You have a conversation scheduled with a potential new client, and you’re excited. You get on the phone, and everything goes well; the next step is for your to write a proposal…that’s when all the energy and excitement drains out of you. Writing proposals is a drag. It takes too long; it’s tedious but somehow…
We’ve been talking about the importance of building your business development muscle. If you don’t want your business to slow down when the economy slows down, you will likely need to be more aggressively reaching out to prospects to find the ones willing to invest in your services. The hardest part of outreach is the…
When you put together a proposal for a piece of work you’d be perfect for, how long is the document you are creating? Do you wax poetic about your “proprietary process? Do you include bios of your key people? Have you added case studies of similar projects? Or do you create a one-page summary that…
Putting ‘Good, Better, Best’ Pricing into Action How much more profitable could your business be if you could sell your services at higher prices? The answer is way more profitable, right? Tiered pricing could be the answer to this conundrum. The strategy is successful for many reasons. It’s a great way to raise prices without…
We are in the middle of the most important three months of the year for B2B services companies. It’s budget season, and your clients and prospects are making their plans for 2021 over the next few weeks. Do you have a plan to get money allocated to projects you can complete for them? 1. Budget…
When I started my business, I learned a “one-call-close” sales process. I would walk into the office of an agency owner that I had never met before, and my goal was to walk out with a check! The crazy part is that it worked. While I had success with this process, I don’t recommend it…
In my last message, I talked about the problem of retainers, they seem like a great way to smooth out revenue and make delivery more predictable. Still, in reality, they may turn into a bog of over-servicing and under profitability. I asked you to tell me about your experiences, and you were very generous with…
(ACTUALLY? Not a whole lot.) I work with a lot of service firm owners and there’s one thing they all hate, and that’s writing proposals. They love meeting with prospects, identifying the problems the prospects are having, and talking about how they can help. But then they get back to their office and the work…
We often see business owners undervalue their services. So we often preach about raising your prices. But we get a lot of hesitancy because many owners are afraid they’ll lose clients, and/or not be able to attract new ones. So we asked Kaleigh Moore who runs We Are Lumen about her first experience raising her prices and…
I’m not going to mince words here: Request For Proposals (RFPs) are a trap, they are a bad deal and you need to stay away from them. I know, it’s exciting to get an RFP. You are flattered when an organization thinks enough of you that they include you in their RFP process. But you know what is more…