Proposal Playbook: Part 3

Proposal Playbook: Part 3

Kelly Kennedy: ​Welcome to episode 85 of the business development podcast. And on today's episode, we are chatting part three of proposal playbook. What absolutely needs to be in your proposal and what do you need to guarantee? Stick with us. We're going to talk about that today.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said business happens over years and years.

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brought to you by capital business development, capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the business development podcast. And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 85 of the business development podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today's episode is awesome. It's part three of our proposal playbook series, and I can't wait to get to it. But before we start, just got a few things I want to get through. First off, I want to thank Dr. Jack Schafer, the author of The Like Switch. He's a former FBI special agent.

He came on our show for episode 84. Thank you so much, Dr. Schafer, for teaching us all about the power of primacy. If you haven't heard that one yet, go back. Awesome episode. Dr. Schafer is brilliant in human psychology. It was It's such an amazing episode and we were so thankful to have him. He is one of my favorite authors and The Like Switch is one of my favorite and most recommended books.

Alright, getting into today's episode, I just wanted to give a shout out and maybe a little bit of a show update. Cool fact, today is November 25th that I'm recording this episode. It also is the anticipated due date of my son. Which is crazy and exciting, and so, for all I know, you guys are hearing this right now, I am officially a dad, and I'm psyched, psyched about it, I've been a stepdad for years, but this'll be the, the real initiation, and I'm super, super pumped to be a father.

And yeah, that could've actually happened already, so, that might be what I'm doing when you guys are hearing this right now, I might be just... Just hanging out with my fiance and my son and my three step sons. So really pumped about that. Really excited. And that's something really cool about today.

Another really amazing thing is our show is about to hit 100, 000 downloads. If it has not already. Today we are sitting at 98, 872. Our show is growing on average by 2, 000 to 3, 000 downloads a week. So very likely at the moment that you're hearing this, we are celebrating our hundred thousand download celebration, which is absolutely bonkers.

Could not have done it without you. Thank you so much for coming and checking out our show. Thank you for telling your friends, your family and making this show what it is. The business development podcast is about you. It's about how do we grow your business? How do we teach you the skills that give you that leg up over the competition?

And you know, we've had amazing guests to give us that kind of advice. I've been giving business development advice this entire show. And I'm just so thankful that you guys have tuned in with us from the very beginning. At this point, our show is actually just about at our, at our 10 month anniversary.

So we started this show on February 6th. So on December 6th, we are celebrating 10 months. And it blows my mind. It just absolutely blows my mind that we are... Where we are, how fast we got here and you know, couldn't have done it without you, our fans, our amazing sponsors. I want to give a big shout out to Hypervac Technologies, atWork Office Furniture, and Maverick NDT.

We could not be where we're at without their support. And we appreciate you guys giving them a checkout and spreading the word about them as well. They are they are financially supporting the show at this point. And it's absolutely amazing. And we appreciate them greatly. And we are thankful for all the sponsors we get on the business development podcast.

Our Spotify and Apple podcast followers. We are quickly approaching 1, 500. We're at 1, 274. We're growing that very substantially as well. So if you are listening to the show and you listen on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and you have not yet given us a follow, we would appreciate it if you give us a follow and a rating and check out our shows as they come out.

Weekly. We appreciate it immensely. Alright, so, let's just get really into it. Man, Proposal Playbook Part 3. I'm psyched about this. I've, I love this series. You know what, I have a feeling this is one of those series that I think is gonna go back in the show's kind of historic catalogue as ones that people really, really check out.

I was going back through our shows a while ago, and you guys really love the, like, ten things, or the, the five steps. Those are something that you guys really like. But I think... We're talking to a lot of business owners right now, and let me tell you what, my friendly, friendly, amazing business owners, one of the biggest challenges that we face is putting together good value propositions.

It truly is. It's It's really the key to business development is being able to come up with an amazing value proposition that generates enough interest where you get to a stage where you can put together a proposal. I know that a proposal isn't actually technically a business development job. It's not.

The business proposals typically do not fall under the realm of business development. However, I have worked in operations. I've worked in business development. I've worked in account management and I've sent a ton of proposals. And now as a business owner, you know, I've been a business owner. Now I'm celebrating three years of capital business development, which is amazing.

December 3rd is our three year anniversary. And I've sent a ton of proposals since I started that company. And so it's really been a learning. a learning flow or a learning period for me as well. And I'm really delivering a whole bunch of information to you guys with this Proposal Playbook because I've had to learn a ton of lessons on proposals.

And so my hope with the Proposal Playbook And to each of you who are listening to this, implementing the Proposal Playbook into, into your day to day tasks or proposals or future proposals, please do. Please do get back to me. Let me know how this has affected you. Let me know how many proposals you won and the feedback you guys got.

