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Discover how to structure a strongly written proposal and avoid these terrible mistakes that could cost you your biggest deal.

A strongly written sales proposal can make a difference in losing or closing a sale, gaining a new client, landing repeat business, and establishing a long-term relationship with customers.?You must approach writing sales proposals as both an art and a science. This balancing act is crucial. Proposals can cement a sale, lead to a larger-than-expected transaction, or even result in more business down the line. You don't want to get it wrong.

In the world of B2B selling, sales proposals sit at the heart and soul of every deal. After all, sales proposals ultimately summarize the problems your prospects face and outline your approach to providing a solution to them. So, when pursuing a hot lead, a carefully planned and well-written sales proposal is the best tool you have at your disposal to land new business. Successful sales proposals convincingly make a case for an understanding of a potential customer's problem and why your company is the best choice to provide a solution — leading to a closed deal.

However, without a solid, compelling sales proposal, even the best solutions can face rejection due to a lackluster pitch. No matter what you sell, certain key elements make up every winning sales proposal, and although each sales proposal must be unique to your client, some proven best practices can be applied to any bid.

Here are 12 essential elements of a proposal that will nudge your potential customers toward saying Yes.

1. Personalized cover letter and show that you've done your homework

2. Know your customer's motivations and?Highlight your solution with great storytelling

3. Executive summary

4. Outcomes

5. Interactive pricing tables

6. Use visuals - compelling imagery to bolster your story

7. Make an action plan and Speak your prospect's language when making your case

8. Include social proof and build trust

9. Make it easy and?Intimately know your buyer and go for the virtual close

10. Usability & accessibility

11. Make it a great differentiator and Humanize your proposal with realism

12. Steer would-be customers toward redlining in your favor.

1. Personalized cover letter and show that you've done your homework; Gather as much information about your prospect as you can. A well-written sales proposal should reflect that you have a great understanding of their goals and pain points. What does their roadmap look like? What is preventing them from hitting their goals? What (professionally) keeps them up at night? Gathering as much context as possible will lead to a sales proposal that speaks to the prospect. The sales proposal is often the result of much back and forth with a prospect and should be treated as a natural step in a well-executed sales process.

Of all the elements of a proposal, the personalized introduction is one that far too many B2B salespeople overlook. Many people who played no role in the discovery process but are heavily involved in the decision-making will see this. Your cover letter is, arguably, the most important part of your entire proposal — its job is to capture your prospect's attention, make them want to read on, and kick-start the creation of those crucial emotional bonds between buyer and seller. Nothing can accomplish these goals better than Personalization. To blow your potential customers away, follow these cover letter best practices:

a. To show the value you offer, succinctly start by restating your customer's goals to demonstrate that you understand their needs, using bullet points with differentiating details about your company and solution (two or three compelling reasons why they should select your …offer)

b. For clarity, always include a reference to the customer's account number, document number, project name, or cited initiative.

c. Stay client-focused by always using your client's name more frequently than your company's name.

d. Provide information to reach the principal point of contact (POC) in your company, making it easy for customers to connect with the right person.

e. Use your company's branded letterhead to strengthen the brand experience. Never let sales reps reinvent your brand with generic or ad-hoc branding.

f. Keep your letter to a single page to allow your prospect to quickly absorb the most vital and compelling information.

It's important to hone in on the sales process to make sure the prospect experience is as smooth as possible from start to finish. This includes empowering sales reps with the right technologies and automation, from initial outreach through signing the contract and beyond. Having the right infrastructure and tools in place will speed up the sales process significantly.?

2. Know your customer's motivations and?Highlight your solution with great storytelling: The first unofficial, but very crucial, element of a winning sales proposal is the foundation of knowledge upon which it's built. Every successful relationship is founded on both understanding and trust. So, truly knowing your customer will go a long way toward helping you nurture great relationships with them. As Harvard Business Review (HBR) pointed out in an article about B2B value, "Since many people can be involved in buying decisions, especially at larger organizations, it’s worth mapping who is on the buying team, who influences it, and the different priorities and sources of value for each."To better understand your customers and appeal to their motivations, HBR suggests:

Benchmarking: Surveying customers your products and services performance compared with your competition on the table stakes of a broad range of elements.

Communication: Talk with customers to understand their experience with your offerings, and conduct follow-up interviews to drill down on their needs and sources of satisfaction and frustration, as well as the compromises they make in using your products and services.

Increasing value: Find ways to increase the value you offer customers. Once you have identified a set of elements that need attention, hold daylong ideation sessions to determine which core elements to focus on first.

