Stop Losing Deals: Proposal Q&A for Consultants

We are live. Welcome to today's episode of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. So what's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Sales proposals. How to close more proposals this year and how to win more clients. If you've ever sent a proposal and heard nothing back or struggled with pricing or were not sure what to include, what to exclude, when to send the proposal, how to follow up, this session is for you. Bring your toughest questions from the trenches, things that you've struggled with or maybe things that you are thinking about, you've tried with one set of clients and it worked and then you tried with another set of clients and it didn't work, So I want to hear it all. I'm here to answer all your questions. I've already collected 20 questions. Some of them are pretty tough about proposals, and I'll be, I'll be answering those throughout this session, but I'd love to hear from you live. Let me know what is it that you're struggling with. 80%, 80% of proposals fail not because the consultant doesn't know what they're doing or not because it's pricing or because the document wasn't well formatted. These might contribute to losing a deal, but the number one reason, the number one reason why most proposals fail is that most consultants think of a proposal as a transaction, as one point That is sort of the grand finale that I send the proposal and I'm done. This is what's killing your closing, your close rate, your win rate. I want you to think of proposals as a process. It's a significant part of the sales process, and it's actually closing the proposal starts with the very first interaction you have with the client. So for this, for proposals and how— what a proposal is and what it isn't and when to send it and what to include and the core and the critical sections that you must have in every proposal and the fluff that you should leave out of the proposal and how to do it the proper follow-up so you're not begging, you are following and adding value. All of that is what I've been spending the last couple of months developing into what we introduced as the Ultimate Guide to Writing Proposals as a Consultant in 2026. So let me share some other resources before I get to the questions so you have, you have them, and then I'll include all the links to all these assets for you. There are worksheets, there are templates, there are sample emails that you can send with the proposals, a full-blown proposal template that you could use as well as AI prompts, thorough tried and tested AI prompts and also a custom AI assistant that could help you write proposals in minutes, okay? This is not using AI in a sloppy way. No, there's this thoughtful way of gathering all the information that you have from your clients, gathering all the information that is relevant to your business, your background, your experience, your case studies, and putting this all in a structured fashion so that then you can prompt AI to give you a winning proposal for your next deal. So before I get into the questions, and again, for those of you who are just joining, we are talking about sales proposals, about closing and winning more proposals this year, and I'm here to answer I have— I already have 20 questions that I'll be going over, but I'd love to hear from you live as well, and I'll be more than happy to critique your approach to proposals. And if you have something that's working out really well for you, I'd love to hear. There's always an opportunity to learn. So before I get into the questions, let me share my screen here again. So these are some of the resources that I have. Um, there is an entire proposal toolkit. I won't go into this with a whole lot of detail because if you go to the channel— let me go to the channel while we're at it— and the videos tab, you see this proposal. Oops, right here. I'll give you one second. Yep, you can see my screen. No, you can't see my screen, so let me change this setting right here. Cool. All right, so, uh, right here, this video that recently launched as the date of, of, of this live stream, The Ultimate Guide to Writing Proposals as a Consultant in 2026. It's an hour and 4 minutes. It's the most in-depth video I have made to date. Full of strategies, tips, um, the science and the art of sales and winning proposals. If there are certain things that you're not sure how to do and the sequence of things, I have, I have a preparedness checklist for you. If you're not sure how, what section should go into proposal, I have a template for you. If you want to use AI, I have that in here. So check out this video and let me know if something doesn't make sense or you're not sure how to implement it in your environment. So that's one resource. Definitely the proposal readiness worksheet, and this is sequential. I want you to go through all these steps, and again, I go over this spreadsheet in detail in the video, so check it out and you can make a copy and then customize it, and you can take this and put it into your Asana or Notion or whatever task management or project management system that you use, you can definitely make use of this spreadsheet, of this worksheet. And then the toolkit, the ultimate toolkit. And there are a lot of tabs in here, but basically I have a sample good, great proposal. I have a sloppy proposal, a sample sloppy proposal. I have email follow-ups that you can— let me just scroll through some of these things here. I have— if you're not sure how to send, what to say in your first email when you send the proposal, and then some follow-up emails so you don't come across desperate or begging, I have examples for you here, so check them out. Also, AI prompts thoughtful. There's a sloppy prompt I do not want you to use, and then there is a thoughtful, high-quality prompt you can definitely leverage. And it's, it's pretty, pretty detailed prompt, so I want you to take a look at it. I don't want you— I don't I don't want to rush it now. And then I have some tabs here with a custom GPT that will prompt you with specific questions to make the whole proposal generation process much simpler than doing it manually or with some shortcut prompt that maybe you're using today. And I also have another AI assistant using Google's NotebookLM. I go over this with a whole lot of detail actually in, in the video. So check out these videos, check out, check out the video, check out these 2, 2 assets, and let me know if you have any questions. There's a lot going on here, so I don't want to overwhelm you. I want to get to the questions, and let's do that. Um, again, for those of you who are joining now, we are talking about proposals. This is what's happening in the world of entrepreneurship. Cool. And I have the questions here. Let me put the questions right here on the screen. So how do you handle proposals when a client refuses to share their budget? In my approach, and I've tried every other approach, I learned sales from the ground up after this painful, that painful layoff back in 2003. And I had to read books on sales, listen to CDs at the time, attended, I attended in-person training, tried different things. And in my approach over the years, I like to talk about pricing early on. I don't have to give exact pricing because I still— I'm not sure what, what is involved, but I want to make sure we're in the same ballpark. So if a client is— no, that thing disappeared. Let me change it. Yeah, so, so, so if a client is, um, is refusing to share their budget, that's part of the process. Sometimes some clients do, sometimes clients don't. So I would— very few people will come out and say, hey, here's my