Because what I'm really teaching you with the Proposal Playbook is my hard learned lessons. And is it the be all, end all of proposals? Absolutely not. Am I the guru or the best proposal maker in the world? Absolutely not. However, I have learned enough to be dangerous with proposals. I've learned how to create successful value propositions with proposals and using these techniques is going to give you an advantage.

It just is. If you implement the information that we have put together in part one, part two, part three, and eventually part four of this proposal playbook, it will give you an advantage over your competition when it comes to proposals, assuming they're also not listening to me, but we always do try to give you the leg up with the business development podcast.

And so I really do. I really, I really want your feedback on this series. Let me know what you think of it. Let me know if this series has been beneficial to you. I know that it is more niche. I know that this series does not apply to everybody. This is very much geared at my entrepreneurs, my founders, my business owners, my people who are actually submitting business development proposals.

Understand BD reps, the people that are also listening. There's a lot for you to gain in this as well. Even if you're not directly sending these proposals, This is important for you to understand how to create value proposition as well when you're doing business development, when you are bringing on new clients and they're asking you why this company, it is critical that maybe you've taken a look at some of the proposals your business sends.

Even if it's not your direct job, it is really, really important to be able to see on paper how they are demonstrating their value to a customer. In the proposal stages or at that point, right before a contract is signed, it's really critical that you understand the value proposition. And frankly, when it's written down on paper and you're showing what your ROI is, that's a really a really great place to learn these lessons.

Or if you, if you don't know, to be able to really see how your company is trying to situate themselves against the competition. Let us just get into it. So part one, of the proposal playbook was very much focused on you, your business, getting to the bottom of what your statistics are, what you can deliver on, where your business stands out above the crowd, how you deliver your services, statistically, what level of service you can, you can achieve, or, or what can you achieve for your client based on some data that you have taken in from previous contracts, right?

I gave the example of this. With capital where we were able to go back through, you know, at this point, multiple business development contracts and statistically find the averages of how much effort it took to gain a meeting. How many direct contacts did we have to make? How many digital introductions led to meetings which allowed us to be able to sit back and say, okay.

In this industry, on average, it takes this amount of effort to achieve this amount of meetings. And now I can use that data to be able to give guarantees, to be able to forecast what we think we can do for a client or, or, or, you know, how successful we think we can be in a contract. So what I was talking about in phase one or part one was about you and your business.

When we got into part two, what we were talking about was How to clarify with the client what their goals are and to become a strategic partner with them. You don't want to just sell your customer services, right? You, you want to become a strategic partner with your customer. You want to accomplish their goals, their, you know.

If you aren't working as a strategic partner with your customer, how do you know that you're meeting what it is they want to do, right? I think one of the biggest challenges that businesses have is that they just provide this one trick pony where they're like, Yeah, this is what we do and you need it and they're going to be like, well, how does that meet our goals?

And we're like, we don't care, but you're still going to need this, right? You're going to need this service. Trust me, it will. It'll meet your goals. Just, just go with it. This is a really hard value proposition for your customer to understand because they have their own set of goals. And so what we were really getting into with part two was how do we ask the right questions to understand how we can deliver for the customer.

I used an example of of a million dollar conundrum for capital, where if a customer came to us and we really drilled into what it is they wanted to do, well, they wanted so many meetings. Okay, well, what are those meetings? What's the point of that? Well, each meeting we get whatever 100, 000. Okay, great. If you secure a customer from a meeting, you get 100, 000.

What was your closure rate? Oh, well, we're closing at 50 percent was the example they gave. And then we kept drilling on them. We're like, well, yeah, but how many customers can you take? And they're like, well, the goal is to make an additional million dollars. So by the time we had all of that information, we were able to put together a proposal and say, In order for you to meet your million dollar goal with a 50 percent closure rate and an average 100, 000 per new customer, you're going to need 20 meetings.

And so that gives us some key deliverables that we can then work from and be able to show an ROI, a massive ROI in that case, and be able to really, really show them. Yeah. This is why you would want to go with capital because we can achieve this million dollar revenue goal for you in this amount of time with this amount of meetings.

And we are confident we can accomplish this amount of meetings because we have the data to support it. Boom. Now you've basically shown. You are going to provide an exponential value to your cost over time to the customer. You showed them how, you showed them why, and it makes sense. At that point, they're like, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna help us accomplish our goal.

We're happy with the price you're going to charge us because you're going to provide exponential value to that price. This is a no brainer. We're moving forward. So this is the level of, of information that you really need to gather before we now move into part three, which is the actual proposal. Okay the actual proposal.

I want you guys to understand this. I'm giving you an outline of things that you should have in your proposal, how you guys structure it or decide to format it. Okay. It's very much up to you. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty and say that this is the best way to lay out a proposal. It's probably not.

It's just the way that I've laid out proposals. And so I want you guys to take this particular part three and understand that this is something that you can make your own. But remember, the stuff that we're going to talk about that should be in the, in your proposal you should definitely find places to insert it.

