A good proposal is a story, and great stories need strong villains. Villains provide an emotional push to the story beyond numbers in a spreadsheet. No matter how much ROI is involved, or how logical the CFO is, organizations rarely move … Read More
proposals
Streamlined Copying of Quotes for Proposal Templates
Creating a proposal from a template copies any quotes from the template to the new proposal. This makes it really fast to have your proposal ready to go. Except for one thing. Mimiran would prepend “Copy of ” to the … Read More
Saying Nothing, Beautifully
A great video made the rounds recently, depicting a “Generic Brand Video” ad. If you haven’t seen it yet, take the 3 minutes… … then think about how so many sales proposals are the written equivalent of this meaningless gloss. … Read More
Top 3 Sales Proposal Myths, Busted
1. The Economic Buyer Is Very Busy You might think the executive who can approve your proposal is really busy, with barely enough time to read your proposal, let alone understand it, but nothing could be further from the truth. … Read More
If You’re Getting Pushback on Price, You’re Probably Not Proving Value
If your prospects push back on your price, you’re not giving them the right value. Let’s talk about what happens in the worst case, when sales reps just toss out some numbers without even really understanding the customer’s problem. Of … Read More
Your Proposal Isn’t a Brochure, It’s a Story
How many times have you seen a proposal that looks like a collection of the seller’s web pages? There’s some “About Us” boilerplate, some product information, and some customer logos. (Sadly, some of the proposals like this that I’ve seen … Read More
What the Lego Movie Can Teach Us About Sales Proposals
We’ve had a strange winter in Austin. Three “snow days”, one of which involved a small dusting of snow. Last Friday, we had a “snow day” based on, well, chance of cold rain. There was no precipitation. I’m not sure … Read More
Why Your Sales Proposal Language Might be Giving You Away
For someone who spends so much time dealing with sales proposals, I really hate reading them. It’s not just that they are boring, it’s that they often lie, or obscure truth. In an effort to sound convincing, their authors subvert … Read More
Speed is a Competitive Advantage in Sales Proposals
Delivering a proposal to your prospects faster can not only help you close faster, it can also help you win more deals. If you can turn around a compelling proposal before the competition, by the time they submit their proposals, … Read More
How Important Are the Graphics in Your Sales Proposal?
Most sales proposals look like they were designed by the template team for Microsoft Word, circa 1995. I get a lot of questions about how proposals should look and how important the aesthetics of the proposal are to buying decisions. … Read More