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How to write a business proposal
What is a business proposal?
A business proposal is a detailed document presenting a company's products or services, aimed at potential clients. It's a key business tool, meant to grab the recipient's attention and persuade them to make a purchase. A good business proposal should be clear, persuasive and tailored to the client's needs and expectations. It includes detailed information about the product or service, including its features, benefits, price and terms of cooperation. It also stands out through attractive design and a clear structure, which makes it easier to understand and to decide. A business proposal is not just a company's calling card, it's also a reflection of its professionalism and care for the client. Creating an effective business proposal requires understanding the market, the competition and the client's individual needs, so you can clearly communicate the value and uniqueness of what you're proposing.
How to write an effective business proposal for a client? You need to get to know them well and sell based on that.
If you want to put together a good business proposal, you need to start with a thorough needs assessment with the client, right from your first conversations. Carrying out this kind of needs assessment is much easier if you've already prepared a brief with the right questions, which you can then send to the client. It's best, though, to ask these prepared questions during a live meeting or video call, right at the start of your sales process. Assuming you've already got a well-prepared brief, the guidelines below should help you put together an effective business proposal. If you don't have a brief ready yet, I'd warmly invite you to read our article on the subject:
What is a marketing brief and what does it include?
That will let you put together an even better business proposal. After all, we build it on the information we get from the client.
What should your business proposal look like?
First up, an incredibly important point that a lot of companies forget, or don't take seriously enough. Namely, getting the branding of your proposal right. I've come across countless situations where a business proposal was sent by email or as a standard Word document. That's not a good idea, and let me explain why. Remember, there's a person on the other side who will definitely notice the visual side of things. Why? Because the look of your proposal builds certain associations in your client's mind, and ideally those should be the associations you want the client to have, not the ones you don't (a bit obvious, I know, but it's true). Picture several proposals, all cut from the same cloth, and yours with completely different branding from the rest.
Modern, with nice icons, on branded paper with your logo and your key visual too. I promise that in a situation like that, your company will come across as modern, growing, keeping up with trends and understanding today's market, rather than one that lists what the service includes and its price in Times New Roman bullet points. You'll stand out, and that's really the whole point: you need to grab the client's attention. Does that mean the client will pick whichever proposal has the best branding and ignore everything else? Definitely not, but it's a very good starting point for your proposal, because it's probably the first thing anyone will notice. There's a lot of truth in the saying that you can only make a first impression once.
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How to write a business proposal with the right structure?
A good business proposal is one that doesn't just present your products or services effectively, but is also designed with your client's needs and expectations in mind. It's important that the structure of such a proposal is well thought out and matched to the specifics of the market and the target audience. At our agency, we've built up experience creating proposals that resonate with our clients (or at least, we get positive feedback about them), so I'm happy to share an example of what a well-constructed proposal can look like. There are a few key elements worth highlighting.
An effective way to present the logo
It's worth starting with a page showing your company's logo and your client's logo, ideally in the middle of the page. You can happily grab the client's logo from their website (if they have one) or their social media profiles (assuming they have those), then use a tool like Figma to get it into the right format and add it to your proposal. Let the client be pleasantly surprised to see THEIR OWN logo on THEIR OWN proposal that you've prepared for them. It's already a form of personalisation, and it won't cost you much time at all. A minute or two, and it's a nice gesture towards the client.