And we're going to get into a part at the end. Something that I have done historically. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue to do it always, but it's worked well for me. So I'll talk a little bit about what I do with regards to the agreement itself after. But once we get into this part, this part three, I just want you to understand, take it with a grain of salt.

Understand that as long as we Deliver what the customer was asking for in a clear and concise way. We don't have it super fluffed up with a whole bunch of garbage that frankly doesn't need to be there. We need to just create a clear, concise proposal that already reiterates what we've discussed with the customer.

Remember. You have already discussed this stuff with the customer. That is the important part about the actual proposal itself. The proposal itself should just reiterate the value you have already told the customer that you can achieve with them in the, you know, two to three interactions you've had before this stage, okay?

They should not be finding out what the price is or what it is you're gonna do for them in the proposal. This should just be reiterating the stuff that you've already discussed. You've already pre qualified that your cost isn't going to be out to lunch. Trust me, you do not want this part to be the part that you send to the customer and say, great, we haven't talked about pricing.

We haven't talked about deliverables. We haven't talked about your goals, but here you go. Here's the proposal, right? You do not want that because you don't want your customer spending two weeks or three weeks reviewing this proposal because they don't know any of the data in it. Okay. This part three of the proposal itself needs to really just reiterate what you have already discussed, clarified, and okayed with your customer.

This should be very much a final check before they just sign the contract and move on with your agreement, okay? I know a lot of companies, including Capital, for a very, very long time Waited until the proposal to submit pricing because the argument at the time for us was, well, we need to get to the bottom of it.

We need to really clarify what the needs are of our customer and we need to take some time and then and then create the proposal and send it. I still agree with this, but what I don't agree with anymore is, I can give you the rough pricing after I fully understand roughly what it is you need to accomplish.

And I do some basic math behind the scenes. I usually need a little bit of a break, maybe a day or two after our initial consult to put together all of the data and my thoughts on the, on the proposed contract and come back to you and say, Yes or no, we can either accomplish this contract or we can't.

And if we can accomplish it, here's the details that I think I'm going to need to do to do it. So I can kind of confirm all of this information with you ahead of the proposal, and this makes way more sense because I'm going to know way ahead of time, if this even makes sense for you, I'm going to know if our services make sense for you or not, if we're going to be able to provide exponential value to our cost or not, right.

Which is always our goal at capital. We want to provide exponential value to our cost. That's just what we want to do. And so it makes way more sense for me to have an initial meeting with you, figure out the, your goals, and then from there work backwards, figure out if capital can meet them and if we can meet them, what it's going to take and then have another meeting ahead of the proposal.

To just reiterate that information with you and make sure that we are on the same page that we're not completely out to lunch on our pricing or that that you know, maybe there needs to be a change in expectations because we did that we ran the data and either maybe we can get more meetings or maybe we need to knock him back a little bit.

But these are things that we can discuss and should discuss ahead of the proposal. The proposal should really just reiterate the information we've already discussed and outline the deliverables and outline the ROI for you and just give you on paper what we've already discussed back and forth. There should not be any big surprises.

You should not have gigantic surprises. In your proposals that you have not already discussed with your customer ahead of time. So that is a key takeaway from this. And I know that I'm talking to a lot of companies right now that wait until their proposal to talk about pricing. This is wrong. This is a lesson that I have learned that I have recently learned what you need to be doing.

is having this discussion with your customer ahead of the proposal. The proposal itself should really just be to outline how you are going to accomplish that goal that you have already discussed, that you have already clarified rough costs, that you've already clarified timelines and deliverables, right?

Once we can get to that point, you are going to win way more proposals. Why is this? Because you are going to disqualify your customer or qualify your customer ahead of the proposal. Mark my words, like think about this. You guys know if you guys are right. I know if you're, I know if you're listening to this, you probably do the proposals for your company.

You know how challenging it is to write a good proposal because they have to be custom. They have to be tailored to the customer because every customer is different. Every need is different. You can't just cut and paste one proposal to the next and expect it to work. There needs to be some time, some thought put into it.

Now, how much time and thought? Have you wasted because instead of having these conversations up front with the customer clarifying saying, Hey, before I send a proposal, I just want to reiterate some of this information, make sure that we're on the same page and let you know roughly what I think we can do and roughly what that cost might look like.

Man, think about all the time you could have just saved yourself. And I'm kicking my own self, because this is lessons that I've learned the hard way too. You know, you guys know this, I come to this show from experience, right? I don't speak to crap that I don't have any understanding about. I speak to what I understand.

From what I've experienced, from my expertise, and from my losses, and my failures, and my successes. That's where I speak from. And so, I hope today that what I, what I do is I save at least one of you a ton of time in this proposal space and just give you, you know, a playbook that wins you so much more business over the course of your business and your lifetime.

