Whether you work with a standardized proposal or each one is a custom work of art, this episode is for you. You will learn about the technique to write your proposal and how to use tech to make customizing proposals easy and you can track them to so you know when it’s being considered.  How do you save time, use the right language, know when to send and track those proposals? In each episode of The Smarter Sales Show, you will get tech and technique to sell more and stress less. Here are the highlights of this episode. Technique Tips from Merit: A proposal is my best guess at what I think you want. A working agreement is let's have a discussion about what you really need and what you want, and then I'll give you the good business reasons why there might be some other elements that you need to get to your outcome. When they say, “put together a proposal…” Respond, “I’d be happy to, but Are you open to co-creating a working agreement so you get exactly what you need/want and it makes good business sense.” There won’t be any surprises in the proposal, I’m just writing up what we discussed.  Proposals outline benefits, deliverables and costs. Make sure you're also includes your prospect’s pain and review that before getting to the costs.  Tracking a metric of how many proposals have you done is not as effective as tracking the metric how many qualified proposals have I done? Recording sales conversations then use the exact language they articulated their problem in your proposal. Technology Tips from Julie: Use tech to track, expedite and make the proposal process more consistent. Separate out the idea of the proposal from the contract, because those are two different stages of the sales cycle. One of the first ways that we differentiate is by being beautiful. Don’t just word document proposals, do beautiful proposals using PowerPoint, PandaDoc or Proposify.  Reuse components of your proposals. So rather than crafting proposals from scratch, every time, decide the 10 different things that you typically sell and have a page for each. Proposal technology platforms allow you to go straight from a proposal to a signature. Being able to follow up on your proposal is one of the most critical things that you can do so you can call them when they are looking at your proposal and are ready to buy. I use DocSend which lets me see that they've opened it and I get notified every time somebody opens my proposal. But the other thing it does is it lets me see which pages of my proposal they spend the most time on. Smarter Sales Soundbites:  “A lot of people rush to get to the proposal that they think is going to sell for them instead of really hang out a little bit more in that question and discovery, part of the sales process, to even discover whether or not this prospect really qualifies for the time and effort that they're going to put into a proposal.” “One of the challenges is making sure that we don't use proposals as a crutch for selling. If I'm just measured on how many proposals did I get out the door, there's no incentive for me to do the qualification step properly so that I'm maximizing the proposals that I do have out there.” “There aren't gonna be any surprises in what we discussed.” “I don't think I'm doing anybody any favors by taking my time to create a proposal that's only based on guesswork.” Listener Challenge:  Make sure that you're not creating proposals before qualifying prospects.  Create beautiful proposals. Use tech to track that proposal. Referenced in this Episode: Creating Proposals PandaDoc Proposify Tracking Proposals Docsend eSignature Platforms Find/Contact us at: www.thesmartersalesshow.com hello@thesmartersalesshow.com Connect with us on LinkedIn… Merit Kahn Julie Holmes Our Websites:  https://julieholmes.com/ https://www.meritbasedbusiness.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices