In this section we cover everything you need to know about writing and winning high-value proposals.
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Earlier this week, I dug up the first real proposal I’d ever written for a client. It was from mid-2006, and the project was a marketplace for doctors to virtually consult with their patients (back then, this client and I were apparently blissfully unaware of the many legalities around doing this).
So as an eager young freelancer, I felt it my duty to put together a proposal. The cursory reading I had done at the time on freelancing informed me that two things were necessary: a contract, and a proposal.
The issue was, I didn’t really know what my proposal should look like, or let alone what it should actually contain.
This summer I’ve written a lot of proposals.
When I was running my agency, this was pretty much my job — I had to bring in six-figures of project revenue each month or it was out of business (or dramatically downsizing). So I was a machine when it came to pumping these things out.
But these days, I’m no longer running my agency. I’m more-or-less a freelancer (but remember, I’ll never admit that to a client) but with one big difference: I’m charging a heck of a lot more, and selling consulting instead of the usual design and development work I used to sell.
Today I want to focus on helping you win more proposals.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: if there’s one part of your sales funnel that you should optimize, it’s how you write and deliver proposals.
How much time do you spend finding prospective clients, qualifying them, meeting about their project, and then writing a proposal? For the average freelancer, it’s about 5 hours per project.
That’s a lot of time. And that’s time you could be billing clients and making money.
One of the most frustrating gigs I ever bid on was a project for a local university.
My consultancy got most of our clients through direct inquiries or referrals; for the most part, we completely avoided the RFP game. In my mind, it was on the same level as spec work.
An employee of mine let me know that his former employeer, a local university that we had strong ties with, was looking to upgrade the internal ticketing tool their IT department used. What made this project really appealing was that this employee used to be on the in-house development team that built version 1.0 of this tool.
Trent asked a great question last week that outlined his fears on digging too deep for the pain behind a project:
I can’t just keep asking, “Why?” Eventually I’ll reach the issue they don’t want to talk about – their point of shame – and the prospect will get uncomfortable and the conversation is over.
How does one get the prospect to say (and this isn’t my space, it’s just an example), “I went on a diet because I got out of the shower and saw myself in the mirror and it was gross. My kids want to go to the beach, but I don’t want to take them because I don’t want to take my shirt off. I feel like I’m letting them down”
That’s the real conversation, not “I wanted to lose weight.” Nobody cares about losing weight; there’s a REASON they want to lose that weight. How to get there without just digging at the wound?
I’ve talked about “proxy pains” quite a bit over the last few months. The idea is that projects are never commissioned in a vacuum… behind each website, app, or whatever you might be hired for, there’s a business problem that needs to be solved.
