Your productised offering and slick proposal writing process could be stopping you from having the conversations you need to grow your business.

But Dan, I thought we were supposed to be optimised!

You are! And you have to be less efficient sometimes too.

Did you want growing an agency to be easy? There’s a reason it takes someone as good as you to run one of these things 😉

The paradox

At the heart of the issue is core paradox of growth. There’s no solution to this but not understanding it will mean you can’t move forward with intent.

Let’s use complicated words for no reason.

The two sides of a paradox are called “thesis” and “antithesis”. In this case, they are

  • Thesis: Growth means tackling more complex problems
  • Antithesis: Scaling means optimising

Here’s how they work against each other:

Growing means more complex problems

Growing means solving higher value problems and higher value problems are harder to solve.

They need uncovering and defining. Initially, there’s more uncertainty and various approaches to tackle the project. Sometimes the desired outcome isn’t completely defined.

The prospect may think they want one thing when, in fact, after you’ve assessed they really want something more valuable.

These projects come with awkward timelines. Any timeline is awkward when you don’t know what they project entails. Someone (you) needs to explain how to break things down to fit with what’s been promised and then how to go on and deliver the full value they want.

In these situations, a client is looking for someone to go on a journey with them through the discovery and scoping. That journey starts with the enquiry they send you.

From an efficiency point of view these are hard to triage. The unwieldy scopes and unrealistic timelines can hide them amongst the time waster enquiries.

Scaling means optimising

As a business owner, you’ll have set up systems to make yourself efficient. Especially if you are wearing multiple hats.

Sales isn’t billable, so you can’t waste time.

It’s likely you’ve been clever and produced reusable assets that define your services and prices. You may even have productised your service and are able to give a fixed cost to a tight scope. These serve as a quick proposal to prospects that get in touch asking for prices.

It’s qualification on rails, and you do get a pat on the back for it.

However, you should also consider how it can be counterproductive and can be the antithesis (🧑‍🎓) of growth.

Here are the problems

Once someone has your costs and proposal, in their mind there is nothing else of value that you can give them. You have anchored yourself, both in the approach you’d take and in price.

If this was a time-waster, then no problem. But a complex project that needed refining can also look like a time-waster until you have that conversation.

A conversation you won’t now have because:

  • If you are responding to the complex problem enquiry with an off-the-shelf proposal, then you don’t seem like someone who’s going to go on the full journey of discovery with this client. To the prospect, receiving a proposal is a full stop on a conversation that only just got started.
  • The proposal is only effective for the specific project type it addresses. Once a project steps out of that lane, you’ve ruled yourself out.

The bigger problem is a lack of growth

Every qualification process has collateral damage. The benefit of efficiency outweighs the cost of any deal lost.

Except if you always automatically rule out anyone who’s going to stretch you, then you are going to stay doing the same projects you’ve always done.

Maybe that is where you want to be. If more-of-the-same makes you happy and is profitable, then you have got it nailed.

But how many of us does that really describe, and what’s the risk of standing still? These opportunities outside of our comfort zone keep us moving and keep our services fresh.

What to do instead

What is the goal of efficiency in the proposal process? It’s quick qualification.

  • Interesting project = get them on a call
  • Uninteresting = send them elsewhere

But qualification doesn’t have to mean sending a full proposal. Is there a halfway house where you give an indication of costs and the range of problems you solve?

We used to have some further information sheets with short case studies of previous projects. Specifically, it outlined the activities we did and the amount of effort they took along with a ballpark budget.

We deliberately put small, medium, and large examples down to be clear about the range we could take on. We wanted there to be something for every interesting type of enquiry, including the unusual ones we are talking about.

Don’t give enough information for them to plan their project. Just enough to know if it’s worth a conversation.

This qualifies out the low-value stuff but keeps the conversation open for the weird and wonderful projects that can lead to big changes.

The questions for you are:

Does your sales process shut the door too early?

Does it need to shut the door at all?