Why are some proposals successful and others not? Why do some people make it to the top of your sales organization and others don’t?
Are some proposals just lucky? Are some sales propositions just better pitches?
Or (the favorite excuse of less successful proposal writers and salespeople) are your prices too high?
No way.
If you want to win, you simply need to follow a simple law: present the prospect with the benefits that are most important to him in the order that they are most important to him.
When you ignore this law, you are praying to win the deal by luck, under false pretenses, or more commonly, because someone else’s proposal is worse than your own.
Sometimes you have the opportunity to speak directly with the potential client before submitting your proposal. If so, then all the better. Ask him what is important to him.
But with the government or when you’re involved in direct sales, you can’t ask what’s important ahead of time. You still need to try to figure out what is important to this prospect, but you also need to get the prospect’s attention and interest to have a chance to do so.
So what should you emphasize in the meantime to get the prospect’s attention? By looking at successful sales, you can identify the sales pitches that are most persuasive overall. These are the 10 commandments.
Here is an example to show how it works in the real world:
When I was in college, I worked one hot summer in Arizona for a small business in an office park, where we did focus groups and survey research. A water bottle delivery man passed by.
Now, this was a service that I, as an employee, would have liked. As it was, my boss’s water bottle system involved one of the employees driving empty jugs to the water refill machine at a nearby Mexican grocery store. When I discovered that the bottles were not rinsed and sterilized between uses, I stopped using them. Other employees felt the same.
This was, however, a cheap system. And my boss was the very definition of a price buyer. He was also a price seller. He was convinced that it was all about price. So if the price was going to work for someone, it was going to work for him.
The vendor gave my boss his card and a brochure. My boss looked at them and said that he wasn’t interested and that he already had a system. But, he asked him, how much was the service?
The seller gave him an answer and a price. He argued that the price was excellent and, for the price, the delivery service was a good investment.
You could almost hear the doorbell ring. No dirty. My boss was not interested. Thank you anyway. The seller left.
A few weeks later, a vendor from a competing water supply company stopped by. He didn’t try to force a business card or brochure on my boss. I have no idea if he had them.
Instead, his first words were about how my boss could increase his profits with a better water system. He gave a case study of an employee who was in a car accident while refilling water on company time and the costs in time, stress and insurance premiums that come with it. He gave another case study on improving employee morale and improving comfort for him. And he gave some evidence about the bacteria count when you refill the bottles yourself instead of using a convenient service.
My boss, always a price shopper, asked the price. The water vendor responded, “Well, it depends on the service you order. But no matter which one you order, you can be sure the water will be clean, the bottles will be sterilized, and the service will be convenient and professional. That’s why we deliver water to Home Depot.” , Sears, and more than 500 local businesses.” He also emphasized how my boss would benefit from his company’s excellent reputation for punctuality and management’s focus on quality.
Finally, he addressed the price. Given all the service benefits I had already mentioned, the price seemed perfectly reasonable, even to my boss. The seller received the order (and I finally managed to quench my thirst again).
The same principles apply to proposals. Today more mediocre proposals are submitted than ever. This is because more companies than ever are using Request for Proposals and the fact that despite this, few companies bother to institute any training on how to win them. Add to this that many proposals are written by salespeople themselves and that there are more mediocre salespeople than ever, mainly because the industry generates 30% turnover each year.
Considering that the same principles that succeed in proposals are the same ones that succeed in direct selling, there is no more pressing need in business than training to improve the quality of salespeople and their sales proposals.
Why the urgency? Because, like the losing water seller, bad sellers use price as a crutch on which to support their sales pitch. And when low price doesn’t win the deal, they rely on price again, in the form of a special discount or “one-time” price concession.
When it fails, the salesperson will use a strange set of bad practices, like asking for the sale as a favor (“because I only need one more to win the competition”), or personal relationships, whining, or just trying to intimidate. the prospect in a sale.
But, even when you don’t know anything about the individual prospect, you know that these are very poor conversion strategies. He also knows that there are other sales pitches that win much more consistently.
Finally, you know that price must be the last focus to win a sale. A seller should practice his poker face and not reveal his hunger for a large order… if the seller cuts the price a bit more. The buyer will see that desperate look and exploit it.
Similarly, the sales manager needs to be able to stand his ground, even while listening to a pleading salesman on the phone or reading a frantic email about how “I can sell 10,000 if we can just drop the price by 15%. Let me know ASAP!” !!!”
No no no. If you don’t know anything about the prospect (which is as bad an idea as there is), and instead of finding out, you need to pitch your pitch anyway, this is the order to do it. Here are the 10 Commandments of Proposal Writing and Selling:
1. Opportunity. The opportunity to make money, to be the first to enter a new market, to dominate an industry. Anyone in a position to make purchasing decisions feels this call. A sale is an opportunity for the buyer. The seller is just the means to get there.
2. Profitability. What would you care if you were making the purchase decision on your own proposal? What would be your concern? If your concern is about more than making the profits that will keep you in business, it’s hard to see how you’ll stay in business.
3.Quality. How much would you pay for something you knew would fall apart in a few seconds? Not only would he pay nothing, but he would have to be paid to take it. All products have the hassle factor in them, so higher quality will always be a selling point because it always reduces the hassle factor.
4. Services. Two types of service are critical: your advisory recommendation service prior to sales and customer service after the sale. They are both critical. The potential customer will judge your commitment and ability to perform the second type of service based on how well you perform the first. Honest, thoughtful recommendations will always trump self-selling.
5. Name recognition. The simplest and easiest way to make a decision is “Do I recognize the brand?” If you do, you buy it. If you don’t, you don’t. This is why so much advertising is simply brand awareness advertising.
6. Reputation. The reputation of the organization closely follows the recognition of the mother. Let’s say you recognize two brands: Apple and Dell. On their own, they would both be fine. However, one against the other, reputation will triumph. Apple has a reputation for providing a great user experience, while most people couldn’t say much about Dell’s reputation one way or the other. This is the value of the corporate goodwill.
After these six, we’re starting to get into the “Why bother?” internship But if that doesn’t work, keep trying. Use your business skills, whether in your proposal or in your direct sales. If you have direct connections, use them at this point. Referrals are a great way to get noticed, even if they don’t close the sale.
7. Art of selling. The art of selling is still important. We all know a lot of salespeople who can close a lot of deals on the strength of their personality.
8. Personal relationships. When you see a vendor complaining or complaining or asking for personal favors like the water vendor, it is usually a misguided attempt to cash in on the relationship before a relationship has been established.
9. References. Having a trusted broker who speaks well can open doors, but rarely close sales.
That’s nine. And what have we not mentioned? Price. The simple truth is, if you haven’t made the sale on any of the other nine factors, a price-based sales proposition isn’t going to change a thing. If a prospect doesn’t want your product at a fair and honest price, then he should go back and work on fulfilling the first commandments again.
10. Price. Certainly a requirement, but last in any good proposal or sale. Price is not a reason to buy. Price is the cost of obtaining all the benefits that are the reasons to buy. It is not an argument in itself.