See if the following sounds familiar: 

You spend a lot of time, energy and money getting an audience with a great client.  You take a detailed brief and you are confident that your company can meet the brief.  Everyone is getting along well. You then busy yourself putting together a proposal with all the bells and whistles.  Some time later you submit it either on email or in person via a pitch of some kind.

And then the Proposal Olympic Games begin.  There are 5 games in all that tend to happen after we submit the proposal:

 1.  The first game is that old show-stopper, The Waiting Game.  Of all the sales teams in the world, almost all of them are playing The Waiting Game in some form or another right now.  And it’s driving some sales people completely mad. 

 2.  The next in line is The Guessing Game:

• “Do you think they’re probably just evaluating it with their internal team?” 
• “I shouldn’t call, right?” 
• “What if they’ve had another competitor in and they’ve blown them away?”

 3.  The third game is a classic, having been passed down the generations for years.  It’s called Tag.  Actually that’s the kid’s version.  The adult’s version is Telephone Tag.  Both versions tend to start off with the greatest of intentions and high energy but sometimes end in tears and frustration.

 4.  The penultimate game is The Blame Game:  “I can’t believe they would take this long to look at our proposal and they still haven’t got get back to us – what sort of operation are they running over there?”

 5.  Which can ultimately, and unfortunately for you, be followed by the last game, of German origin, called Let’s Play Togeschwiegen. 

Togeschwiegen is a fabulous German word I learnt recently that means “killed by not being mentioned”. 

This is where the client has clearly let your fabulous proposal die a slow death, maybe because they never wanted it.  And so you do the same.  Clearly you’ve lost the deal, and its better not to bring it up because doing so makes your temples ache.   

Do you recognise some of the stages leading up to Togeschweigen?  If so you’re not alone.  Our sales coaches regularly report our clients are spending so much time on their written and spoken pitches only to find them in the proposal graveyard.

What happens to sales proposals that go nowhere? 

This analogy, from “Hope Is Not A Strategy” by Rick Page, starts to shed some light on the matter:

“The client issues a request for proposal (RFP) and a new salesperson thinks ‘Great, somebody’s going to buy something’, so he dashes back to the office and cranks out a huge response.

The salesperson jumps on a white horse and gallops out to the client.  But the drawbridge to the castle is up, so he circles around the walls trying to get access.  No way. 

In frustration, he heaves the proposal over the wall hoping it hits someone important.  There it lands, plop, in the middle of the courtyard.  He hopes somebody picks it up and becomes so excited a contract is heaved back over as he waits on the other side. 

This is not control selling…Proposals don’t sell, people do.”

So, what can we do? 

There seems to be three dynamics at work with regards to rejected sales proposals: 

1. The opportunity is poorly qualified, and
2. The salesperson didn’t get close enough to the prospect, pre and post proposal
3. The sales person is in freefall, and not in control

Here are some tips and techniques for ensuring this doesn’t happen to you: 

A.  Qualify, qualify, qualify: 

If you sell, you have a duty to your company and your own sanity to qualify your clients before spending days or weeks of your precious time to deliver something that might have never really been in the frame. In other words, clients don’t always know best, and are whimsical, and can lack authority, and might never have checked their bank balance and so on. 

I once heard about an advertising agency that refused to take part in “beauty parade” pitches where there was no pre-existing relationships because they saw them as a low probability waste of time and resources.  There is some merit in that.  Time would be much better spent developing an existing client than pitching for a new one in high risk circumstances.   

B.  Recognise customer heat: 

Customers are usually hot for a sale in short bursts.  You must learn to read those bursts and understand how to keep the heat (and how to lose it).  There are a whole range of strategies to keep the heat in the sale, such as getting your proposals and solutions to customers in record time.  For more, download our new e-book on the right of our homepage:  “HEAT:  Why Customers Buy From You – and Why They Don’t”.

C.  Demonstrate creativity pre-proposal AND post-proposal:

Typically salespeople put in 95% effort pre-proposal and very little afterwards.  Keep the attention, creativity and focus on the client.  Send them information, updates and items of interest.  Show you care – not that you simply want them to buy something. 

We have seen a high level of care post sale paying tremendous dividends.  Even if they say “no” to you this time around, they will find another project for you to do!

D.  Don’t over-sell or second-guess what they will need. 

In other words, don’t sell them blah-blah when you can sell them blah.  I have seen teams sitting around meddling with their winning solution because they (wrongly) assume they have to give the client extras – “What if they don’t like X, we should provide Y”.  Sometimes, if not all the time, clients want the basic solution presented in a common-sense, factual way.  Your extras, your value, your bells and whistles may confuse what the actual offering is.  Be confident enough to save something for next time!  You also need to give them reasons to come back to you and continue the discourse.

Don’t compromise your status.  The client doesn’t know everything, nor do they reserve an unlimited right to push you around without you qualifying them.  Keep your chest puffed out and don’t be a dogs-body racing around for information without stopping from time to time to say “What am I doing here, why am I doing this and what do I need right now to validate that my time is being well spent?”

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that while it’s your choice to play the Olympic Games of Rejected Sales Proposals, we recommend that you make a conscious decision to choose wisely, keep applying heat to the sale and know that every shot you go for has a great chance of making it.

We help companies win business via winning sales proposals processes in our sales training workshops.  To find out how your proposals stack up, give me a call!