Business Proposal and Presentation

HUBSPOT

https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/7-tips-presenting-winning-proposals-clients

How to Present a Business Proposal

1. Optimize your meeting time from the start.

2. Have a clear agenda.

3. Open up with the customer’s problems and challenges.

4. Pause and ask questions.

5. Lead with stories, not data.

6. Don’t read off of your PowerPoint slides.

7. Present your solution — and sell them a vision.

8. Establish a clear follow-up timeline at the end of the meeting.

1. Optimize your meeting time from the start.

When presenting a proposal, it’s important to remember that your clients are busy. They have other meetings to attend, phone calls and emails to return, and problems to solve. Time is their most precious asset. Here are a few tips to optimize the time you spend with your customers:

· Arrive early. This is a no-brainer, but arrive to the meeting with at least ten minutes to spare, especially if it’s in person. Use this buffer to use the bathroom, rehearse your introduction, and even set up the meeting space.

· Rehearse setting up the projector or sharing your screen before the meeting. If you’re carrying out a meeting in person, you don’t want to waste ten minutes figuring out how to project your laptop’s screen. Carry several adapters with you and have a fail-safe plan, such as bringing a tablet with a copy of the presentation. If the meeting is over Zoom, practice sharing your screen so that your notes aren’t visible.

· Keep your introduction short. Leave space for banter and rapport, but keep your personal introduction short. Small talk should be reduced as much as possible — you shouldn’t spend twenty minutes talking about the weather, unless you sell a weather-related solution.

2. Have a clear agenda.

Your presentation must have a clear and compelling agenda, which you can share right at the start (in addition to having shared it over email before the meeting).

The meeting should begin with compelling reasons to consider your proposal and culminate with a specific request for the business. Here’s an agenda template you can use to structure your meeting:

· Challenge/Opportunity. Begin your presentation by illustrating the opportunity or challenge that your client is overlooking. Make sure it’s compelling enough to motivate your client to listen to the rest of your presentation.

· Benefits. Discuss the benefits that your client will achieve by adopting your solution. Use a customer case study or testimonial to support your point.

· Plan. Present your plan or options to resolve the client’s challenge/opportunity.

· Company. Briefly share your company’s background, including who your company helps with these issues.

· Recommend. Before closing your presentation, be sure to ask for the client’s business. You might close by asking the client, “Do you believe that the solution that I’ve presented will effectively help you overcome your challenges and achieve your goals?”

In the presentation, include a few bullet points that outline these parts of the meeting, so that the client knows what to expect.

3. Open up with the customer’s problems and challenges.

As mentioned, you’ll begin the meeting with a challenge or opportunity. Don’t walk into the meeting and immediately start talking about yourself or your company or your products. If you do this, your client will immediately focus on cost and product features, often ending the meeting before you’ve had a chance to finish.

Instead, focus on re-emphasizing the customer’s challenges and pain points. Your clients want to know how they can beat their competitors, reach new customers, retain existing customers, and increase profit margins. But before you can sell them your product, you have to emphasize the graveness of the issue they’re facing and illustrate how their challenges will prevent them from achieving these goals.

For instance, if 30% of their customers are churning, and you sell a business solution that can help reduce churn, you might open up your presentation with how their revenue will continue to be impacted by this loss. This will emphasize the urgency of the problem and help you create a stronger pitch later.

4. Pause and ask questions.

After you’ve spoken for a few minutes, stop and ask your client a question. This is a great way to stay in control of the meeting while allowing your client to interact with the sales presentation.

Here are some questions that you might ask:

· Have I summarized your challenges correctly?

· Is there anything I’ve missed that you’d like to add?

· Am I right in saying that you want to solve this problem in the next quarter?

5. Lead with stories, not data.

While clients value data, they are also realistic about what data can — and cannot — tell them. They’ve seen many projects fail despite the glowing research results, and they’ve seen projects succeed despite the lack of any data to back it up.

So, introduce stories first, then the data to back it up. Come to the presentation armed with customer experiences and competitor moves. Your clients are far more interested in what other businesses like them have experienced and what their competitors are doing. They’re not all that interested in the latest research study, but you can use a study to support your points and lend credence to an anecdote.

6. Don’t read off of your PowerPoint slides.

Let the deck complement your points. If you read directly off the slides, you’ll quickly bore your customer, and the impact of what you’re saying won’t land.

Keep your slides simple, too, so that you’re not tempted to read off of them. Most slides are far too complex — too much text, distracting designs, and unrelated images.

You should only put one picture and one line of text on a slide. No more. Your clients can only absorb so much at once, and if they’re too busy trying to sort out paragraphs upon paragraphs on the screen, most of what you’ll say will be missed.

7. Present your solution — and sell them a vision.

After you’ve re-established the business challenge and spoken to the customer’s pain points, it’s time to present your product or service as a solution. But it’s important to not stop here — you have to also sell them a vision of what their business will look like after they take care of the problem.

Will they experience increased sales? Streamlined processes? Better customer retention? And what will that look like a few years from now? Don’t exaggerate, but don’t be afraid to show them how your product can create a much positive future for their business.

