8 elements for a profitable sales proposal and tools to automate the process.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm your host on this podcast, which is for business owners who know they've got value locked up in their companies and organizations. If they can just find free and easy and effective ways to communicate that, this is the podcast which talks about technologies and tools that you can use. Now today, I'm going to talk about the challenge of creating professional and personalized presentations and proposals. We're all in the position where we need to communicate through our websites and through our PR, but when it comes to the close, we need to prepare proposals. How can we do that at scale when it's personalized and also at speed? So today I'm going to look at some key elements within a great proposal, but also some technologies that we can use for helping us to create quick, effective, and personalized presentations and proposals. Now, first of all, the reason that this is so important is that the proposal and the presentation that we make really then delivers on all the marketing promise that we've made. So we need to make sure that the proposal that we're issuing is in line with all the public relations or advertising or events or signage that we've done. For the company. So that's why I'm addressing this in a PR conversation, because after all that great work, the next set of experiences, the next set of relationships that the audience is going to have with our business is going to be the, the one where we're making them an offer. Now, actually, this applies not just to potential customers, but also to partners and to potential members of staff. So this idea that we would make sure that we're offering a presentation or a proposal to somebody that really reflects the brand qualities that we've got as a company, I think is worth addressing. Now, over the last 25 years, I've issued literally tens of millions of dollars worth of proposals, and not just actually for public relations, because in China I imported Morgan sports cars and And I worked quite hard to make the presentation about building a custom sports car for a Chinese client into part of the experience. So, when we look at what a proposal includes, let's just drill down into what I think that can include. First of all, it needs to be personalised. So, some idea of a cover letter. Or a media or some sort of a welcome address. And I've recently started using a couple of apps. One is called Bonjoro, which allows me to send a video along with the presentation. And I've also been using Loom, which has enabled me to then have the presentation ready, but then I record it and I then send the video link along with the file to a client or prospective client so that instead of hoping that they're going to read and understand all the nuances that I have in my presentation, they're going to have me explain it. And that's important because, as we know, we can't make a presentation too long because people don't have the time to read it, but if it's too short and too brief, then we're missing out detail. If we're making an in-person presentation, we have all the benefits of charisma, character, chemistry. But if we're sending something to somebody that may be on the other side of the planet, often in my case, how do I communicate and send the energy that I have for the work I'm about to try and get from them, or the product I'm about to sell them, but all online? So first of all, personalization, which can be done with video. Second is about knowing the customer's motivation. So in consumer PR, for example, people are buying products and services so they can feel better. It solves a problem for them, whether it's a car or a piece of clothing or food or travel. It's meeting a personal need. Now, in business-to-business, it's different on many levels. They're buying a good or a service or a person in order to accomplish something else. And they're spending company money, not their own. So they'll often have to justify that expenditure. So there may be 2 or 3 people involved in the process. In fact, almost always there will be 2 or 3 people involved in the process. So understanding the different people inside the organization that are going to be involved in the purchasing decision, but also understanding what's their motivation for actually buying the good or service that we're selling. I think is really important. So the third part is about the executive summary, so making this now into the body of the proposal. So what we do in East West PR is we have a 5-stage methodology, and we, we talk about investigation first. So we, as part of our presentations, we always include a little bit of background both about the company but also about the market that they operate in. And one of the things we found works really well is when we include information about their competitors, especially if we include information, for example, news coverage that their competitors have got. And that's partly because actually we want to instill a little bit of fear in our client or prospective client that actually we know that they're not alone. And we're perhaps— we're perhaps, and quite often I found, had as much or more information than they have internally, because internally they're focused on their own work and they're not often then searching for their competitors. And we can do that. So the executive summary can be the research that we found about them, but about the market and about maybe a market trend, but also about the competitors. Second element in the presentation can be about the outcomes. So in consumer, the outcome is happiness for yourself or your children or whoever you're buying that good or service for. But in B2B, the outcome is, for