If you were a business owner requesting proposals from different companies, would you want to receive twelve proposals of 50 pages? Then again, would you want to read a total of 600 pages of companies bragging about themselves before you make a decision? Chances are you will only read the one your good friend recommended and put the rest through the shredder, or inside your file cabinet. People can hardly finish reading a 2 page resume when someone recommends one due to how many they receive on a weekly basis. Why would they read 50 pages?
Before you send out your "magnificent" proposal that took you a week to write, did you ever talk to your potential client? Did you talk to the decision maker? Did you ever meet him/her face to face? Did you find common ground? Did he/she like you? And did you ask the magic question: "Mr. Robinson, now that we are fully aware of what you need and you know that we can deliver the project, if our price is fair, do you want us to be the ones completing it for you?
If the answers is"yes", any company history information is completely unnecessary at this point. A proposal should never be the sales pitch. A proposal is the document that sets in stone that you will be working together on the elements that you already talked about.
Send your proposal in digital format (PDF), this way they can open links or look at it on their smartphone. They can print it if they want to as well. Your client is going to skip all the pages and look at the price first, so do them and yourself a favor, by putting the executive summary at the top of the proposal.
Have you gathered video testimonials yet? If you are dying to brag about your history, use video testimonials to do it for you. For example: "In 1998 we worked with client name on building a marketing campaign, and this is how they explain the outcome". Place a video capture image below, that links to a vimeo video of your client expressing their great experience. Let your testimonials tell your company history. Do that until you get to the present day if you want.
Use testimonial videos to overcome every single objection before they present one. For example; have a subject header be: "Why client name bought from us", have a video capture image link to a video with your client speaking about how they thought the price was too high in the beginning, but they were more than satisfied with the outcome, they were ecstatic!
You can use testimonials to show examples of past work, overcome objections, tell your story and guess what else? They will do all the selling for you without you having to write one single word of poetry. Get to it!
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