I reviewed a proposal recently that was written for IT people, not business owners. It was full of what I call feature vomit.
To you, “24/7 endpoint monitoring” and “DMARC compliance” are vital. To your prospect, they’re expensive noise unless you translate them into outcomes.
If you list features without context, you force the buyer to do the mental work to figure out why they should pay you. Most won’t. They’ll scroll to the bottom and look at the price.
The quickest fix is the “So what?” audit. Read a line in your proposal and immediately ask, “So what?” Keep asking until you hit money or emotion.
“We offer 24/7 remote endpoint monitoring.” So what?
“It means we see a server go down immediately.” So what?
“It means we fix it before staff log on.” So what?
“So you don’t have 20 people sitting idle on Monday morning unable to invoice customers.”
That final sentence is the sales pitch. You’re not selling monitoring. You’re selling the ability to keep billing customers.
If you stop at the feature, you’re a cost. If you reach the outcome, you’re an investment.
What to do next: open the last proposal you sent. Take the first three feature bullets and run the “So what?” audit. If you can’t land in plain English a CEO cares about, delete or rewrite the line until it does.
If you want your proposals to sell outcomes (without turning into marketing fluff), you’re ready for the 16-week coaching programme.