Course Navigation:
- Lesson 1: One Size Fits All?
- Lesson 2: Ditching Custom Proposals
- Lesson 3: Hiring & Delegation
- Lesson 4: 10x'ing Your Hourly Rate
How to Scale Sales & Ditch Writing Custom Project Proposals For Good
Hey again! Brian Casel here from Productize & Scale. Today lets talk about those custom proposals.
You know what I’m talking about, right? I’m talking about those long, painfully detailed project scope documents that we send to prospects in hopes they’ll sign on the dotted line and hire you for the project.
Back when I made my living on freelance web design projects, I hated writing those proposals.
They took me all day to write and with every phone call and follow up email, I had to revise the scope. Not to mention that if the client decided not to hire me for their project (which was at least half the time) then all of that time I spent writing the proposal was a waste.
The problem wasn’t in the way I structured my proposals or the content I included in them. The problem was with my underlying business model.
Every proposal was completely different from the next because every project was completely different and so was every client. That meant that every client I spoke to was faced with the question, “Does this person really know what I want?” And “Does this proposal actually work for what I need?”
Those are tough questions for a prospect to answer. They (understandably) come with a lot of risk. That adds up to a lot of friction and frustration in your sales process (for both sides).
Like I said in the previous lesson, our goal when Productizing is to get away from serving everyone and move to serving one ideal customer.
Where this really starts to pay off is in the way your transform how you sell your service. Maybe a better way to put it is to say your service can start to sell itself.
You see, when you’re selling a Productized service, it’s not only easier (and far less time consuming!) for you to do the work of selling and onboarding new clients. It’s even easier for your clients to decide on buying your Productized service.
That’s because once you’ve Productized your service, you’re able to tailor all of your marketing (your website, your content, the people you talk to, etc.) to attract your best clients—the folks who you know experience and really feel the problem that you solve.
As a result, those clients’ first impression is “wow this company knows ME”. Then when they’re presented with the solution you offer, it’s much easier and far less risky for them to say, “Yes, I need to buy THAT”.
Meanwhile, since your website, your sales material, demo videos, and onboarding process all follow the same script, you’re able to streamline the process and stop putting all that wasted effort into lengthy sales meetings and writing long custom proposals.
And that sets your business up to scale sales!
But then the question becomes, how can you deliver your service to more clients without driving yourself nuts?
In the next lesson I’ll show you the key to hiring and delegating to a team without sacrificing quality. Stay tuned...