168: Kyle Racki On World-Class Proposals

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James Say What Sales Buckley. Welcome to another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode, as always, is brought to you by our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Owler, Sendoso Out of the Box, and Zoom Info. On this episode, we're talking with Proposify CEO, Kyle Racky. Kyle's going to give us some stats from the State of Proposals report this year so that we know what it is about proposals that make people sign them. He's also going to talk to John about some hot topics like RFPs, images and proposals, making it easy to buy from you, and the top performing proposal practices in business today.

Don't forget to check us out at ondemand.jbarrows.com, where you can invest in your own sales skills, develop a personal brand, close more deals, and ultimately hit your sales quota consistently. Here's John and Kyle. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. It's John Barrows making it happen Mondays. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. I had a pretty decent one, even though my Patriots lost it around midnight last night, which kind of pissed me off, but that's all right. Bright and early up this morning and with a very interesting guest to talk about some stuff that I don't think people pay too much attention, but every little edge counts these days. So, Kyle Racky, co-founder and CEO over at Proposify.

How are you, my friend? I'm good, John. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for coming on board here, Kyle. Like we're so, so just for context here, everybody, we're going to be talking about proposals and the delivery of proposals and why it's so important to pay attention to the details here and some stats around that. But before we get to that, Kyle, I think, you know, I usually ask all my guests, like, you know, walk me through your journey here. Right. And you can usually tell, I mean, sales, most people fall into it, whatever. But you're CEO and co-founder of a pretty successful company and your background is nowhere near sales. So could you walk us through kind of how you got to, to, to starting proposal?

I always liked the founder journey too. Like, when did you really decide I want to start my own thing? So back up a little bit and you got into design and then bring us through. Yeah. I've actually always been intimidated by sales. Um, when I was very young, I was actually brought up in a, in a sort of evangelical type of religion where you knocked on doors. No way. Yeah. Oh man. That's the ultimate sale. Jesus. It is. Yeah. 20, I think 20 years or something like that of, of my first, uh, you know, bit of my life doing that. And to this day, like if somebody's left their lights on and I've got to go up to their house and knock on their door, I get like palpitations and like scared. So I've always been fascinated and intimidated by sales, but I actually got into design and then coding and software and all that later on.

Um, so I'd started an agency, which obviously had to do all the sales and kind of a lot of proposals, a lot of sort of bigger value kind of clients. Um, and I was always for some reason fascinated by the proposal piece because they were very important in the agency world and they were always just a shit show. Like nobody wanted to do them. There was nobody dedicated to proposals. Everybody was just trying to find, you know, versions of old documents and old work case studies and that kind of thing. And so it was always like, Hey, there should be like an app that kind of keeps that all together and, uh, ended up building it. And, um, you know, long story short, here we are today, Proposify, uh, 10,000 customers, 90 employees and, and growing.

See, that's a, it's crazy. You know, it's like, you never think you're going to be a founder of something, but then you find a problem and you solve that problem. And it ends up being like, Holy shit, I got something here. Right. Like a lot of people have this problem. So, uh, awesome, man. So, so let's talk about it because I, you know, when I talk about negotiations, right. Um, we do this give, get scorecard where you give and you get, right. And it's all based on the rule of reciprocity. When somebody asks you for something, they feel obligated to give you something in return. And so you have leverage points all the way through. Problem is, is most sales reps are givers, right. And, and what I, you know, I always suggest is that proposal, hold onto that thing for dear life, because that is your leverage point, right?

Like if you haven't gotten to power yet, if you haven't been able to engage with the executive buying team or whatever it is, hold onto that proposal and leverage it to quote, deliver it, right. So that you can at least get access, right. With the right reasons. Hey, I want to make sure you have all the answers and everything like that. In a lot of cases we can't get to those powers. So it's the ultimate leverage point, in my opinion, but I think to your point, it's, it's also not something that reps really, they think about delivering it. Hey, let me show it to you, but not the physical aspect of what this thing looks like, how it flows or any of that stuff. So with the data that you see with your customers and everything like that, let's start with the importance of the actual physical document of the, of the proposal itself and why it's important.

Yeah. Well, you, I mean, you covered a lot there and a lot, lots of, no, no, I think, um, so I mean, a lot of it's industry specific, right? Like some are, are more volume based type of businesses that send tons of proposals, you know, hundreds a week and it really is a numbers game. But I think overall, I agree with you and, and, uh, you know, my background is sort of marketing agencies where, yeah, the, the proposal is the point of leverage, usually a competitive situation. Um, pricing is a big factor there as well. I mean, a lot of times if like the client is first finding out your pricing through the proposal, I think that's a mistake. A lot of people make, they don't talk about what this costs up front and then they get a proposal sticker shock and wonder why the client doesn't call them back.

Um, but no, I mean, as far as the physical delivery, I think, you know, back when I was running my agency, uh, 10, 15 years ago, it was all about the, you know, there was a printed copy often like they wanted, we thought it was just ridiculous to mail printed copies of a proposal. Um, and then the next best thing I guess was PDF, but a lot of custom, you know, a lot of companies are still kind of stuck in those old ways and they don't realize that, you know, now there's much more modern ways to deliver proposals that are interactive, that are engaging, that you can embed video. So I think interactive proposals have become much more of the cutting edge. So, cause, cause you're, I mean, the challenge I see most reps have is they have their main point of contact.

Okay. Who, you know, you, we do our best to get to power, to get access to all these other people, but inevitably it's like somebody, we have a pretty good relationship who says, I got it, John. You know what I mean? Like, let me take care of this man. Like, just send me the proposal and we'll get back to you and I'll take it from here. Right. And, and like, if I was able to deliver my proposal at a hundred percent in front of the right people, I mean, there may be 20%, you know what I mean? Like their ability to articulate the value here. So is the goal of a proposal to kind of speak for itself? I think, I think more and more it has to, because we have no control over who they're sending it to and who holds the real buying, you know, keys, who holds the credit card, right?

