A proposal is sometimes part of what is required in the commercial world of thought leadership.
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Proposals come in many forms. They can be as simple as an email with a few bullet points, or as detailed as a 50-page response to a public tender, answering specific questions and establishing the commitments around a proposed piece of work.
As Thought Leaders, though, we want to be careful about getting too caught up in the proposal game.
Sometimes a proposal is genuinely required. More often than not, a request for a proposal can be a sign that you have not done enough work in the sales conversation.
If you spend too much time in exploration, without moving towards agreement, the client will often say something like, "Why don't you outline some of that in a proposal and we can reflect and review?"
That sounds like progress. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply a polite way of delaying a decision.
There are dozens of suggested structures and templates for proposals. We suggest a simple framework that integrates well with the Curriculum we teach:
The identified problem. Your Green Sheet.
The proposed solution. Your Cluster.
The journey or process. Your S-Curve or Value Model.
The agreed mutual commitments. Your terms and conditions.
The decisions to be made. The next steps.
Jo Clancy, a Black Belt in our community whose work focuses on open collaborative strategy, suggests making your proposal milestone-based rather than time-based.
Instead of saying four days on X and three days on Y, describe the milestones that will be reached and the outcomes that will have been achieved.
Units of time can be interrogated and negotiated down. Outcomes are much harder to reduce to an hourly rate.
Milestones also tell everyone where they are in the project. They create natural stages for progress, review, billing and invoicing. Importantly, they allow you to lock in value as the work progresses rather than waiting until the end.
This is particularly important when the value you create is intangible.
The strange thing about expertise is that the better you become, the more rapidly you can create value.
A few decades of experience might allow you to solve something in a day that would take someone else three months. Sometimes you can see the answer in an hour.
This is where pricing by time becomes dangerous.
Twenty-five thousand dollars might sound unreasonable for one hour of work. But the client is not buying the hour. They are buying the thousands of hours that made that hour possible.
Factories break value down into units, time and cogs. You are not a factory.
You are closer to the specialist surgeon who can recognise the problem, make the right intervention and create an outcome quickly because of expertise, experience and essence developed over many years.
A great proposal should also establish a shared vision of what success looks like.
Matt Joy, another Black Belt graduate in our community who focuses on entrepreneurial exits, calls this the True North section of the proposal.
What are we actually trying to achieve? Why does it matter? What would success look like if we got this right?
This is the client's big why. It becomes a magnetic True North for the work, something that helps both parties make decisions as the project unfolds.
It should also connect to measurement. The measures do not always need to be hard numbers. Some outcomes are qualitative. But both parties should have an agreed way of knowing whether the work is making a difference.
What are we doing?
Why does it matter?
What does success look like?
And how will we know?
Finally, remember that a proposal is simply one stage in a healthy commercial rhythm.
Every day, make two approaches.
Set up one meeting.
Every week, aim to move one of those meetings towards a proposal.
And remember, the proposal does not always need to be a beautifully designed document. Sometimes it is an email. Sometimes it is a short summary of agreed commitments. Sometimes it is a text message saying, "Are we doing this?"
The purpose of the proposal is not to impress the client.
It is to help both of you make a decision.
PS. Where possible, keep formal proposals for pieces of work above about $40,000. Below that, the proposal process itself can easily become disproportionate to the value of the work.
PPS. If you are proposing a significant piece of work, consider including a smaller, lower risk first engagement that sits comfortably within the buyer's approval limits. A small piece of useful work can create confidence, demonstrate value and make the larger commitment much easier to progress.