Do your proposals win or lose clients?

Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm Ellie Scarfe, your host and experienced executive and leadership coach and now coach and mentor to other coaches who are looking to grow their business with more corporate clients. Now just a little behind the scenes snippet. This morning I am sitting here in my office recording this podcast with not just one but two schnauzers so sitting at my feet. So can I just ask for some grace? They are very loud and if one of them starts barking, the other does and it becomes this inception of schnauzers barking. So apologies if you hear any background noise. I will try to speak calmly so that they don't think I'm speaking to someone at the front door, because that is their kryptonite. Anyway, so today I want to talk about proposals just to change the topic. And so my first thought was, well, why exactly are proposals so important for a coach who is working with corporate clients? And firstly, I just want to say I'm talking about proposals not just for coaching, but also proposals that are for whether it's facilitation or team development or training or anything like that, I'm including it all. So proposals are ultimately are important for a few reasons. One is that they create a bit of a paper trail, they create shared clarity. But the way that they are documented and the proposalization of that information above and beyond say a discussion or email, even an email conversation, the reason the documentation is important is that so often now decisions, funding decisions that are made at an organisational level are made by multiple, multi stakeholder decision making teams. And so it's really important that what we have in that document is something that can stand on its own, be read by people coming from very different perspectives. And also that it is an asset for the person who is trying to get this work funded. It's an asset for them to use internally as well. So it is a really important asset. It's a really important document. And so I just wanted to share that context before I dive in with a few tips. As I've said, I'm talking about the old fashioned PDF document proposal right now. You may not like to do your proposals that way. I would say that one in three people prefer to do it as a deck. There are certainly organizations that prefer a slide deck with proposals on it. The concern is, and I'm like, yep, do it as a deck. But when we start putting things into deck format, it gets a lot of pitch energy. And pitch energy isn't necessarily what we want in these documents. What we really want is we want thought partner energy. And in my experience that is most most effective in landing work. We want thought partner energy rather than look at how great I am or great my organization is energy. So I find a document best to do that. But the truth is, it can. A proposal can even be what you send in a very detailed email. So don't get too hung up on the format, think about the substance and the ideas that I'm sharing and then apply that to your, to your context. So here are my tips. Tip number one, send it quickly. So when I say send it quickly, is that best practice? And the most effective proposal sending happens when you can respond to an opportunity within 24 to 48 hours. So I'll just let that settle in and I want you to reflect on how long does it take you to send a proposal. Now, a lot of people tell me that it takes a lot longer. And usually the reason that it takes a lot longer is that we want it to be perfect. Of course, we as creatures are deeply, deeply affected by perfectionism, right? So we want it to be perfect and we want it to be like perfect, not just in terms of how it looks, but we want it to be the best program. We could pick the pitch, the best coaching opportunity, the best coaching program, the best training. And we think we need to basically have done the work that we would then deliver before we can even send a proposal. And the truth is that's absolutely not the case. Right, And I'll talk about that a little bit further. But what I want you to say, I want you to know is you need to send it quickly. And that can be made a little bit easier by knowing that you don't have to have all of the details already resolved. Right? So that can make it easier. Now, the reason why is that I don't want you to let it drag on because it is going to help you build trust. And it is going to be the very first opportunity for us to either meet or exceed expectations. And when we talk about trust, I always use the trust equation by David Meister, who did this research in a professional services context. But his trust equation is that trust equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy all over or undermined by self interest or a perception of self interest. And so if we think about just one piece of this equation, which is reliability, reliability is does the client perceive that we do what we say we are going to do. And sending a proposal either really quickly or in line with the expectations we set in the meeting is our first opportunity for us to show that we do what we say we'll do. Now, I say 24 to 48 hours is great. However, sometimes this will be much more complex than you can pull together in that amount of time. And there are things you can do to make it quicker, and I'll talk about that in a second. But sometimes it might take a little longer. It may be that you are delivering and you just can't do it. In that case, you need to be really