Up Your Win Rate

One of the less fortunate aspects of selling in the design and construction industry today has been that the sales people now have to write better proposals.

Writing proposals is about as much fun as having your teeth drilled. And reading them isn’t a whole lot better. So why do clients ask for them? One reason is that the client wants to compare offers from various firms to make sure they buy the highest value solution based on your differentiators and value proposition. Or, they might simply want to compare prices, clarify complex information, and gather information so that the "decision team" can review it. And, let’s face it, sometimes they just want to slow down the sales process and figure that asking for a proposal will keep marketers busy for a few weeks.

Whatever the client’s motivation, proposal writing has become a common requirement for closing business in the design and construction industry. 

What Goes Into A Winning Proposal?

The object of a winning proposal is to provide the client with enough information, persuasively presented, to prove your case and motivate the client to buy

Tips For Maximizing Your Win Ratio

If you follow this following basic structure-first summarizing the client’s needs, then showing their potential for gain or improvement, third recommending your solution, and finally substantiating that you can do the job-you will see an increase in your win ratio. 

But there are two other principals that can push it even higher:

1. Personalization

2. Primacy.

PERSONALIZATION

What does this mean for you and your proposals? It means that you can’t give them boilerplate. You have to include their name and their company’s name throughout the proposal. You have to acknowledge that you have listened to them and remember what you’ve learned about them rfom previous interactions.

1. Engage your clients in conversations, listen and view clients as individuals.

2. You must have something worthwhile to say and you need to say it in a way that shows the audience that it’s relevant to them.

3. Boilerplate messages may be worse than no messages at all because they sound "canned" and undercut the rapport you’ve created with clients.

4. Use the client’s language and refer to issues from their business and their industry. If you use the jargon they use and show familiariry with what’s going on in their business and industry in the cover letter and executive summary, they will assume that the entire proposal has been personalized to them.

Unfortunately, many sales and marketing people resort to "cloning" as a means of getting their proposals done quickly. They borrow a proposal that somebody else has written for a different client and use the Find/Replace function in their software to change the client’s name. That’s about as personalized as a can of beans. Plus, you run the risk of having a wrong client’s name turn up somewhere in the proposal. You can imagine what that does for credibility.

PRIMACY 

What is Primacy? You might call it the principle of first impressions. So what does this mean for proposals? It means that you must put the things up front in the proposal that the client cares about most. It means don’t send a boilerplate cover letter. Don’t write an executive summary that’s all about you. And don’t call your proposal something generic like "Proposal."

The primacy principle tells us that it’s vitally important to understand the client and then structure the message correctly. Put the need that the client feels is most important first. Put the goal or outcome they want the most first in your list of outcomes. And structure your substantiations in terms of the things that matter the most to the decision makers.

- Meeting a perceived need

- Delivering superior value or ROI

- Complying with their sspecifications

- Proven experience

Don’t guess! If you don’t know what the client cares about, ask him.

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