It makes you just that much more successful because these are lessons that unfortunately I've had to learn the hard way. Many business owners have had to learn the hard way, but the thing is, if you learn them and you enact them and you do this stuff that we're teaching you in this proposal playbook, you are going to win more business.

Period. You just are. And really, that's what this is all about. That's what these lessons are all about. I just want you guys to win more proposals. Okay? Okay. So, let's just get into it. So, in my case, remember, I'm talking today from the way that I structure capital proposals. You are welcome to structure your proposals any way you like.

Just make sure that the things that I talk about today. are a part of your proposal. Okay, that it leads down the list and you are, you're running one thing into the next, however, order or whatever order makes sense for you and your business, your product, your service. Just make sure that you are able to include some of these things that we discussed today inside of your proposals to give you a little bit more success.

This is the order that I choose. You can follow it. Or you can change it. That's completely up to you, but it is important that we touch on the things we're going to discuss in the proposal playbook. All right. So part one, or the first part of any proposal keep in mind, sorry. I'm just going to clarify.

There's always a title page to a proposal capital. We like to have us and the company and you know, the contact information for the people that we are. Reaching out to, but our title page is usually very pretty. It has our logos on it. And it shows that it is a business development proposal. Then we go into the second page and that's where I'm starting here.

So our second page is our client overview. What is a client overview? A client overview is really simple. It just showcases your understanding of the client. You're sending a proposal to, it shows that you understand who they are, what they do, what industries they serve, why they're a leader in their space, how long they've been around.

And I know this sounds maybe a little redundant, okay, but it's important. Why? It shows that you have done a little bit of homework on your customer, that you know something about them, that you know that they are a leader in their space. They're an up and comer in their space. They've been around for four years, five years, 40 years.

It just shows that you've done some homework. I can't tell you how many times that I've seen proposals that It doesn't show whether or not they've even researched the company they're sending a proposal to. And it is important that you know what it is that your company does or that the company you're sending a proposal to does ahead of the proposal.

Just show that you have a base understanding of this business, this organization. There are maybe some of their accomplishments, maybe where they're facing challenges. Or, you know, just any, any bit of information that shows that you've done some homework. So your very first page or the first part should be your client overview.

You can also put in the client overview, any information that you have on their competitive advantage or their value proposition, talk a little bit about what makes them competitive, what makes them valuable, what are they doing different? Are they trailblazing or not? I know this sounds like a bit of a pump out.

Maybe it is just a little bit, but give them. Give them something that shows, holy crap, this person's actually done some homework on us. They actually know who we are, what our organization's about, and where we're going. That's where we want to start. We want to start by showing the company that we know something about them.

Okay. Part two. Now we're getting into the, the meat and potatoes. Okay. The next page or the next part, and this should probably be a couple pages. This is going to be your agreement overview. Your agreement overview has multiple parts to it. Okay. What it's going to do is it's going to summarize the areas of focus for the purpose of the proposal.

So, put your understanding in this agreement overview of what service this company, your client, is trying to acquire from you. Whether that be a product, a service, speak to... What the organization wants XYZ company is looking for, you know, top notch services and quality controller, top notch services and XYZ product.

They come to us because they know we're a leader in this space. Some of the products that they're after are this, this and this. This is why they want them. This is what makes those products great. This is how we are going to achieve. Their goals understand as well that you understand the challenge. Okay.

We want to speak to the challenge. Remember part two was about really understanding our client. This is where, this is where you win the proposal. Okay. Mark my words. This is where you are going to stand out from the crowd because in this, in this part two, the agreement overview, you really want to discuss what the challenge is.

That the customer is having and then how your company plans to solve that challenge for them. Make sure that you are addressing every single part of what the challenge is that your customer is facing and how your company is going to be an excellent fit for providing solutions for those various parts, okay?

If we do this part right and we really spell it out and we speak to every challenge and how we're going to meet it. It's going to line us up for the next part. So we want to outline the understanding that the challenge or challenge that the customer has and the outcome that you would like to achieve together.

We want to put whatever information that we have for them. So are there target industries they're trying to get? Is there ideal clients they're trying to work with? Do they have financial goals that we're trying to help them achieve? What is the problem that we can solve? Okay. And then also make sure that at the very end of this, if there are any known challenges, okay, there's.

almost always a known challenge, right? So make sure that, yeah, we want to show all the good. Okay. We want to show all the good always, but it's also important that if there are any known challenges or, or, or hiccups that could impede the outcome that we want, that we are also listing them here. So at the very end, once we've shown the understanding of the client goals, what it is they're after, what they would like to achieve, whether that be the acquisition of a product or whether that be a service to help them accomplish some type of goal.

We need to. Also list what the known challenges are. Is there going to be a labor shortage? Is there a, is there maybe a shortage of parts? Maybe is logistics a problem? We need to list some of the potential challenges you might face as well, and make sure that that's down on paper so that you can show the client that you're not just head in the clouds, hoping for the best, that you do recognize that there are things that could cause hiccups and you, and you're going to obviously try to mitigate those because you've identified the challenge.

