In this week's ultimate guide to proposals series I talk to Marcus Blankenship. Marcus is former CEO of a successful agency in the States. With 18 years of experience and a $750-million track record of success, I figured he'd be a great guy to help us learn what makes the ultimate proposal.
If you’re reading this then chances are your proposals are under-performing and you don’t know why. As designers we dislike writing proposals. We worry about all sorts of things: Am I too expensive? Am I too cheap, too eager, too slow to respond, have I understood the client, do I even know if I can provide real value…? The list is endless. But you might be surprised to hear that most proposals don’t fail because they're priced to high, too low or look like they were thrown together in Word. Most proposals fail because they...
Let’s not beat around the bush. Nobody likes writing proposals. They eat away at billable time. They can be tedious, and a portfolio is all you need anyway, right? UUUURHHH! WRONG. An amateur designer can make do with the traditional “quote email”, the one that says, “That’ll be $3,500, please”. But a professional sets themselves apart. A professional woos their client with a project proposal.
When we talk about setting goals we tend to think about new year's eve, promises of weight loss and failed gym memberships. But goals are something that are with us all year round. So how do we make them work for us? Do we need them and are they even relevant? I think they are, and here's why.
If you get a decent flow of traffic to your website then you'll know how difficult it can be to convert visitors into customers. Building your client pipeline is a significant challenge, and unless you have a particularly high conversion rate most visitors will leave and disappear forever. Pretty brutal, right?
