How to Turn Your Sales Proposal Bottlenecks into a Revenue Growth Engine

Welcome everyone. Thanks for your time. Uh, if you're tuned in, uh, to the Sales 3.0 Conference, the AI Sales Summit, uh, so my session is called How to Turn Your Sales Proposal Bottlenecks into a Revenue Growth Engine. Uh, sales content and how I show up as a seller is something that's become near and dear to my heart. And I want to talk today briefly with you about why it's becoming really important. So this will be a little interactive. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump through this in a second, but in a moment, I'm gonna invite you to pull out a phone and scan a QR code and be able to walk through an example with me. But let's get into, let's get into it. Okay. So AI is not just changing how we as sellers are getting data, getting insight, and selling. It's also massively impacting how buyers are buying. What we see today, and this is research from Gartner, is that only 17% of buyers' time is spent interacting with salespersons from across every supplier they consider. This is interesting. What this means is that 83% of their time is spent doing their own research, using AI to do that, but looking at content. primarily is what we're talking about here. That's why it's important. And so 17% spread across all your competitors and you of your face time, and then 83% where your content is doing the heavy lifting. So that's what I want to point out here. We also see from Demandbase some research, 72% of the buying decision is now spanning across multiple departments. We've already known that buying committees have been growing, but what we're seeing is that Multiple departments in the organization are getting involved. End users that are going to be using the tool are involved. Many people that, as sellers, we never get a chance to meet. And so, again, here, our content has to do the work because we don't even get to talk to them. And finally, I want to point out another stat that's interesting. About 40% to 60%, so half of every loss in B2B sales— this is research from Forrester— we're not losing to competitors. We're actually losing To the status quo. So that means that a buyer is saying, you know, I'd actually just rather stick with the pain that I have, stick with what we're doing. I'd rather do that than buy what this person is selling me. And why is that? And I think it's because we are struggling more and more to build that trust and rapport that's required to get deals across the finish line. So what does it mean for us? It means that the proposal, the sales content that we're putting in front of buyers is becoming more and more important. And I have a personal story for why this is really near and dear to my heart. A few years ago, I closed a deal with the Fortune 1 ranked company in the world at the time, and it was a 7-figure enterprise software sale. It was exciting. I did a win interview, and the reason that they chose us was really surprising. They said, it was your sales process that was the reason we chose you. out of 20 competitors. And I thought, what in the world? What do you mean sales process? Not our price, not our product, not our team. Nope, your sales process. She said that everything that I had sent over the 6-month sales cycle procurement window, from a brochure to videos demonstrating capability to a presentation to my proposal, RFP response, that there was never a typo, that the design that we put into it was head and shoulders above our competitors. Our responsiveness was always immediate while other competitors would take a week. And at the very end of the conversation, she said something that would change how I think about sales forever. She said, that experience told us everything we needed to know about what it was going to be like to work with the rest of your team. So what's the lesson from this for us as sellers? That our sales content, not just our sales conversations, but the actual content we send over, becomes a referendum on how much our company cares, how responsive we're going to be when we provide products and services, and the integrity of our work. This is the very first product they're buying from you when you send a case study, when you send your sales proposal, when you send a pricing quote. That's the product they get first before they actually receive your services, and it matters. So what does this look like for us right now in organizations? We all know how this has gone when you're putting together a sales proposal, especially if you sell something complex or you have a lot of volume. You've got the fire drills before every proposal deadline. You've got SMEs that you're waiting on to contribute content. You're rushing to get pricing calcs done. A big pain point that we often see is that a lot of our sales team and support team are spending their time assembling content and editing content rather than being in front of customers. So this is a process gap pain that we see, and it gets tolerated because we don't often see the real cost. And that's that when we lose these deals, and I gave that stat a second ago, half of deals we're losing are to the status quo, not even to a competitor. And we're saying, well, we must have been too high-priced or the timing wasn't right. No, a lot of times, quietly, the reason that we're losing these deals is because the sales content, the sales proposal, That process, what we put in front of them, is undermining buyer trust. Those assets are now doing a lot more heavy lifting than they'd have in the past, and it matters. So what do we do about it? Well, a lot of companies, I think, would say, well, we need to just make it faster, cheaper, easier for our team to do this. I would say no. I would say it's not that we need to invest less in these assets. Or make them easier or, or more cookie cutter. It's actually that we need to invest more, particularly in how it gets done, the process. And so the big thing there is that we need to be able to make sales content that's thoughtful, accurate, responsive, which means we got to be able to do it immediately and not wait a week to put content together, and complete, tailored for every customer every time. If we solve for that then the efficiency is going to improve and the time that we're losing is going to be reduced. But most importantly, we're going to win more deals. Okay, so what buyers should always get from us as salespeople, in my opinion, what I've learned— think about this— with every deal you're doing, this is what your buyer should get: personalized and responsive content. It needs to be tailored to them, their pain, their story, so that they see, wow, this person gets me and spent the time on this. It needs to be designed well, look beautiful, not have sloppy mistakes. It needs to be responsive. You should be the first one to show up, not the last when they're looking at 10 competitors. Second, a centralized digital sales room where everything is in one easy place for the buyer to access. There's not multiple emails, things getting buried in inboxes. And then finally, visibility between your team and theirs so you can see who are all the people involved in this buying decision. So that you can have access to them, so that they can have easy access to you. So that's what they need to get from you. How do we do it? Okay, so this is the interactive part of the short time we have together. Take out your phone, scan this QR code. I'm going to show you how we do this at Tailwind. This is not a sales presentation. This is just— this is how I believe you guys should approach this. There are other ways you can do this, not just with Tailwind. But this is the idea. So scan that QR code. We're going to build a proposal real quick together and show you what I mean by this. So I want to get away from editing documents and building documents and opening Word and opening Google Docs. And I just want to, as I do my discovery and scoping, have that build my content for me automatically. So I want to build a system that's going to make me more efficient as I scope. It also builds my content, but that content's going to be pitch perfect. So this is an example where I'm a sales rep with Dunder Mifflin and I'm selling paper products. So I'm going to say, okay, Jim is the sales rep. We're selling out of Scranton. We're selling to the Pawnee County Courts, legal industry. Here's what we're selling. So we're going to select the different products or services. Here's the volume. How often are we delivering? So you can imagine for your organization everything that you sell, the different variables involved. This could be quite involved. There could be branching logic in all of this. That's fine. We can build this out with AI, or in terms of Tailwind, we do it with a mix of AI and deterministic programming. But once you're done, boom, boom, boom, I've done all my scoping, right, with my customer. I just hit generate proposal. And this is how we approach a lot of our content. And so we have this proposal generated in seconds, and it's on-brand specific to this deal. And then when I deliver this, and you can see it's got even pricing built in at the very end, signatures if you need it. But when I deliver it, I deliver it in a digital sales room that where our technology also builds this automatically for every single prospect. So you've got a co-branded digital sales room between you as the sales organization and that unique customer that you're selling to. And you can see they can view that proposal right in this system. They can go back home and they can scroll through and get other information that you want to give them on that particular deal. We can even upload case studies or product sheets, uh, and all in the same location. And then finally, when I look at the seller view, I can get a view into what is every individual in that organization across departments that's looking at this deal, and what are they looking at it, and how long are they looking at it. And then we can interact with them right here. And so that's the idea. Ultimately. And so as I go back over here, I would say this, I'd leave you with this. A sale happens in 2 places, when you're in the room and when you're not. And your sales proposal and your sales content is how you win the second one. We're seeing across everybody working with Tailwind, they're seeing an increase of 5 to 10% in their win rates, more opportunity throughput. And of course, reducing that workload on your team is a big one. So that's it. I'll leave you with that. Maybe we have a minute or 2 for questions, Gerhard, but thanks for going through that with me. Also, Cody's in the chat right now from my team, so you can ask him questions there.