Okay. All right. So this part takes a little bit because you definitely want to spend some time here. This is the, this is kind of the space where we really want to reiterate what the problem is that the client has, how your, or what services your company provides, how you're going to meet the challenge your your client has in this situation that, you know, any risks, any challenges, and that you're really kind of laying out for them here, how you're going to accomplish that for them.

Okay. Thank you. Remember, this is very basic overview. We're going to get more into detail in the execution plan or strategy. Okay. We're going to get into that next. All right. So just remember the, the, the agreement overview, the part two of our proposal, we definitely want to spend some time. We want to spend some time outlining your service, your efforts, how you're going to meet the client's challenges, that you understand the client challenge, that you, you're, you're not head in the clouds.

You know what it is they're asking for and you have a plan on how you're going to meet that challenge. Okay. All right. Now we're going to get into part three. All right. Part three is our execution plan or our strategy. So this is really critical because it's not enough just to show the client that you understand their problem and that you think that your product is probably the best fit, whether it be a product or service, you need to also show that you've put some thought into how you're going to actually accomplish those goals.

We definitely want to spend some time here in the execution plan or strategy, and what we want to do here is we want to outline for the customer. We understand your challenge. You know, XYZ customer is experiencing this need or is building this product, and they need this to accomplish it. And here is how we're going to deliver these, these services, these products within the timeline specified.

Okay? This is the part where you really emphasize your solutions, your skills. This is the part where you talk about your strategic initiatives, how your company is going to accomplish this goal for them, why your company is the best fit for accomplishing this goal. You're going to put this in the strategy itself.

You're going to outline for them step by step how you plan to accomplish This goal or this project or this service on behalf of your customer. This doesn't have to be super complex. It can be, it can be as complex or as simple as you want to put it, or as your service may be, but it is important that you outline for your customer, how you plan.

To accomplish their goals. If there are phases, outline them here. If there is pre work, post work, and whatever else, outline this here. Show them how you are going to accomplish their goal here, step by step, stage by stage, right to the end. And make sure too that you have timelines in here, that you're showing that it's not just an unlimited time.

You know, between this time and this time, we're going to do this. Between this time and this time, we're going to do this. For the remainder of the year, we're going to do this. And then when we close out, we're going to do this. Make sure. that we are outlining for our customer in detail, our execution plan and strategy, and that it makes sense.

Okay, it makes sense. Please. There's nothing so secret that you can't talk about it a little bit. Okay. So even if you have a proprietary system, you can explain, we then use our proprietary system to provide this to you, right? But, but show it to your customer, how you plan to execute your strategy. How you plan to deliver their product on time, how you plan to manufacture a thousand units of it, how you plan to get a thousand people onto their site to get this project done.

Okay. We have to show them that we have thought through the execution and that we have planned it and we are confident in our ability to deliver on that strategy. All right. And so once we have completed our execution strategy, we can do one of two things. We can actually add this next part. into the execution strategy, which is actually what I recommend you to do.

Some people will have a separate section for ROI. I think in this case, execution strategy, showing how you're going to meet that need can also fall into the ROI section. And so, you know, after you're kind of filling out your strategy, I want you to have a part here for ROI. You can literally include this.

inside of the execution plan and strategy. You can have ROI as the last part of it. And what do we want to do with ROI? ROI is really, really, really critical. We actually talked about this immensely in the last part in part two. This is the thing where if you don't have all the data, it's really, really hard for you to truly understand the ROI to your customer.

However, to your customer. The ROI is actually one of the most important parts of the entire proposal, right? The customer needs to be able to see the dollars and cents in their head. Either the dollars and cents they're going to make from having your product or service or the dollars and cents they're going to save.

From your product or service, you can either make dollars and cents, you can save dollars and cents, or I guess it could be part of the total execution strategy, but you really need to be showing the customer how your product and service provides true. Value. We talked about this in part two. Remember when I said you need to, you need to truly understand the value of your product and service to your customer.

This was the point. This is the thing that is missing in like so many proposals where people have not, they just don't understand how their product and service factors into the overall value for the customer. So they, they have no idea. If their price makes sense, or if any of this makes sense, right? If, if, if you can't understand the value of your product or service to the customer and demonstrate it in written ROI, you're in trouble because ROI is what sells proposals.

If a customer can look at a proposal and say, yeah, they're going to accomplish this goal for us, and they're either going to save us X number of dollars, or they're going to make us X number of dollars over time. It's. It's really hard for a customer to wrap their head around what value your product and service provides.

So, you know, I get it, like in consumer products, that might just be entertainment value. Maybe the value is just entertainment value, right? But in business, there is usually a dollars and cents value. You're either saving the money, you're making the money, or by accomplishing their project on time, you're making the money.