clear on expectations, which is to say, hey, is it okay if I get that to you by the end of the week or is it okay if I get that to you early next week? Now, a little beware is that almost always they're going to say one of a few things. One is, oh, yeah, absolutely no rush, right? And that's a little bit of a beware when they say absolutely no rush. That says a few things to me. One is that they don't have any urgency. And so the second stat, this is an opportunity that could easily fall off, right? Could fall, could just become nothing. And so in those cases, it's even more important to act quickly and get it through to them asap, because we want it to get to them while they're still feeling that enthusiasm, engagement, and they can really remember that credibility that you built in the moment. So reliability, trust, don't let it drag on. Get it out as quickly as possible. And if it can't be done quickly, set expectations clearly, right? So next week, I think I also said that there are a few common things that people will come back with. So one is, oh, yeah, no, don't worry about it, no rush, right? Whenever, red flag. Another one is, oh, okay, that's all right. But could you just give me a ballpark, right, in terms of the financial cost and that they only really want to know the number. And so if you can say, I'm going to get that, I'm going to think it through, I'm going to get it to you in one or two days, it'd be clear on which they're less likely to push you in relation to that. Give me an indication of price. I would say always be prepared to give an indication of price anyway. And that just means when you, if you know what your broad offer categories are, have an idea of pricing, but you can sort of say, oh, look, I could throw something up in the air, but I'd really just, can you give me a day to get something more concrete to you? And so acting quickly is going to help you with that. The second tip I have is that it is really valuable to have a really good template. Okay, so a really good template for your proposal document. And that could be. It could be that you have a few templates like one for coaching, one for facilitating, one for workshop delivery, one for teamwork. Because there are all sorts of things in a proposal that are really specific to the offer. Things like defining concepts or having a bank of options within what you're sending. So have a template that is going to save you so much time. I often have members of my program, the Accelerator, tell me that they were shocked how quickly they could pull a proposal together because they had spent that time building their template. So I would really encourage that. Encourage that you do that. Now if you by chance are considering whether joining me in the Corporate to Coach accelerator and working with me as your coach as you grow your business, if you book in a sales call with me@elliscarf.com Bookacall, I'm really happy to send you a copy of my template for proposals and that could help you as well, give you a bit of an additional jumpstart and save you some time, which is the goal of a lot of what I do inside the corporate coach accelerator. So book a call and then just shoot me a message over on LinkedIn and I will make sure that you get the template asap. My third tip is that in your proposal you want to have real details without over explanation, if that makes sense. So let me explain. So real details means that when someone is looking at the proposal, we don't want to have too many buzzwords or word salad, we want to have real details so that they can see what exactly are we recommending, what are we proposing. And ideally that includes what are the proposed outcomes or the purpose. Like if it's coaching, the purpose for the coaching, defining the components you're recommending, like alignment sessions or assessment. And if you're proposing a workshop or a team or something like that, going into that next layer of detail down, right? And that could include having a draft agenda, having some high level content so that they can say, okay, I know what would be included, I know what my investment would include. Not just here's what we're working towards, but that next layer. However, this is so coachy as well, right? Is give them detail, but not too much detail, right. And the first thing is I don't want you doing the work before you get the work right. That means I don't want you designing the workshop, I don't want you doing the research that's required I don't want you preempting a series of stakeholder interviews that would then lead into your strategy day, for example, enough detail. Use drafts and suggestions, but don't do the actual work before you get the work because it can be really overwhelming for clients to read a wall of detail. Right. Our job is to distill, to give them high level. They can ask for more information if and when they want it, but they can't get overwhelmed. Right. So we can layer more information into it, we can't take it away. So that is my recommendation. Give real details but don't over explain. And that works on two levels. It works on that client basis. Don't let them get overwhelmed, don't let them get too into details that are not relevant for them. But at the same time give them enough to know this is what my investment is getting me. This is I can sort of see how it would look and they can understand what's included. My fourth tip is to remember that context is king. And again we have a bit of a Goldilocks situation which is