example, the integration within an existing process. And I always say, really, the only 2 outcomes that companies are looking for is either time or money. They're buying something to make them either more money or to, you know, directly, or to save them time. Or to save them some cost somewhere. So outcomes for B2B, I always narrow down to either efficiency or profitability, and how can I translate my service into doing that? In PR, we talk about, for example, bringing leads, bringing awareness, bringing traffic, helping the salesperson to arrive in a meeting, and people in the meeting already know about that company. The next element is about interactive pricing tables. So we go quite quickly into what it costs. Now there's a school of thought negotiation. Says name price first. And this is because by going in with a price early, you're setting expectations. And I will say about how much the good or service or the program is going to cost early because frankly, I can save a lot of time. In the early years of my PR firm, I did a long presentation and then we'd all go away and then we'd come back and maybe on the third meeting we'd ask how much money they've got to spend. I wasted a lot of time. Now I quickly get to a ballpark figure with the client, and then they either say, or you look in the whites of their eyes, or you listen to a pause, and you can know whether you're on the right lines or the wrong lines and tailor really your, your proposal accordingly. So interactive pricing tables mean that you can have then a set of offers which enable you to move within the range of what the client has got and maybe what you want to sell them. We're now just building our proposals really in a menu system. We found over the years that as attractive as it is to give a lump sum, clients then often are afraid, especially more recently, afraid of that lump sum. So a bit like buying a base-level car, they may end up with the entry-level product that gets them to what they needed, but then there are optional extras. And my line is always that I want them to be happy and us to be happy. It has to be profitable on both sides or the relationship won't work. So interactive pricing tables mean that we can modify together what the project's going to cost, and it's already then getting teamwork between us and the client, which is a big part, of course, of the proposal, is getting them across the line of having trust in us. The next can be compelling imagery. Now, data from 3M has shown that people access and process images up to 60,000 times faster than text. Steve Jobs was always the, you know, the proponent of one large picture and then on the screen and then a narrative. And that's great if you're in the room and you've got a theater-style presentation, but it's not great if you're just showing a picture of an apple on a screen And you need to talk to them about data processing across their information architecture. So compelling imagery, you can start to use infographics, and canva.com has some templates for infographics, which, for example, which are really useful. But what I also like to do is to put inside pictures from the client's website, for example, or coverage, because I found that the clients really like to see themselves most of all. The next part is about making an action plan. So element number 5 is making an action plan so that what you're showing the client is what they're going to get over time. What we do in our proposals is that we put a chart showing which work by which timeline we expect to get done, and I think that's important because All the people I've dealt with are trying to integrate what we're offering them within another plan. It's never standalone. So next, what we like to include is social proof, evidence that we've done this before. So having case studies at the tail end of a presentation, this is of course taken from your public relations content, and this is then the intersection between sales and PR. What we'll include, for example, is media coverage that validates the performance of this product or service. What we also do is give people a link to view them online, especially important now that we're not necessarily with them in the room. We used to, in the old days, give people a printed-out handbook of case studies and media clippings to show that we've got people media coverage. So if you're creating an offer for somebody, how can you demonstrate that you've already succeeded for someone like them with another client? Because it removes the element of risk. And what we're trying to do in presentations is to remove risk. And the reason why this is related to public relations is because if the PR has done its job properly, they'll have already heard and understood and read about the product or the service. Now, the next thing is about creating a couple of sort of calls to action. Now, I always like to include a time frame or a validity for which the quote is available. I give people 7 days. I say, this quote is available for 7 days at this price, because then it creates 2 things. One, it creates a sense of urgency on their part, but also If they have an event or a particular need and they don't give me enough time to deliver on all the goods and services I've proposed, I'm just creating a problem for myself. So I give a duration. This is valid for this much time. And the final thing that I'm including now that we're sending proposals to people and not with them specifically is I give them phone numbers and emails of people to call. We're using the Zoho booking system, so I'm including a link saying, if you're not happy with anything or you have a question, here is a place to book time with me to review it at your convenience. So these are some of the elements that I would include and am