They can tell you, yeah, I'm the final decision maker, but how many times does it get down to it? And they say, oh, actually our CFO has to sign off on this. Oh, well, why wasn't your CFO involved earlier in the sales process? It's very hard to get control of that. So, you know, as much as possible, this should be a standalone piece that it's not about terms and conditions and contract and pricing. It's about actually selling the value of what you do, um, beyond what your website can do beyond, you know, um, brochure materials or collateral, that kind of thing. Like this is really specific for that customer, that client showing, here's how we're going to solve your problem. So I think if the more personalized you can get, the more you can do stuff like video, address that CFO, CFO, if you can't get in the room with them, um, that's going to, and be able to track, did they forward it to the CFO?

Did they even open it? Which page did they read? They didn't even delve into her scope. So that lack of visibility piece is why more companies are going, uh, digital proposals. Do they like, what are some best practices around this? Cause I look at it, this is almost my evolution. I don't really use a resume anymore, obviously, but you know, in the past it was, you know, there was your standard resume, but then I, you know, I started seeing people summarize like their key highlight points of like, Hey, here's my key accomplishments. And then if you want to read the details here, I kind of take the same approach with proposals where I map out like Kyle, you and I talked about, here's the top three things of why you're looking at, here's the components of our solution that align with those just from an overarching standpoint of why we're different than everybody else, but the highlights.

And yeah, if you want to go read the details, you can. So what are some best practices that people should be thinking about with their proposal process of, of how they even structure it? Like, is it value upfront? Do you put the price on the last page? Do you bury the price somewhere? Like, what are some of those pieces that are helpful just to give us that little edge? Cause now in this virtual world, and sorry, like for more context here, but I honestly think you need every single edge you can get in this world right now. I don't care how small or minute it might be. So what are some of those things that give you the edge to have people pay attention and look at that proposal as, wow. Okay.

This company knows what the hell they're talking about. They, they really listened to me and go from there. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, again, industry specific, but if we're talking, um, general or more specifically software sales or SaaS, um, there's a lot of kind of best practices when we analyze our database of proposals, kind of what people are doing, what kind of gives you the higher close rate, that edge that you're talking about. Um, so a few things, one is, uh, keeping it very short. Um, I think the, the days of sending like 50 to a hundred page proposals is, it's gone. Nobody's going to read it. Um, maybe a government contract. They require that level of P whatever. Yeah, exactly. Um, but as far as what you're talking about, the executive summary is such a perfect place to put that, that high level here's, you know, we're demonstrating that we understand your pain.

We were really listening during the sales process and here's how we're going to solve your pain. And then here's evidence of results that we've gotten for customers just like you. That's, you know, essentially in a nutshell, what that executive summary does plenty of the, you know, a lot of the proposal can be templated. There's nothing wrong with boilerplate things you've used for other customers, but the executive summary is, is probably the most customized part of the proposal that a rep's going to want to spend a lot of their time on. Um, and then obviously picking the best case study for that client, obviously pricing has to be, you know, optimized and thought about. Do you, um, when you, let's talk about that specifically, the pricing one, because I've actually played around with, I mean, everybody knows as soon as they get the proposal, they flip to last page, see how much this thing costs.

And I think to your point, if you haven't addressed that upfront and that's a shock, shame on you. But there also is the, I'm dealing with my main point of contact. My main point of contact takes my proposal, sends it to somebody with no context, that person then flips to the last page. So is there a strategy around actually physically where you put pricing in the proposal to make sure it doesn't just flip to the end. It actually forces them a little bit to read some of this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. The middle, the middle is generally the best place to put it. Um, things like next steps, terms and conditions, or, or, you know, the call to action of sign now or whatever it is, is probably the better thing to put at the end.

Um, and maybe some case studies pre, pre, uh, loaded with that. Um, but the pricing works really well in the middle, because again, they kind of would have to find it. They'd have to go through the proposal to get to it. I also like framing it as in your investment and not calling it something that's easy to scan and see in a table of contents like pricing or budget. Um, your investment is, is again, um, you've got to look at it to kind of see what it is, but it also is framing it as like, this isn't a cost. This is, this is what you're investing to get these results. Yeah, I've actually that just a little words, right? The nuances of how you shift a word here or there shifts the mentality. I always, you know, say with, with discounts, for instance, I tell people, take the word discount out of your vocabulary, change it to flexibility or creativity because it's a different conversation, right?

Um, you did mention though video and I want to, I want to tie this into that executive summary piece here because ideally the executive summaries piece speaks to the executive that it's going to. But to your point earlier, CFO who's almost never involved all of a sudden gets this thing and you do your, do you do a, an alteration? So let's talk about video as a potential use case for this, but do you alter your executive summaries to try to hit at least two or three of the personas that you think are going to get this or do you just kind of in general talk about the executive summary there, right? You know what I mean? So it's like if a CFO gets it, is it like, Ooh, okay. That speaks my language and a CEO versus like, okay, from an executive level, this is kind of where we are.

Do you tailor it towards the multiple people that could see it in any way? Um, that's a great question. I don't think I've ever been asked that before. Um, I think that general is probably good if you think a lot of people are going to be seeing it, but I, but I mean, hopefully that the, the contact you've been dealing with this whole time is aware of what the broader company issues are. And you're not just, you know, talking to somebody down in the mail room, who's, uh, who's not really abreast of like, what are the big issues happening in the company? Um, so obviously everything that you would teach your, uh, you know, your people in terms of how to, how to find the right buyers, how to, how to engage multiple stakeholders is relevant.

