Tips for Client Proposals

Introduction

In this article I’m going to provide you with some tips to ensure that your client proposals are streamlined and heavily stress the benefits that you can provide to your clients by offering Interspire products private labeled as your own.

The Proposal Wars — What’s Your USP?

Picture this: You’re the owner of a small business. You’ve received 5 development proposals for your new web site. Each with the same spiel. Same price. Same timeframe. They all look and read the same. Ugh.

Because web development is such a highly competitive (although still fairly niche) market, you can’t just slap together a proposal in 5 minutes and send it over to your potential client hoping to win the job. You need to differentiate your proposal from the 3, 10 or 53 others that your potential client will skim over when making their decision. You need a unique selling point, or USP for short.

What is a unique selling point, I hear you ask? Good question. Put simply, it’s one reason why you do what you do better than your competitors. Read the previous line 5 times before you continue.

I was at a seminar last week and one of the speakers was Jack Cohen, the founder of Hungry Jacks (the Australian franchise of Burger King). When asked why Hungry Jacks was so successful, he proudly stated something along the lines of “it’s because we flame grill our meat and don’t fry it”. That was his USP. The one thing that Hungry Jacks does to differentiate itself in the already over-crowded fast food industry.

Why flame grill meat instead of frying it? Taste, of course. We eat what tastes good, and flame grilled meat naturally tastes better than fried meat. When you think about it, most (if not all) of the worlds biggest companies have a USP — that one reason for you to choose them over anyone else.

How can you make your proposal different? You could deliver a complete solution to your potential client in 24 hours instead of 3 weeks. That’s different. There’s your USP right there: time. Why, then, would the potential client choose you instead of the next guy? Because you can give them a solution quicker than anyone else in the game. Simple.

Time is one of the few commodities that you can’t stop by a 7-11 to buy more of. And if you can save your potential client time, then you can also save yourself time. Ultimately that means you have more hours to get more jobs and make more money, which puts the dream of retiring at 40 just a little bit closer. Cool.

Now that we’ve established what your USP is going to be, let’s see how you can communicate it in your proposals. But first, how can we help? Read on to find out…

Stop Re-Inventing the Wheel

Long before Interspire was born, we all either worked for a web development company or freelanced. As we went from job to job, it started to get frustrating building the same type of site, CMS or email solution over and over again. It was a case of re-inventing the wheel every time you took on a new client. Not the most productive way to spend a day.

To cut a long story short, we knew there had to be a better way. So we got busy. Busy coding for months on end. After 6 months our first product — WebEdit Professional — was born. It was private label, meaning that you could quickly change the product name, color and logo in the editor. Heck, if you wanted, you could even remove the link to our home page and link to yours instead.

What this meant is that we had a solution for most of our clients — an online web site editor that we could private label with their corporate image in a very short period of time. We could also charge mega bucks for it because it appeared as if we’d labored for weeks with a team of programmers to build it just for them; when really, we built it for them and dozens of our other clients.

Today, we don’t do web development any more. But as you probably know, we do have a range of fully private label solutions that we’ve developed to help web developers like you get more clients and reduce the amount of time it takes to implement, train and support those clients.

Pick Me, Pick Me!

Now. What to include in your proposal. Firstly, you want to get your client interested in actually reading your proposal. The trick is to answer one simple question for your client: “What’s in it for me?”. Well, here’s a quick list of the benefits that you can offer your client by choosing Interspire products:

• Implementation in under 24 hours
• Product design identical to company image
• Detailed documentation
• Flexible “per user” licensing
• Extremely competitive pricing

Let me expand on each of these points.

1. Implementation in under 24 hours

   When you order one of our products, you receive it immediately. Put simply, that means you can get to work quicker. Installing our products on your clients web server is a simple process. First, you upload the files. Second, you run the installation wizard that takes care of building the database, private label options, etc. Thirdly, you present the user with documentation on how to use the program.

   If you’re familiar with the basics of uploading files via FTP and you already have your clients database details, then you can quite literally have them up and running — complete with a private labeled interface — in about an hour. Alternatively, we can even do the install for you free of charge.
    

2. Product design identical to company image

   All of our products are private label, meaning that you can easily change the product name, logo, colors and even layout quickly and easily. Most of our applications include a control panel where you can upload your own logo or stylesheet. Because of this, you can have any of our products match the look of your clients site within minutes.
    

3. Detailed documentation

   For those who are new to computers, even logging in can be a challenge. That’s why all of our products include detailed end-user documentation that explains everything, including how to work with the product, etc. The documentation also includes screenshots.
    

4. Flexible “per user” licensing

   You have 3 clients now, but you may have 10, 50 or 500 in the next 6 months. For most of our products, you can upgrade your licenses as you go. For example, with SendStudio you can buy a base license, which includes 3 user accounts. Then, when you get more clients you can buy another 5 user licenses for just $49 (a once-off payment) and resell them for as much as you like.
    

5. Extremely competitive pricing

   All of our products take anywhere from 6 months to 18 months to develop. If you did the math on this at the typical rate of $40 per hour for development, then it would cost many, many thousands of dollars to develop similar products. However, because we offer competitive pricing, you can offer a completely personalized solution to your clients for a fraction of the cost of what it would cost any of your competitors to produce. In a much shorter time frame too.
    

Conclusion

Hopefully these tips have given you enough information to start writing your next client proposal. Combined with your existing client base and referrals, you should be able to generate a significant amount of new business and new revenue without too much work!