Executive coaches: Stop wasting your time writing proposals to clients who aren't ready to hire you

At the Center for Executive Coaching, we provide ongoing support to our members. Our members can set up a call anytime to review anything going on with their coaching practice. We only have one restriction on this benefit:

Never, ever email us or call us to ask what to put in a proposal that a prospective client has asked you to send them.

And even still, every month, one or two newer members of our program do just that. They haven't gotten to the business development part of our curriculum yet, and are super excited to already have a prospect. So, as soon as the prospect says, "Send me a proposal," they end the meeting by saying, "Thank you so much! I'll get right to work on it."

After ending the meeting with the prospective client, they email me telling me that they are about to sign up their first client. Then they ask what they should put in the proposal so that they win the business. It's as if they think I have some magic proposal on my hard drive that I can send them.

I don't. And they aren't about to sign up their first client. Neither are you if you fall into this trap.

My return email is a polite version of: "How the hell do I know what you should put in the proposal? I wasn't at the meeting and I can't read minds any better than you can. I'm afraid you now either have to guess, or you have to go back and ask the client to confirm scope along with how much they are willing to pay for your solution."

Clients don't ask for proposals because they want to hire you. They usually ask for proposals because they are too polite to say "no" and want to get rid of you. The Wizard of Oz did this to Dorothy when he first met her. (The Wizard of Oz is actually a sales training movie). The Wizard wanted Dorothy to go away, but she was a bit too eager and perhaps, as we get to know him better later on, he didn't want to hurt her feelings. So, instead of saying no, he told her to get the Wicked Witch of the West's broom. He probably thought that by sending Dorothy on this quest he would never hear from her again. It was much easier to send her on this challenge than to tell her "no" flat out. Prospective clients do the same thing when they ask for a proposal. They are essentially sending you out to get the witch's broom. They are avoiding the inevitable confrontation of rejecting you.

A member of our Center for Executive Coaching coach certification program is a Chief Financial Officer in his company, and validated this fact for me recently. He told me that his CEO wanted a coach and, as the CFO, he didn't want to pay for it. So, what did he do? In his own words: "I told my CEO to get a proposal from a coach. My way of winning is by getting a proposal to say no to. Good job [articulating] something that couldn't be truer to life."

I am also reminded of the late, great comedian Mitch Hedberg's one liner: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away." When you write a proposal for someone, and you haven't yet gotten their commitment on scope and price, or even confirmed that all decision makers are on board, you are basically handing them a flyer for them to throw away.

So what should you do when a prospective client asks for a proposal?

Tell them you would be delighted, and ask them for twenty minutes together to sit down and figure out what to put in it so that it would be something he can approve. If the client isn't willing to do this, you know right away that you don't have a serious prospect. When I find this to be the case, I let the client know this, and thank them for their time.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of things you can do before you get to this phase to make sure that the client is ready.

The most important is to ask probing questions to make sure that the client has a very real, pressing problem that makes it worth his time and the organization's money to hire you. I have found that many coaches are not very good at doing this.

For instance, suppose the client says that he has issues with team dynamics -- something we just worked on as a case study in our program this week. "Team dynamics" is too vague. It is not specific. It doesn't give you the proof you need that the prospective client has a serious enough problem to hire you.

You have to dig deeper. What kind of problems are the team dynamics causing? Is the team not meeting deadlines? What's the cost of any delays? Is their turnover on the team? What's that costing? Is the client frustrated? Working overtime compared to peers? Spending too much time in doing things that are not part of his formal job description or that are not strategic? Missing opportunities to move up in the company? There can be both tangible and intangible costs, but they have to be big and they have to be concrete.

Before anything, you have to confirm that there is a big enough problem to justify your time and fees. It can't be a vague issue. If the client won't open up to you about the costs of the problem, or the costs are vague, then the organization is unlikely to invest in hiring you.

Second, you have to make sure that the client is in a position to get the necessary funds to hire you. Many times the person you are speaking to will represent that he or she can get the funds and is the sole decision maker, when this is not the case. You have to ask, "Who else besides yourself has to sign off on this engagement before we start?" And you might have to ask again, in a more directive way. For instance, if you are working with the head of Human Resources in a health system, you might ask, "Usually I have found that the Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Operating Officer are involved in a decision about coaching at this level. What is their role in this process?" And, if these people have a role, I want to speak with them before I write a proposal. I want to be sure everyone is on board before I invest the time, and I also want to be sure that the proposal I write reflects all decision makers' input.

If the client tells me that they need me to write a proposal so they can use it to "sell" my services higher up in the organization, I already know the engagement has a low probability of success. Basically this is a person telling me that they don't have the power or skills or credibility to influence people above them. They actually think that an outsider like me has some sort of marketing brochure that will do the job for them. I don't. If they can get me a meeting with the other decision makers, I can at least ask them if they perceive a problem that might need my services, and then we can go from there. But there is nothing I can do to sell them on coaching if they don't already see the need to solve a problem they have. I solve problems; I don't sell coaching any more than a plumber walks into a company cold and says, "You should buy plumbing services."

Third, you have to make sure that you and the client are on the same page about the length of the engagement, how often you will meet, and any assessments you will do up front. Scoping out a coaching engagement is ridiculously easy compared to almost any other kind of professional service. You should be able to do it verbally, on the spot, for just about any coaching situation. If in doubt, say, "A typical engagement is six months. We meet weekly. We will firm up the exact coaching plan after some initial assessments, but the plan will include working on the one or two behaviors that will have maximum impact on performance, as well as on handling specific and immediate challenges coming up during the week that are related to this issue."

If all of this is in place, a typical proposal becomes no more than a 2-page document summarizing the problem, outcomes, scope, fees, and client responsibilities. There should be nothing in there that you and the client haven't already agreed upon. The client should agree that he or she will sign the document and move forward as long as it accurately reflects what you both discussed.

As just about every sales training out there teaches (and I think it was David Sandler's training system that first came up with this phrase): "Close before you propose."

A final note: Never respond to RFPs that you get in your email. You aren't going to win those. The only time to respond to an RFP is when you write it because the client wants you to win the business, and by the rules of the organization he has to send out an RFP to other suckers before hiring you. Usually the client knows who has higher prices than you, and stacks the deck accordingly. Then other, naive coaches complete the RFP to allow the client to meet organizational requirements, and the client hires you.

For all of the above reasons, please stop wasting your time writing proposals before you have closed the business. The way to do this is by getting better at having specific discussions about problem, solutions, price, and scope before you agree to write anything. Otherwise you will be chasing lots of witch's brooms and not doing much coaching at all.