budget. People are typically a bit guarded when, when they're in a sales environment. They're thinking the salesperson, this consultant, is going to rip me off. Not everybody, some people think that way, but typically when we talk about money, we're a bit guarded. So people might not share with you their budget. They might not share They might not be sure what's involved. They might have to go and get approval to get this service implemented. So I would— what I found to have— what I found to work well is that you give a range. So let's say your service is $2,500 and you're not sure yet if you want to quote $2,500 because of a number of factors including the scope of the work, including how fast the client wants, how responsive they want you to be. So you want to gauge if the client is ready for you. So you can say, my services range from $1,000 to $5,000, right? Something like that. That would— and then see their reaction, whether over email, obviously they have to read it, if they reply back to you, or if you're meeting with them in person or on Zoom, you'll see how they react to that. So yeah, that's within our budget. Yeah, we've hired consultants in the same ballpark previously. So that would be one way. Again, in my experience over 20+ years, very, very few people will not respond to a range. Now they say, I remember it happened a few times where people say, yeah, this is way too expensive. Like when we got into analytics, So we were doing, for those of you who are new to the channel, after I was laid off, I got into building websites for customers, for small businesses. And then I got into digital marketing, my co-founder and I, and then we started to niche down and we focused on analytics and we became a Google certified partner. And then over the years, we became one of the globally, one of the top Google partners. And we started to sell audits. This is for mid-sized, larger companies, Fortune 1000 Fortune 500, we'd say, yeah, our audits are at $25,000 at the time, and some people say, yeah, we've paid something like this before. Others would say, oh, no way, you know, we're looking for something below $5,000. So that was at that point, at that stage of the business, we would walk away from that very small project. But if I'm just starting out, if someone tells me they have a $5,000 budget, I'll be all over it. So again, depending on where you are in the stage of the business, if you're more established and you have recurring revenue and you have a full pipeline of leads, you can be more selective, more choosy, but if you're starting out, you can be a bit— I want you to be more flexible. So if the question is, if the client is a bit evasive or they just don't know, I think guide them with a range, a reasonable range. Don't tell them, yeah, it's anywhere between $1,000 and $100,000. That's just— no one's gonna buy from you. But give them a reasonable range that will help them take it internally and discuss with their team. And also on your end, you left yourself some room to navigate. You can price it down a little bit if they're price sensitive, or they— or maybe they want to start with you with a small project to test the water. Or you can scale up a little bit from $2,500 to, you know, $4,500 or $5,000 if they're looking for maybe premium package that you offer. So that would be my approach to handling clients, handling situations where a client is not straight out telling you what the budget is. The second question, should you ever not send a proposal even when asked? Well, should you never ever not send a proposal? If you don't want that business, yeah. So it could be awkward if the client is interested and they like you and they want you to send a proposal, but for some reason you developed a sense that they're going to be very difficult to work with, or maybe you're just very busy, or maybe you're, um, uh, it's too complicated, too complex for you. Like, you don't wanna— you're not sure you wanna get this project. So, so I would say whatever you do, you want to be very, very professional. You want to be as transparent as you can because your reputation is on the line. Trust me, money comes and goes, but your reputation is with you. So if you want to bow out of a situation because of whatever reason, hopefully it's a valid reason, then do it in a very professional manner. Say, hey, I know you like what we offer. I know you're interested in our services, but at this point, I'm going to be very honest with you. I'm overbooked and I can't deliver, or I've got a lot of a lot going on in my personal life, or whatever. Again, don't make things up, but you don't have to also be very, very, very detailed in your answers. Just let them know that this is just not a good time. So if that's what you meant. in terms of not sending a proposal even when asked, I think that those are some situations. Now, of course, if the situation is where the client is rushing you to send a proposal and you're still gathering information, then yeah, I would be very careful in developing, especially in developing— I would be very careful in developing a proposal and spending 5, 6, 7 hours to make it look professional and thorough and all of that. And then, and then, and then, and you're personalizing this. And, you know, there's not just the documentation piece is easy. Again, with the AI tools that I share in the Ultimate Guide video, you can produce the document fairly quickly. Of course, you have to proofread it and you have to make sure it's personalized, all that good stuff. But there are a lot of steps before And after sending the proposal, right? So I don't want you to spend a whole lot of time if a client is rushing you to send the proposal right away. Maybe they already have a vendor and they are ready to go with that vendor and they're selected and maybe they're the incumbent or whatever the case might be and they just need to have another proposal so they can tell their manager that, hey, I reviewed a few proposals but I'm going with that vendor. So sometimes they use you as scapegoat or they use you just as a number to check off, okay, yeah, we had 3 proposals and we like this other one. So you have to read the situation. I think my approach after all these years again is that I would say I need more information and I need some time to produce a high-quality personalized proposal. So if, for example, if you've only spoken, if you've spoken with one of the stakeholders and you know there are 2 other stakeholders that have crucial information that will impact your implementation and the delivery of the service, then you really have to nudge and be very polite, but be very persistent and again, in a very nice and a polite way, find opportunities to meet with these other stakeholders so that you can capture their requirements to include in the solution that you are offering. So you have to read the room, and if you're new to sales, you can't develop this skill overnight. It does take practice. It does take doing it wrong for a few times before you get to do it right, but it's really being— it's about being genuine and wanting to collect more information, not just more information, relevant and critical information That will impact the scope of the project, the timeline of the project, and also the price of the project. And I think with most reasonable people, if you let them know why you need more time and you need more input, I think they'll, they'll understand, they'll support. But sometimes they also have a deadline that they have a proposal by. So if that's the case and you want to make sure you have, you have a horse in the race, then Then you might want to expedite this information gathering process