My business partner and I debate about this more often than I care to admit. We should probably run a split test on it and see which of our PPC proposals closes more deals.
The answer to this question really depends on what you see is the ultimate purpose of a proposal. One school of thought, and also mine, is to use the proposal as a sales tool. I’ve always seen a proposal as a representation of what my company can do for you. Ultimately, I feel the job of a proposal is to act as a rebuttal to the initial request from a prospect. Or as a loose blueprint for how I can get your company more business.
My partner, on the other hand, sees it as an all-encompassing packet of information that many times is compared apples-to-apples against other proposals. That, to him, is why he feels including contract terms in your pay-per-click proposal is a must. So it stands a better chance of answering all possible questions while being compared to other proposals. Now that I write this out, it seems like a valid point.
We’ve actually been using Better Proposal’s proposal builder lately for handling all of that. The template we’ve been using comes with a contract built-in, if you need that. We did replace it with our own. Mostly because we paid an small fortune for ours. So I guess we might as well use it 😉
I’d like to hear what you think about the question at hand. Do you include your contract terms in your proposal or not?
