“Whenever you meet a new client, make sure that you’re going through a series of questions that uncover the issues that they might face and that you can then solve.” – Adam Hempenstall in today’s Tip 301
What are the most important things in your business proposal?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Adam Hempenstall. Adam is the CEO & Founder of Better Proposals, where they offer proposal software and also offer Proposal Writing University. Here’s Adam with another proposal related tip:
Adam Hempenstall: One of the simplest things that you can do to make sure that you’re closing more of your sales and making sure that you’re winning more of your proposals is to ensure that the introduction is absolutely spot on. Now what I mean by this is the first meaningful piece of text that your client rates, so this isn’t in the email that you’re delivering it with. This is once they’ve opened the document or the presentation or whatever it is, what’s the first thing they get to read? Now, usually, or most people do as a mistake here is the talk about themselves. They talk about, you know, maybe awards they’ve won or the kind of business that they are or how they do things and that kind of stuff and it’s not the way to go. The first thing you need to do is you just grab them with something that’s important to them and something that means something to them. And that is their problem or what they are trying to achieve, so their goals. And this is only achievable when you understand what those goals are, what the problems they’re facing and what that really means to their business or their life or whatever.
So to start all of this off, the easiest way that you can make sure that this is perfect every single time is whenever you meet a new client, make sure that you’re going through a series of questions that uncover the issues that they might face and that you can then solve. So you want to have a set of questions that you refer back to every single time and they should uncover things. Now, don’t be afraid of asking why. So if somebody asks, says that they want more leads in their business, for instance, why do they want more leads in their business? They want more money. Okay, well maybe it would be easier to increase your conversion rate. No, no, no. We want more leads. Why though? So dig in, a comfortable being uncomfortable. And once you do that and once you start pushing past some of these initial barriers, you’ll find that you get information that you’ve never had before. And only once you get to that point, can you really write a rural quality introduction or you know, overview or executive summary, how of you want to refer to it. And once you’ve done that, it’s gonna grip them. So when they read the proposal, they’re reading it through this lens of you understanding them. Compare that to the old way of writing about yourself first. And they’re reading this proposal with, you know, glazed over, look in their eye and they’re really not taking any of it in. So you get this bit right first and everything else. Even if it’s not great, we’ll flow much, much easier. It will be much, much easier to write. But even if it isn’t amazing, it is still being led with a really, really quality piece. So ask great questions in your meeting or on your discovery sessions, however, you do them, and then make sure that the first piece of meaningful texts that they read in the proposal is a really good quality description of their problems and what it is that they’re trying to achieve. I hope that helps.
Scott Ingram: You can learn more about Adam’s Better Proposals solutions and sign up for free at betterproposals.io
Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!