and then send the proposal so that you are within their window. A lot of if, if then, you know, a lot of it depends, a lot of you do this in this one situation and you do this and that in this other situation. That is the art of sales. I mean, I can go over all the best practices, and all the tips and all the strategies that a salesperson or a consultant or a business owner should do, and I can right after that show you situations where you shouldn't follow any of these best practices because of maybe some situational awareness. All of a sudden the CEO shows up and the CEO hasn't been involved at all in this process and you have to engage them and get to know them. So So this, the art of sales and the art of writing proposals and the art of business, just like any other art, it takes a little bit of time to develop and you can become very good at it and you can master it with reps, with practices, with wins, and also learning from losses. But initially, I think go at it with this mind of, I'm here to help you, Mr. Client. I need to gather information. Help me define the scope, help you succeed by defining the scope, the requirements, dependencies, so that I can give you a proposal that will work for you and we will have— it will be mutually beneficial for both of us. Cool. Then next one. How do you price or scope proposals when the client's problem is unclear or evolving? Yeah, that's a very good question. If the needs of the requirements are evolving or unclear, do not, do not send a fixed fee proposal. That is a death sentence for your project. You'll lose your shirt. You might be like someone asking you, I'm looking to buy a car. Give me a price. Can you answer that question? Of course you can. You can buy a car for $10,000, $15,000. You can buy a used car for $2,000. You can, I don't know, get a Lexus, get a Tesla, whatever, for $80,000. So, so requirement definition is really key, especially if you are quoting based on a project scope. Sorry, if you're quoting, especially if you're quoting fixed fee projects, or if you're, if you're, um, not doing hourly. And I do have a full video on pricing models and the pros and cons of each and when to use each depending on your skill set and depending on the maturity of, of your business processes. So 7 models I talk about, uh, I'll include the link, a link in the description if you're new to pricing. But if the requirements are not clear and evolving. One approach would be to, to sell hourly, and I have a video on hourly pricing with a whole lot of details. And this way the client knows that, um, that you'll be billing based on, on, on the work you're doing. And if the, the work requires 20 hours, then you'll bill 20 hours. If they add more things on your plate, it'll be 30 hours, and so on. So, so I would say hourly And I would definitely put some parameters to the best that you can document what's included and what's not included and the dependencies, third-party dependencies or customer dependencies, so that you and the client are clear on what is, what is this project is about. All right, the next one. How do you write proposals when the client insists insists on hourly, but you know value-based pricing is better? Well, value-based pricing is an amazing model. Typically, if done right, you can have amazing margins because you're selling on value. It could take you 2 hours to fix something and you can charge $5,000 for it. And this is not hypothetical. It's not very common, but it's not hypothetical. I've seen situations where someone comes in and help you fix a PR issue, and you get a PR specialist and they charge you a whole lot of money. Or a strategist can come sit down with you and give you a strategy session that could save you a whole lot of time and money and effort, and you'd pay them handsomely for that. So value-based pricing is awesome, it's a great model, but in— especially for new consultants I would not recommend it. I would recommend hourly, and then maybe project-based would be second. But value-based pricing is not for new consultants. It's just too many things, too many unknowns. You need to have— be able to establish your authority and you have the track record. So again, I covered a lot of these in the pricing model video, but what I recommend is that go with hourly Because that's what the client is interested in. And, and then give them some, give them some peace of mind. So for example, you tell them a project like this typically takes between anywhere between 20 to 50 hours, and this is my hourly rate. This way it's not open-ended because some people, even with hourly, they might become— they might be concerned that what do you mean hourly? This could take us This could take you 200 hours. You're gonna bill me for 200 hours? No. So let them know that it's hourly. Give them a range in terms of number of hours. Give them your hourly rate. And also let them know that you're very transparent. At the end of every week, Monday morning, Friday— end of the day Friday, you'll share the time you spent, especially for clients who like to maybe micromanage the invoices. So So, so that, that's common, especially if trust has not been established. This is the first time the client is working with you. So be very transparent, share with them, get their approval before, before you want to spend 30 hours. Let them know, hey, you just gave me this new requirement. I was planning on spending 5 hours on it just based on everything you've given me. It's going to take me a whole lot more time. and share that with them early on. Most people don't like surprises, especially when it comes to budgets and money and timelines. So that would be my approach. The next one, and for those of you who are just joining, if you have a question on proposals and sales, enter it in the comment. I will make sure to get to it. I have a number of questions already, but I will get to your question. It looks like we have a comment. Give some advice on. This is from Medmologi 1882. Give some advice advice on the schedule attached with the proposal. On the schedule attached with the proposal. So when you say schedule, are you referring to the timeline? Um, are you referring to like milestones or like the money schedule? So I'm not sure what the— what do you mean by the schedule? But, but if you're referring to the timeline or the milestones, I would definitely break it down into— if you have a service, depending on the type of service you have, if it's something you do over a couple days, I don't know if there's a reason to break it down. But let's say your service, let's say you do you do financial audits, or let's say you're an HR consultant, or, or maybe an IT security, cybersecurity consultant. So you want to go in and upgrade the client systems. Before you go in, before, before you can give a quote on how long it'll take you and also how much it will cost them, you have to assess what's involved. So for example, in that case, if you want to have a timeline or a schedule You can go in and say, let me offer a mini audit and it will be $500, something nominal where it'll cover some of your expenses. You don't have to make a whole lot of money on that first sale, but then it also shows that— it will also show that the client is serious about the relationship with you. So you are getting— you're covering some of your costs and then the client is serious because now they're signing the contract and they're paying you some money. So you can go in and do an audit, and based on this mini audit, then you can come back and say, okay, now I understand what you have. You have, you know, 300 people. I thought you only had 50 people. You have, you know, 200 pieces of