Proposals aren’t just a necessary evil, they may be your best chance to differentiate yourself.
Smart sellers dread the Request for Proposal (RFP) process, and start-ups and growth stage firms should fear them too. If your company isn’t the low-cost provider and you don’t have an established relationship with the client, generating a sales proposal can be a significant resource drain, distracting your top technical and sales resources away from more viable sales targets—a potential company killer for early-stage firms. However, there are real deals that go out to RFP and marquee clients that merit such attention. Read on for some advice to growing organizations on how to develop winning proposals.
Have a Plan
Generating a solid proposal is the ultimate team sport. Each member of your team must understand his or her role in creating a winning RFP response. It is critical that everyone understands the buyer’s key decision criteria. Do your research, understand what drives the customer’s business, and work as a team to tailor your proposal accordingly.
Be Consistent
While it’s essential that proposals speak to the buyer’s specific needs, it is equally important that you provide consistent information so that the client doesn’t understand from your website that “x” is true, from your collateral that it’s actually “y” and from our proposal that it is now “z.” Furthermore, with RFP responses easily ranging from 30 to 200+ pages, you don’t want to start from a clean sheet every time. Developing a library of strong, consistent proposal copy can significantly improve the efficiency of your proposal process.
Don’t Just Tick the Boxes
Serious sellers have evolved beyond “ticking the boxes” and approach the RFP response as an opportunity to differentiate their firm and solution from the competition. Whether it’s using quotes from the firm’s latest investor conference to reframe the problem, highlighting an industry trend’s effect on their decision criteria (that coincidentally lead back to your solution), or just recognizing that a picture is worth a thousand words and convincing them with strong visual and graphical content that’s easy to read and understand, it’s important to find ways to set your proposal apart.
Introducing Proposify
Proposify is a new cloud-based tool that’s all about simplifying and streamlining your proposal process, but its ultimate goal is to impress the heck out of your clients.
Building your proposal content library is the key to accelerating your Proposify process and ensuring consistency across deals. Collaboration tools in Proposify, through browser or app interfaces, enable your team to work together in real time to ensure consistent updates across all sections.
Proposify’s intuitive design interface and template library enable you to brand and differentiate your proposal. A gallery of attractive document templates makes it easy to create eye-catching and informative proposals that can be customized to your style and voice.
Finally, say goodbye to the proposal black hole, or that deafening silence you often hear after you have sent your RFP response to the customer. Proposify has notifications to inform you every time your client interacts with your proposal, from opening the first email to signing the contract.
As a Proposify Certified Partner, Katzcy is excited to share this tool with you because we have seen first-hand how it can accelerate success in generating proposals and closing new business.
If you’re ready to impress the heck out of your prospects, Katzcy can help with your next RFP response. Whether you’d like us to assist you with market research, developing compelling copy, or creating beautiful proposals that command your clients’ attention, we’ll help you put your best foot forward. Let’s talk!