Outlining your client's situation
Since we're putting together a proposal for a client, let's start by referring to their needs. Remember the brief I mentioned earlier? This is where what you established in it comes in perfectly. If you haven't read the article on how to put one together yet, I'd recommend starting there and coming back to this point afterwards. Assuming you've already got a well-prepared brief and you've had the client's answers to your questions, the next page should be dedicated to describing their current situation, as you understood it from the brief. Credit here goes to Szymon Negacz (a Polish sales expert and podcaster), who suggested in one of his podcast episodes that this kind of description be added to a proposal, and I fully agree. The content of a page like this might look something like this:
XYZ, you got in touch with us because you want to open an online shop selling XYZ. You want to test how the market responds, because you feel it isn't served well yet. This will be a test for you, since you have plenty of experience selling XYZ, but XYZ is new territory for you. The shop will sell products in the form of XYZ. The minimum order value is XYZ. There will be X different options available, one of which will let customers build their own combination from XYZ available products. The products will be the same price but will differ in XYZ. Right now you're working with XYZ, but you're not sure yet whether you'll need it. We'll make sure it can be integrated later on
This gives the client confidence that you've understood their situation, and it also gives them the chance to respond to what you've described, raise any comments, or tell you about extra details they didn't mention before but remembered while reading your description. Lovely stuff. Presenting it this way also lets you refer back to the client's situation later in the proposal, when you're talking about the services or products we're offering as a solution to their problems or challenges.
Presenting your service or product
The moment we've all been waiting for has arrived (hahaha): the thing every salesperson wants to do right from the start, but shouldn't, because we're not the most important thing in the proposal. Let's present the service or product we've put together for our client, one that answers their needs. While describing the service or product, it's worth referring as much as possible to the goals, actions, problems or challenges you managed to identify during your earlier conversations with the client. You need to show the client that the proposal you've prepared for them is a solution to their current situation. Remember, the proposal isn't about you or your company: it's about the client and their company, about how your proposal will help them reach their GOALS, not your sales targets.
Presenting the value of your service or product
The next page of your proposal should be dedicated to the specific values of your company that, once again (I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but it's genuinely important), will directly help solve your client's problem or help them tackle the challenge they've identified at that moment (a bit like Deckard Cain's items in Diablo 2). These can't be values like "we offer quality", "we have a professional team" or "we have X years of experience", because as it turns out, most companies in Poland have those exact same values, whatever industry they're in. So we're all high-quality, we've all got a great team, and we've all got loads of years of experience in the market.
So basically, we're all wonderful. Okay, so how should we actually present our values in a proposal then? We need to answer a really important question, namely what we want to do with our lives and just... no, I'm joking, that is an important question, but it's not the one I meant. The question is: "Does my value genuinely solve this client's problem or challenge?" or "Does my value genuinely help the client reach their goal?" Why is it so important to answer exactly these questions? Well, because when the client looks through your proposal, or listens to you talk about it during a meeting, they'll definitely ask themselves those questions, or something very similar. Since we know they'll come up anyway, why not just answer them straight away? Let me give you an example from our own agency.
A client told one of our specialists that in their previous agency partnership, the problem was that they often waited a long time for answers to their questions or requests, and that they didn't have contact with anyone specifically dedicated to them, which was holding back their ability to scale their business. In that other agency, quite simply, the owner was the person responsible for sales, client service and consulting on the situation, all at once.
And that's a real problem, because you simply can't stay in constant contact with every single client if you run your business that way (I know, because we've been in that exact situation ourselves once). One for all and all for one: that just doesn't work once you're running a company at a larger scale, not to mention the risk it creates for the client (but that might be a topic for another article some day). That's why, in the proposal we prepared for this client, we included values that addressed the problems they'd mentioned (all our company's values are written down and built together with our specialists, and everyone has access to them in CODA), and they included at least the following.
A dedicated Project Manager plus support from various specialists: for the whole partnership, you'll have access to a dedicated project manager and a team of specialists from different departments at our agency, so we can build XYZ that increases your sales and brings you new clients.
Fast communication: we reply to messages within one working day. That means you get quick, efficient communication, which speeds up project delivery. On top of that, in urgent cases, we make it possible to call the project lead directly.
Those weren't the only values we listed in the proposal, but including these two specifically reassured the client on two counts. First, that we'd genuinely listened to them, and second, that our service or product had the solution they needed for their current situation.
