The ONE Word That will Change the Way You Make Proposals Forever

Transcript:

Hello and Welcome to The “S” Word LIVE. My name is Renee Hribar Sales Strategist, TEDx Speaker, and author. And my goal today is to help make sales simple and fun.

Tell me in the comments below, if you’ve ever been asked to write a proposal but were unsure about what to include, I get this question all of the time from my students and from my clients. They ask questions like Renee, I, you know, been chatting with this person and they’ve got this company and they’ve got this and they need that. And they need this and they want this. And they told me to send them over something. I’m not sure what to send them. Has that ever happened to you? Let me know below, another way it might come out is, oh, I was reached out to someone emailed me or someone connected with me on LinkedIn or someone connected me on Facebook or Instagram and they were asking me about this particular service. I do that, but I don’t typically do it all by itself. What should I send them? I want you to share with me if these situations or others have ever happened to you. So when this happens, I want to share a quick story with you to kind of give you context when this happens.

Like, for example, if you are in business, if you are a coach or a consultant or a strategist or a done for you service provider, hey, Robin, say hello as you join or maybe you are an agency owner, so you deal with clients for other clients.

Oftentimes you’ll have big clients, big contracts, and then you have contractors help you fulfill those. So let’s say you have this scenario like my clients. So what does it look like?

You are putting out content. You are you maybe you’ve been told, you know. Right. Lots of posts and, you know, nailgun, your ideal client avatar. Hey, that’s all good. And definitely you should work on it, but not not having it nailed down or like Robyn and I, we both work with people that are always pivoting.

Right. They’re always changing that course slightly anyway, or they’re newish, you know, in business and they need to still figure it out. So I’ve had this one client who particularly she was pivoting probably every three months, God love her. And she wasn’t sure exactly who she wanted to talk to. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to offer them. My encouragement because she would put out, you know, content, she would get inquiries, but she was still stuck in that What do I offer them phase? If this has happened to you, let me know.

In this case, the one word that will change the way you write and create offers and proposals forever is specificity, specifics.

What are the specifics?

So if I get a question directed to me via D.M. or PM or message, I very often will reply with tell me exactly what you mean specifically. Most often the potential client doesn’t know how to explain what their problem is. Specifically, they probably have a lot of things that they need help with in general and they’re not used to explaining what they need specifically. I can’t say specificity. Yeah, it’s a tough one is a tough one. So the goal is, is that we help them as potential coaches, consultants, service providers for these amazing potential clients. We help them draw that out by asking the right questions. If we’ve been hanging out for any length of time, you know that I always say good salespeople have a good pitch. Great salespeople ask great questions. So we get to the exact details of what we should and could offer them by getting specific. If you can do that over email or messenger. Great. Most often times, though, in the past twenty God help me five years.

Twenty five years that I’ve been selling professionally for other people and now for myself. I will tell you one thing and one thing for sure. Most of the time it’s not going to be done quick bam boom oftentimes what do people like. They like to feel seen and heard and they like things that are custom. So oftentimes if we pull something off the shelf like yes, I have this, I have this, it seems like it would fit. You try that. They’re like, that’s not for me. Yeah, I tried that already and it didn’t work. Has that ever happened? Yeah, it does all the time. Right. So to avoid those kind of sales objections, the way I teach sales is to get specific in the beginning before you ever make a proposal, before you ever make that offer so that it nails its target direct, even if in the general term of messaging, an ideal client avatar is you’re still like, whoa, what are we doing? Right. So you could still be deciding on what your messaging needs to be. You could still be deciding on who your ideal client avatar is. You could still be pivoting and still make sales with this one word in your pocket.

Specificity, so what I’m going to encourage you to do is to ask specific questions, get specific details if you ever are in the position where you are trying to create an offer or write a proposal, I have written my share of RFP, my friends. What I’m going to encourage you to do is go back and ask more questions. Never will a client say, oh, you should know that. That’s our fear. That’s a fear that lives in our head that’s not true. Put yourself in the position if you’re the doctor and this and the person that’s coming to you is in pain and they need a doctor, would you want the doctor to just kind of assume and make guesses about what they think is wrong with you? So they’re just going to do the procedure that they think is right? Or if they have questions, would you prefer the doctor to come back to you and ask for more tests, more evaluation, more questions to be answered before they start cutting you up and, you know, probing?

I hope the latter. I would like more tests, please. I would like another opinion.

Please, please ask more questions before you put that where. So for those of us, Robin  and I we’re at a certain age, we’ve been to the doctor like that. Yeah. Example. So thank you for sharing this with me today, sharing your time with me. And thank you. For those of you who have been asking questions, please click the link above. Let’s continue the conversation. Sales does not have to be hard. It does not have to be complicated. And if you’re not making enough income, you should be working on this skill of sales. And if you don’t know where to start, click the link. Start there.