Mapping: Map out exactly who is on the buying team and the different sources of value for each individual with purchasing responsibility.

Refinement: Take the best ideas from the ideation session and by discussing their appeal with customers and your ability to deliver on them. That will allow you to revise value concepts, understand how they fit into the customer experience and refine your approach. When you know who the decision-makers are inside a company, you give yourself a huge advantage in the sales process—you know exactly who your proposal is for and with whom it needs to resonate.

When you understand where that company is positioned within its space and what its needs are going to be over the next several years, then you give yourself the insights you need to accomplish that. Writing a winning sales proposal comes down to communicating that you understand the problem your prospect has encountered and demonstrated you have an effective solution. Customer stories are a great way to show how you’ve guided past prospects through similar challenges.

AN EFFECTIVE SALES PROPOSAL SHOULD TELL A STORY. THIS MEANS YOU BEGIN BY RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM YOUR PROSPECT IS TRYING TO SOLVE. AFTER YOU EFFECTIVELY SHOW THE PROSPECT YOU UNDERSTAND THE CHALLENGE, SOLVING THE PROBLEM BECOMES A TEAM EFFORT (YOU AND THE PROSPECT), AND YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE IS THE SOLUTION.

Avoid the feature-functionality trap and focus on the business problem at hand. Quantify the opportunity and present a business case to your prospect for why your solution makes sense.

3. Executive summary; First impressions matter. So use the knowledge you've uncovered in your research to aim for a powerful executive summary in your proposal focused on the value you bring to the customer and projected outcomes. Unlike your cover letter, which provides a broad overview, this section should be more tightly-focused, clearly and succinctly describing how you plan to implement your solution and include a timeline and details about the resources that will be required. Use a strong, compelling opening statement that spells out the results you can help your prospect achieve through your solution. Other things to consider:

a. Avoid buzzwords, industry jargon, and start with a list of deliverables or pricing.

b. Focus on how you can solve their problems and reduce pain points, NOT the products or services you're selling.

c. Position yourself as a partner and teacher, not as a merchant or vendor. In a nutshell, you should concisely lay out the problem, need, or goal; describe your proposed solution; explain how you'll overcome risks, and paint a picture of the desired outcome.

4. Outcomes; B2B prospects are in the market for outcomes, but they're equally concerned with the specifics of how you can deliver those results. Your proposal should bolster your executive summary (opening statement) by clearly explaining how you're going to approach your solution. Offer as much detail as possible when laying out your scope of work, highlighting exactly what steps your company plans to take, leaving no room for miscommunication or subjective interpretation.?

This serves a two-fold purpose: it proves you have a well-thought-out plan and reduces the potential for misunderstanding down the line if you win the bid. Show your unique value proposition without overcomplicating your offer. Say, for example, you're competing with several companies that offer similar products and services at a nearly identical price point. What makes you stand out? Instead of obvious boilerplate descriptions and product pitches like "our top-of-the-line products will help you reach your goals" or "we'll work hard to satisfy your needs". Be as specific as possible about what truly sets you apart from the competition by positioning your product with your client's needs and wants in mind.

5. Interactive pricing tables; If you've been successful in the first four steps, your customer is already sold on your product or service by the time they get to this point. You've done your homework, shown a strong understanding of their needs, and offered an ideal solution for them, so now they're ready to buy before even seeing the financial costs. In this section, layout the costs with clear, easy-to-understand pricing breakdowns for your solution. Communicate the financial costs and detail the payment terms. Keep things short and to-the-point and use Interactive pricing tables that let your prospects and customers edit item quantities, select the products or services that best fit their needs, and include optional items, allowing them to customize your solution. How much you charge is less important than your justification for charging it. For example, if you’re proposing a new software solution, instead of simply stating the final cost of $10,000, break down pricing with line items that show how you arrived at the price (licensing costs, work phases, estimated hours to be spent and specific services rendered, etc.)

6. Use visuals - compelling imagery to bolster your story; Whether or not to include any photos or videos in your proposals depends on your industry best practices, statistics have it that proposals with visuals are 32% more likely to close. Powerful imagery won't just make your proposal more aesthetically pleasing. Data from 3M has shown that people process images up to 60,000 times faster than text. Carefully including imagery (and ample white space) in your proposal will not only help attract your prospect's attention but present valuable, actionable messages in a more succinct form. Using images, videos, flowcharts, and infographics will also help break up the flow of the text – without any visuals, you're asking people to slog through a wall of text to take in a proposal that you want them to be paying their utmost attention to. One way to form some emotional bonds with your prospect, for example, is to introduce them to the team that they will work with if they start using your product. Consider including photos of your team, along with a short bio for each member.?

