Zach Selch explains why deals over a few hundred thousand dollars need a standardized proposal. His salespeople produce wildly inconsistent ones, tanking win rates. He recommends Tom Sant's Persuasive Business Proposals as a practical guide to building a repeatable template that raises quality across the organization.
Chapters
Hi, I'm in the Yangon Airport in Myanmar, what used to be called Burma, one of my absolute favorite cities in the world. And I want to talk about a book called Persuasive Business Proposals by Tom Sant. And I know this is sort of a snooze type of subject for a lot of people because a lot of people don't really care about their business proposals. They're, they're, well, a lot of people like me who are more face-to-face sales guys, etc., PO guys. On the other hand, very often we need a sales proposal. I haven't written a sales proposal myself probably for 20 years, but what I found was people who reported to me and my distributors were all doing non-uniform or non-standard sales proposals. Some of them were fantastic, some of them less fantastic, and And they impacted sales. You could really take a look at your list of people and see who was doing a better job or who was closing more business. And sometimes it really was triggered or related to the quality of their business proposal. Anyway, so I went looking for some books on this, and this was a great book. It gives you a really good understanding of how to build a very persuasive business proposal. And a business proposal, as much as we like to think think of getting in and negotiating and talking and presenting and asking questions and all that stuff with sales, the business proposal is something that typically you're going to need to close big business. To close anything over a couple hundred K, you're going to need a business proposal in the end of the day. And having a good template, a playbook as to how to put together the right type of business proposal, in my opinion, is very important. And this is the right book. To do that. Persuasive Business Proposals by Tom Sendt. It really walks you through what you need to know both to develop your own but to manage people who are doing it, the elements of it, and how to really improve it and design it well to put together what the endgame for me was a standardized system for my salespeople and my distributors to be putting together high-quality business proposals that brought in more business. Now remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