But no, I mean, if I were to do a video for say, um, in the next executive summary, it would really be addressing like, Hey, my contact here is John. John's been helping me understand your company challenges around growing your revenue. Um, you know, our proposal is going to lay out all the different steps we're going to do to address these three specific concerns and how we've done it for customers in the past. You know, I just wanted you to see, uh, put a face to the name, that kind of thing. It's just really about that personalization because you can't get that CFO maybe on a Zoom call. At least they can see there's a person here and you can use Vidyard and tools like that to do it. Well, actually I was going to ask as far as now we can talk about proposal by specifically, but do you do that as, as the like embedded into the proposal and unique ways like videos, or do you do something like a Vidyard where you, where you pull up the proposal, you have your head here and Hey Kyle, man, thank you so much.

I just want to kind of give a bullet point review here. If you need anything, let me know type of thing. Do you like, is it embedded in or is it a preface to? Oh, it's embedded. Yeah. If you can do that, if you don't have to make them open separate links and all that, if you just put it all in the proposal, the whole thing's there again, like a really big value add piece of interactive proposals is the video. It's also, um, just going back to the pricing, right? Right. Like, you know, not just having static pricing, but being able to say like, how many units do you want to buy? Or here's some optional add-ons, letting them actually kind of tinker with it and watch the price update to kind of pick what they want.

We'll just give them that feeling of control and more likely to give you a yes. So you let them, you let them tinker with pricing options, like with pricing variables in the proposal. Yeah. Like dependent, like obviously you'd have your kind of starting package of like the minimum you spend, but you can also throw add on pricing in terms of value add services, maybe an onboarding service or training on top of it, depending on what you are. And then if you're buying like say seats or some kind of unit quantity thing, you could start it at like minimum, but then you could say like, Hey, but tack on an extra 20 seats for this price. So just giving them that feeling of control of like, they can actually customize the pricing to fit their budget.

You know, have you talked to Todd Capone by any chance? Who? Todd Capone. Oh no. Oh man. You put, put him on your list. Uh, like you will absolutely love a conversation. He has, he has a book, uh, called transparency sale and literally the way he negotiates is exactly how you said, right? What, what he does is he goes to a whiteboard and he says, effectively, look, here's my rate card. Okay. I understand you're going to want a discount. Here's the levers I can pull. Um, it's worth like, here's what, uh, here's what I find valuable, right? So multi-year contract, I get value out of that. So I'm willing to pay for that. Um, larger size contract, right? So if you, if you want more licenses, I'm willing to pay for that payment terms.

If you're willing to pay up front, I'm paying for that. And what he does is he maps it all out on the board and he lets the client pull the levers to say, okay, well, what if we did two years plus 50% down pot? Like what would that get us? And it gets them to this. And now all of a sudden to your, it's this collaborative conversation versus here's the price. Ask me for a discount. Yeah. That's, that sounds like the Ikea effect, that kind of psychological principle that when you assemble something and put it together, you're actually more closely tied to it. Yep. Yeah. So with that, with the pricing, I've always wondered this and I'm actually, maybe I could use your help right now for crying out loud.

I screwed up, um, after 25 years, I still mess up a lot of stuff here. Um, when it comes to pricing, how do you suggest reps introduce that and then how it relates to the package I put together? Cause there's one theory here that is, I'm going to put together like Kyle, based on what you told me and my, you know, and the questions, I'm actually going to put together the whole package here. You're going to get training. You're going to get the licenses. You're going to get this. You're going to get that all those things, because this is what you should buy based on what I told you. But the problem with that is that obviously gets your price to be inflated pretty big compared to what like, you know, base service would be.

So with your insights, with what you see, is it better to propose the actual, like, this is what you should get solution and then take things away as they start to negotiate with you? Or is it better to get in at the baseline and say, Hey, here's my price. And it's probably going to be comparable to everybody else. And if you want all these extra things, you can choose that stuff. Like what, what, what have you seen be more effective if there is a better approach? I mean, from what I've seen over the years, and I don't have like a data point to say exactly this, but when you, when you're talking to the prospects, talking in general ranges and saying, Hey, prices range from this to this, we'll probably be working in this range that at least gives you the, you know, anybody who can't afford even the base level is going to say, you know what, this is way too rich for my blood.

I can't do it. I've, I've seen a lot of success going on that upper range and seeing like, Hey, this could cost, you know, around 200 grand. Is that, you know, is, does that scare you off? And then have customers, are they like, no, we're not even close to that. Or like, okay, well, why don't you just send me the details and we'll see what we can do. That gives you that kind of anchoring effect where it's like, Oh, you said it was going to be 200 and now it's actually 150. Okay. We can, we can deal with that. So I think setting the expressions, uh, the expectations a little higher upfront tends to work better. Yeah. See, I, I, the, the example that I have recently, I'm so pissed at myself for doing this.

I was kind of negotiating through one of my employees who a great inbound lead came in. I mean, a logo that legitimately any company on this planet would absolutely die for. Right. And this person had previous experience with me. So I was kind of like when my rep called me and said, Hey, this is what the scenario is. They're, they're fanboys here. They want to do this. They're super excited. Boom. Right. And they have to have it by this date. And I'm like, listen to my rep and like, great, cool. And they're like, they have this many reps. And so long story short, we put a package together and instead of doing it as if like rate card, like that's it. Like, this is what we, this is what our packages, this is how many people's included.