equipment. You have cloud services. You have on-premise data. So you have an assessment of, of all the systems and the tools that the customer owns, again, assuming you're an IT consultant. And now with this mini audit, you can give them a more detailed proposal with a better, better defined scope, with a more detailed outline or schedule as you called it. And then obviously you can price it better because now you have a better understanding of what is involved. Hope this helps. All right, back to the questions. So we talked about hourly, uh, yeah. How do you deal with proposal tourists, leads who just want your thinking or format without buying? Oh yeah, so they're shopping around. I mean, sometimes they shop around because they're genuinely looking for help And excuse my allergies. And sometimes they— I mean, there are many reasons why people do that. Sometimes people are required by their procurement department, purchasing department, to get 3 proposals or at least 2. Sometimes people are really curious about learning about new things in a specific industry. In government contracts. And we, we were— we did a lot of work for the federal government and for some of the states as well. And we were the number one analytics provider, digital analytics for marketing, um, and website performance, uh, services for the federal government for a number of years. And they have a very specific process that they go through They might issue something called an RFI, a request for information. They might issue like an RFP, request for proposal, request for a quote. They have these tools where they send it to multiple vendors to gather information from the marketplace about the thing that they want to buy. So part of it I would think is required. You have to spend time and you have to educate the client about what you offer and show how you differentiate, but I think what— that's not— so that's not in your control, what is driving them to come to you. I think what's driving— what's in your control is that you can do some vetting. So you can ask about budgets early on, again, give ranges. You can ask if they have an incumbent already. You can ask if they've hired consultants like you before. So ask. And we have, we have a video on, on avoiding difficult clients, clients who are not just difficult clients, clients who are not likely to buy from you. So you can check it out. I'll put the link in the description. But I would say if they're just shopping around and if they're not serious, you can, over time, you can tell. But I would ask very, very simple questions like the ones I mentioned earlier. And also you can, you can see, are they very engaged with you? Are they asking you thoughtful questions or are they just kind of listening and, and, and they just want to get to the price and, and see if that's something works for them? So, so I would make sure that they're engaged, ask them those questions I listed earlier, and based on that, decide how much How much time you want to put into it, because at the end of the day, it's the time you put into developing these proposals and doing the follow-ups and establishing rapport with the lead. That, that's what usually takes time. All right, next one. And we're going to go through this quick so we wrap it up here, um, at the top of the hour. How do you stand out? Unless some of you who are joining now or maybe later, if you have questions Outside of the 20 that I've already collected, I'll be more than happy to answer your questions. Live questions always take a priority. So how do you stand out when a client is reviewing 5 to 10 competing proposals at once? I haven't seen it where they're collecting 10 competing proposals. I've seen where they have maybe 5, and that's an overkill. I think 3 is reasonable. Like if you wanna, I mean, depending on the service too, if you're going to invest $100,000, Put yourself in their shoes. If you're about to sign off on a $100,000 investment, wouldn't you want to talk to a number of vendors? I think you would. So I would say how to stand out is a whole process, and I have some videos on vetting your business idea, on doing market research. You have to stand out. You have to in certain different ways. For example, you can stand out based on your pricing. You could be the the most economical vendor to go with. You can be the most responsive, you can be the most talented, the most qualified, and that will show. That will show from the logos you have from previous clients, the testimonials, the case studies, the way you respond. If it takes you 3 days to respond to a client, that's one impression you're leaving on the client. If it takes you, Now, if you respond within 2 hours, that's a different impression, a better impression that the client will have on you. So I would say you have to have this, the differentiation and standing out is not a function of the specific proposals, it's about your business in general. Now, there are experience, credentials, all that good stuff. If you are competing in a space where, let's say it's in healthcare, and you happen to have experience in healthcare, that would be a differentiator. If you are competing after a business for a mid-sized company and most of your work is for mid-sized companies, that's a differentiator. So I would say in your discovery, in your discussions and research about the client and their needs, Highlight as many areas of commonality when I took my— as you can. When I took the first sales training, I believe Marvin was the sales coach at the time, and he said this concept of mirroring is really important in sales. A lot of sales is psychological. You go to meet someone and that person speaks very quickly and they don't pause and they just keep going. And if you speak very, very slowly, that's not gonna work out for them. So you have to— again, don't fake it. I'm not saying you fake things. You have to be yourself. But it's important to, to find commonalities with the client, with the lead. That helps establish deep, deeper connections than, than just this transaction you're about to make. So, so I would say the more you can identify things you've done in their industry, for company— companies similar to them, for companies that have problems similar to them. Give them amazing references, people they can call, case studies. All of that will help you differentiate and stand out. So again, pricing is one thing, but it's not, not everything. The next one What is— what's the right length of a proposal in a highly technical industry? It really depends. I meant not to say it depends in this video because it depends applies a lot in sales, but I would say, let me see if I have, let me go to here and see if I have something. On LinkedIn. I don't believe I have it here in, in this, um, in this preparedness spreadsheet. I, I definitely talked about it in the video, in the ultimate guide video that I mentioned earlier. I had a whole section on, on how long it should be and what it should include. But for our purposes now, I would say whatever does not help the sale hurts the sale. So don't make it a 20-page document with a whole lot of details that people are lost trying to find the scope and the schedule and the pricing, right? So, so I would say again, check out the resource I mentioned, the template, the toolkit I mentioned earlier in the video, and I have a sample proposal that you can follow. So, um, I would Again, some background about you and your company, the problem and the solution, that executive summary, and then the scope, the detailed timelines and milestones, and then obviously pricing, pricing terms, legal terms are important. So I would definitely not make it too elaborate. I