Presenting your results from working with other companies in the same or a similar industry
If you possibly can, it's worth adding examples of results you've achieved with other clients to the next page of your proposal. Ideally, these should be examples related to, or similar to, your potential client's industry, and matching the goals your client wants to achieve. This can take the form of a case study, or a breakdown of the key information from the client's perspective. I'm assuming case studies are a well-known format, so I won't explain what they are (how to write a good case study is definitely a topic for its own article), so instead let me give you an example of how we break down results, for example from an SEO service partnership. We focus on a few things:
- Industry + company name (if we're able to share it)
- Monthly budget + how many months we've been doing SEO for
- Results for key keywords
- Google Business Profile (if that's part of the results too)
- Area (specific cities, regions etc)
Sharing this information is meant to prove that when we understand a client's situation, our services and the values behind them let us achieve real, concrete results. It also helps put to rest any objections your client might have, since they're bound to be wondering what results we're actually getting for our clients right now.
Presenting the price of your service or product
Now we've reached what's probably one of the most stressful moments for any salesperson: stating the price of your service or product. Everything we've done up to this point, the needs assessment, the brief analysis, building the proposal around the structure set out in this article, and talking through it in terms of the client's goals, needs, challenges and problems, all leads to this exact moment. The moment where you show that everything you've prepared for the client, these solutions matching their situation, cost THIS MUCH, full stop. If you do that, there's a good chance the client will understand what they're paying for and, most importantly, why they need to pay that much for your product or service. Especially if your prices are higher than your competitors', like in our case.
It's a very good idea to offer at least two pricing options for your service or product in your proposal. A version that costs more and includes more, alongside one that's more affordable for your client and still lets them reach their business goals, just perhaps with a slightly smaller scope or a longer timeline. I honestly don't know exactly what those options should look like for you, you'll need to work that out for your own business, but it's better for the client to compare the options we've put together against each other and think about which one suits them best, rather than comparing a single option we've prepared against your competitors' options. That always gives you a better chance that the client will decide to work with us, or at least keep the conversation going.
What should a good business proposal include at the end?
I don't know whether there's a ready-made template, or set of templates, for business proposals that properly answers the question in this heading. A professional sales proposal will certainly have several possible ways to end, depending on the industry. The real question is: what will benefit the client most from your proposal? I think the best approach is to present a few ideas you could add to the end of your proposal, and you can decide for yourself which ones make it into your own business proposal template:
- a suitable call to action: why a call to action? If you can't present the proposal in person and have to send it as, say, a PDF, it's a good idea to add a CTA at the end of your proposal, for example "Book a call to walk through this proposal with a specialist". Let that CTA also tell the client what to expect, as in this example, that the next step might be discussing the proposal with a specialist. Make it a well-thought-out invitation to work together, and don't forget to add your contact details.
- introducing the team who'll be involved in delivering the service: your proposal can include a photo of, say, the project manager who'll be in touch with the client throughout the service, or you could add a photo of the specialist who'll be involved on the agency side, along with a short bio. The recipient may well appreciate getting to know, at this stage already, the people they might potentially be working with.
- optional services or products: you can include information in your proposal about products or services that, after analysing the client's situation, you'd class as additional, worth considering, and that solve their problems or challenges in some way, but that could be introduced later on. Make sure the client knows you offer them, because it often happens that clients start working with other companies on solutions we also offer, simply because they didn't know we had them in our arsenal.
- portfolio and case studies: a good sales proposal should include examples of working with other business partners, chosen to match the client. Earlier on, we gave a short version of this kind of information; here is the place to link to full examples and show the benefits of working with our company in more detail.
There are surely a lot more options out there; I've presented the ones we add most often to our own proposals. I'd encourage you to experiment, to change the elements of your proposal, to change the content of your business proposal, to find out what you could do better, and to discover new ways to convince a client to buy. Above all, I hope you enjoy the process of creating proposals, wish you as much sales success as possible, and thank you very much for reading this article.
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