I just created my proposal. I don't know whether you can see it, but has the great opening slide. He has an executive summary. Product and pricing, service and delivery. Why us? It's amazing. And that took like 7 seconds for a 9-page proposal. Yep.

Yeah. So it's, so we don't have to sacrifice quality to get speed. It's about the process and we just have an old Manual process. We're used to Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheets and email. We've always done it that way, and we just tolerate the pain of doing it that way. And I think for those 2 reasons, because we don't realize how important this actually is, that it is costing us business, and we don't exactly know how to fix it. But we have the technology now to build out systems to tie all of the automation to your actual discovery and scoping so you can crank out content very easily and it can be beautiful.

So after you see the proposal, you want to edit something, what's the process?

Yeah. Yeah. So when you want to edit, uh, there in our system, there is a full WYSIWYG editor. So once it's generated, you can go in wherever you want, page by page, edit any of the content. Uh, some of our customers lock down certain parts of that because they don't want their sales team editing some of it, but there are certain, like an executive summary or an intro letter, and they can go in and edit. They can do discounts in the pricing. Even in that buyer showroom, that digital sales room I showed you, buyers can redline and annotate. And so it can become interactive in that deal room that we create, which becomes very important.

Yeah. Describe the digital sales room for buyers.

A digital sales room for a buyer, like when you walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealership or a Toyota dealership, and you walk through the front door and right there in the front, they've put out the best-looking cars on the entire lot. Like, this is— when you buy a Toyota, it's always going to be, you know, this amazing. The showroom when you walk in, that's essentially what a digital sales room is, but for B2B sales. And so when a buyer goes to that room, it's been branded for them, it's been tailored for them, and it's showcasing your products and services Hopefully in a way that's gonna build trust and confidence. And we wanna be able to make that easy for sellers to put together. And as I said, tailored for every single buyer.

Right. I think it's very much needed that I recommend that anybody who wants to sell more go to tailwind.com.

Yep.

And we have a link so you can connect with Andy on LinkedIn.

Well, thank you, Gerhard. It's a pleasure being with all of you.

When, when are you gonna write a book?

Yeah. Uh, you know, uh, I, I still feel, uh, uh, maybe like I need some more gray hair and wisdom before I've, I've earned that. But, uh, you know, maybe that would be in the future. I think it's a really important topic. I'm passionate about it. So I don't know, Gerhard, maybe, maybe we should.

The Morehouse Manual for Automated Proposals.

Yeah. Well, we'll talk about it after the conference.

Let's do it. I think that the market needs a book. Then not— there's not enough intelligence in that particular field that you are in and you're the leader.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you.