wouldn't make it too light either. Again, there's a lot of times where you can send a a sort of, I would say, not a casual proposal, but you can give an email proposal where basically you say, hey, it was great meeting you, I met the other stakeholder, I gathered a lot of information, I want to validate, I want to confirm, is what I captured is exactly what you're looking to solve? And you can summarize that, and then you can start to test the water and include, here's what I'm thinking of from a scoping perspective, Here's the timeline, and also here's the price range. That could happen verbally, it could happen over email before you send the formal document, and that will— you'll then see their reaction to that. They might ask you to tweak, they might ask you to do more, to do less, and then you can, you can, you can then, you can then develop the official, the official or the formal document and send it after you've gotten some nods based on this informal email, maybe proposal or conversation that you had. Good. The next one. How do you write proposals for retainers versus project-based work? So retainers, just for those of you who are maybe new to consulting, let's say you are an accountant, a CPA, and it's a new customer. Let's say it's a business, not a personal CPA, B2B. You— they want to take over their reporting and their accounting and their bookkeeping and all that good stuff. So they ask you for a quote. So you can go— well, I can go in and let's say they don't have any systems yet. They've been, they've been doing things manually. Did that for a number of years, paid handsomely for that. Big mistake. Always, always get professional accountants to work with you from early on. Okay, that's a tangent. Back to here. So I would say for that CPA, for them to assess what's involved, they have to go in and review your, your books and see how many customers you have, how many invoices, how many bills, how many people, payroll. And then they'll set this— the systems up for you, and they might charge you $5,000 to do that. And then there, there, there are ongoing— there's ongoing work. So for example, they want to, they want to be in charge of handling all the bookkeeping for you, track all the invoices, the bills properly in the accounting system, right? So, so they might charge you, say, you know what, for the initial setup it's $5,000, then we'll charge you $750 a month to do all the invoices or the bills and manage payroll for you. So that could be, it could be a monthly retainer, fixed price, or sometimes retainers could also fluctuate, but that's a monthly retainer where they are offering you as a consultant, you are in our example the accountant, they're offering their services on a monthly basis, on an ongoing basis. So from a proposal perspective, I think the only Excuse me one second about these. From a proposal perspective, you need to have all the main critical sections that I covered in the template I shared earlier and then in the video, in the Ultimate Guide video. But when it comes to the scope and the timeline and the pricing and the payment terms, those you have— they'll have to change. So if it's, if it's an implementation project, and then there's maintenance and support for, for on a monthly basis. Then you say, I will charge you 2 types of fees. One for the implementation work, let's say it's $5,000. I will bill you $250 on signing, um, $200— that's right, $2,500 on signing and $2,500 when I'm done with the implementation phase. And then for the monthly work, for the retainer, then you can say, I will send you the bill on the 15th of the month and it will be $750 a month. So those sections will be different, but the rest of the proposal, the problem solution, executive summary, your background information, the legal stuff, all of it will be the same. It's just a few sections of the proposal will be different, whether it's a retainer or whether it's a project-based type work. All right, the next one. How do you handle procurement teams who insist on using their contract instead of yours? So in bigger companies, typically mid-sized companies and, and bigger, they have their own what they call master service agreements or MSAs, or they might have their own standard terms, and they more often than not, they They more or less force buyers— they more or less force vendors to use those contracts. So if you want that business, invest in a couple hours of attorney's time and have them review the client's MSAs and agreements, and then you can redline those. You can offer feedback on those agreements. So just because you're using the client's terms and agreements It doesn't mean you have to sign them as is. You can always negotiate. You can always review, and you want to make sure you're protected. So for example, some clients, some procurement departments, they go overboard. They might force exclusivity on you. You can't work with anyone else in our space. They might have some very, very unfavorable payment terms. They'll pay you net. 120. Ask me how I know. Fortune 100 that one time forced us— didn't force us because we could have said yes, we could have said no and walked away, but I wanted that business. But it was— they pay 120. I think it's criminal that, that these big companies who have a lot of money are forcing these small business owners to go with 120 days before they get paid. You know, not technically legally criminal, but I think it's just not good business. Uh, so, so if you really want that business, go for it. Get their contracts, have your lawyer review it. Yes, you have to pay some money. Don't just rely on ChatGPT or Gemini to review contracts, especially on these larger contracts. And then, and then negotiate the things that are are deal breakers for you, like exclusivity, obviously payment terms, you know, cash flow. Cash flow is really important for a small business, so make sure the payment terms are something that you can live with. Okay, um, so to summarize, just because you are using the client's contract, it doesn't mean you have to agree to all their terms. In very, very small cases, like the bigger the companies the more likely it will be the case that they will just not agree to make changes. But typically those are very large contracts and those are multi— sometimes multi-year contracts, and they're worth the additional insurance requirements they ask you, the additional paperwork that's required. You know, we did— we had, we had 6-figure contracts, multi-year contracts, so Really very familiar with that process. And at times, you know, you make— you take some risks, and to get that million-dollar contract, you bend over backward, and then it works out really well for you. So I believe having a good attorney in your corner is a prerequisite to succeeding in business. So make sure you have someone that you can rely on. You can do your own research, you can search, obviously you can check with ChatGPT and learn more about a contract or a specific clause that's not clear to you, but always, always check with an attorney before you sign these or negotiate these, these larger contracts. All right, the next one. Uh, what should you do when a client wants endless revisions to scope before signing? Yeah, it happens. You can be polite, you can push back politely, but they're the client. So it also depends on how, how, how much you need that business, how busy you are. Again, you always want to be professional. Professional when you deal with clients and with leads. So even if you want to walk away from a, a contract, do it in a professional manner as I covered earlier. But if they keep asking for revisions, you have to take a bit more of an ownership