Best Practices for Creating Proposals in Professional Services

Proposals are important; they are the way your professional services firm gains new business. A well-written proposal conveys to a potential client why they should do business with your firm, instead of the competition. Due to their importance, the process for creating proposals in professional services is a crucial consideration to achieve growth. Marketing teams need to make sure their proposals convey all the necessary information in the most effective and efficient way possible.

Outline Your Value Proposition

Your firm’s value proposition communicates to potential clients why they should choose you. A value proposition goes beyond your firm’s practice areas and bios to tell clients how you can meet their needs, according to the American Bar Association. The ABA states a value proposition should be a combination of three Es: Expense, Expertise and Extras.

• Expense: The ABA advises law firm marketing professionals to share the cost in a proposal, as well as the value the client will receive, as it’s a critical part of the decision-making process. Staying mum on what your firm’s services cost may only lead to time wasted if the client isn’t a good fit.
• Expertise: Lay out your firm’s professional accomplishments. The ABA suggests sharing your achievements and the obstacles you’ve overcome.
• Extras: Extras are your firm’s “X” factor. This can include diversity, community involvement, technology and more.

Use a Template

Smart marketing professionals know that using a template saves time and ensures a consistent end result. According to Templafy, building each proposal from scratch reduces efficiency and comes with a high risk of incorporating outdated material. To further drive that point home, Templafy’s research shows that 69% of workers admit to using Google to search for a company image or logo to insert into content, and only 27% say they use company-approved assets when creating content.

Using a template is easy and quick since marketers don’t have to hunt down logos, imagery, stats, boilerplate, disclaimers, product descriptions and so on. When a proposal starts as a template, it’s easier to review and proof due to fewer errors. Time is saved because marketers don’t have to replicate the process every time.

Use Infographics

Professional services marketers need to make sure they quickly grab clients' attention with their proposals through eye-catching content. 

Using infographics helps marketing proposals stand out. Research shows that humans can process visuals 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. So, the better your infographics, the more likely people will engage with your proposal. And as infographics are easier to process, they can improve decision-making, which gives you an edge against the competition.

Tell Your Company’s Story

Aside from your expertise and achievements, part of your company’s story is who you’ve worked with. 

Tombstones help organizations advertise past clients. So, when you generate and add tombstones to proposals or accompanying presentations, you’re telling potential clients about others who you’ve helped, enticing them to become your client as well. 

Pulling data for tombstones can be a daunting process without the right software. Just like a template makes creating a proposal more efficient, a tombstone builder like Pitchly offers, does the same for creating tombstones. Pitchly’s tombstone builder quickly and seamlessly puts your data to work and saves hours each week in creating this valuable pitch asset.

Its dynamic, customizable templates connect to your database, saving hours manually reformatting your content. Relevant data is easily accessed and filtered, reducing the need to search through disparate databases. Tombstones are then easily exported into your proposal via PowerPoint or Word.

Use Good Data

Every proposal needs facts, figures, graphs and charts to show clients how you work and what you can do for them. Having great data is paramount to this research. 

Data that is disorganized and inaccessible is hard to work with. Going back and forth between multiple data points is not only time-consuming but it’s hard to tell how high-quality the data really is. 

Data management software offers a better method of collecting, retaining and maintaining data, like highlights from attorneys and staff. And data processes that are automated, can quickly collect and store information into an online, on-demand database. The data is always up-to-date and accessible to everyone who needs it.

Adding Pitchly to your mar-tech stack enables team members to leverage their data for marketing and business development purposes.

With Pitchly, you can:

• Consolidate and centralize access to data for a seamless search experience
•  Quickly and easily pull data for pitches and proposals
• Automate data tombstone creation
• Reduce data silos so everyone can work as a team

Take your proposals to the next level by using marketing technology that enhances your data processes. Contact us to learn more.