An effective sales proposal will inspire your leads to take action and will serve as a document that will help your champion get internal buy-in.
In this guide, we’ll go over how you can create a winning sales proposal as well as some additional tips on how you can ensure that your proposal is well-received.
What Is A Sales Proposal?
A sales proposal is a formal document that businesses use to outline how their solution can meet the needs of a potential buyer to convert them to a paying customer.
The sales proposal includes:
- Your sales team’s understanding of their problems.
- A proposed solution to their problems and terms of service that is tailored to their needs.
- A proposed pricing model that will fit with their budget.
This proposal serves as the last piece of the B2B sales funnel before you can close the deal with your prospects, which is why organizations use sales proposals to showcase why they are the best solution to their problem.
What Makes For A Good Sales Proposal?
A good sales proposal is tailored to your prospect’s needs, and budget, and offers a well-defined plan of action.
Effective proposals are organized and concise to portray the value of your solution to your prospect’s problems and how much it will cost them to solve them.
Lastly, a proper sales proposal ends with a clear call-to-action that guides your prospects to the next steps if they were to agree to your terms and conditions.
There are 6 components of a winning sales proposal:
- Personalization: The sales proposal and your solution should be tailored to your prospect’s situation and problems.
- Executive summary: Not every decision-maker will have the time to read through the whole proposal, which is why there should be an executive summary at the beginning of your sales proposals.
- Clearly outlined problem(s): You should show that you understand your prospects’ problems.
- Solution: The plan of action should be tailored to your prospects and not be standardized across all prospects.
- Qualifications: Your sales team should outline what makes your company capable of successfully implementing your solution.
- Next steps: If your prospects were to agree to your terms, what would be the next course(s) of action?
How To Create A Winning Sales Proposal
You can create a winning proposal by:
- Personalizing the proposal to your client.
- Writing an effective executive summary.
- Defining the problem.
- Noting down the solution with deliverables.
- Showing the pricing structure.
- Adding social proof.
- Finishing up with a CTA and next steps.
Let’s go over each one of them in more detail: 👇
#1: Personalize The Proposal To Your Client
The first step in creating a winning proposal is to personalize the proposal to your client.
This includes adding your client’s logo, brand colors, and font.
That means you are not just sending out a generic proposal that dozens of other B2B brands have received.
Sales proposal software like Nusii lets you personalize each sales proposal with your client’s logo, font, and branding.
#2: Write The Executive Summary
The next step is to write the executive summary, which will be aimed at the busy decision-makers to get an idea of what the solution will be about.
The executive summary should include:
- The key points of the sales proposal include a concise overview of the proposal, the client’s problem, and the proposal solution.
- What your company is all about and your credentials.
- A quick rundown of how your solution works with exact deliverables that you’re going to do with deadlines.
- The final goal of the project (e.g., reduce expenses, increase revenue).
Your outline should serve as a roadmap for busy executives to have a quick overview of the key elements of the deal and your proposal solution.
💡 Proposal software like Prospero lets you develop custom sales proposals with a drag-and-drop menu, where you can include an overview in the beginning under the title.
#3: Define The Problem
Next up, you want to clearly define the problem that your prospect is facing.
You can start with a detailed description of your prospect’s challenges.
This is the section where you want to demonstrate an understanding of their situation and that your brand has properly evaluated your client’s pain points.
➡️ This section is important so you can build up authority for the section where you will talk about your tailored solution.
You want to do your market research and note down competitor activity, user activity, and market trends that could be worsening your client’s situation.
#4: Note Down The Solution With Deliverables
After discussing the problem, the next step is to note down your proposed solution alongside deliverables.
💡 Alternatively, you can include the solution in the section where you are discussing the problem and have the deliverables separately.
This is the section where your brand should go into deeper detail about:
- How you are planning on solving their problem?
- What are the deliverables and actions of work going to look like?
- What are the measurable objectives that you are going to be optimizing around?
- In what timeframe would you get the job done?
➡️ If you are trying to sell a B2B SaaS product, this is the point where you want to outline how long your product will take to be implemented.
Your goal is to demonstrate the value of your product and why they need it before you can walk your customers through your pricing section to close the deal.
➡️ If you are trying to sell consulting services (e.g., marketing or software services), you want to outline your deliverables for the client.
For example, you can mention that for the first 1 month of working with that brand, you are going to be optimizing their customer onboarding funnel and then the 2nd month, you’ll help them with their content marketing strategy.
The more detail you cover in this section, the better.
The final decision-makers will have a comprehensive read through all of these sections with deliverables so they can hold you accountable afterwards.
