I’m stealing this from Wendy Weiss (@WendyWeiss on Twitter), who says her prospects’ favorite station is WIIFM(*). My prospects listen to WSIC. (Why should I care?) Your proposal brags about your awesome product features? Sorry, wasn’t paying attention. Was listening … Read More
Blog
Does Your Sales Proposal Have a Great Villain?
A good proposal is a story, and great stories need strong villains. Villains provide an emotional push to the story beyond numbers in a spreadsheet. No matter how much ROI is involved, or how logical the CFO is, organizations rarely move … Read More
Streamlined Copying of Quotes for Proposal Templates
Creating a proposal from a template copies any quotes from the template to the new proposal. This makes it really fast to have your proposal ready to go. Except for one thing. Mimiran would prepend “Copy of ” to the … Read More
Saying Nothing, Beautifully
A great video made the rounds recently, depicting a “Generic Brand Video” ad. If you haven’t seen it yet, take the 3 minutes… … then think about how so many sales proposals are the written equivalent of this meaningless gloss. … Read More
Top 3 Sales Proposal Myths, Busted
1. The Economic Buyer Is Very Busy You might think the executive who can approve your proposal is really busy, with barely enough time to read your proposal, let alone understand it, but nothing could be further from the truth. … Read More
When You Should Make Assumptions in Sales
We’ve all heard how when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. In sales, we’re taught to never assume anything, to always ask open-ended questions to understand the customer’s real issues. This advice is usually great, … Read More
If You’re Getting Pushback on Price, You’re Probably Not Proving Value
If your prospects push back on your price, you’re not giving them the right value. Let’s talk about what happens in the worst case, when sales reps just toss out some numbers without even really understanding the customer’s problem. Of … Read More
Your Proposal Isn’t a Brochure, It’s a Story
How many times have you seen a proposal that looks like a collection of the seller’s web pages? There’s some “About Us” boilerplate, some product information, and some customer logos. (Sadly, some of the proposals like this that I’ve seen … Read More
The Steve Jobs Secret to Sales
What do great sales reps know that the rest of your team doesn’t? As this article on SellingBrew notes, great sales reps know when an opportunity isn’t a real opportunity. So they just say no to it and stop wasting … Read More
Facebook’s Acquisition of WhatsApp is Bigger than You Think
Facebook rocked Silicon Valley with its $19B of messaging app WhatsApp, with tech writers, leaders, and investors debating the massive purchase price. Wall Street seemed less than enthusiastic, dropping Facebook shares slightly after the announcement. The deal price is certainly … Read More