You work hard to get to the proposal stage with your prospects, so why do you hit "send" and ask the proposal to close the deal for you?

Proposals don’t close business. YOU close business.

As an accomplished seller, you know presentation skills require confidence and deep knowledge of your offering…to name a few. But when it comes to presenting proposals, the only skills that matter are grit and determination.

Maybe you can’t present your proposal in person to your prospect, but what about a video or phone call? Hey, that’s better than nothing. Even if you get 10 minutes of their time to review one crucial part of your proposal, that’s big.

Pitching your offering to a prospect differs greatly from presenting a proposal. Getting to the proposal stage represents significant progress through the sales cycle, yet most sellers don’t get an in-person audience when presenting their proposals.

You work hard to build proposals that you deem perfect for your prospects, so it stands to reason that you should work hard to get buyer face time to review the proposal. (Unfortunately, most sellers send their proposals through email and then wait by the inbox….strumming fingers…hoping…praying.)

In a perfect world, you’d have access to your prospects to present your proposals, but even if you had unlimited time, would you review every sentence, every graph, and every page of the doc? No way. What if the buyer told you, "I’m granting you 10 minutes to review some pertinent elements of your proposal with me." Which parts of your proposal would you choose to present? But face it, the buyer isn’t going to make that offer to you.

Too bad…you’ve worked hard on that proposal!

It is statistically proven that you don’t get what you ask for 100% of the time you don’t ask for it. Even if you can get 10% of your buyers on the phone for five minutes to review a few key points of your proposal, you’re miles ahead of your competition. And you’d take it. What about 10 minutes over Zoom? …oh boy, you’re IN baby.

This is why you work hard developing relationships….for those five-to-ten crucial minutes.

Fight. Scrape. Claw. Bite…and do it repeatedly to get time with your prospect so you can review the proposal together. You and your team spent HOURS developing a great proposal; it deserves more than just hitting the send button through your email.

Yes, this is a herculean ask in an age where buyers instruct you to "send it over…and I’ll get back to ya." Uh-huh. "Take a number" is more like it.

Whether submitting a proposal today or later this week, consider how high your conversion rate will climb if you get to personally review (parts of) your proposal with your buyer.

In a perfect world, a salesperson could always reach their KDMs on the phone and get meetings whenever they want. HA….yeah…wake up and smell the espresso. Fat chance, right?

But you DO agree it would be optimal if you could review even a portion of your proposals with your prospects…riiiiiight?

When you think about the times it’s most needed to get face time with a buyer, presenting proposals ranks pretty high, eh?

You’ll rarely get a KDM to agree to a meeting to review an entire proposal – but if ya can, fantastic! The next best alternative is to get in front of your buyer to review ONE part of your proposal. Like…two or three items that are important and differentiating.

Try this line over email, "Hey, I sent over the proposal yesterday – as you saw – but there’s one part of the proposal that could use some context and discussion – do you have ten minutes to get on a Zoom tomorrow?"

Go into that meeting prepared to nail the one part you mentioned, and have a backup plan for a couple more parts of the proposal that you want to reinforce and get the buyer’s reaction on. Whatever you do, get off of that Zoom after NINE minutes!