You Lost a Proposal. How to Make the Most of It.
After spending hours crafting content, designing graphics, and formatting your proposal, you hear back from the customer that they went with someone else. While a loss is always tough, it doesn’t have to be a total loss. Instead, use this to improve your process for next time. Below are a few ways you can turn a proposal loss into a win for your proposal process.
Repurpose content
One of the best ways to improve your proposal process is to repurpose content from past proposals to be used in future proposals. After you submit a proposal, review the content and see if there are any sections that are likely to come up again. If so, take those sections and revise the content to speak to many customers (ideally within the same type of buyer group), and add it to your content library. You might want to take this time to create any graphics to complement the text that you didn’t have time to create during the proposal creation process.
To keep the content personalized, replace the customer’s name with placeholder text, such as “CLIENT”, which you can then find and replace with the new customer’s name in future proposals. By updating your content this way, you save time in future proposals by not having to start from scratch, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally including a different customer’s name (it does happen!).
Client Debrief
Losing a proposal is a great excuse to schedule a debrief meeting with the customer to learn more about their challenges and how you can address them. Ask for a debrief meeting, and, if possible, also request any scoring information that you can review ahead of the meeting to make the best use of the time. You can then develop specific questions in areas where you were weak. For example, if you scored lowest on the Company Qualifications section, ask the customer what qualifications they would like to see.
You can also use this time to learn about your proposal design to make sure it’s easy-to-read and not distracting for reviewers.
Evaluate Fit
In addition to the client debrief, hold an internal debrief to discuss why you may have lost the opportunity. Many times, the solution might not have been a perfect fit for your business. It’s helpful to hold internal debrief sessions both before and after the client debrief to confirm if your hypothesis for why you lost was correct.
If the reason you lost the opportunity is because it did not line up with your offerings at the price point you need, then you can use that next time to recognize when this might occur and avoid wasting time on proposals that aren’t likely to win.
Refine Process
Sometimes the reason for your loss might be process related. For example, your sales team might be creating your proposals in addition to meeting with and supporting customers. If that is the case, did the proposal suffer because they weren’t able to devote much attention to creating the content? Another possibility is that you didn’t have enough insight into the customer’s needs when creating the proposal, which means that next time sales should spend more time learning before sending out the proposal.
Something as simple as making sure you have the right proposal tools can also help to streamline your workflow and win more proposals.
At the end of the day, you will likely lose many proposals as you work to grow your business. Viewing each loss as an opportunity to learn more about how to improve will help you to both win more opportunities and keep your sanity.