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Imagine this:
You and your team have been tasked with preparing a business proposal for a major potential client with a complex set of needs.
With your team, you spent hours crafting a detailed slide deck, writing lengthy documents, and preparing a polished presentation. When the day to present arrives, however, you notice the client executives quickly losing interest. Despite your best efforts, the proposal seems impersonal and fails to resonate. You can see their attention drifting away, and their questions reveal they didn’t feel their specific needs were truly understood.
Crafting business proposals that captivate and engage clients can be challenging, and more than 50% of proposals aren’t accepted. Traditional methods — static slides, lengthy documents, and one-way presentations — often fail to capture your client’s interest and appreciation for their needs. But what if there was a way to transform your proposals into interactive, collaborative experiences that fully engage your clients?
Challenges in building effective business proposals
To start, let’s address some of the common challenges organizations face when building business proposals:
- Lack of engagement: Traditional proposals can sometimes feel impersonal and uninspiring, often failing to fully engage clients.
- Understanding client needs: It’s hard to gather and integrate client insights in a way that addresses their pain points.
- Collaboration hurdles: Especially for globally dispersed teams, effective collaboration is hard to achieve. Proposals might take longer or seem disjointed.
- Adaptability: Client needs are dynamic. Static proposals can quickly become outdated, especially when client needs evolve rapidly.
How consultants can elevate proposals using Mural
As a solutions consultant at Mural, I’ve witnessed firsthand the power of Mural in transforming how teams collaborate, solve, and create. Visual collaboration changes the proposal process from a routine task into a meaningful interaction. Your clients aren’t just participants, but essential voices in creating solutions tailored to their needs. This approach not only makes proposals more compelling, but builds stronger, more trusting relationships with clients.
Kick your proposals up a notch and boost client engagement with interactive, real-time collaboration.
From one-way to interactive
Mural offers a seamless environment for co-creation. It allows teamwork to flourish, regardless of where a team is located, and will enhance every stage of proposal creation. Mural can improve client engagement by shifting the dynamic from a one-way discussion to an interactive, collaborative experience. Clients want to feel that their voice is truly heard, and that their needs are deeply understood.
- Summon participants to different sections of your proposal
- Have clients share reactions via stickies, images, and icons
Diverse perspectives in real-time
Start your proposal process with a mural where clients actively contribute their insights and feedback in real-time. Bring all voices together on the same digital canvas, sending a strong message that the final proposal considers diverse perspectives. This way, you ensure that the proposal reflects their needs and challenges, making it richer and more compelling. You’ll also establish a relationship with the customer characterized by meaningful interaction and genuine collaboration.
- Use private mode to prevent groupthink, especially when working with multiple stakeholders
Insights for future growth
The valuable insights gained from your collaboration can also inform strategic and planning objectives. The customer fully benefits from your partnership, and you position their organization for future growth.
- Synthesize the outcomes of your conversations using Mural AI features.
Best practices for crafting interactive proposals with Mural
In any client engagement, creating trust is crucial. Clients want to feel confident that they are partnering with an organization that understands their needs and can deliver excellence. They’ll want to know that they are in safe hands and want to experience a flavor of that expertise in real time.
Create trust in an organic, engaging way using LUMA methods that give your client involvement in the proposal development process.
Improve your process with human-centered design
As you create your proposals, focus on developing solutions for the people who’ll most directly benefit from the solution. Transform your proposal process by approaching it with a human-centered design lens:
- Looking: Deeply observe your client needs and challenges through discovery.
- Understanding: Analyze and interpret data to gain meaningful insights.
- Making: Develop and improve solutions that address clients’ problems.
When you and your team have a shared language and approach for creative problem-solving, you’ll develop stronger customer relationships. Plus, you’ll enhance your ability to deliver proposals that engage and excite.
Let’s take a look at some examples of how you’d use the LUMA during the discovery phase.
Uncover deeper insights with LUMA templates
Uncovering deep insights is key to a successful discovery process. Deep insights into client needs are essential for creating proposals that resonate. Your customers may even learn a little about their own business from the experience, increasing the value of your partnership.
Use pre-designed LUMA templates to tackle a range of client scenarios:
Take a closer look at a tricky problem. Explore the causes and effects of a specific issue with a problem tree analysis. For example, if a customer’s organization struggles with employee burnout, you’d use this method to analyze root causes, like long commutes and poor work-life balance. This might lead you to propose more flexible work with virtual collaboration tools.
Jumpstart discussions to solve a problem in the best way. Use statement starters to encourage broad thinking by restating problems as invitations for exploration.
- “How might we use technology to make work schedules more flexible?”
- “How can we give employees more control over their work to reduce stress?”
Find themes in the discussion. Use rose, thorn, bud to reflect on strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities on a given topic, then affinity clustering to group like items and find patterns. Reflecting on employee burnout might reveal strengths like existing wellness programs, weaknesses such as long commutes, and opportunities like modern collaboration tools. End the discussion with key themes, like a bigger focus on health, to combat burnout effectively.
Choose the most impactful solution. Generate a ton of new ideas quickly with a creative matrix, then visualize the vote to pick which ideas you’ll move forward with. With your customer, you might brainstorm anything from new AI-driven productivity apps to mediation sessions to a complete overhaul of their tech stack.
Adapt and respond to your client with LUMA templates
You’ll want to maintain and preserve your valued client relationships for the long term. However, your clients’ needs are rarely static, so proposals shouldn’t be either. Create dynamic and adaptive proposals that can be refined in real-time based on ongoing client feedback.
Use templates like stakeholder mapping to consider who the proposal will impact, and interviewing to better understand their needs. Maybe you have a solution, but want to iterate on it with the customer. Try a concept poster for a fun and visual collaborative experience, or run a structured critique session to get their thoughts on your initial proposal.
Elevate client engagement in business proposals
Try a few of these activities where you use LUMA and Mural together to boost client engagement. Use these tools for client engagement and get great information to help you craft a better proposal that meets the client’s needs.
Together with your customer, explore ideas, map out strategies, and refine the proposal in real-time. The client becomes an active collaborator, leaving the meeting feeling heard, valued, and excited about the partnership.
