Most salespeople do not co-create proposals with their customers

Hello Sales Reset Leader

This week’s Weekly Sales Reset is about co-creating proposals with customers. The newsletter assumes your team members are familiar with this concept.

However, most salespeople do not co-create proposals with their customers. It’s much more common for a salesperson to meet with a customer and then prepare and send their first and only proposal for the situation they discussed.

Like most things to do with selling, there are many levels of co-creating, from simple to sophisticated.

This week is an excellent opportunity for you to help your team members understand and use this powerful selling process. Each team member will likely be at a different stage of understanding what co-creation means in practice.

As we explain in this week’s Weekly Sales Reset, there are multiple reasons why co-creating proposals is not how most salespeople sell. And because it’s not common, many customers aren’t even aware they can play an active role in co-creating proposals.

In their first newsletter this week, your team members learn that engaging their customers in co-creating proposals is their responsibility.

We’ll develop these ideas in our mid-week newsletter and recommend that your team members coach their customers to think through the most significant implications of each major part of proposals.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s first Weekly Sales Reset“:

• Title: The first thing to get right when trying to co-create proposals with your customers

• Subtitle: Make sure your customers expect to co-create proposals with you!

How to improve your team's results this week

• Where to look for evidence of proposal co-creation

• Expected pushback

• Role-Play Recommendations

Where to look for evidence of proposal co-creation

Before your coaching session with each team member this week, here’s where to look for evidence of proposal co-creation:

• Do your team members actively engage customers in the process of proposal co-creation? As you accompany team members in meetings or review recordings or transcripts, what is the evidence that your team members explicitly secure the engagement of their customers in proposal co-creation?

• Is the content of every proposal the same? A feature of co-created proposals is that they’ll all be different! While their proposals will likely use the same design and structure, the details should be unique for each customer. If every proposal a team member sends looks the same, concluding they’ve not been co-created is reasonably straightforward.

• Have meetings been scheduled to review and improve proposals? Ideally, you will see evidence of meetings already in the calendar with invitations accepted and an agenda about proposal review and improvement.

Expected pushback

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are three areas of possible pushback from your team members:

1. My customers won’t engage in proposal co-creation: Customers are typically busy and short of time. Your team members will need to use all their selling skills to engage their customers in an agreed process of proposal co-creation. What’s in it for the customer to actively engage in proposal co-creation?

2. Our systems and processes don’t allow this much personalisation: You may work in a business with inflexible proposal creation processes. These standardised proposals might be designed to save salespeople’s time. Or they might be to reduce risk as your company creates contracts with customers. One solution might be to focus personalisation efforts on the content of covering emails.

3. I don’t have time to spend so long on each proposal. In our experience, this is the most common issue. How can you help your team member to prioritise their time more effectively? Might this response also be an excuse for your team member’s poor writing skills?

What are your best responses now that you know these potential pushback areas?

Role-Play Recommendations

1. Best Current Opportunity: In this team member’s best current opportunity, role-play the part of a conversation where your team member seeks greater customer engagement in proposal co-creation.

2. Most Significant Next Meeting: In this team member’s most significant next meeting, role-play the part of a conversation where your team member seeks customer engagement in proposal co-creation.

3. Biggest Recent Loss: Review this team member’s biggest recent loss. Reflect together on how proposal co-creation might have improved the outcome for your team member. Role-play the conversation with this customer where proposal co-creation might have been agreed upon.

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

Join us in our FREE Workshops this week

Join us on Tuesday, November 5th, at 4:30 pm UK time for this week’s Sales Reset Stories Workshop. We’ll share stories about co-creating proposals with customers.

Learn from the experiences of our community members. They’ll be happy to answer your questions. We’d love to hear your stories and learn from your experience of co-creating proposals.

This Thursday, November 7th, we’ll meet at 4:30 pm UK time for our first monthly LIVE! Practice Workshop. You and your team members can join us to practice and improve skills in small group role-play.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?