And you have to buy 10 of them to get that many people trained. We immediately got creative without even really talking to the customer about it. Like we gave a package deal where it automatically discounted because we figured, Hey, this is going to be easy for them to buy. Let's get it over to them. Let's cut through the chase. Let's give them our best offer and let's go. Right. Sure. Shit. Get back and email. Hey, I brought this to finance and they were, they almost had a heart attack and they want us to sharpen the pencil. And it was just like, you've already sharpened the pencil. You know what I mean? And so I like, I, I was so mad at myself for, for proactively discounting something, but a lot of times, I mean, you see it more than I do.

How often do reps proactively discount or how much, how often do companies bake in discounts into their proposals so that they is flexibility and then give that out before the client even asks for, is there a strategy on that? Or do you see a lot of that? Well, I'm really excited for the next, um, the next report that we do, cause we're actually going to be digging into discounts and seeing what's happening there. It's a little hard to tell from the system what's, what's going on other than just anecdotal conversations like that. I mean, it sounds like in your case, um, you know, the background had sort of caused you to let your guard down a little bit and probably, you know, not follow the process completely anyway.

So there's probably a few things going on there, but you know, um, discounting upfront, I mean, it's, it's generally not a good idea because you want, ideally want to start them here and then work them back to where they should be or where, uh, you know, where both of you can live with, as opposed to, it's like that whole thing, like no good deed goes, uh, unpunished, right? I've done that a million times running an agency, like, Hey, I'm going to just give them a whole bunch of extra stuff for free just cause I like them or their friends. Yeah. And then you, you end up, uh, paying for it. Right. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Cause now I have to go negotiate. I negotiated with myself. You know what I mean?

Like I, I, and, and look, I don't think we were too far off. Like we were going to put in for like, I think if we rate carded everything out, it was going to be like 75, but because we could put enough reps in the class and it's all remote. I'm like, screw it. Let's put it 60, lock it up at that and let's go. But now I'm negotiating by myself off of 60, whereas I could have been negotiating with them off of 75. Right. So I'm wicked pissed. It was a Friday afternoon. I was probably not going to attention. Oh, it happens. It happens to the best. Exactly. Um, but you said you're going through some data stuff here too. Like you, you got a report that's coming out. Uh, what did you, what do you call it?

Did you put out there the state of sales or something like that? I'm trying to remember. Yeah. We call it the state of proposals and we do it, um, industry, we kind of have a general one, but then we go into some industry. So we did a SAS one, um, just to find out like, is it different for software as a service companies? Um, a lot of the stats are, are pretty, pretty general across all industries. Like for example, um, of all the proposals, we analyzed 2 million of them, um, image proposals that had images closed at 23% higher rate than none. Wow. Um, does it matter what the image is? Well, I mean, you know, put a big image of a butthole or something. You know, within reason, right? But is it like a chart or a graph or is it like a photograph that represents something?

Like, I don't know. Cause I, I use, I use images, but more like of the actual offering itself. So we have an online portal. Like I'll take a screenshot of just what it looks like. Right. Versus like a graph or a chart on an ROI or something like that. Is there any nuances there that you came across? I think the, the, the broad principle is that if you, you put some effort into the look and feel, the design, the presentation of your proposal, it actually matters. I don't know why there seems to be this, um, misconception, you know, in the sales community of like, oh, they just, all they care about is the number. Just get them the details. It doesn't matter what it looks like. And it's like, wait a minute, your marketing team put effort into your website, your, uh, eBooks, your lead magnets, all these things we design.

Right. But then for some reason we think that when it gets down to brass tacks, like let's do this deal, let's make it happen. It's like, oh no, people don't care about visuals. They're not visual people. They just care about the numbers. Design matters. Right. It makes a difference. It also matters to, I mean, I'd be interested to see, I mean, you said you segmented down based on industries and stuff. It's also kind of like who's receiving it. Right. Because if you're in marketing, obviously marketers like flashy picture, you know what I mean? Cool, visually stunning type of things, because that's what they're trained to look for. Whereas maybe CFOs are a little bit more direct into the point.

Um, and that's why, you know, I don't know if you, do you do any like research or integration of like neuro-linguistic programming or any of that stuff, or have you studied any of that? I haven't, no. Yeah. You got to take a look into this and also cause it's all about personas. And the, and the reason I bring it up is cause you said, uh, that, you know, a lot of us are visual, right. And it talks about how the three types of communicators, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic kinesthetic is touch and feel auditory, obviously in visual. And it's basically a third, a third, a third, a third of us are visual, a third of us are auditory and a third of us are kinesthetic. And when you don't know the audience, you have to make sure you're hitting on all three, right?

You're, you're, you got to put something visual in there for the visuals to be attracted to. You got to do something video where you're presenting your proposal and they're hearing it. And then tactically getting them to click around maybe and do some things in there. So regardless of what your persona is, you're actively engaged in some aspect of whatever it is. And that increases your chances of, uh, of aligning and getting people and connecting with people. Yeah. Well, and the other thing too, is that design isn't all just about flashy visuals, right? It's like you're, you're wearing a, a, a t-shirt you're, that's a branded t-shirt. Make it happen. Why isn't that just a white plain t-shirt with you handwriting, make it happen on top of it.

Probably would have been cheaper to do that. It's all like typography colors. Like it's not about necessarily like wowing people with crazy visuals, but think of like apple packaging. It's not crazy. And you know, it's about as simple as it gets. Very simple, but like elegant, well-designed. That's what we're talking about, right? It's, it's all about making the, uh, creating consistency through the buyer journey so that when somebody, um, engages with, with all of your marketing materials and gets right down to the proposal or the contract, they're not like, oh, this is just like, you know, then they will probably never say that out loud, but they'll think it or they'll, it'll be subconscious.