But either way, you need to understand Where your product and service makes sense and then show it in ROI. And so this section is one of those ones where you need to do the math. You need to understand what it takes to deliver your product and services, the total costs, your ability to deliver on it, what amount you're able to deliver in the timeline, and make sure that you are able to demonstrate your ROI for the customer and show them, Hey, if you use my, if you use my product, this is how much we expect to save you.

If you use my product. This is how much we expect to make you. If my product delivers on time, we expect to save you this much because you're going to deliver the project on time to your customer, and you're not gonna take in overage charges. There's, you need to understand as best as you can, what the true value of your product and services to the customer, and make sure that you, you list it on paper in this ROI section in a way that is easy to understand and shows how much money you're going to make them, you're going to save them or what other.

tangible, tangible value you are going to provide with your service. The ROI section can be part of the execution planner strategy, or if you so desire, you can actually have it in as a separate part. But for the purpose of this agreement or this this lesson, I'm going to just have it as part of the execution planner strategy.

So our part three. All right, and rolling off ROI. The reason I wanted to have this right at the end was ROI typically talks a little bit into the deliverables section, and so we just roll right from ROI into deliverables. So as part four is our deliverables section. You need to make promises here. Deliverables is a place where we are making promises.

Okay? And so you need to be very thoughtful. And realistic about what you can deliver. Don't just give metrics that are absolutely bonkers that you cannot hit. Okay. My rule of thumb is I would never put anything in the deliverable deliverable section that was not realistically possible. It needs to be realistic.

Okay. Our deliverables. are a few things. Okay. Deliverables are measurable, right? It's not intangible. There's, there's a, there's a set number that we can put or a set percentage increase that we can put for a deliverable. It is a measurable it is a measurable thing. They are defined. Okay. We're clear.

We're concise. We're not, Lawyer language. Okay. If we say we're going to deliver five meetings, we're going to deliver five meetings. Okay. It's not five and a quarter or five lunches or five, you know, phone calls. We're talking five meetings. We need to be clear about what it is we're delivering. They're tangible.

They're, they're, they're real. Okay, they're real deliverables are real. They're not pie in the sky. They're not ideas. They're not hopes. They're not dreams. They are real tangible things. They are achievable. Okay, achievable. This is something that I think a lot of companies fall flat in their face too, because we all have hopes.

Okay. We all wish we could accomplish so much or we think we can do it in this time, or it makes more sense. to put achievable goals and discuss achievable goals with your customer than to give them these pie in the sky hopes and dreams that we could potentially hit maybe in a million years, right?

We don't want that. We want to make sure that all of the goals in our deliverable section for our customer are achievable goals in the timelines. Obviously, the next part here is timelines, Okay, they are not woo woo time. You are going to accomplish these deliverables in a certain time period, okay, that you are going to know because you know your ability to accomplish this because we talked about what we can do in part one.

This is why we need to understand our services, the amount of time it takes to complete them, the amount of time it takes to manufacture our products or whatever it is we're doing. We need to understand timelines within our own organization and then make commitments to accomplish our goals of our customer in a set timeline that we both agree to.

And you need to make sure that your deliverables are met on time. And this is why we need to make sure that we set achievable goals and that we can achieve them within the timeline. Then let's get into realistic. Okay. Realistic. We talked about this pie in the sky. We don't want pie in the sky. Not for our deliverables, right?

We can talk about hopes and dreams and our goals and our aspirations and whatever else. Like you can set goals with your customer, but in the deliverables section, you need to be on earth. Okay. We all love to be on the moon when we're in the goals. section, right? You know, we do to you a capital because we want to accomplish amazing things.

We do, but we also want to make sure that when we are committing to things for our customer, that we are committing to things we can actually deliver on. And so being realistic about the deliverables section is absolutely critical. Now that we've talked about deliverables, we're going to get into our guarantee.

Okay. Every single good proposal includes a guarantee. Whether you were selling a product, you're going to guarantee that it's free of defects or that it's going to work for X amount of time. When you're selling a service, you're going to guarantee that you're going to, you're going to hit the goals that you set with your customer.

Okay. There has to be some level of guaranteed. Do you have to guarantee the whole thing? No. No, you do not. You know, especially when we're talking with customers that the hopes and dreams are really aspirational and they have high goals. Hopefully we've talked about this and in the deliverables section we've said, look, you know, your goals are high.

We're gonna aim for them. We think that we can for sure hit, hit this though. And so it's important that we are guaranteeing what we can guarantee. Okay? And I would encourage you, regardless of what product and service you're selling, I don't care what it is. Give your customers some type of guarantee.

Give them something that says that you were going to stand by them, that you were going to get the job done. This is a place that I actually fell flat on my face when I started doing proposals, because in my mind I thought, well, it's business development, right? Like how, how much can you guarantee? Well, it turns out a lot.

Once you understand what real success looks like, what real deliverables look like, what real statistics look like, this is why I was pounding statistics into your guys minds in part one of this, because it was something that we had to learn before we could get to a point where I can give a guarantee now.

Yeah, I can give guarantees on business, on business development, right? It's something that we couldn't do in the beginning, but once we had the statistics and we knew, we were able to give guarantees. And that changes everything, because it allows you to stand behind your service, to say, not only are we going to kill it for you, we are going to guarantee we get you some level of result.

We're going to guarantee that this product is free of defects for two years, we're going to get you another one. We're going to guarantee that this product is going to meet your need. We're going to guarantee that our service is going to accomplish what we say it's going to do. www. microsoft. com You need some type of guarantee.

Okay. It's 2023. If you are not offering some type of guarantee in your service agreements, in your proposals, make sure that you can sit down. I want, if this is like, you're hearing this on a Sunday or a Wednesday, make sure that later on this week, if you guys don't have a guarantee in your proposal, you sit down and have a team meeting and say, look, what can we guarantee in our proposals?

Because it is absolutely critical that we are guaranteeing some level of, of. of performance. Okay, we have to guarantee something. And so if you do not have a guarantee section in your proposals, you need to add it. This is absolutely critical in 2023 and forward. Okay. All right. Now we've gotten through.

This is it. We've really gotten through the main parts of a proposal at this point. This is really the main things, right? It's not a lot. It's five really important sections though, but understand here like this doesn't have to be 20 pages. You can do this in four pages in three pages if you really can find it, but you probably want to make it readable at a picture or two, but yeah, like you can do this, right?

It's not that hard, but. I hope that what you're really understanding from these proposals is what we're showing to a customer is, Hey, we understand your company. We understand your need. This is how we plan to fix that need. This is why we're the best at doing it. And here, not only that, we're going to show you an ROI.

We're going to show you that if we meet your need, it's going to be beneficial to you in this way, in a way that is tangible, measurable. Understandable. Oh, and by the way, not only that, not only are we going to meet all those needs for you, we're going to guarantee our product or service. We're going to guarantee it.

Do you see where we're leading our customer with this? We are leading them to a no brainer yes, right? This is what we want. Proposals should become a no brainer yes. If you were going to get no for your proposal, you should have got no before you made it. That is a lesson I've learned. I'm learning, okay?

I should have known ahead of sending all these proposals, whether or not I was in a, I was in the right place to even send one. The reality is most of the time I wasn't because I hadn't gotten clear on my customer needs. I hadn't gotten clear on what, what it is that would really accomplish their goal or what their goal even was.

I just said, Hey, you need business development. We can do it. Here's our proposal. Right? But obviously that was, it makes sense. I get it from a service standpoint. We think that we think that all the customer knows. The customer knows what our value is, like, obviously, like, they'll just see our rate and they'll be happy and they'll go forward.

No, you have to spell it out for them. You have to show them why. Why, in dollars and cents, you make more sense. You're going to be the best option, okay? That is why these proposals are absolutely critical, okay? And so, Once we've gotten to our guarantee, you know, the pitch is done. You've done all the work with regards to showing them why they should choose you.

Now we're into the investment options. So part six should be your investment options. Investment options can be multiple. It can be one. You choose. Statistically, having three options actually gives you the highest likelihood of success. That's just statistics. But you can do... As much as you want. And you know, at Capital what we like to do with regards to our proposals is once we understand the client need, we just give them some timelines and say, Hey, you know, we understand you want to accomplish these goals.

We think we can accomplish them. But here, would you like to accomplish them over a year, over six months or something different? And sometimes, you know, giving a customer some options like that, where, you know, the outcome is the same, but maybe the timeline is compressed or sped up. Sometimes that's a benefit to them.

And so You need to figure out what types of packages you can put together for your customer that will still meet the need. Maybe there's additional services in there. Maybe you're an advertising company and you can give additional advertising services. Maybe you can do brochure creation. Maybe there's things that are outside of the scope of this agreement but are still beneficial to the customer that you can throw in in different packages.

Understand your package options are, are, are very much there gives you, gives you lots to talk about. But remember, you should have already discussed the pricing with the customer ahead of this proposal. This proposal should not be a shock to them. Okay. It should have a price that you have already, at least a close one, that you have already discussed with the customer, okay?

I'm going to give you a little example of why this is really important. So, recently I had reached out to a few different companies looking for some website quotes because we were looking to do something really cool. Still are, I'm going to keep it kind of hush hush because we're not sure if we're going to do it yet, but I was looking for some website quotes because I wanted something that had never been created before.

And so I went out to the market and I reached out to a few people that I trusted and said, Hey, can you give me some recommendations for people that might be able to do this? Sent out one, one quote, the quote came back was really realistic, had like three meetings with this other company out of Poland.

Okay. And you know, everything that was told to me about this company out of Poland was. Oh yeah, they're great. You know, they, they work on Polish rates, so it's a little bit cheaper, but they do great work. They're 12 hours apart from us. So don't worry about it. Like you got to reach out to these people.