including in my proposals. Now, what about the software? Because as you know, I like to think about how I can automate this because I've mentioned we're trying to create proposals that are personalised but at scale and with speed. Those 3 dimensions. And building templates each time off of Word or out of PowerPoint or out of Excel is really cumbersome. But also because most of us now are working remotely, we're unable to just cross over and have people look at things. So, you know, part of my team are in China, some are in Singapore, some in America. So I really need to have a shared platform. I've been using the, the Zoho platform for my CRM, and we've just been wrestling with getting the Zoho Quotes module into place. I say wrestling because Zoho is an extremely powerful and extremely cost-effective platform, especially with Zoho One at just $40 a month with over 50 apps. It's amazing. So I've opted to use that because it enables me to have a sign, a signature element in that as well, also within the Zoho framework. But in terms of displaying of graphics and embedding video, the Zoho Quotes isn't there for that really. It seems to have come much more from the sort of manufacturing and production side of things. So the fields that we're able to enter really talk about products, for example, and they talk about units and boxes and so on. So I'm having to customise that, but also I'm not really able to embed some of the graphics and so on that I'd like to unless I just upload a separate document. So it's great for the quote in the sense of actually delivering a piece of information and the pricing and the terms, but it's not so great for making it all look beautiful. So there are a couple of other tools out there that I'd just like to share. One is called Proposify. Now Proposify is not free, and in fact, in my looking, none of these proposal apps are free, unlike a lot of the social media tools that you can get for free. Proposals are not. So Proposify integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero, and, and as well Zoho. So it's a really well-connected, really well-integrated app for making dedicated proposals. And what I like about it is that you don't have to use a Zapier integration, so it— I don't need to engage another piece of middleware between for example, Zoho and Proposify. Now it's an online, so it's a SaaS service that you can use, and it allows you to create branded and marketing-approved templates that we can use ourselves directly and again and again. And of course, this is the beauty of this, is that you can create standard templates like you would a Word document but in the cloud and with graphics embedded. They also then have the ability to add in video, for example, which is nice, and also to translate the interface into 15 different languages. Now obviously you write the content yourself in different languages, but that's great if you've got an international team selling into different countries. And it also then allows the preparation, for example, of a proposal by a marketing team, but the sending of that proposal by the sales rep. You can change the date, the currency, the location, and the owner. And it also has an embedded live chat function, so you can actually take the client through that proposal, you know, using something like Zoom and have this live chat on the document, which is really nice. And then it has an analytics function, so you can see who's viewing the document for how long, and you can also then take it from proposal to quote to contract. They have the ability to take the key data and move it across the workflow, which is really nice. Using that within Zoho is something that I haven't tried, but it's something I'm considering. Now, it has a plan called the Tall Plan at $19 a month per user, so that could add up because that's 3 users maximum per account. So you could be looking at the best part of $60 a month. But of course, if you're making proposals, you know, every day, it could easily pay for itself. But you can only have 5 active proposals. Now, I don't know many companies that only have 5 proposals out there, to be honest. Although I guess if that is 5 per user, then maybe that's 15 per month. It's a bit unclear. They have a grand plan, which is unlimited proposals for $49. Per month per user, which is billed quarterly. Some alternatives, one is called iQuote Express, which is $39 a month. There's another one called PandaDoc, which is also just $19 a month per user, and there's one called Proposeful, which is from Brazil, which is also $19 a month. $19 seems to be the magic number when it comes to getting a proposal made. So proposal preparation and distribution, then followed up with the, with the quote to the contract to the invoice. The reason I'm mentioning this is because it's automated now. It's centralized online, but it's enabling us to create proposals which are personalized and at scale. And a big part of public relations now is about creating personalized communications. We talk about this in our Speak PR program about personalization, engagement, amplification, and knowing. So it only makes sense that once someone's seen the social media, read the mainstream media, gone online, that when they receive a proposal, it's branded the same. It has case studies that have come from the public relations to give reassurance, and that it's got all the key messaging that you have in your public relations across the proposal. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. I hope you found this useful. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do come to eastwestpr.com. You can find also me on LinkedIn at Jim James. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on creating proposals which are personalized, And profitable.