Most salespeople know their customers well, and their products intimately. But when it comes time to put all of that information into a proposal, many salespeople struggle to find the best structure and format.

At The Seibert Group, we use a proven proposal methodology called Persuasion Selling™. The Persuasion Selling™ method is designed to produce compelling sales proposals that differentiate your solution from competing solutions, and that persuade the decision maker to adopt your recommendations.

Persuasion Selling Design Goals

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology was formulated to accomplish specific design goals. The most important of these goals are listed here.

Maximize Persuasiveness

The majority of proposals that people write are more informative than persuasive. Their goal is to present as much information as possible in the hopes that the reader will see something they like and respond. The problem, though, is that this approach isn’t very effective. A proposal, by definition, should be persuasive. Its purpose should be to present a solution or recommendation, then persuade the reader to accept what you are proposing.

To maximize the persuasiveness of your proposal, the Persuasion Selling™ methodology is inherently customer-focused. It talks about your products and the solution you are proposing, but only within the context of how your solution is going to help the customer to solve his or her business problem.

Differentiate Your Solution

When a customer is preparing to make a decision about what product to buy, the last thing you want to do is to send them a proposal that cements your solution as ‘just one of the pack.’ Rather, you want to differentiate your solution—to make it and you stand out from the pack.

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology incorporates a number of features to differentiate you and your solution from all the other competitive solutions that the customer may be considering. The title page is a perfect example. Instead of titling your proposal, “A Proposal for Customer”, which is one of the most common mistakes that people make, we show you how to make the title relevant to the customer. Instead of blending in with all the other proposals on the decision maker’s desk, your proposal will stand out.

Minimize Length

Many sales proposals are long—too long for busy business people to read. That’s a problem. If your customer doesn’t read your proposal, what are the chances they are going to buy what you’re selling? Your proposal needs to be long enough to communicate your message without ambiguity and without excluding information that the client needs in order to make a decision. But it can’t be so long that no one reads it.

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology shows you how to write a proposal that is concise. Typically, a sales proposal we produce for a client is between twelve and twenty pages, and even then, it’s heavily formatted so it isn’t a solid page of text. Further, it is well structured with headings and subheadings so it’s easy for the reader to find the information he or she wants. This increases the likelihood that the buyer is going to read your proposal.

Simplify Customization

You want your proposals to be high-quality, well-written, and effective. But the realities of business require that you also be able to produce them quickly with minimal effort.

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology shows you how to produce your proposals to make it as easy as possible to customize them for multiple opportunities. We do this by creating a Master Sales Proposal. A Master Sales Proposal is a previously written proposal template that is purposefully designed to be easily customized. Rather than writing each proposal from scratch, this approach lets you produce a fully customized, customer-focused proposal in less than an hour.  

Improve Readability

Research shows that few people read a proposal from cover to cover. Most of us have a tendency to browse through a proposal, paying particular attention to those parts that we perceive to be most important. To make a proposal more useful for your client, then, it’s important that you design it so it improves readability.

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology improves the readability of your proposals. It accomplishes this by formatting your proposal into chapters. Then it breaks each chapter into unique paragraphs introduced by meaningful headings and subheadings. This approach offers many benefits. Most important, though, this approach makes it easier for the reader to understand your sales message by browsing the headings, alone. They can read the content to learn more, if they want to, but they don’t have to.

Implementation

The Persuasion Selling™ methodology can be applied to a variety of document types, including unsolicited proposals, proposal letters, RFPs and RFIs, and persuasive sales presentations. That’s because while the implementation may vary from one document type to the next, the basic goal—to persuade the audience to accept the solution you are proposing—remains the same. In other words, the structure may vary between a sales presentation and how you write an RFP answer, but the logical structure is consistent.

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