Yeah. I mean, it's, I agree with that. Like every, like I said, every little impression these days makes, makes a difference. And if you, it's a lot, it's like, it's almost like if I, if I see all this quality up front and, and then behind the curtains, or when it gets to something like this, I see lack, you know, poor execution, if you will, or just, it's not, then I'm, I might, it might creep in of, wait a minute, you know, throughout the sales process, I was really impressed with this, but now when it gets to the operational side of the house, this is what I am now doing. You know what I mean? So now I cast some doubt in there. How have you seen proposals like make a difference when you are head to head?

Like what are the, say you and I sell the same type of service, right? And we're both proposing to the same client outside of being visually appealing and those type of things. Is there something that else that can give me the edge? You know, it might be in that report, but you know, images, video to explain it. How else can I get an edge on my proposal over you when I'm, when I'm presented, when I'm sending it to the client? Yeah. So like things we've heard from, from customers have been about like what you said, the people kind of being won over by the presentation or the communication side of it. So that's kind of one. Another one is like, how easy is it to buy? So we actually have some stats around using things like forms and e-signatures because so often the traditional way of doing proposals and these types of documents is like, you know, first of all, you get the proposal with kind of more generic information and then it gets down into the contract.

And then suddenly we have an order form where we need to get information from you. And then we're going to, you know, send over a document, docu-sign maybe to get to sign. And it's like, you've got all these documents and all these ways of doing it. If you can just make it really easy to buy, it's the same reason like Amazon puts so much into their e-com. It's, you know, one-click purchase, make it super easy for them. So that can have an effect as well. And then obviously like the pricing, sometimes the relationships, there's so many factors that go into to ultimately closing, but like proposals with e-signatures are 3.4 times more likely to close than those without, right? So if people aren't just embedding that signature right in the document, there's a missed opportunity.

Wow, Kyle's hitting some serious high notes around proposals today. Be sure and send us your sales wins at jamesatjbarrows.com to be highlighted in an episode of Make It Happen Monday. Today, we salute David Haxby, who's getting a 70% connection rate using a more targeted search on LinkedIn and hitting up active users instead of just sending random connection requests. Keep evolving, Dave. We see you. I think about the Amazon, you know, experience and how it's crept into our expectations in a business world, right? I mean, consumer world, we expect one click shows up on my door tomorrow, see you later. You know, I think we all expect it, but we accept that it's not in B2B. You know what I mean?

We're like, yeah, we got to go through this piece of shit process. But I think streamlining that to your point, because I still go off of sales as an emotional thing. And once somebody is emotionally committed to buying, you want to capitalize on that as fast as you possibly can. Once they've crossed that, yep. And the longer that takes to get executed, and the more it sits in legal and finance and, you know, review, review, review, the more that emotion dies, the more that and therefore the potential of the sale dying, right? Absolutely. Like you said a mouthful there around what people think about B2B buyers. For some reason, they think that as soon as you put on your C-level admin or, you know, C-level executive jacket, and you're buying a $100,000 or a million dollar product, that suddenly you're not a person anymore.

Right. And you're never, you're no longer influenced by things. And it's so, it's not true. Like, the data that we've looked at has shown that proposals that get sent faster, created and sent faster, close at a higher rate. Because just like if you're, you know, standing in a lineup at the grocery store, and you're like, I'm hungry, I want that Snickers bar, you probably wouldn't have left your house to go get it, but it's right there. And people do the same thing when they're like, I've got this problem, it's on my mind, I need to get it. If they have to wait two weeks for a proposal, they've moved on to something else. Well, I think that also goes to the, you know, just the ease of buy. Yeah.

Like, and also what your company is like to work with. You know what I mean? Like, if all of a sudden you and I are having a good vibe during the sales process, and now I have to, you have to wait two weeks for me to put together a proposal and, you know, and then we have to go through the legal, you know what I mean? Like now all of a sudden I'm like, Jesus, you're a pain in the ass to work with. I mean, I straight up lost deals when we sold, when I sold outsourced IT services, my VP or my CFO, he put together a 12 page, 12 page master services agreement in like 0.2 font filled up every part of the margin of every page. And I looked at him, I'm like, Calvin, are you out of your mind right now?

You want me to put this in front of a client? And he's like, yep. Well, we have to protect ourselves, you know, we're a small business. And I was like, and I tried to fight him for it, but we lost a dozen deals because the client wouldn't even, they were so offended with how hard it was, like with just even visually looking at it saying, are you out of your mind? You know what I mean? For $3,000 a month, like I, I, I can't even read this. And so you seemed way too difficult to deal with. So therefore either ghost or see you later or no, thank you. I got to assume that's a little bit of the same when the proposal process, forget about the MSA for a second, but the proposal process itself could be too, eh, for, to impress me.

Too much friction. Yeah. I mean, we, we have a stat that says that proposals that get viewed two and a half times. So meaning they open it two times, um, that's going to close faster than one that gets, that's open even more. So if one's open three or more times, it's actually less likely to close, which is kind of surprising. Yeah. But then when you think about it, if somebody has to keep going and opening your proposal and keep looking at it, what are they curious about? What there's something not clicking or they have questions or they have doubts. And if you don't know that, I mean, obviously you can't do anything about it, but if you do know it, it's like, you can get in and be like, Hey, what's going on?

Like, uh, you, you, you must have questions. You keep looking at this thing. Yeah. And actually that leads me to my next question, which is, you know, when you see somebody is clicking through a proposal or spending time on one page, what's the approach there? Like, first of all, do you set the stage that this is something I, you know, that's a collaborative document. So therefore, or is it just, okay, there's a proposal, like, you know, let me know when you have any questions. And the reason I bring it up is it's the same question when you're using like a cadence tool, like a sales loft or something. And I've always had the question, like when somebody opens up your email, like, what do you do?