that we want to give enough but not too much. So I always include a context page at the start and I usually often frame this as a bit of a letter sort of reflecting here's the conversations that we've had. This is my understanding of what's at play. And so sometimes the challenge, sometimes it's the goal, sometimes it's the need, sometimes it's the coaching purpose. So I'll talk about what is the purpose of the coaching or what is the outcome they're seeking from a program. Now with coaching, I wouldn't say here are the goals of the coaching because that is part of the process of working with your coachee. But we can define what is the purpose of the coaching. So for example, have they been given feedback on a particular issue and the coaching is to support them to address that? That's different to saying here's what the goals or the outcome of the coaching will be. Now if we're running a program or a team day, we might actually get a bit more into what are the outcomes they're looking for, what are the deliverables. So really we just want to talk about why this and why now, but not too much detail. So many times and this is a lot of coaches don't realise this. Client organisations actually don't want any document that is going to be circulated. And I'm thinking particularly of coaching. Now they don't want names of coaches necessarily captured and circulated or at least they may not want the details of any difficult feedback captured because these documents can be circulated, as I said, a little bit beyond. There's sort of no control over that, particularly when there might be procurement involved, there might be accounts involved. So what I would say is include the context, but always ask your client. So the representative, the person who's briefing you, person who's going to be engaging you to do this work, ask them how much detail they would like included, how they would like the coachee referenced, and oftentimes they'll say not at all. Or other times they might say happy to have the coachee name, but they don't want any of the documentation of the why. So you need to find out so that you don't accidentally cause your client any problems. My next tip, I think we're at number five, is to think of your proposals as a starting point and not as an end point. So this also makes it a little bit liberating really to put it together. And it really reflects my recommended approach for selling to corporate clients. And that is not a me versus you can I convince you to hire me relationship. It is actually that we want to engage with our clients. So the people bringing us into the organization, we want to engage with them as a valued thought partner, right? As a trusted person who is part of their safe and helpful team of consultants. Right. And very rarely do proposals get agreed exactly how you pitch them. The content will change, the pricing will change, the inclusions or the scope can change. And so it takes a bit of a load off. If you think of your proposals as working documents, right. And express them that way to your clients, that's okay. This takes the pressure off and it positions you as a thought partner and as someone who wants to co create rather than sort of lay down the law. And I think with corporate clients, particularly when we're talking about complex engagements, that is generally really valued by clients when it comes to pricing. Just a little tip is that we want to be clear about what is included in the pricing, but we don't necessarily want to make every breakdown of every inclusion from a pricing perspective. So I think it's always better to frame your pricing as an all inclusive fee with the exception of optional additions. So optional additions we might, they can add on. I would tend to separate them out as optional additions, inclusions, but the rest should all be very clear and you should include all of the inclusions in a list, but then have the one pricing so that they can't necessarily say, well, this is what an alignment session costs. This is what a coaching session costs. This is what an hour of coaching costs. We don't want them to necessarily have that detail. And then my last thing is make sure you include your terms and conditions in your proposal. If you have a proposal document like this, often this is the only contractual document that you will have. And so it will often be that you send the proposal and you go back and forth and then there's an agreement that is sent by email. So this may be your only opportunity to ensure that your client consents to your terms and conditions. Now, in case, I always include a signature panel in the proposal document, an acceptance panel, but it is generally accepted that acceptance by email is okay. Now, this is not legal advice. You should absolutely get your own legal advice. But we just need to be sure that our terms and conditions are in a place where our clients have an opportunity to consider them and to agree to those from an educated perspective. Okay. I hope this helps. I really love working with my clients inside the accelerator to help navigate these opportunities. And that includes things like proposals and deals and pricing. So if you would like to discuss your business, your opportunities, your deals, your pricing, and you are considering whether working with me as a coach could be a good way to take the next step in your business, please do book a conversation with me. You can do that over at www.elliscarf.com bookacall. I will be back with more next week.