Hi, I’m Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we're talking about business growth strategies, some of which are unconventional. I don't know that you would necessarily point to proposals as a way to grow your business, but we're talking about proposals because for too many consultants, they waste hours and hours on proposals that end up getting rejected. So what I want to do is talk to you about how to ensure that your proposals get a yes almost every time, what you can do to do that. And that will definitely grow your business if you get more proposals to yes. So, let's get started.

The concept that came to me when I was thinking about this topic is those proposals that they used to do on spec at all the big consulting companies, you know, they've got an army of MBAs up there sitting around with not much to do. And so the consultant would come in and say, so-and-so client wants that proposal about what we can do with something. And so the MBA would put together this 50 or 100-page proposal and send it over, and then they would see what the client thought. And they can do that because they have MBAs on staff. But what it did was, it introduced into the lexicon the idea that the client might say, hey, send me a proposal about that.

And then someone in our position has to figure out what do we do? Well, by no means do you ever send a proposal in that situation but it is the case that that's what clients think they're supposed to do if they hear you talking about something that's interesting to them. They don't know what the next step is always. So very often they'll say, send me a proposal. So today I'm going to talk about the things that you should not do in the area of proposals and then I'm going to specifically share with you a key thing that you can do to get a yes almost every time on your proposals if you’d be brave. I just want to say for the record that proposals are heinous, they are time-consuming and dreadful for almost everyone and there is a simpler way to do them. But why are they so terrible? Well, because they take a ton of time to do. It takes a long time to write a proposal if you're going to do a good job on it. And very often people don't know what to say in the proposal and it's a ton of work to do and to risk only to have a no come back to you in the end. So this is why I'm so careful with your time around proposals and why I want to give you these ideas so that you're not wasting time on a proposal only to hear no.

And the thing is that in many cases, the role of the proposal as it's being done right now is the wrong role. It should actually play a very limited role instead of what most consultants have it doing. So they send me something about that and then having all these tons of ideas and things in there is not the role. The role of a proposal is to summarize all of the conversations that we have already had rather than to be a discovery session. So for a lot of people, that hold the same yet on spec, well that's if it were a discovery session, I'm going to send out this proposal, it's going to include all of the things that I could do. There's going to be ideas and explorations, and some of those are going to be a fit for you. But since I don't really know you all that well, they may not be. Well, that is a useless thing to send. It's a waste of everyone's time. Again, it's not a discovery session, what it should be is a summary of discovery sessions. So what should have happened all the time before a proposal got written? Well, you should have had meetings with the client. You should hear what are their challenges? What do they want to have instead? What kind of support are they looking for? What outcomes and desired future are they looking for?

So you want to put all of that into there, how long do they want to take? What do they want to cover? How much do they want to invest? If all of that has been covered in advance, then you can go away and write a proposal. And it can be actually pretty simple at that point because you have all the information you need. It's a super drag to get back to your desk to start writing a proposal and realize you don't have the crucial information. So quick tip on this, make sure that your sales intake process, your discovery process is aligned with your proposal, that way, you're always collecting the information you need to go into that proposal. So if you've done it right, the role of that proposal you now hear is very limited. It's just a few pieces of paper that says, did I hear you correctly? Let's get this down on paper. Here's what we're going to be doing, just sign right here. That's that proposal's role ok, it isn't all of this other stuff and I'll tell you some more stuff that isn't.

So first ok, I hear you, if I don't send it on spec, then what do I do? I understand that when the client says, send me a proposal, we want to do that right? We want to do what the client said so instead you can say, hey I'd be happy to, I have a few more questions that I need to ask,can we schedule a time for that? Or you can say, I would love to put together a proposal. What exactly would you like me to include in there? So that is the beginning of a conversation or a continuation of a discovery process that you may have already begun. But you have got to have a complete conversation before you do anything with a proposal.

By no means write a 50-page document ok, so, how long does the proposal need to be? It needs to be long enough to cover what we discussed in the discovery sessions and no longer ok, so this 50 pages means and I'm exaggerating, you might have 15, but it still probably has way too many details. You only want to get into enough information to remind them, oh yeah we talked about that, oh yeah I remember talking about that so you want to refer to the conversation without writing so much detail in it. Here's the reason, details in a proposal are going to invoke pickiness from your client, so whenever I've had someone say my clients are driving me crazy with all this kind of nitpicking and blah, blah, blah, I'm like, well what was the agreement? And they'll say, well in the proposal I had all this, yeah. So don't write the number of hours you're going to work or the number of people you're going to interview all of those things like that leave it to where they trust you as an expert and you're going to do as many interviews as is necessary to or you're going to write as many of this as is necessary to like, let them trust you on your expertise. I also like to put in the proposal anything where we may have had issues with in the past so if there is boundaries, problems that I've had with other clients or that I suspect that I might have with this client, I might want to address that in this proposal in terms of what I refer to scope issues if you've had scope creep in the past, you can be very clear about what the scope is or isn't in this document. So those are cases where you might want to put in specifics just to protect yourself.