You call them out on it? Be like, what's up, Kyle? I know you opened up my email, man. I know it's on your cell phone in San Francisco. So you're watching for some, you know what I mean? Or, or do you just kind of pretend like it didn't happen and just be opportunistic? Same thing with proposals. Do you, how do you set the stage for delivering it? And then what happens when you see people clicking around? How do you, how do you and your team approach it? Yeah. I mean, I think you can, you know, set the stage by sending them a link. Obviously this isn't a PDF embedded in the email. So it is an interactive document. I find most people aren't concerned about it. They're like, Hey, you were looking at what I was doing.

It's like, well, yeah, you're looking at a website. People know what you're doing. We use a product or a SAS tool. Everybody knows what you're doing. I'd be a little bit coy about it and be like, Hey, I just, you know, thought of you guys. I know we sent the proposal two weeks ago or whatever. You're looking at it now. Hey, or, you know, if you think they're going to be offended by it, just like, Hey, it was fade or whatever. You were top of mind. But I think I, you know, you can even embed chat tools in an interactive proposals tool. So if you're using like intercom or drift, you know, you can actually jump on there and be like, Hey, do you have any questions? Like you can actually engage with them that way too, as in addition to calling them.

Nice. Yeah. I mean, there's so many different unique ways. Um, the revisions of proposal is where I think people get stuck a lot of times you talked with, um, you talked about putting stuff in there if relevant, that they can kind of choose, right. To add, uh, or subtract, whatever. What about giving them options so that you approach it, you know, kind of the old psychology around give them three options. They'll usually choose the middle one, give them a high end, a low end, a middle one. Uh, do you do that? Do you, or do you go right for what you really think they should, they should buy? Good question. Um, I think you should have a conversation, you know, the other thing about proposals too, is even though we're using all these cool tools and making them digital, it doesn't replace the idea that you actually want to present your proposal.

If it's, if it's of any value of, if it's more than, you know, you're selling widgets or whatever, like you should really be holding onto that link. Like you said, it's the, the black leverage you have and actually presented to them and talk them through it and see if they have questions so that you can say like, Hey, look, you know, here's what we recommend. Um, there's a few add-ons that I think you should look at getting, but you know, really it's like, I wouldn't start at the bottom and work up. I would start at the top, um, and let them kind of take away things. But if you're like, look, you're getting rid of training, you really want to have training. Like, you know, you have to, you have to sell those add-ons as well.

So with that, give me some insights on procurement, because I think there's a perception out there. You probably deal with procurement or at least have dealt with procurement way more in your life than mine, just under, just in building what you're building and, and, and those types of things as well. Um, there's this guy, Mark, uh, over at Negotiations Ninja who used to be on procurement side of the house and now he's training sales reps how to deal with them. Um, how do you avoid, or what's your approach to making it so you've done your job, you've sold the business value to your champion, you know, you, you understand what the decision process it, it now needs to go through these other few people and whatever.

And it's ultimately, you know, is going to end up in procurement and nine times out of 10 procurement just gets the proposal with no context. And so they do their job, you know, 20% off because, and we think as sales reps that it's, it's, there is, they're purely there to get the best price possible. What I've learned is that procurement actually gets held accountable for when the solution isn't the solution that they tried to buy because they bought, they, they discounted it or they got, they took too many things out of it, right. To get to the price that they wanted. So what's your experience with procurement? Are they mostly money motivated to slash and burn or are they, do they, is it better to engage with them earlier and build it with them?

So most of my experience in procurement has been on the government side. And I dealt with it a lot of the, at the, uh, agency that I used to run. And, um, it was a lot of like government's, um, contracting websites that they'd have to go to procurement if it was above a certain deal size. Um, what I've typically seen has been that procurement will throw out the lowest price and the highest price and go somewhere in the middle. Um, and then they'll typically award it to the person that somebody in that department has a relationship with. It's very, very relationship based now, maybe, maybe if you're a construction company and selling a pylons or something like that, they'll just go with the cheapest if it's really a commodity.

But usually if it's consulting or some kind of service like that, they'll like, if you just find the, go on the government tender website and submit a proposal, you've, you've wasted time. You could be out there, you know, actually selling somebody. Yeah. It's like RFPs. Like, uh, I, I hate, I, as a practice, I don't respond to RFPs because I think they're either either written by my competition or written by somebody who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. So is how much of, how much, how much of ours, RFPs do you see with what the, with the work that you do? We don't do a whole lot. Cause I also, I've, I've wanted to ban RFPs, uh, from the agency and also our two of the product we build and the customers we work with are not well suited for our fees.

There are companies out there like RFP IO and RFP 360. There's two, you know, there's companies, um, that do this. Uh, Lupio is another one, but, um, yeah, no, they're, they're, the person who's going to win it already has that relationship, but they've won it before the RFP went out. What they do is, you know, the contact finds a provider or a vendor, and then they actually help them write the RFP that they win it. And that's essentially what happens. There's my give get always too, is like, when you ask me for an RFP, I'll be like, cool, let me set up a meeting with the people who wrote this RFP so I can ask them some questions. And there he's like, well, well, no, we can't do that. I'm like, yeah, then I can't reply, respond to your RFP.

And then when I get on the phone with them, I'm like, all right, Kyle, who wrote this? Where did it come from? Right. Cause I can sniff. It smells like, you know, Sandler, it smells like whatever. So, um, do, do, uh, do you see any variances in, in, cause I, I mean, would you say the majority of them are written by our competition? I think so just, you know, that's just, you know, experience in the past, but I think the better thing you can do is if you sell to government or, or, you know, an industry that is very bent on RFPs and procurement, um, go out and build those relationships, go to those, you know, trade shows or like, however you do that. Um, what I used to do in the agency was I would find out what their minimum threshold was for an RFP.

