Most people want to say “yes”, to be helpful, most of the time. In sales, there’s a lot of pressure to say “yes” to the prospect. However, sometimes saying “yes” not only kills the deal, it means you’ve actually said … Read More
proposals
Bad Corporate Writing, Again
John Gruber over at @daringfireball points out the absurdity of Twitter’s corporate strategy statement: Twitter’s New ‘Strategy Statement’ “Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and … Read More
Snippets Let You Save and Reuse Proposal Content
Sometimes you have some content that you want to reuse. It’s smaller than a whole template– maybe a section, or even a few bullet points, or a nicely formatted image with a customer quote. Now you can, with “snippets.” Here’s … Read More
Set Up a Mimiran Lead Capture/Proposal Autoresponder in an Hour
Here’s a guest post from a customer on setting up a web form and a proposal auto responder in Mimiran. This is a great way to collect and convert more leads. If you have a Contact Us page, consider adding … Read More
Sales for Nerds, Developers, and Other Engineers
As a software guy turned sales and support guy, I get a lot of questions from technical people about how to do sales. While I’d like to say “here are the 4 things you need to know” or whatever, it’s … Read More
Do Your Proposals Put Your Prospects to Sleep?
I’ve seen many proposals that are The Worst Movie Ever. Don’t make your proposals like this… Yes, you usually need some legal-type language, but you can still make a proposal interesting and compelling. If it’s important enough for the … Read More
Austin Sales, Proposals and Pricing Meetup
Got questions (or answers) about sales, proposals, and/or pricing? Join the Austin Sales, Proposals, and Pricing Meetup Group. We’ll be discussing tips, tricks, pitfalls, etc, to help you sell more effectively and profitably, how to attract the right kind of … Read More
Proposal Writing Style: Formality and Clarity
There are two ways to look at writing style: formality and clarity. The formality of the writing, formatting, and imagery will depend on your customers. A professional party planner may promise to “keep the drinks flowing, the music thumping, and … Read More
Defining the Customer’s Commitments in a Proposal
In addition to clearly defining what we are not doing as part of a project (see What You’re Forgetting to Include in Your Proposal), we need to define what we need the customer to do to make the project successful. … Read More
What You’re Forgetting to Include in Your Sales Proposal
In our rush to define all the great things we’re going to do for our customer, we sometimes forget that we can’t do everything on the wish list. Even worse, the customer sometimes forgets this, as well. Even if the … Read More