So the last thing that you're not going to do, and this is where you are going to save yourself from rejected proposals and you're going to put yourself more on the path towards yes. There should be no surprises in your proposal. What am I referring to? You know what I'm referring to. So often consultants will put together all of the whole proposal, they'll have all of the conversations with the client and then go back to their desk and at their desk, they will put in that investment number. It's never been seen or discussed with the client and so they take these five sheets of paper and they send them off in an email or you send them by FedEx. However, you get it in front of the client and then you metaphorically run and hide behind that boulder-like Wile E Coyote blowing up the roadrunner, you put your fingers in your ears and you wait for the bomb to go off remotely.

That's the moment that the client will see the price on this thing and that's the reason why so many proposals get rejected is because the price is delivered remotely. Somewhere in the universe, the client is opening the proposal, seeing the price, having sticker shock, and dying and then the conversation goes nowhere. Always deliver the investment number in person or on the phone or by Zoom live, that way you can manage their reaction and talk them through the process of coming to peace with that price or making new decisions about what else to do ok, but when you're not there and they're seeing a price without you, it's too easy for them to have a flip-out and you never be able to pick it up again. So you'll get a terse email back. It's out of our budget or we've decided to go another direction or something like that, right?

So, how do we do this if it is in conversation with them? Well, first of all, sticker shock is not always fatal and when you have a client who is experiencing sticker shock at the price you're charging, that's the beginning of a conversation, oh, they say this is the number well, it's more than we expected ok, what did they expect? Just because it's more than they expected, it doesn't mean no. So this is your opportunity to talk about the value that you're going to be bringing to them, you're going to talk about and remind them of what the cost has been to their organization. All of the context that you have learned from the client over this time will be able to be delivered to them live while you're having that conversation.

So remember, we've been in discussions and discovery sessions with the client gathering all this information and then there's a moment when it's time to talk about what you would do for them and how much that would cost. So that is when you're going to deliver that information, in those meetings. Now, what if there are different ways you could solve this? So very often we get the question in proposals, should I have options in there? Well, sure, why not? You can put options in there if there are various ways that you could solve the problem and you feel like the client may want to choose from those options. I would do this if and I would never do more than three. I'm a believer in the small, medium, large personally, I think more than three options begins to confuse the client. You will see many other experts recommend many other things and I have seen huge experts in the consulting field offer seven options and for me, as a decision-maker, I would find that overwhelming. A confused mind never buys and I think if you've got more than three options, it's way too confusing. So small, medium, large, you could do it this way, you could do it this way, you could do it this way, I think that presents things to the client effectively. I always like, can you do the whole kit and caboodle right now? You could do partially over time and then the least you could do that would still begin to solve your problem would be this so that's the way I think about three options.

Years ago, and I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, years ago, my husband said, I was pondering what to offer a certain client, and he said, well, what do you think is the right thing for them to do? And I said, well, obviously the right thing is this and he said, well, why would you ever offer anything else? So, many times I will offer one thing and if the client asks me about other options, I may say something else but I also may not. So the reason I do that is because I have a very high tolerance for risk. Meaning if the client says, no, I will not be crushed, right? I think it's important, I think I'm offering what's in the highest good for the client, but if the client says, no, I understand and I'm okay to not do that.

For some people, they're not okay to have a yes or no, only one option in their proposals, this is where you do you, think about what is a fit for you? For me, almost always I have one option in my proposals. I think there's the right way for the problem to be solved, the right way for me to work and that's what I do. So there are two ways of looking at putting options in your proposals. Either way, the number or the price is not seen for the first time when they get that paper, there's already been a conversation about it.

So if you're in a single meeting with the client and you've taken in all that information, and then you need to come up with a price, but you don't know what that price is, it is ok to leave that meeting, go back to your workshop, figure out what that price is, and then come back to them and say, great, so I wanted to go over with you how I would work on your project and then here's the timing and the scope and here's what the investment would be. You can also offer a range if you haven't really nailed that down or if you need a little more input from them like, would you like to do this, this way or would you like to do it that way. Again, that to me, is part of the conversations that lead up to the proposal writing process. They are solved before you write the proposal, I don't want to do exploration in a proposal, I want to have decisions in advance and I think if you do that, you're going to find that you're going to have all of those tough discussions.

You're going to be brave and have them, and you're going to find that most of the time you're going to get so much better at them, you're going to find that most of the time, it's not a tough discussion. You basically let them know, they go, oh okay, wow that's more than we thought, or oh, that works with our budget great! Whatever is their response, you're going to be able to work with that in that meeting so that you can then move on to the next phase.

Ok, the last thing I want to do for you is to help you take less time to write your proposals and the key for that is to have a template. So I'm going to share with you my personal template you can download it at the theyesproposaltemplate.com, including "the’ at the beginning, theyesproposaltemplate.com. I'll put the link in the show notes. There you can download the proposal that I use. I've used this proposal to close business in the range of low thousands all the way up to a million dollars for a client that we wrote one for. So I think it can be a winner for you as well. My intention for you is that the proposal process becomes light, easy, and inflow, so with that I want to wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business and I will talk to you next time.