They'd say, Oh, if it's under 50,000, we need to, or sorry, if it's over 50,000, it goes to RFP. Great. My proposal will come in at 45,000 and you win it, or you can say, Hey, you're looking at this big giant project. What if we just sold you a discovery or something small so we can understand it, give you some value. And then with that plan and that blueprint, we map out, you can go, you can take that out to tender and they would always agree to that. And then you build that relationship, you know, create value for them. And then it goes to RFP. It's yours. So you can do essentially what the other guys are doing. Yeah. Nice. Awesome. Any other, uh, interesting stats that you saw to that SAS state of, uh, state of proposals report that, uh, we should be paying attention to.

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's interesting things there. So like one quarter of, um, potential buyers are going to view your proposal on a mobile device first, which is interesting. And so a lot, oftentimes we don't think that, that like, you know, somebody is on a laptop or whatever, looking at your proposal, 25%. So one quarter are going to be on a phone. So I'm thinking about how that, how it's viewed there. Yep. Um, another one is like, maybe I'll ask you this, see if you can guess it. What is the month with the highest close rate? The highest close rate? Yeah. Uh, I mean, the obvious answer is December, but I would say, I'm going to go, well, I'm going to go with us, August. What is it?

No, it's December. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, ours is, I mean, ebbs and flows depending on, but obviously, but that's the, the, the challenge with December though, is we got to figure out a way to recondition people because you know, 70% of sales is closed. You know, organizations that I work with, it's like 80% of their number is done in December. It's like, Oh, like, and that just, that just screams discounting, like just throwing money out the window to get up because we've effectively conditioned the prospect to wait until the end of the month, wait until the end of the quarter, wait until the end of the year. So it's like, even though that is the heaviest month, this is why you see companies like Salesforce and a few others shift their fiscal year.

Right. Because instead of having it be December, like everybody else, they made it January. So, you know what I mean? Give them a little bit of a break there, but yeah, December is always that chaos. Uh, I'm, I'm super happy. I don't have to deal with that crap anymore. I mean, I do, but I don't, you know what I mean? I'm not like, I remember at Xerox, we didn't get paid until the copier was plugged in and it made one copy and I'm not joking. So we had to literally plug it in and make a copy so it could register so I could get my commission check. And I was selling multimillion dollar machines when I was there, secretary of state government stuff, right? Yeah. And I mean, there are two years that I worked there, December 31st at 11 35 40 at PM.

I'm sitting there with my shirt on, like underneath these things in grimy areas with the installation guy being like, just plug the fucking thing in please. So I want to run away from that, but are there, are there ways to uncondition or recondition people that you see to, to get them maybe to sign earlier? Is that part of kind of the value here of what you're trying to try to accomplish is get them to engage and make it simpler so they can close earlier. So we don't have to sweat it out at the end. Yeah. I don't know that that's a big question. I don't think I have a solution for that because yeah, I mean, December is one thing or end of year and a fiscal year, but yeah, other than that, that end of month thing too, that happens to everybody.

It happens to us. Like, no, you know, things aren't going so great in the month. And then like last day of the month, everything comes in. Um, I don't know. You'd be, you'd, you'd know. Yeah, there's no, I mean, look, I think it goes back to that give, get right. Where, you know, instead of, I always tell people if you're going to give a, like, I don't, I hate discounts in general, specifically what I did, which is proactively discount. But if you're going to use it, tie it to the close, but tie it to the close, not at the end of the month, you know what I mean? Close it, tie it to the close, the, the last, the, you know, the, the second to last week of the month so that you give yourself that burden, even if it's like two days before the end of the month.

Right. Cause there's always that last minute. Oh shit. You know, we can't, you know, I'm too busy or finances locked up doing whatever. So give yourself a little bit of breathing room, but it should be an if they end statement. It shouldn't be Kyle. I'm going to give you like, okay, I'm going to give you the discount. Will you close? It should be, Hey Kyle, um, if I were to get you that discount, would you be able to, cause I got to go fight for you internally on my end. And if I don't have that, if I don't have your guarantee there, my boss is probably going to say no to this, but if you and I are on the same page, let's get this done. And that's where, you know, you have a champion, right?

That's, that's huge. Yeah. And also time constraints. Like, again, it sort of depends on industry, but like, as opposed to saying by the end of the month, it's like, okay, what is it? The, the fifth of the month, if we can get your sign off by next Friday, where we can also include this extra thing. Maybe it's a value add service or that kind of thing. So I like kind of using a, not a, um, a discount, but a value add like, you know, uh, shorter turns or something like that to say, like, we'll throw this in extra, but we need your signature by like next Friday. There you go. Yeah. Or like, like training, like you said earlier, like training, like, you know, that part I'll throw in or a few extra licenses to get people on board, you know, those types of things, but, but trying to bolster the value of what you presented as opposed to take pieces away from it, uh, cause I find the more reps take pieces away from the solution that they were supposed to present because it made sense.

The worse now it ends up being this gross thing. That's not, you know, it might be in the price range that the client was looking for, but it's really nowhere near the solution that they needed. And that, that is nobody's that does nobody any favors and being willing to walk away. I know it's hard for a lot of reps. It's easier if you're a founder, if it's your own company to be like, look, I just don't want to work with you guys anymore. Like there's nothing in it for me anymore. Reps have a really hard time with that. Yeah. Well, it's cause we're about, we're smashing them over the head of hitting their quota and stuff like that. And, and I think you and I, you know, I told this, this woman that, uh, I kind of screwed up with and help and trying to help her negotiate with this big client, you know, I said, look at the end of the day, um, I don't care if we get that client because I don't want a big client owning us in the sense, you know, a lot of these huge companies, once they work with some small little provider like me, you know, they feel like they own me and they can treat us however they want to, you know, extend terms until net 90 days, you know, those types of things.

