March 8, 2024
What do you write about in your proposals?
Let’s say you build WordPress sites.
A potential client asks you how much it would cost for you to build a website for them.
What are you going to write about in the proposal…?
Yourself?
- Your years of experience using WordPress
- The process you use for WordPress development
- The list of WordPress conferences you’ve attended
The time it’ll take you to do the work?
- How many hours you think it’ll take to build the site
- How many design review meetings you’ll conduct
- How many rounds of revisions they’ll get
The quantity of deliverables you’ll produce?
- How many pages you’ll create for them
- How many features you’ll build for them
- How many plugins you’ll install and configure
Guess what?
Your client doesn’t really care about any of these.
These items are all INPUTS and DELIVERABLES.
What the client REALLY wants are BENEFITS.
What are benefits?
Benefits are the ways in which the client’s life will be better after you’re done. The results. The outcomes.
Not putting benefits in your proposal is like me asking you:
Hey, I’ve got 100 milligrams of Vitamin J. Wanna buy it for $50?
As the seller, I probably know all the wonderful ways Vitamin J can improve people’s lives. I’m a Vitamin J expert. But if you don’t know how it will improve your life, you won’t spend a dime on it.
So, for you to agree to buy 100mg of Vitamin J for $50, I would first need to connect the dots between taking the dose and some outcome that’s worth more than $50 to you.
Here’s the thing…
Committing to deliver actual benefits instead of inputs and deliverables will cause your prospective clients to compare your price to their perceived value of the benefits to them, instead of the prices of some cheaper competitor who can promise the same inputs and deliverables for less.
Focusing your proposal on the business benefits that your buyer is after will help them connect the dots between the activities you undertake and the outcomes they desire.
This means that you can set higher fees and still close deals because you’ll be differentiated from the competition in a way that is more important than money.
Yours,
—J
P.S. Do you dread writing proposals? Does it take you forever? Do you always feel like you’re winging it? Are you just making stuff up to sound professional?
The entire first week of The Pricing Seminar is devoted to learning, once and for all, how to write killer proposals in record time. But proposals are just the first of twelve key business topics.
Lessons for the 13th session of TPS start on Monday, so enroll now before it’s too late:
I hope to see you there!