(Video) Service Business Systems: Proposals

Today’s video is for service providers and how to automate and systematize your proposal process.

Now every service provider I’ve ever worked with has a long arduous process of having a call and taking pages and pages of notes.  Then going through those notes over several days and then putting together a custom package that stands out from the crowd for their service to get a new client.

I find there’s a big problem with that.  When the person is most motivated to work with you is immediately when they get off the call.  If you’ve demonstrated on the call that you are the person that they need to be working with, they don’t want a 12 page proposal coming in a week.  They want something they can say yes to today.

So today I want to talk about service packages, so you can get your proposals out there quickly. This is a system you absolutely have to have so you can close business.

Take the last proposal that you sent and break it down. If you’re like most service providers, you probably have an introduction of some sort, a scope of what you will actually do, a section on what they’ll pay you, and then all the extra contract-type stuff (like confidentiality, work hours). Right now we’re just going to focus on the proposal.

Let’s break it down into three sections:

1. Welcome: This can be incorporated into the email that you send. So you don’t send a blank email but rather a warm email letting them know that you do want to work with them and that you think this will be a great thing.

2. Proposal: This can be broken into two sections: what you provide and what you will do. And what they will provide you in return.

Now, you can look at what you typically do. Maybe you’re a service provider that works by the hour. Look at your hourly rate for what tasks. Or maybe you do blocks of hours so they have to buy 10, 15 or 30 in a week or a month. You block off those hours for them and they pay you to compensate.

You do want to detail what you do, but it is a mistake to go line by line and detail everything that you talked about. You want to keep it high level and you also want to keep it a little bit broad. The reason for this is if you’re doing graphics and you had to list out every type of banner, every type of button, every graphic that I could possibly want you to create just so I know that you were listening during our conversation – it’s going to take you a week to get me those graphics. Instead, what you can do list out types of graphics – banners such as or buttons such as. Then, put any limitations on that.

So maybe you’re going to do badges and buttons but not infographics and videos. That’s fine if you want to put in any exclusions but you don’t have to list out everything individually. Listing out everything individually has the negative consequence that it starts to look like you’re a custom business and you do things one at a time. The problem with that is that clients can change things on you because you don’t have any standards, right? You made this up, just for them.

So you want to make it as standard as possible. Have your packages or have your hourly, and just give them the proposal about what that would look like. What they get and what they give.

Once they say yes to the proposal, that’s when you’re going to give them all the other language and all the other details in the contract. That you’re going to respect their privacy, that they’ll going to pay you on the 1st of month, that nobody is going to sue anyone, that you’ll go to arbitration if somebody gets mad – all of those details can happen in the contract.

But the proposal itself should be short, sweet and easy to read. At the point you get off that Getting Acquainted conversation or you’re done with the consultation call, you want to give them something that they can say yes to right away. And if they have to read all that legal jargon it’s going to take much longer.

So I hope that helps you automate the system of sending the proposal for your service business even if your service is going to vary widely from client to client. We also have some resources for you – the system and service that I use to send all my contracts electronically. I absolutely love it and it’s free to get started. It makes it so much simpler to get those contracts and proposals signed right away. It’s called EchoSign and you can check it out here.