The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

In today’s sales world, it’s apparent that most companies have mastered PowerPoint or Prezi to compose absolutely gorgeous proposals. In fact, many companies have dedicated teams or specialists to create seemingly-compelling, graphically-rich proposal pages that go onto a shared drive, making it much easier for salespeople or the support people they work with to simply grab some of those pages and assemble them with a minimal amount of customization necessary. One could argue this approach saves countless hours for the sales operation and puts presentation elements in the hands of those who build such things every day. On the surface, this appears to be a breakthrough akin to Henry Ford’s assembly line. But there is problem, and I bet you know what it is.

I have read about 300 proposals in the last year in my consulting practice, and nearly all of them were, indeed, beautiful. And nearly all I read looked alike – a reference to mostly generic needs that most prospects could have, pages and pages of product information (more than anyone would read), and some boilerplate information about the company offering the proposal. Just imagine you are a professional buyer or business owner who sees multiple proposals of this type every week. It would be an effective organic cure to insomnia, for sure. The number one complaint I hear from salespeople is that they put out a proposal to their prospect and then never hear anything again. Is it any wonder? 

1.  They don’t hear “yes” often enough.

2.  They don’t hear “no” often enough.

When you talk to salespeople all time as I do, it’s easy to see the biggest problem with many proposals is that they seem to fall into a black hole, an abyss, where salespeople don’t hear either "yes" or "no." That’s a problem.

It’s better to hear “no” than nothing. As a result, salespeople feed pending information to their managers each week, which includes proposals still hanging out there, and sales managers continue to miss their projections with faulty data. Experience shows that each week that goes by between presentation and getting an answer, the chance of closing a proposal goes down. In fact, the closing percentage on proposals over 30 days old is usually less than 10%, far less than what the salespeople are projecting. The reality is a no answer is usually a “no” answer.

So, how can salespeople avoid having their proposals drop off the face of the planet, never to be heard about again? Here are some steps that should be useful:

Today we have a guest post by Mikita Mikado. Mikita is the Co-Founder & CEO of PandaDoc, a platform helping sales teams create, deliver, and track intelligent sales content to close deals faster. To learn more about simplifying your sales documents, connect with Mikita and the PandaDoc team on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Price competition is a reality, and it can become pretty intense at times! You can’t avoid it altogether, but you can greatly minimize the haggling over price. The key to dealing with price competition is creating specific value for each of your customers.

You gotta know that modern software and a bevy of specifically-trained digital layout specialists is lifting the tide for everyone when it comes to creating absolutely gorgeous proposals. Who knows what tomorrow’s technology will produce for us. Perhaps 3-D versions of a proposal delivered by hologram, featuring the best-looking and best-sounding salesperson technology can conjure up.  Intriguing to think of, isn’t it?

Despite the fact that very few proposals are unattractive these days, I hear from salespeople that it seems fewer of them actually get read—or if they are delivered in person, not enough of them are being sold. So what is going on? What the high-powered graphics packages don’t take into account is that a proposal must me more than a pretty face. CONTENT trumps appearance 9.9 times out of 10.  A plain-looking proposal with strong content is more likely to sell than a graphically appealing production with weak or generic content. 

I’ve been divorced and remarried. I’ve also lost and closed sales opportunities. As I think about the courtship of either kind of relationship, I’m reminded of how a marriage proposal simulates both really great and not-so-great business proposals. 

Recently I had a conversation with a manager where she was expressing concern about the language she was seeing in their proposals. In reading them over, the words were crisp and highly descriptive. The problem was, the language and terms were those they use in their own internal discussions—their industry jargon. This is a problem. 

Salespeople too often rush to deliver their proposal to the prospect, often believing that the sooner they deliver it the sooner they’ll get the order. Maybe—but only if it’s the right proposal, fully vetted.

Instead of being in a hurry to hand off the proposal, be in a hurry to uncover all the possible objections. Ensure that the vetting process happens by finding all the decision-influencers, running the plan past them, and looking for problems. When you’re present for that vetting, you can fix the problems and switch thumbs-down opposition to thumbs-up support. If you’re not there, you won’t know the issues and you won’t be able to do anything about them.