4 Essential Components to Include in Every Business Proposal Template
Once your business relationship has developed and your prospective customers are asking you what they should do, what do you say?
At the Bottom of the Predictive Sales Funnel™, your potential client asks you for advice. This is when every seller needs to know how to write a business proposal—and then, of course, the best way to present it.
Every presentation wants to persuade its audience to take action. Here are the four essential components that every effective presentation should include.
How to Write a Business Proposal
At this stage in the business relationship, your potential client has asked the seller to take control. We have all the information we need (from the phases of Education and Discovery) to develop a presentation outline.
The effective presenter, though, is the one who makes it easy for the client to grasp ideas. Your business proposal template should be a story—a story that leads the client to one, irrefutable conclusion, and the journey there gives the audience a psychological comfort level that makes it easy for them to say yes.
Presentation Outlines to Incorporate Psychology, Storytelling, and Calls to Action
The audience perceives a person who can tell an effective business story as in command and worthy of confidence. This post on how to write a business proposal is about selling, but it’s also about psychology, storytelling, and getting the audience to respond to the call to action.
Below, Program on Persuasion details the ingredients for a sample business proposal. This is the pre-presentation stage, when we gather our information and organize it. It’s important to note that the data dump has to be part of the preparation, not part of the presentation. Brainstorming is the system for dumping data.
To see the beginning-to-end process of how to write a business proposal, click here for Program on Persuasion’s eBook.
Business Proposal Template Checklist
This checklist should be used as a business proposal template, meaning that it may change to include more important information as the seller continues to brainstorm.
Begin with the End in Mind
Every business presentation’s goal is to take the audience from their starting point to their objective, Point B. At Point B, the prospective customer should understand, believe, and take action.
Your presentation may be educational, engaging, and entertaining, but if you don’t move the buyer to take action—if you don’t get them to Point B—then you’ve failed.
Before your audience can understand your purpose, though, you must understand your purpose. One of the most important components in how to write a business proposal is knowing why you’re giving the presentation at all. Before we worry about the flow of ideas, we should focus on what we want to accomplish. We must begin with an end in mind.
Understand the Pain
Once we establish Point B, the next component in your sample business proposal is understanding the buyer’s pain. Every seller should fully understand the pain—or potential gain—of not fixing the buyer’s problem.
Once understood, the impact of the unaddressed problem or opportunity should become the second point in your business presentation outline.
Customized Benefits
Another integral component in the business presentation outline are your potential client’s Customized Benefits. If we asked the right questions, the seller should have discovered this information in the Middle of the Predictive Sales Funnel™, while we developed a sense of urgency in the prospective customer.
If we don’t have that information, we need to revisit the prospect. Any missing components from this sample business proposal means that we are not ready to proceed to the Bottom of the Predictive Sales Funnel™.
Value Proposition
The final checklist item is for us to brainstorm our Value Proposition for this specific buyer. We will have lots of value proposition samples, but we should not present the buyer with all of them. As the seller, we should isolate the one that directly addresses this prospect’s problems or goals for this presentation outline.
When we have all the ingredients that we need from this checklist, we can move forward to the next module and the crafting of our story.
To see the business proposal template from start-to-finish, click here for Program on Persuasion’s detailed eBook.
Conclusion
The four most essential components in any sample business proposal include beginning with our goal in mind, understanding the cost of not addressing the potential client’s problem, presenting the customized benefits for this prospective customer, and cultivating the best value proposition. Without each of these components, our business relationship has not yet entered the Bottom of the Predictive Sales Funnel™.
Photo by Ruslan Burkala.