What Makes A Good Proposal?

One of my clients is having an overhaul of how they present Proposals to prospects.  They’re conscious that attempts at making production of such compelling sales collateral easy for reps have failed beforehand.

A previous English regime spent many long hours creating a standard document, from which a 71-page template emerged.  But the reps ended up either sending it almost in its entirety or not at all.  The will to continue ebbed away.

Then an American team tried a drag-and-drop approach.  But they found that too much resource was needed to create and maintain it, with the amount of “feeding and watering” required to keep it up-to-date too onerous.  This idea similarly faded away.

So, they’re trying again.  This time they’re focused on how to avoid making something generic.  The plan now is to create a kind of question route for a campaign that enables the Proposal to effortlessly follow.  The main types of discussion are aimed at identifying:

• why the project is important to the prospect
• why problems have arisen
• the people affected (whether they realise it or not)
• how all this can be improved and delivered
• the headline business growth/improvement figures

And the project name for this initiative? The Post-It Note Proposal.