332 Are Your Sales Proposals Working Effectively?

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">In Japan we usually need a couple of meetings with the client to get the business.  In Meeting One, we build the rapport and trust, we explore their needs and try to understand if what we have is actually what they need.  We are tremendously disinterested in slamming any square pegs into round holes and wasting our precious sales time. If we have understood their needs and we can help them, then we set up Meeting Two, right then and there, to come back with our proposal.  In some cases, we might have a simple requirement and we can provide the pricing and terms on the spot and try and do the deal while we are in the first meeting.  Usually anything with big numbers attached to it needs a proper proposal, because various sections of the buyer’s company will need to conduct their due diligence on the deal, so there are multiple decision-makers involved.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">How much detail should the proposal include?  Some salespeople in Japan work on the basis that Japanese clients are always hungry to devour as much data and information as possible, to make sure they reduce the chance of making a mistake.  So they have a long and very detailed proposal for the client to wade through.  This is a very tricky equation.  We are in danger of diluting our key points by over-powering them with too much information.  On the other hand, as noted, there is always more than one person involved in the decision and some people will be data vampires who want to suck up as much information as possible.  So we have a number of audiences for our work and how do we keep them all satisfied?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">One answer is to keep the main body of the proposal fairly simple and clean – we don’t bog it down in endless detail.  The heavy lifting detail can be moved to an accompanying document or we sequester it at the end of the proposal, as a separate entity for those who need lots