In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how I write marketing funnel proposals in under 20 minutes.
I’m going to take you through the entire framework that I use, to write marketing funnels for £10,000, £25,000, and all the way up to our largest ever, which was a seven figure contract.
I’m going to take you through each stage and how to write a marketing funnel proposal. Even if you’ve never written one before, even if you’ve got no idea where to start and what to do.
I have actually got a proposal template down below in the link, which you can go ahead and enter your email address. And I’ll just get that sent straight to you. It’s a free document where you can fill in the blanks.
20 minutes
Whereas most people take a few hours, you can write your proposals in 20 minutes.
If you hate writing and sending marketing funnel proposals, it’s usually because most people don’t know how to write them and they over-complicate them.
I’ve even heard horror stories of people spending hours or up all night, trying to write the perfect marketing funnel proposal, only to send it and still not be entirely sure and it might not convert
This funnel proposal converts really, really well. It doesn’t take very long to write. And if you’re inexperienced and you don’t know what to put in a proposal, I’m going to tell you how to get the customer to write the marketing funnel proposal for you.
It’s pretty much the entire marketing funnel proposal that I use. I said, I’ve actually got one that you can download for free, down in the link below. If you go into the description, go ahead and click that and it’ll just send you a Google doc version. But I used to write these almost as an email.
$93 million in sales
I wouldn’t even bother writing out a short proposal. I do use betterproposals.io. Adam’s a really good mate of mine. And I love that software.
We don’t write a huge amount of proposals now, because of my focus on Sell Your Service. But when we were writing marketing funnel projects, we would use betterproposals.io and also the proposal template I’m walking you through now is in there for free.
So if you sign up to better proposals, you can actually get this marketing funnel proposal template. And there’s even a blog post that talks about how many millions of dollars, that particular proposal template has won.
I think the misconception is that proposals need to be very long and wordy and they need to be really complicated and well-written masterpieces and well-designed, and it’s just not true.
I’ve sent proposals that are pretty much written out as a word document, saved them as a PDF and sent them out and won business all the same. They also don’t need to be long to write.
Write it as soon as you can
The first thing that I would say is you should write the proposal immediately after the meeting with the customer.
That’s the first time that you should write the proposal. If you have a meeting with them at a coffee shop or a hotel, or they come to your office or you go to their office or whatever. Sit down even say to them “Hey, do you mind if I check some emails and get all of this stuff out?”
The framework that I’m going to share with you is going to help you write proposals so quickly that you’re not going to have to stress about it and you’ll know exactly what you’re going to put into it.
Four sections – problems, resources, goals, and solution
The proposal is split into four areas. We have problems, resources, goals, and solution. Each section could be just one page The whole proposal could only be four pages.
And that’s how simple it is. And at the end, what we tend to do is have a summary to punch up the ending of it and just bring it home.
Write the call to action
The most important thing that you need to write first is your call to action. This is without a doubt, the most important thing that you need to start putting in your marketing funnel proposals. Don’t leave it wishy-washy, don’t leave it up to the customer. Don’t do the whole “we’ll get back to you” or any of that kind of shit.
What you need to do is write to the call to action and tell them exactly the deposit that you require and also what you need from them. If you need a signature, if you need them to let you into their system.
Find out exactly what it is that you want as your call to action and write that first, partly because you’ll be able to repeat that in all of the other proposals that you write. And it’s also the most important part of the whole piece. That’s the first thing I want you to write, is the call to action.
What do you need from them? What do they need to do? And this is why I use betterproposals. Because there’s a button where the customer just clicks, they can send you the deposit and they can also do a digital signature.
In my particular case, I say, I need a 50% deposit upfront. I can even take payment using my card machine or using my phone. “You can transfer the money. I need a signature here accepting the proposal”.
Case studies
What I then do is I work backwards through the rest of the proposal. I have a bank of case studies, and if you don’t have a case study, that’s absolutely fine. You can do the rest of this without a case study.
But I have got three or four case studies that I use in circulation, depending on the situation. If you don’t have one, don’t worry about it. If you download my proposal template it has a case study template.
But Mike, what if I don’t have anyone to do a case study on?
There’s a lot of different ways you can address this. First, a case study doesn’t have to be about one of your clients. As long as you’re upfront and make it anonymous, you can write a case study based on other businesses who have done what your client is looking to achieve. Or, you can just skip the case study until you’ve got one.
Get the customer to write the proposal for you
Let’s start at the beginning of the proposal. Here’s how to get a customer to write a marketing funnel proposal for you. Here’s how to get the customer to tell you what they’ll buy.
Start with the problems.
So let’s say we have been asked by ABC manufacturing to come in and work on their marketing strategy.
In the opening paragraph of the proposal, I’ll give a little overview of the company and write ABC manufacturing has been in the business for 25 years, but with the rise of social media and the internet, they need to update game a little bit.
Just something nice and broad that. And I’ll then ask them during the meeting, “what are the things you need to fix?”
What are your problems in the business? What are you working for? Why are we here? What are the roadblocks? Where are you finding a lack of results? What are the things you want to fix? What are the things you want to change?
And I’ll just list those answers out and I’ll get all of their problems out on paper, and then I’ll ask them “what are the top three?”
What are the most important ones? What’s the priority here? They usually say something along the lines of, sales, leads and strategy. Use the wording that they use, and this is why it’s so important to record the meetings. The wording that they use is what you’re going to put inside your marketing funnel proposal.
The words that they use are what you’re going to put in your proposal, because you’re going to write “ABC manufacturing has been in the manufacturing game for 25 years. The internet has completely changed the game. Currently they’re suffering from a lack of leads. They’re suffering from a lack of sales and a lack of strategy. Their strategy is broken and it doesn’t work in the way that they used to” or if they use specific terminology, that’s the sentence that I want to put in the proposal. If they say “our sales team, isn’t able to keep up with our competition”, you write “the sales team, isn’t able to keep up with competition”.
I want to repeat back exactly what they’ve told me and after that section, I’ll then write the consequences. I’ll write something along the lines of “if ABC manufacturing doesn’t alter their sales and marketing approach and their strategy, what they’re going to find is…”
What’s going to happen if they don’t make this change? Ask them that question. “If you keep facing these roadblocks, if you keep facing these problems, if you don’t fix this, what’s going to happen?”
They say “we’ll have to cut staff, we’ll have to fire people. We’d have to downsize and shrink operation size. ” They don’t want that. You want to repeat back the consequences and write them out in the proposal.
Resources
The next stage is now the resources. This is what they’ve currently got. This is why it’s important to do a bit of a deep dive.
If possible you want to do a paid discovery or deep dive session as well. When you ask them “what are your current results? If you are struggling with a lack of sales, what are your current sales?”
You’ll want to write all this out, saying “here’s a snapshot of the business” telling them this is where they are currently. This is how many leads you’re generating. This is how much traffic you’re generating.
Also ask them “what works? What’s going well in the business?” And again, this is a really easy way to get out of the customer, their language and make it look like you’ve been paying attention and look like you’re the person they should work with.
The customer lets you know “we want to generate 50 million in sales and currently we’re doing a 35. We currently have a database of 10,000 leads. We generate 5,000 visitors a day to the website etc.” You want to find out and write down what works.
I’ll then wrap it up with a bit of a summary. “We have been hired by ABC manufacturing to take their current sales process that works and move it over to a lead generation platform that changes their current strategy. And that supports their current sales process. If we do that, this is what we could have in the future”.
I’ll start selling the future a little bit.
Then we want their goals.
Again don’t overcomplicate this. What are their goals? They might say we suffer from a lack of leads, no sales strategy and they have a weak marketing strategy.
But you need to ask “what do you want in the future?”
this is where you can use a technique called go wide, go deep, which was taught to me by Troy Trey Dean, over at WP Elevation.
You can use this for the problems as well, which is, and this is where you can ask them “what are your top goals for the business? What are your top five goals. What are your top 10 goals?” and get them to list everything
Then ask them “out of all of those what’s the priority?” And they’ll say “we want sales and revenue.”
What you need to ask, is why is that the priority? They’ll respond with something like “we want to expand. We want to grow. We want to hire.”
Go further down that path and try to uncover why their goals are the goals they have. You’re going wide by asking “what are your goals? What are your goals? What are your goals? What are your goals?”
Then going deep asking “what’s the most important one?” Picking one going deep on it asking why is that important?
Now we’re beginning to uncover what their true goals are. You write “they want to do is generate more sales because they want to sell the business because Jim, the CEO is looking to retire.”
Those are the goals and desires that you can sell against. Now you know that your marketing funnel proposal is really designed to help them sell the business and move on. That’s a complete game changer. They want to grow the business to attract investors, for example.
Case study
This is where I’d to put a case study in. Now this does sometimes tend to be its own page. If you haven’t got one, don’t worry about it too much. This is where I to put a case study in which by the way is just a shortened version of the marketing funnel proposal. I’ll just shorten all this down and write up the case study.
Solution
Finally, we then write up the solution. This is where people get a bit funny and iffy because they think they don’t know what they’re going to charge. They don’t know what I’m going to write.
Don’t worry about that. You’re going to write the benefits.
Benefits are not the features, benefits are the futures. You’ll write something like:
- put a lead generation strategy in place that ensures we’re going to increase the number of conversations our salespeople are going to have.
- We’re going to create a plan to get Jim out of the business within three years.
- We’re going to create a sales strategy in order to make sure that any potential buyers for the business are going to be interested in, in buying.
This is where you basically reiterate goals, resources, and problems, and you rewrite them into headlines. And those are the benefits you tell them what it’s going to cost.
Investment
It doesn’t have to be itemized. You just list out design, build, testing, and hosting. And all together designing is going to be $10K, building is going to be $5K. Testing is going to be $5K and hosting is going to be $5K. All together that’s “$25K.
Write out the timescale. Next to each item above, write how long it will take For example, design; six weeks. Building; six weeks. Testing; four weeks, and then 12 months ongoing for hosting. Problem solved.
And then you tell them what the call to action is. So that’s your marketing funnel proposal.
You’re getting the customer to tell you what they will buy, what are their problems, get a list of all their problems that roadblocks they’re facing, what their things they want to fix.
What are the resources they currently have? Where are they now? What are the goals? Where do they want to be? And then tell them what the solution is. The benefits of the things they’ve already told you, the cost you should already know because it’s within their budget. And the timescale is just how long it takes to build it.
Remind them repeatedly of the call to action. And that’s how you write a marketing funnel proposal for your customers in under 20 minutes and even better get them to write for you.
Remember, I’ve got a free template. You can use the description down below. It’s a Google doc that you can just kind of cut up and edit and fill in the blanks for.
Do you have any marketing funnel proposal tips? Let me know in the comments down below.
