How to stop your deals dying in Proposal

You’ve got an interested prospect on the hook. You’ve just nailed the demo. Your prospect asks for a proposal. You send them a proposal. Suddenly the dynamic changes. Momentum slows, your prospect delays the next call or stops responding altogether. Your VP starts asking why the deal hasn’t moved.

If this scenario sounds familiar, this post is for you.

Before you build a proposal, you need to understand 3 things:

1. Who else is going to review it

2. What they care about

3. What their objections are likely to be

If you can’t answer these questions, your deal is likely to die. Why? Imagine you are a VP and one of your team forwards you a vendor proposal to spend $50k on some new software. You probably haven’t been involved in the buying process so your first (and only) impression is the price. $50k? Seems like a lot of money. You have the budget but you’d earmarked it for something else. Maybe you just ignore it, maybe you say no, maybe you say maybe but don’t commit. This is why many deals die in proposal. Trust me, I’ve been that VP.

Or imagine you are a lawyer who has painstakingly built a contract review process for new vendors. You get an email on a Friday afternoon marked “Urgent. Need to sign ASAP.” You lack context for what problem is being solved so you err on the conservative side and redline the shit out of the contract. Since nobody except you understands sentences that lack punctuation, contain 19th century english phrases like “notwithstanding the aforementioned” and make random use of ALL CAPS, the only way out is with a lawyer-to-lawyer call, which only complicates things further. The deal gets “stuck in legal”. This is why many deals die in proposal. Trust me, I’ve been that person who forwarded that contract to my lawyer.

As a salesperson, there are two ways to avoid these scenarios:

1. Talk to all the key stakeholders early in the sales process, before moving into demo. (See my earlier post on how to do this, and why buyers actually prefer it).

2. Create a Mutual Success Plan immediately after the demo.

The goals of a Mutual Success Plan are threefold:

1. Answer the 3 questions listed above.

2. Show your prospect and key stakeholders what is involved to get from where there are today (being excited about the product) to where they want to be (realizing the impact on their business).

3. Create alignment on who needs to do what by when. It takes work to buy a product so this is a good way to validate that your stakeholders are willing to put in the effort on their end. Otherwise, why waste time creating a proposal.

The easiest way to describe what goes in a Mutual Success Plan is to show an example. It’s two slides. Here’s the first one.