of the process and start nudging them toward something where you land on a scope. And then If the nature of the requirement is evolving, as one of the previous questions, uh, persons asked, you can say this part of the scope is very clear, I'm going to give you a fixed fee quote, and then this evolving part is just not defined yet and I cannot give you a quote, so I will bill this hourly. or I'll sell you a mini audit or a discovery phase to better define the requirements. So that would be one approach to stop this endless cycle of trying to scope and re-scope and re-scope. But at times, if you have a bigger client and they have a lot of stakeholders, you start meeting with the director of marketing and then the director of IT and then the CFO and they each come at you from, you know, with a different set of requirements. So you have to, you have to accommodate. But if it's a very small client and they don't have the budget and you're busy, uh, maybe, maybe sometimes it's okay to, to just bow out and say it's not a good fit. Again, do it in a very professional manner and maybe refer them to someone else. But, um, but a lot of times I would say to If you're a new consultant, don't be too picky. If you're struggling with sales, do spend the time to make this client happy. If you make the most unreasonable client happy, you're going to delight everyone. You're going to delight everyone else. So again, it's okay to bend over backward for a number of clients early on to get the track record, to get the— build that sales muscle, to build that delivery muscle. And then over time you can graduate from this phase and you can be a bit more choosy in the clients you get and the leads you decide to service. All right, the next one is, how do you politely withdraw a proposal when the deal is dragging and no longer makes sense? Like, why do you want to withdraw from a deal? I mean, if it's dragging, if it's not taking you time, Just if you're using HubSpot or Salesforce or one of the CRMs, just have a reminder every 2 weeks, right? So this way you— it's still top of mind. Or you can use my DIY CRM, the spreadsheet, and you can add notes to on when to follow up. So it does take, based on a lot of research and a lot of the articles I've read recently, 80% of sales take more than more than 5, 6, 7 follow-ups, sometimes 5 to 12 follow-ups to close a deal. So I don't want you to leave money on the table. I don't want you to bow out of a proposal or a potential opportunity because you're not doing enough follow-up. And you know, there is an art to follow-up. You don't just email people and say, hey, what's up, ready to buy? No, you always follow up and you add value. You share a report, some new findings, maybe some competitor research. You do something where they see, the client sees that you are investing in that relationship. So I would say if it's something on your end where you don't have the bandwidth or it's just you found out that this customer, legally you can't work with them because some other legal requirements you have, then yeah, maybe you want to back away and just let them know that, um, due to some business reasons you can't service them. But other than that, don't, don't, don't leave too early. Don't back out or don't bow out too early. All right, uh, how should you present optional add-ons or upsells inside a proposal without overwhelming the client? Good question, good question. I love the growth mindset here. I want to sell you this and this and this and that. So great. So make everything very well defined in the document. So you have the scope, you have the timeline, you have pricing and dependencies. That's what they've asked for. So you can— what I used to do is make it— there's like a table, pricing table. That's what they've asked for. And then I would have another section say other clients who have used us for these services also benefited from these add-ons. Now the proposal document is not the place where you first introduce this concept of add-ons. You want to make sure you socialize this, you, you mention it to the client. The lead. You, you get input. Sometimes they do themselves ask you, give me, give me a couple options. Option A includes this, and then option B includes that. So make sure this is discussed with the client before they see it for the first time in their inboxes. So discuss it, let them know clearly what's included in the original scope, and then what is the the extra and just have the additional scope, the additional timeline, the additional pricing, and the additional fee, have those separate from what the core of the proposal is. I hope that helps. What is the right way to include subcontractors or partners inside a proposal? Yeah, a lot of consultants package a number of services and they go into a situation, to a sales proposal, say, you know, we can do A through Z, and then maybe, uh, K, L, and M are done by a third party, by a contractor, by a freelancer. It's really up to you. I don't think there's this one magic formula, but you can You can— it's your neck. It's, it's— you're signing the contract, so you're responsible. So if you have— whether you have employees or freelancers, that's, that's really on you to, to manage. Now, of course, if you have— you're signing some confidentiality and some data privacy contracts and, and, and and you're not supposed to give— you're not supposed to be giving access to people outside of your organization, you might want to have these freelancers, these contractors also sign similar documents. And sometimes you might have to have them use the same email domain that you use. The last thing you want to do is some— your clients seeing someone with @gmail accessing their systems or they're getting emails from someone that they don't know who it is. So I would say, It's not uncommon to have freelancers or contractors, subcontractors be part of the delivery. It's up to you whether you want to be— you want to share that with the client or you don't want to. That's really up to you. In some cases, especially if the subcontractor or the freelancer, they'll have client-facing responsibilities, you then want to make sure the client is aware. But sorry, and also in some contracts, again, the larger the company, the more of these constraints you'll have, and those will be in their contract. They'll tell you, you have to explicitly state that you are using subcontractors. They might ask you actually for the rates, and sometimes they prohibit you from doing that. So that's what I said, be careful when you sign these big contracts. Make sure you understand the terms and what you are signing up for. But if it's a smaller business and you are doing, doing all the client-facing work and you have a number of freelancers or subcontractors supporting you behind the scene, that is totally fine. You can just bundle, bundle their hours under your hourly rate and that's— you're good. All right, good. Uh, then let's see, we have 10 more to go, so I'm gonna Go quicker here. How do you create proposals for work that requires collaboration across, across multiple client departments? Good luck. Ideally, ideally, the client will have a project management or a program manager who will coordinate internally and come back to you with one set of requirements, one meeting one project meeting, one calendar, one set of documentation. So ideally, that's what you want to look for. At least ask for it early on and make sure it's in the contract that the client will provide a single point of contact. Otherwise, you'll go nuts. Now, that's okay if the client does not have a single point of contact and they see the need for your services and you can serve these different departments. And add an add-on here is that you offer this program management capability, and you add this as a 15% or as a 20% line item, and you say, for this to be successful, we need someone to program manage this, these different— it'd be like herding cats. So you need to have someone who will be project managing all these activities and these people. So you, you offer that as a service and you know it's gonna— it's going to take you time, so make sure you charge for it. And it's not uncommon, you see big companies do that all the time. They do hire people to do this for them. Sometimes they have their own internal project management or program management team. So, so yeah, either ask them to do it or offer it and charge for it. Good. And for those of you who are just joining We are talking about proposals and we are talking about— we're answering— I'm answering questions about how to win more deals this year. So don't hesitate to add your question in the comment. I will address it right away. The next question here— oh, I love this one. How do you avoid scope creep? Hard, hard, but you can. How do you avoid scope creep when the client uses vague language like optimize or make improvements. So yeah, the client more often than not will give you vague and undefined requirements. It is on you, the consultant, to go through this process of defining what the scope is and also define what's not included. Okay, so, so it's hard sometimes. The example I use all the time I want you to paint my— I want you to paint my house. Okay, how many rooms do you have? Okay. Oh, I mean, apply this to anything. I want to buy a car. What type of car? Looking for a sports car, a minivan, truck, right? So what are your needs? So I— most reasonable people, once you explain to them how the scope of the project will vary significantly, they'll understand, and then they'll work with you. They'll either spend the time to define the requirements, and then you can include that in your quote, or they'll ask you to come in and define the requirements for them. Now, depending how hungry for the business you are, how busy you are, and among other factors, but at times, go in and define the requirements, go and talk to the stakeholders. You'll identify so many gaps and so many issues that are potential upsells and cross-sells for you. So defining the requirements is really important and explaining to the client why your proposal— and I used to say that like, it's not just me. If you bring any other consultant and these other consultants, they'll bring— they will quote you a fixed fee price for this work. These other consultants don't know what they're talking about. Because let me show you how, depending on what the require— requirements are, this could take me a week or take— it could take me 3 months, and it could cost you $2,000, it could cost you $20,000. So I did a whole lot of education with the client and for the client so they— oh, this person knows what they're talking about. They, they've done this, they know it like the back of their hands, and now they're showing me what's involved. I way underestimated what's involved. And these other bozos, these other competitors, they just were happy to send me a proposal to sign and get my money, but they never asked these thoughtful questions. This is one way to stand out. This is one way to differentiate, is invest in educating the client on what you're selling, what you're offering, and what's involved and what options they have. They'll appreciate it, and they are more likely to go with you because now you've established some rapport, you've established some trust. Good question. All right. How do you write proposals for clients in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, governance, government? We did a lot of work actually in all across a lot of these sectors, and over the first time you get a quote, a request for a quote, it could be overwhelming, especially again the larger the clients, the more of this you'll get. They'll have all kind of requirements including back office requirements, data privacy requirements, insurance requirements. So oh my goodness, what do I do? But you can, you can figure it out. Again, you'll have, if you can do your own research, you can check obviously with AI. If you have an attorney who worked in that industry, they can guide you through this. The more, the larger the opportunity in terms of the logo you'll have on your website as a client, of course, the revenue, the profitability with this opportunity, that the more, the larger these are, the more you want to invest time into learning about this industry or the sector and what is it that's required of you as a consultant to be able to service that sector. So sometimes I remember we used to have to upgrade our insurance, the types of insurances we used to have, and also the limits. One, I forgot, one was an insurance carrier they wanted us to have like a $20 million insurance coverage on, on some very— for something very, very specific to them. And it was a 6-figure contract, and I ended up paying $2,000 for that insurance premium, but we got the deal. So it's a trade-off. If you're very— if you're just starting out and maybe you don't want to work with these big, big clients, maybe— and if you don't have experience serving these larger clients, maybe Maybe it's okay to bow out or maybe partner with someone who has done work for them and you maybe can split the revenue, split the profit. All right, good. How do you present pricing when the client keeps pushing for discounts without reducing the scope? Everybody likes to get a discount, so what's the big deal? Give them some discount, okay? Now if they're being unreasonable, If they want, you know, three times more work for one-third the price, you can walk out. You can always walk out, right? But if the pipeline is dry, and if you don't have a whole lot of proposals out there, and if you have bandwidth to deliver, then entertain the customer. Give them some discount. If they're asking for more, say. I'd love to. Would you work with me on a case study once the project is complete and you're happy and you're delighted? I'd love to do a case study with you. Some clients agree to that. I'd love to have you on my podcast or have you do a video testimonial for me. These things are invaluable. So if they're pushing for discounts, find ways, accommodate some of it. Don't go You know, don't go overboard with this. Um, and, and, and see if they can also— you can get something in return. Again, a testimonial or a case study. They can give you a video. Um, they can sing your praises in that video, or they can maybe be on a— write a, a blog post for you on your blog, something that will be of marketing value to them. Or maybe they can commit. Tell them, I'll give you a discount but I want you to commit to a 3-month retainer, right? So find ways where it's reasonable. They're negotiating, they're pushing back on you, then zig and zag with them, dance with them. That's just part of— some people like to do that, like to get a discount. But if they're unreasonable, you also have to be careful. So make sure you get something in return if they're asking for multiple discounts. All right, how do you include performance metrics or KPIs in a proposal without guaranteeing results? Yeah, you don't— you do not want to include KPIs unless you have 100% control of the deliverable. That's the standard rule I have. If you have 100% control over the outcome, then it's on you to deliver. And you can, you can, you can have KPIs and you can, you can guarantee results. But the minute you have the dependency— dependencies on the client, third-party