logic to justify those decisions. That’s why sales reps invest so much in building “rapport”. You can’t really run this experiment, but think about taking a proposal that seemed to address all the issues, yet didn’t move the client to accept, and rewriting it as a compelling story. How many more deals might you have closed? How much more do you want to do something, especially something hard, when you feel excited about  it, compared to when you feel like it’s just a chore?

Give your prospects something they want to read. It should be easy– you’re writing about something that’s probably literally keeping them up at night.

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