They're going to give you an amazing, amazing deal. So. I just went with that. I, I, I'd get, I'd been given that information. This was going to be great and I just kind of rolled with it. And what was really funny, I ended up having like three meetings with these people. Okay, like three meetings, like early, early meetings because their day ended when our days start in North America.

And so like I was getting up super early. I was trying to attend these meetings and go over what the goals were and was really clear with them about kind of what we wanted. At least I thought that. And then they're like, great. Yeah, we have all the information. We'll send you the proposal. Okay. So there was never once any discussion of cost or what this could look like ahead of the proposal.

They made no effort whatsoever. To discuss with me what was realistic for, for our business or our organization. Okay. And I should, you know, this proposal came back, the work that I needed done was going to take a timeline of something like seven or eight months, and it was going to cost me half a million dollars Canadian.

Yep, you heard that right. Half a million dollars to create a website. So we're not even going to get into that. But, once again, had this company just straight up said you know what, like, our costs are this on average, we use big teams if we were going to accomplish this, like Is this even in the ballpark?

I would have been like, hell no, this isn't even close. Thank you for your time, but I'm not going to waste any more of it. But no, we went through three long meetings, scope, everything, probably invested between me and them, four to five hours of conversation. This proposal came out. It was absolutely bonkers But, you know, like, there was nothing to say, right?

Like, there was no way along this way that anybody quality checked to think like, Hey, you know, is this even realistic? Yeah, just to give you an idea, this website probably shouldn't cost much more than about 25, So, it was way out to lunch. But Oh, goodness. Yeah. Just an example, right? Just an example of why it's absolutely critical to be talking pricing with your customers ahead of the proposal, right?

Make sure that you guys are at least somewhat on the same page because you don't want to find out you're out to lunch when you've already devoted, say 10, 15 hours of your time into meetings and creating a proposal. Okay. We want to know this ahead of time. All right. So we've talked about that. We've talked about our investment options.

It's up to you and your business, but make sure that your investment options are discussed upfront. That it's not a gigantic surprise to the customer. And heck, yeah, you can have additional services and stuff on there, but make sure that at least the agreement that you guys discussed has already been chatted about in price.

And it's not going to be giant sticker shock, a 5 million or a 500, 000 sticker shock, right? All right. And then our last part, and as in our, in our proposal, okay, and we'll take this into another part. I'll explain what I do. Our last part, our part seven. is terms and conditions. So obviously every company has terms and conditions that they work under.

Make sure that the terms and conditions are part of your proposal so that it's not a shock when you send the service agreement, okay? You don't want it to be like, Oh, amazing! We love this! We can't wait to move forward! And then they see your terms and conditions and they're like, Ah! We can't do that! We don't...

None of these are anything that we can agree to, right? Make sure that your terms and conditions are part of the proposal, so it's something that you guys can either discuss or negotiate on ahead of your service agreement. I'm gonna get a little bit of flack for this, I think. Part of capital proposals, and I've been doing this since the very beginning, and it was, it was advice that I got from a book that I really love.

It was called Consulting Success. I'll, I'll put, I'll put a little thing to it in this show title. I, I really love, I think it's Michael Zipurski or something like that. It's a book called Consulting Success. And, and when I was initially learning how to do proposals, when I first started my organization, I, I really kind of fell to that book to try to help me out with it.

But the information inside of that, he had mentioned that. He sends his agreement as part of his proposals. And so I have as well, and I've, I've heard it both sides. You should send the proposal and then send the service agreement at Capital. I've always sent the proposal with the service agreement included in case somebody just wanted to say, yep, that's great.

Let's move forward. And that has been the way that I have done it. I have heard that that's wrong. I have heard that don't worry about it. It's no problem. And that's right. I think it's up to you. So however you do this, whether you include your service agreement as part of your proposals or not, that is up to you.

I don't think it really matters one way or another. I capital I have since the very beginning, it made sense to me to just say, Hey, if you know, we've already discussed this, if you agree to these terms. Here, just sign and let's get started. I think that in my mind is the best way to go about doing it. But I've been told that maybe you shouldn't do it that way.

You should send the proposal and then send the service agreement later. I'm gonna leave that up to you. That's completely up to you. But in my experience, that is what I have done. All right. So that takes us to the end of part three, talking about our proposal playbook and getting into how do we actually create the proposal.

So I hope that you guys got a ton of value from this. I hope that it helps you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Like I said, you know, I'm not an expert. I just know enough to be dangerous. I've, I've learned a lot. from my own failures and I really hope that you were able to take stuff out of this and start to create winning proposals that win more often than they lose.

Until next time, this has been the Business Development Podcast. Stay tuned with us next week for the last part of the Proposal Playbook where we chat about follow up and considerations. Until next time, we'll catch you. On the flip side.

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists.

For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.