dependent— sorry, the minute you have dependencies on the client or third-party dependencies like software, hardware, environmental dependencies, then things could be out of your control. And this, this is common in many, many industries. If you have someone who generates leads for you, you can tell them, okay, I'll pay you based on qualified— the number of qualified leads you get me, but closing those leads is not on them, it's on you. That you— if you, if you're getting that service, because you have to pitch, right? So it's in a way unfair if you tell them, I'll pay you only if I close deals. Like, closing the deal is not part of their scope. It's part of your ability to present and pitch and propose and negotiate. So anytime you have full control, I think you can be— you can go performance-based or have KPIs. And many other times you don't want to do that. Now what you can do to ease the risk, the situation, to ease the anxiety, the concern that the client has is you can share previous performances. You can share data from other things you've done, and you say, with these 2, 3— with these 3 clients of ours, we've done similar things. In my experience, when we do X, we get Y, plus or minus. I can't guarantee the same exact outcome because of these other factors, but I've seen this In my experience, or if there's some industry benchmark you can reference, I think that also will help this way. And a lot of the cases, the client is not being— the client is not being difficult. They just want to make sure they're not making the wrong decision. It's making a decision on a $20,000 contract or a $30,000 contract, sometimes bigger. It's a big decision. It weighs on people. So the more you can reduce— it's probably hard to eliminate the risk and the anxiety 100%— the more you can show them that you've done similar things, that this is what happens in the industry, this is what you expect to happen plus or minus, I think they'll be at peace with it. But guaranteeing, contractually guaranteeing specific performance is something that you have to be very, very careful of before you do. And I would, again, I wouldn't advise it. I wouldn't advise, I would advise against it in most cases. All right, a couple more questions and then we're done. Let's see. How should designers or creatives build proposals when deliverables are subjective? Branding and yeah, that's a very good question. You sell design services and you help companies rebrand and design their logos and their taglines and their letterheads and all that good stuff and their business cards. Yeah, I would say one trick, because we sold web graphic design way back then, so we did manage the scope by defining a number of iterations. So for example, I would say we will give you 2 original concepts, and then once you select one of these concepts, we'll allow for 3 iterations. So this way you went from very vague to giving them 2 concepts, they pick one, and then you take that one concept and you refine it 3 times. So that would be, that would be the approach. Now If you give them 2 concepts and they don't like any of it, yeah, it's difficult. Again, most people are reasonable. I think you give them some parameters. You can do it, for example, I'll give you an outline, I'll give you a draft after all the discovery. You can break down the process and sometimes you can do specific milestones before the final delivery, delivery, before the final delivery, can't speak now, before the final deliverable, and then when you break down that into a number of milestones, you can also bill based on those milestones. So if the whole process takes 6 weeks before they get their first concept, whatever creative element you're creating, you can potentially bill, Maybe 20% on signing, maybe 20% once you have the summary of your discovery and, and the general direction you're going with. You can maybe bill for another 30%, and then you, you bill 25% when you get the first concept out, and then 25% when they sign off. So this way they're also committing and they're investing with you. You'll run across some very unreasonable people and they'll drive you nuts, but it's typically not the norm. And the more, the more I think you defined the scope and the parameters, whether you're doing this early, you know, hourly, or you're doing fixed price, it doesn't matter. The more you define this verbally with the client and show them examples, and the more you doc— the better you document it in, in your proposal, in your contract, the less of these issues will come up. All right, and the last question I have is, what is the best way to close stalled proposal when the buyer goes quiet but has not said no? So that's AKA ghosting. How do you avoid ghosting? You want to have a thorough follow-up plan. So you let the client know, here's when you'll expect the proposal. I'd love to do a follow-up A walkthrough call once, you know, 2 days after receiving the proposal, I will schedule a follow-up walkthrough, and then I'd love to meet with other stakeholders if you haven't met. Ideally, you want to meet with the stakeholders before you send the proposal, but lay out a follow-up plan so that it's not sort of spraying and praying. As they say. So set the exp— in a way like you're leading this process and getting confirmation from the client. Like, once I send you the proposal, typically how long does it take you to review these kinds of proposals in-house? Who else has to review it? So when you ask these questions before you send the document and have a follow-up plan, including a walkthrough, potential onsite visit, maybe a Zoom call, answering qualifying questions or clarifying questions. So have that laid out and communicate that with the client typically improves the probability of you getting back. But I wouldn't— I would not bow out of this process. I would not mark it as a closed opportunity in my CRM. After a few email follow-ups. As I said earlier, in, in B2B, it's taking people 7, 8, up to 12 follow-ups before they're closing deals because people are busy, people have other priorities. You know, buyers, buyers have competing priorities. Sometimes budgets get reallocated. So it is normal. You're not nagging them, you're not begging them when you follow up. As I said earlier, you want to always send something of value in your follow-ups, not just, hey, ready to buy? No, always, hey, it's been a couple weeks, I know you wanted time to review, anything I can help you with? By the way, I ran across this amazing article on, on the similar issue that you're facing, and I will, I'll use this approach in my solution. So always add value and the client feels like they're benefiting from every interaction. That will help a lot. So it doesn't look like we have any other questions. So thank you for those who joined us today. And, um, for those who are listening to this later, if you have a question about proposals, about sales, about entrepreneurship, don't hesitate to reach out. And I do want to share with you, um, the resources that we've had, if I can get to it right here. Yeah, again, as I said earlier, we have the the proposal, yeah, the proposal template, sloppy one and the good one. We have the email samples on what to do and how to follow up and what to say when you follow up. I have some AI prompts. I have the custom GPT and the NotebookLM AI assistants to help you get proposals out, winning proposals out in minutes, not in hours. So check all of those out and check out the resources and the links in this Proposal System That Works, this ultimate guide to writing proposals this year. So check it out. Let me know if you have any questions, and we will see you next time. Bye.