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How to Write Sales Proposals That Actually Win Sales

Sales

Do you write sales proposals? How confident are you that you will actually make a sale after you write a sales proposal? All too often, sales professionals spend a lot of time writing proposals, then days or weeks later they learn that a competitor got the sale. Here’s how you can write sales proposals that get results.

What does your sales proposal promise?

What are you promising customers? Your sales proposal should be stating that promise. All too often, when salespeople write proposals, their sales proposal titles are an afterthought; their titles end up being boring and ineffective.

How effective do you think sales proposal titles like these are?

  • A Proposal From Company XYZ for Company ABC
  • A Sales Proposal From Company XYZ.

Those titles don’t exactly compel you to grab your wallet and buy something, do they?

Instead, consider sales proposal titles like:

  • $50,000 Savings From Downtime Reduction at Company ABC
  • 25% Increase in Productivity at Company ABC From XYZ Software Implementation

A proposal with the cost savings in the title helps you accomplish a sales objective. In order to buy, the customer has to actually read the proposal, and not just simply flip to the pricing page. An effective proposal title makes the reader want to read the proposal and find out how they can get those results.

Does your sales proposal get the reader to do something?

You may think your competitors in the marketplace are your competition. That’s only partially correct. There are customers who seek proposals just to see what the current market offers. They really aren’t interested in doing something more than what they are already doing. What does that mean for you? It means that your true competition is the customer who is doing nothing.

An effective sales proposal title shows the customer the cost of his/her doing nothing. It is hard for a customer to do nothing when a customer has downtime costing him $50,000 or she is missing an opportunity to increase her productivity by 25%. Your effective title shows customers they have a big enough problem that needs to be addressed by buying something from you.

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Are you ready to write your sales proposal?

What if you can’t determine the cost of your customer doing nothing? That means you don’t have enough information to write a sales proposal. You may not have asked enough questions to get to the root cause of your customer’s problems. Perhaps you aren’t asking the right questions to quantify the issues you are learning about. Either way, it’s too early to write a sale proposal.

Only write a sales proposal when you can quantify what the customer’s problem is costing them. What can you do if you find that you can’t write the sales proposal? Go back and ask more questions to learn why your customer wants a proposal from you. What existing situation has caused the customer to ask for a proposal. Ask about how that situation is impacting their business. Calculate the dollars the issues is costing the company. Find out what other companies are also being asked to write a sales proposal.

Note: If you don’t have the quantified cost of the issue, you are making it too easy for your customer to stay with their present supplier or select a competitor who has a lower price.

Importance of a strong sales proposal

It takes a lot of hard work for a salesperson to reach the point where a customer considers them to be a supplier. You don’t want all your work to be futile because you wrote a poor, ineffective proposal. Write your next sales proposal when you are ready to deliver a compelling sales message that is impossible for your customer to ignore.

And that’s how you will make the sale.

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Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.