Great sales proposals tell a visual story. Here is a simple formula to get you started: Sales Story = Change + Pain + Gain + Proof.

First, describe the Change in the world that is bigger than your company to demonstrate why now. Next, show the Pain of today's situation with both quantitative cost and qualitative Customer Stories. Only then should you dive into the Gain your product offers and then provide the proof that it works. Customer Stories are critical to sales proposals because they help a prospect visualize the value you are offering.?

To build an effective Customer Story, you need three elements:

– What Outcome did the Customer achieve?

– What Action did the Customer take to achieve this?

– What product benefit made that action possible?

In terms of persuasion power, a well-crafted Customer Story beats feature lists every time.

LESS IS MORE. ONE OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES WE SEE IS THE SHEER VOLUME OF TEXT IN PROPOSALS. THE REALITY IS THAT MOST PROSPECTS AREN'T READING ANYMORE - THEY'RE SKIMMING. DESIGN YOUR PROPOSALS ACCORDINGLY.

7. Make an action plan and Speak your prospect's language when making your case; Since most B2B solutions require some level of setup, training, or other support – as well as collaboration from the customer — here's where you explain how you'll pull everything together. Use this section to outline in detail how the solution would be implemented in your prospective customer's business. Be sure to convey that you have a thorough strategic plan in place focused on delivering maximum value to the customer. In this section, help make your case with illustrative charts, tables, diagrams, and outlines that support the value of your proposed solution and the steps you plan to take to bring it to fruition.

This is crucial to make your prospect feel that the value your solution offers is worth the time, effort, resources, and potential headaches associated with implementing it.

Things you want to include: In cases where your solution is a replacement for an existing one, demonstrate to your prospect that you have a plan in place to make the transition a smooth and seamless one. Since the implementation is often a long-term and even ongoing process, show how you plan to support your prospect's needs over the long haul. Use a testimonial or two from an existing customer that highlights how well you handle new accounts. Speaking of which, it's time to showcase your best work.

Tailor the case studies and use language that the prospectuses. If a prospect says the proposals they’ve reviewed are too generic, then your proposal needs to be much shorter and include specific details and timelines. Also, make sure your proposals can stand on their own to upper management or the decision-maker. You want to make sure the proposal is CEO- or CFO-friendly, as those are the folks cutting the checks and ultimately the stakeholder.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK ON YOUR COMPETITORS AND THE PROPOSALS YOUR PROSPECTS ARE REVIEWING, AND DO THE OPPOSITE OF WHATEVER EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING. WHEN OTHERS ZIG, YOU NEED TO ZAG.

Sell them before the proposal is sent. The proposal should just confirm what the prospect agreed to on a phone call, meeting, or email.

8. Include social proof and build trust; Far too many proposals set unrealistically high expectations without backing them up and without any proof that the product/service can deliver real-world results. You have spelled out why your solution is the best possible one for your prospect, and now it's time to bolster your claims and make your promised solution feel attainable by showing credibility. Prospects identify with stories that resonate with them, so walk them through a scenario where your solution helped a similar business achieve success. Here's where you use case studies, testimonials, references, and third-party reviews that objectively highlight your solution and past successes in situations similar to your prospect’s role or company objectives. These relatable materials will help show why your solution is best for them.

Keys to doing it right: Have several case studies ready to go. Regularly debrief clients after each project and assign a team to develop and write them between proposals. Make sure everything you present is relevant. Ideally, you want to have results-focused shows of credibility that reflect what you're bidding on in the proposal. Only use fairly recent reviews. Depending on your industry and solution, two to three years tops is a good life cycle for case studies. Always get client permission upfront. Since some clients don't want their business challenges or practices publicized, be sure to get permission from the customer to feature them.

9. Make it easy, Intimately know your buyer and go for the virtual close; Your real goal should be to gain a true understanding of the prospect that is so precise, you can then predict (in advance) where their sweet spot is, rather than running through every possible benefit and wearing them out. So what's the best way to prepare before delivering a sales proposal? Ask your prospect questions! More specifically, strive to ask open-ended questions that can't be answered with a yes or no. Use these questions to map out the prospect's wants and needs. Then once you get to writing your sales proposal, there's no guesswork involved—you'll be pulling from real solutions to the exact challenges your prospect is telling you about.