And it's, and I'm like, no, no, I told her, I go, here's the line, go for it. If we lose this, we lose this, but this is why that big fat pipeline is so important because, you know, I, I train prospect, even though I train negotiations and all that other stuff, I still print train prospecting the majority because a big fat pipeline solves all of those problems. Yeah. You just can walk away. So I love it. Yeah. I always like to put myself in a position where I want your business. I don't need it. Yes. Yeah. Well, and especially for SAS, right. If you're, if you're a sales rep selling SAS, your product and engineering team aren't going to be too happy if you close an enterprise account that feels like they can dictate your roadmap now.

Oh yeah. Or suck up all your resources. Oh, and by the way, that price now is now the, is the baseline for renewal to be discounted against not added to, right? So as soon as you come in with this package that you think to win the deal a year later, you put your CS team and everybody else in a world of hurt because the client doesn't remember what, what happened a year ago. That's the price they're looking at right now. And they're saying, I want a better one. So, you know, you can't, you can't blame them for it, but it's the sales reps fault for putting the company in that bad of a situation. Totally. Yeah. Cool, man. All right. Well, look, um, what, how can people, um, like talk to us about Proposify, right?

Cause I, cause I think this, the, the conversation, hopefully people got as much value out of this as I did, as far as like the different little nuance areas and the data and the insights here. Um, but talk to me about Proposify itself and what it does. Yeah. So Proposify is, um, uh, a platform that essentially it works with Salesforce. It works with your CRM. Um, and it kind of removes that black box from the sales process. Like everything we talked about, like, do you, do you know how many times your client opened it or are they on it right now or which sections they viewed the most? So, um, essentially what would we do is we help sales leaders get more control and visibility into their proposal process.

Um, control because, um, a lot of times when people are coming to us, they're saying like, our, our process is a mess. Proposals are inconsistent. The branding, the verbiage, there's mistakes in it. There's, there's price, um, you know, unapproved discounts, like all of these kinds of things are just all over the place. And we have reps kind of running wild. So, um, essentially Proposify kind of creates guardrails, lets you lock it down, lets you, uh, put everything in one place so that there's some level of control, but then more importantly, like get visibility into like, how are people interacting with it? And, uh, you know, our deal's getting lost because of the proposal. Yeah. And that's, I mean, we've been using you guys, I think for a couple months now, and it's like the, the difference of my insight into what's going on is, has been drastic because what I usually do is, you know, I'll have the sales call with a client.

I'll do my thing and then I'll flip it over to my, uh, CLO and she puts all the paperwork together and send Eustace and the PDF and whatever. And I'm now I'm like, okay. And I look in CRM to see, okay, when is she going to follow up to see if that signature happens? But we've had no insight into, did they even look at it? Was this something, did they share it around yet? You know, and then I'm calling in, you know, nobody's looking at it for, for the most part. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And it kind of dies on the vine. Now we're seeing, Oh, they just engaged. You know what I mean? Where are they? And I usually, before my closing call, I'll then log in and see, did they look at it? Who looked at it?

Those types of things. So I can have some context. Cause if you come on this phone with me, Kyle, and I know that you didn't even open the damn thing and you didn't look at anything and you're like, Oh yeah, yeah, no, John, the proposal looks great. You know, it's a, I appreciate that. You know, I don't think we had any questions, so I know you're full of shit. And now the determinant is like, do I call you out on that full of shit? Not, or, or do I just realize that this probably isn't going to happen because this guy's blowing smoke in my ass. So we've been, we've been big, I've been a big fan of, of, as an owner, being able to see without having to bother my team all the time to say, Hey, where is, you know, have you sent it?

When's the followup? You know, do you know if they've looked at it or not? Now I just click the button and look in. So it's been, it's been a pretty cool, uh, insight into, uh, into that part of the process that I truthfully never really, as we started this conversation, gave a shit about, you know, I was like, whatever, overlooked often. It really is. I appreciate that. That's, that's great. I'm glad you're having a good experience. Yeah, no, it's, it's like I said, every, any little edge today, I mean, in this virtual selling world, in the business consumer world of that experience that people want, I think it, I mean, I'll take it. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, even if it's going to give me a slightest edge possible, I'll take that edge these days.

Cause right now, um, all those little pieces matter more than ever. A hundred percent. Awesome. Kyle. We'll appreciate you coming on board here. How can people find out more information about you? And, and do you want to tell people where can, they can find out about that SAS data proposals? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn, Kyle Racke, R-A-C-K-I is the last name. If people wanted to connect with me there, I I'm, I'm on quite a bit, uh, as our people on the Proposify team, but yeah, check out proposify.com. Um, if you want to check out the product and the state of proposal guide, I've actually got to get a URL for you, but, uh, I believe it's proposify.com slash state of proposals with dashes in between, but maybe, maybe we can firm up that link after.

We'll put it in the post when it goes out, but, uh, but I mean, they can find it on your website if they dig a little bit, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Well, Kyle, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, John. All right. And everybody else out there, hopefully you're having a fantastic day, but like I always say, even if you're not go make somebody smile today, because if you made somebody smile today, then you know, he had a good day and we need way more of that in today's fucked up world. So thank you all much for listening and have a fantastic week. Hey everyone. This episode shed a ton of light on proposals. I'd wager that you learned a lot about what you should be focused on moving forward when presenting your proposals to your prospects to continue to develop your sales skills.

Visit on demand.jbarrows.com today to begin the journey of JB sales certification. These certifications go on your LinkedIn profile and they signal to your buyers that you're focused on their success and how you can help them achieve their goals. Let's have a great week, everyone. We'll see you next time. Keep making it happen.