Blueprint | 07 Building an Impact Proposal

B L U E P R I N T BUILDING AN IMPACT PROPOSAL Impact Proposal The impact proposal provides a trade-off between the impact your client is going to experience compared to the investment in money and people they are making. Step 1. Obtain the decision criteria and the impact of each criterium on a client’s business. As you have obtained these in a discovery call and/or stakeholder meeting it is important that you provide the impact and the pricing in a few steps. Step 2. Make sure that when a client asks for pricing, you offer a range of “what similar customers like them end up spending.” It is important that the mentioned reference customer is relevant to the client. You immediately confirm the price range provided in an email. Step 3. Follow this up with a detailed proposal. Over the years we’ve seen great success by jointly creating this proposal with my clients. I spin up a template, invite them via a shared link to join, and start editing/customizing it to their needs. During the creation, the client often asks questionS which helps build a deeper understanding of what is needed. Step 4. When the client was fully engaged in the creation of the document, the review can be as simple as an agreement on terms. Not even trading is needed. However, not all clients have the ability or interest to work together on an impact proposal. In those cases, you have to schedule a review of the proposal with the client team and step them through it. Impact proposals need to be written in such a way that it helps your internal champion sell internally.

B L U E P R I N T BUILDING AN IMPACT PROPOSAL EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The executive summary is a one-page summary that turns an overwhelming stack of papers that is the full proposal and helps the reader more easily understand what you’re giving them and what to expect. “Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice” 3 parts to the executive summary: Diagnosis - summarize their top challenges and why you’re there today. Make it about them. Prescription - couple options of recommended offerings. High-level scope. Pricing - Something people want to see first. Have a pricing overview in the executive summary. You can add more details later but you want to make sure the meat of your proposal isn’t skipped over. PRICING INTRODUCTIONS Customers won’t talk about falling in love with you if they don’t think they can get married. How to bring up price: ● Talk about a 3rd party that’s similar to them. Talking about someone that’s already bought what you’re recommending them helps them to understand the value. - “that reminds me of someone like you...they spent 200k with us to do a sales transformation” ● Ballpark pricing - “customers typically spend between 200k and 300k with us per year.” - If you give that ballpark price, you’re implying something that can open up the conversation later, such as the difference between what 200k and 300k will get them. ● It was mentioned earlier to have a pricing overview early in your proposal to give them an understanding of what to expect. Later on in the proposal, you will break the pricing into 3 tiers. Many make the mistake by explaining this as the low price option, mid-price option, and premium price option. These tiers should be called Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 and be based on the amount of impact you offer, not based on price. ESSENTIALS TO INCLUDE IN YOUR IMPACT PROPOSAL If you want to give the reader the biggest impact when reading your proposal, use visuals! Any form of visual will augment what you’re putting in writing. Visuals help paint a story and help make it easier to understand what you’re talking about. ● Info Doodling - combining visuals with writing ● Formal visuals include screenshots or examples of what you plan to implement and what deliverables will look like, a picture from a case study, a 5-star review from a review site, etc.

B L U E P R I N T BUILDING AN IMPACT PROPOSAL It’s good to think of a proposal as a conversation as opposed to something you create and something they read and either sign or don’t sign. Include sections such as Q&A. As you go through the conversation, client questions go in this section for them or for them to go back to or for others to not need to ask the same questions. TOP 3 MISTAKES IN PROPOSALS DON’T be generic. DO highly customize the proposal based on conversations with the customer and your diagnosis. DON’T be too wordy. DO make it easy to read, visually pleasing, and simple to navigate to the section they’re looking for. DON’T make it completely static. DO have the proposal be a conversation including a Q&A section.