8. Establish a clear follow-up timeline at the end of the meeting.

This is maybe the most important part of your business proposal presentation. Tell your customer what will happen after the presentation, so that there’s no ambiguity regarding next steps.

We highly recommend establishing a clear follow-up date. Don’t say, “I’ll follow up in about a week.” Instead, try, “Is it okay if I call you on Friday, May 10th?”

We also recommend creating a timeline after the follow-up call. For instance, you might say you’ll call on a certain date, and then you’ll send the contract over using a tool such as PandaDoc, Qwilr, or Proposify. Your contract will be in your customer’s hand for a week, and then on the following Wednesday, you’ll follow-up once again to see if the customer has any questions.

Adjust this timeline depending on your customer,  sales cycle length, and industry. Such a short timeline might not suit a product that costs thousands of dollars and requires a yearly commitment. However, it might suit a product that only costs a few hundred dollars a year.

Feeling stumped? No worries. Below, we share some business proposal examples you can glean inspiration from.

MASTER CLASS ARTICLE

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/pitch-deck-guide

What Is a Pitch Deck?

In business, a pitch deck is a pitch presentation for entrepreneurs or businesses to provide a streamlined but informative overview of their company or startup to potential investors, such as venture capitalists or  angel investors .

A pitch deck presentation—also known as a startup pitch deck or slide deck—is a visual document that provides investors with essential information about your  business plan , product or services, fundraising needs, and key metrics like valuation, target market, and financial goals. The best pitch decks are brief but informative and feature simple, visually

What Is the Goal of a Pitch Deck?

A pitch deck aims to generate interest and even excitement with investors about a company that can lead to another meeting and the potential for investment discussion. A pitch deck can be a critical tool in raising money for a business, but it’s only the first step in the process.

4 Tips for Making a Pitch Deck

There are several important tips to consider when making your own pitch deck:

1. 1.  Be straightforward. Entrepreneurs may want to overload investors with information on their first pitch deck, but less is often better. Straightforward, clearly-explained ideas detailed in bullet points and infographic content are more appealing than lots of text and can lead to questions and even subsequent meetings.

2. 2.  Prioritize story over stats. The point of a pitch meeting is to engage potential investors. A list of facts and metrics will have less impact than a narrative approach. Entrepreneurs should provide stories about their companies that investors will find relatable, such as how customers use their products or services to improve their lives.

3. 3.  Make it a standalone deck. A potential investor may want to refer to the pitch deck after the presentation. Ensure that the deck contains the most critical information they need in print or PDF format.

4. 4.  Keep it updated. Businesses typically pitch many potential investors before they secure funding. Ensure that pitch decks are up-to-date with the latest information, including critical metrics and recent milestones, before every pitch to maintain professionalism and avoid presenting out-of-date information.

10 Elements to Include in a Pitch Deck

Though every pitch deck outline is different, here are some essential pieces of information that yours should include:

1. 1.  Introduction. The first slide should introduce the pitch deck and explain the business in simple and clearly understood terms. Businesses typically include a  unique value proposition  as part of their first slide, which compares their products and services to another established company.

2. 2.  Problem. The pitch deck needs to explain a problem the business’s target market faces. This information will demonstrate the necessity of your product or service in the marketplace.

3. 3.  Target market. A  target market  is a group of people that share common characteristics. Every service or product is aimed at a specific group, and yours should be featured in your pitch deck. Include information on the competitive landscape in which your business exists and the market opportunity to succeed in that landscape. What is the market size for products or services like those offered by the business?

4. 4.  Solution. The solution slide should state the way(s) in which the business solves the problems that your target market is facing. The best way to relay this information is through a narrative approach—provide relatable stories of customers using these products to improve their lives. Support those statements with descriptions and visuals of the products or services themselves, including photographs, screenshots, or even video of a physical demo.

5. 5.  Traction. This slide validates the company’s business model by showing any month-over-month growth through early sales and support. The goal is to reduce any fear of risk in potential investors. This slide can include a simple bullet point list of milestones such as the number of users, annual revenue return rate, and profit margins.

6. 6.  Marketing and sales strategy. It’s important to detail how the product will be advertised and sold to its market. Investors will use this information to leverage a company’s understanding of the market size, and how its marketing approach differs from its competition.

7. 7.  Competition. Include information on the qualities that set your product or service apart from other entities or alternatives in its market—you can pull this information from your  competitive analysis .

8. 8.  Team. The team slide will underscore a company’s management team’s expertise and capabilities to market and sell a product. Listing the key team members (and co-founders if applicable) and detail how their expertise and previous experience can help establish the company’s competitive advantage.

9. 9.  Financials. Investors will typically want to see a company’s financial health for a period of three to five years, including  income statements , projected growth, and information on the business model itself. Infographics, such as pie charts or bar graphs, will be more effective in presenting the information than listing numbers. The information on the traction slide may help to corroborate projected figures.

10. 10.  Investments and funding. Sometimes, entrepreneurs will craft a pitch deck that forgets a key piece of information: the amount of money needed to fund the project. It’s important to include that detail and note how the funding will be spent to help the company reach its goals. This explanation will build much-needed trust with investors.