7 Steps To Personalize Your Proposal (Without Adding To Your Workload)

We want our clients and are potential clients to feel special, unique. But we don’t usually have time to fit that feeling into our contracts and business proposals. We’re just trying to get out as many proposals as quickly as possible to increase the odds of us improving our winning rate.

We at Quote Roller want to offer you a few tricks to help you make your business proposal look like you’ve made especially for your client. We are going to teach you how to create a custom sales proposal, without actually having to take the time to create a custom sales proposal.

What your clients really want is to know that you are qualified to deal with their “unique” situations, recognizing their pains and offering solutions to them. So how do you portray that without adding more than a few minutes to your workload? Here’s how!
Creating a custom sales proposal could be one more step to getting that coveted signature. Putting in the extra effort to respond to your client inside the sales proposal acts as a sign you are going to provide your clients with great customer service.

We are here to tell you that you can do it without too much extra work. It’s all about how to find, develop, and respond to the customer’s needs, worries or pain — that’s what they’re looking for and that’s what they’re paying for. So here are 7 steps to teach you how to do it.

1. Ask your client!

If you get a chance to visit your client or catch them on the phone, don’t spend all your precious time talking about your company. This is the moment to identify the needs of your client. Ask them why they want to outsource this service. Parrot back what they’ve told you in the “Problem” part of the business proposal. Even a well-worded Tweet or a flash email asking clients “What is one thing our company could do to make your lives easier?” can quickly help you find that perfect piece to the killer proposal puzzle. Because, let’s be serious, who does everyone prefer to talk about? Your company or themselves?

2. Chances are, you can guess that time management is one of their reasons and cost is another

Nearly all companies share the pain of not having enough time to adequately do the job they are looking for you to do and of not having enough money to hire a full-time staffer to do it for them. These ideas suit just about every client’s needs and can be auto-added to just about every sales proposal, leaving the individuals evaluating your proposal with the sensation, “Wow, awesome start-up X really gets me and my company.”

3. Google and Google News your potential new client

Read their Wiki — especially since they probably drafted it themselves. It’s an easy way to know your potential client and understand their problems. The cover letter — or the bit that should persuade the reader to continue onward — should include two to three lines about why you want to work with that particular client. “You are the leader in blah-blah and we think our company would make an excellent partner due to blah-blah-blah.” Cite some goodies about what your client is known for, maybe even an event or accomplishment they recently had.

4. Talk is nice. Clear pricing is nicer

When it all comes down to it, the part they are going to care the most about is the pricing page. For us at Quote Roller, we’ve found that your customers are spending more than half their time looking at the pricing table on your sales proposal. Make it clear what services you provide and what they cost.

5. Prioritize Services and Products

Maintain a thorough list of services and products, with pricing. Since your competitors may or may not keep as comprehensive of a list, don’t delete services, but rather rearrange the order of services to reflect the needs and priorities of the client.

And what do folks like most with payments?

6. Pricing options

We now have the service you’ve been asking for: “Optional Pricing Options,” which makes it simple for you to offer you clients “specialized packages” and other options, where you include the option of different solutions to solve their pains. If you have returning customers, simply offering them a special package “For returning customers” may be enough to make them feel valued and to keep them returning.

 

7. Guarantee

And when in doubt, nothing gains more trust than including a guarantee in your terms and conditions. Simply saying that you are so confident with your service/product that, if they aren’t, the next service is free, etc, builds a personalized line of trust.