I SEE ONE ELEMENT THAT'S CONSISTENTLY LEFT OUT OF MOST SALES PROPOSALS, AND IT DRIVES ME CRAZY. THEY DON'T GO FOR THE VIRTUAL CLOSE. AFTER YOU’VE QUALIFIED A PROSPECT, HAD A CONVERSATION WITH THEM, AND PUT TOGETHER A PROPOSAL, THIS SHOULD BE ONE OF THE FIRST QUESTIONS YOU ASK: ‘WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO BECOME A CUSTOMER?’

This is so crucial because, with this question, you're doing two very specific things: 1) getting a clear picture of the prospect's buying process, and 2) encouraging them to imagine a scenario in which they buy your product. Why is this so important? Well, how often are deals derailed by unexpected events? Maybe a qualified prospect that sounds committed to buying says, “We need to run this by legal" or "Technically, procurement has the final sign-off." If you’re caught off-guard by something like legal or procurement, then you didn’t do your job. You didn’t ask the right questions. And by the time you're sending over a proposal, you need to be asking for the close.

Now that your prospect is ready to move forward (hopefully) with your solution to help them reach their goals, the time has come to set an offer expiration date and to sign on the dotted line, so to speak. Set a clear deadline for a decision regarding your sales proposal and provide a space for your prospect to place their signature. Don't surprise your prospect with your deadline.? Communicate with them upfront and set a mutually agreed-upon decision date that's reasonable for both parties. It helps to always routinely set dates for future action throughout the sales process, so your customer expects you to keep things on a strict schedule. Give your prospect the power to digitally sign your proposal from anywhere — their desk, mobile device, or in-person — with legally binding eSignature technology.

Remember that selling is about your prospect or customer, not about you. Always emphasize your understanding of the problems they want to solve and demonstrate how your solution is the best way to address those problems.

For the best possible results, propose three or four solutions at different price points (instead of a single one). By giving your prospective customer multiple options, they can weigh each offer at its price level and better evaluate the value of your proposed solutions. This strategy not only lets you offer a range of prices (including one at a higher tier), it effectively makes you your competition, which creates a win-win scenario for your company.

Follow an A, B, C format where B is the one we want them to choose. A is too little and not enough and least expensive, C is too much and typically much more expensive. Each offer is laid out specifically on a single page showing the differences right next to each other. Understand that it's yet another piece of content that informs the buyer of your brand and how you operate. So help them help you.

10. Usability & accessibility; The final piece of the puzzle is these intangible elements of a proposal that don't stand alone.

Give some thought to the following:

Aesthetics; Think in terms of creating a proposal that looks neat, organized, well-put-together, and user-friendly. If you're not willing to put much thought into your proposal, your customer will question how much you care about them.

Flexibility; The best sales proposals are responsive, meaning they look great on all desktops, tablets, mobile devices, and in printed form.

Security; Sales proposals contain confidential information for you and your prospect's eyes only, so having a secure document is a must.

Trackability; Being able to track sales proposals in real-time as prospects view and sign them will ensure that you're always kept in the loop and are pushing your deal forward.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach to creating successful B2B sales proposals, but these components give you a starting place for building a proposal that will help you seal the deal.

By following the framework of these elements of a proposal, you can speak to your prospect and prove why your solution provides value as the best fit to address their pain points. All effective sales proposals should address your audience’s needs specifically, "Get to know what your prospects want, and describe in clear terms how you are going to deliver it." Armed with a highly customized, tightly focused, and well-written sales proposal tailored precisely to the needs of your prospects, you'll be well on your way to closing more deals.

Time is the most valuable asset you have in the world, sitting down to write a winning sales proposal might be time-consuming, from the research phase to the design aspect, and gathering compelling images that will suit a winning proposal will be taking so much of your time.?

Get an experienced virtual assistant with years of experience that will assist you in putting together a winning sales proposal today.?

I will give you a professional brand-winning sales proposal with legally bound E-signature technology software so you and your client can sign virtually.

Get a brand-winning sales PROPOSAL + E-signature integration, and account set up (using a legally bound E-signature technology) so you and your client can sign virtually.

Using information from the discovery call plus careful research about their #1-hair-on-fire problem/pain point keeping your prospect up at night and how you can help them solve this problem with your guarantee will be communicated clearly in the proposal. The proposal will be sent to your client to sign virtually via email or custom URL. After signing it will be sent back to you so both parties can have their copy. Your E-signature account and password will be handed over to you. You can log in and use your account at any time. A change of password is recommended at the end of the job. You don't want to get it wrong, avoid these terrible mistakes that could cost you your biggest deal.

You can reach out to me at: [email protected] or click here to see how I can help simplify and make your work life easier by taking care of all those essential backend tasks for you virtually.