Creating and closing proposal more efficiently is a big win for personal and company productivity, and it’s also a big win for your customers’ productivity.
Do you hate the grunt work of answering RFP questions or just having the seemingly endless series of meetings and phone calls to gather the information required to create a proposal? Your prospects don’t enjoy it any more than you do. They have a problem to solve and if they could have solved it without meeting with vendors, they would have done so.
You can use your efficiency in the proposal process to your advantage, being “easy to do business with”, which makes your customers and prospects actually want to work with you.
Here are some tips:
- You’re the expect in your field. You know most of the questions you need to ask to understand the prospect’s problem and propose a solution. You know who in the buying organization can answer them. Gather the right people, ask the right questions, so you can create a compelling proposal on the first try.
- Make your proposal easy to read, easy to understand, and as short as possible. Sometimes a diagram is worth 1,000 words. (Never use jargon, unless it’s your customer’s jargon.)
If you can do this, you can often create, send, discuss and close your proposal before the competition has even got their proposal out the door.