Here’s an example from one of PandaDoc’s pre-built templates:
You can also further emphasize the value of your offer by noting down under each part of the solution why you are doing it to solve their problem (e.g., ‘’we will work on your onboarding because you are losing too many clients early on’’).
#5: Put Down The Pricing Structure
After you’ve established the problem, the solution, and the promised deliverables, now it’s time to discuss the pricing structure.
You want to clearly outline and be transparent about your pricing structure, including hourly costs, running costs and/or cost of set-up.
Depending on the industry and your solution, you can also set up flexible pricing that your prospects can choose depending on your budget.
💡 For example, Proposify lets you create tailored quotes with dynamic pricing.
Your sales team can use these customizable quotes to up-sell your prospects or to help them fit your cost structure to their budget.
#6: Add Social Proof
Somewhere around your pricing structure and solution, you should add social proof to continue building up your credibility.
Such social proof can be in the form of:
- Statistics about your solution, such as ‘’79% of our clients have seen their first organic leads from social media within the first 1 month of working with us’’.
- Testimonials from happy clients who outline what it has been working with your brand.
- Showcase logos of brands that you’ve worked with.
➡️ The goal of social proof is to show your prospects that you have experience resolving problems like theirs and that you have experience in their industry.
Here’s one example of PandaDoc’s pre-built templates where you can include client testimonials.
#7: Finish Up With a CTA & Next Steps
The last stage of the sales proposal is to include a call-to-action to sign the contract alongside the next steps on what happens next.
The CTA should be short, often with a single sentence that re-states the goal of the project.
To make the call-to-action stand out, you can also make it visual with your prospect’s branded colors, font, and logo.
Lastly, the next steps.
You want to outline what would be the next steps of your collaboration if your prospect were to sign the contract.
➡️ In this last part, you can include the starting time of work, onboarding information, or meetings to be held, such as discovery sessions.
Tips For Closing More Deals With Your Sales Proposals
Now that we’ve got the formula for creating high-converting sales proposals, here are a few bonus tips for closing more deals with your proposal:
#1: Share the proposal in a sales room
When you send your sales proposal, put it alongside the rest of your sales collateral and resources, not as one more attachment in a long email thread.
You can use digital sales rooms to put the proposal, your collateral, and the next steps in one place. Your champion gets one link to share internally, and the deal keeps its momentum.
The room only helps if it stays current. After every call, update the next steps, add the resources the buyer asked for, and change the dates they gave you.
Arrows (that’s us) does that upkeep for your reps. It reads every call and email on the deal and keeps the sales room current with the next steps. Your rep approves each change before the buyer sees it.
#2: Follow Up On Your Leads
Many sales reps send out tailored sales proposals, do not hear back from their prospects, and assume that they do not like it.
To increase your close rate, your sales team should be following up on your leads every now and then if they had the chance to look at your proposals.
➡️ Follow-ups also enable your team to clarify objections that are related to your pricing structure or proposed solution and deliverables.
The sales expert, Ivy Malik, recommends dealing with slow-to-respond prospects with confidence, clarity, and strategy.
Ivy recommends:
- Keep the follow-up short, kind, and direct.
- Assume positive intent from your prospects.
- Invite clarity or next steps.
#3: Use Pre-Built Templates
Last but not least, you can save time with pre-built sales proposal templates.
Sales proposal platforms give you access to a template library where you can choose between dozens of sales proposal templates that are tailored to your industry.
Using templates will help your team save time so they can focus on building out the value proposition and pricing structure that works best for your prospects.
From there on, your sales development representatives can just fill in your prospect’s branding, and then your solution.
💡 You can also use templates for your tailored quotes, such as including interactive pricing tables.
Keep every proposal moving with Arrows
A proposal rarely closes the day you send it. It closes in the follow-up, with the stakeholder you haven’t met yet, and on the date the buyer mentioned two calls ago.
Keep the proposal tool you already use. Arrows is promptless AI for account executives: it reads your call transcripts, emails, CRM, and notes, keeps a gameplan for every deal built from your team’s playbook, and does the work around the proposal:
- Follow-up emails drafted from what the buyer actually said.
- Every date tracked from your calls, with nudges when a deal goes quiet.
- Multi-threading, so the proposal reaches every stakeholder, not just your champion.
- A sales room kept current with the next steps on both sides.
- The right case study for the buyer’s industry and use case.
There’s no prompt to write. Your rep approves every email, CRM update, and sales room change before it sends. Arrows works with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, and Attio, and with the notetaker your team already uses. See the CRM integrations.
If you’re a sales leader who wants every proposal followed up the way your best rep follows up, book an agent kickoff to see how Arrows works today.