How to make a commercial offer

A commercial proposal (abbreviated as CP) is an offer from a seller to a buyer, which is a key step in the process of “complex sales,” that is, those when the buyer decides to cooperate not only on the basis of one price.

Obviously, we are talking exclusively about complex services. No one will make us a commercial offer to purchase a bag of potatoes. We just look at the product and the price tag and make a purchasing decision. But when we think about a complex service, it is important to know what work it will consist of, how long it will take and how much it will cost. Moreover, this entire set is needed exclusively for our task, which the contractor learns about only during the first negotiations.

My service is complex, so I can’t do it without a CP. Most often this is a letter with brief information on prices and terms. I am attaching to the letter a design contract with a detailed Appendix No. 1, which lists all the requirements. Less often, when the task is small, I can limit myself to a message in the messenger. It’s even rarer that I’m able to make a commercial offer right during the first negotiations, voicing the terms. So the form of information transfer will depend on the circumstances. But the content is always the same. I’ll tell you about it in this chapter.

But before that, I would like to announce one rule that cannot be overestimated. “Don’t delay with the CP.” The sooner our potential client receives information about the terms, prices and scope of work, the easier it is for him to make a decision on cooperation. I try to provide CP within a time period of one to twenty-four hours. At this time, the potential client is still “hot”: he remembers well what and how we talked about, and is full of enthusiasm to get to work. And at this time, he is highly likely to communicate not only with us, but also with two or three other performers in order to choose the one he likes best.

When I collaborated with studios, I often observed the following picture. I conducted the first negotiations with a potential client, assessed the design work, and on the same day transmitted information on terms and prices to the manager or general director of the studio so that he could make a proposal. However, preparing the document did not take a day, not two, or even five. Sometimes this took weeks. During this time, the potential client had already managed to find other contractors.

But let's return to the content of the commercial proposal. The fact is that at the time of writing this book, I myself more often act as a customer than as a performer for complex services, so I react especially sharply to incomplete information in the CP. Designers, layout designers, planners, programmers, marketers, lawyers, copywriters have given me such documents over the past few years that I wanted to immediately refuse cooperation, since in response I had to ask many counter questions just to find out and understand what they were trying to sell me. In order to somehow influence the situation, now I try, even before receiving the CP, to draw the attention of the performers to those issues that will interest me in the document.

Did the performer understand the task correctly?

The more clearly the performer described the task in the document, the more confident the potential client can be that he was understood correctly. I once received a CP from a lawyer who only assessed half of the tasks I listed. And before that - from a layout designer who, apart from prices and terms, did not write a single line about the scope of work. And so on and so forth. Do not forget to briefly and succinctly describe the scope of work that is assessed in the CP.

How much does the job cost?

The most common mistake when answering this question is to break the work into stages, calculate the cost of each stage and provide the client with a summary table that does not indicate the amount of work. Like, consider yourself healthy, dear client! Therefore, do not forget to first name the final figure, and then detail it if the client is interested.

The second most popular mistake is not specifying the payment procedure. What is the prepayment amount? How does the performer want to receive money? For some reason this is often forgotten, apparently believing that this is not such a significant point. And he is important.

You should also pay attention to a scenario where you can accurately estimate the first stage of work, and the rest will depend on its results. In this case, I name the cost of the first stage, and then list the next stages and announce the minimum prices for them, warning in advance that the maximum is still unknown.

Often such pricing can be found, for example, in car repair shops. Technicians can estimate the cost of disassembling the car to get to the transmission and inspecting it. And they will be able to evaluate the repair of the box itself only after they understand what exactly is wrong with it.

How long will the work take?

I’ll tell you how to estimate deadlines in one of the following chapters. And when drawing up a commercial proposal, I pay attention to two things. Firstly, I give the dates in calendar days, not working days. Accounting for holidays, long weekends and a five-day work week is no easy task. Especially if the start of work falls at the end of December. You shouldn’t force a potential client to do complex calculations. Secondly, I don’t give specific dates, since I start work only after an advance payment, and the time of its receipt does not depend on me.

What will happen as a result of the work?

I often encounter situations where performers forget to write about the final artifacts. We are talking about documents, layouts and their sources and other conditionally material results of work that performers mean and keep in their heads, and do not include in commercial proposals.

Does the client need anything other than money to successfully complete the task?

For example, in my CPs I indicate the number of hours that may be required for interim negotiations. In addition, we can talk about the hours of the client’s employees, additional documentation, access to certain resources, and so on. If this is not discussed in advance, you may end up in a situation where the work moves too slowly because the client is not willing to work at my speed, resulting in the risk of missing deadlines.

We could end here, but I want to share with you a couple of points that I myself pay attention to in KP as a customer. These are the qualities of a performer that are easily read from any text message.

Attentiveness

Based on typos and inconsistent sentences, you can immediately understand whether the performer re-read the result of his work. If you haven’t re-read it, then this is a bad signal. There is a high probability that the freelancer will not double-check his work during the execution of the service. This means that I will have to spend my time (or the time of my employees) catching and correcting these moments. By the way, you can just ignore literacy at this stage. Unless, of course, we are talking about proofreading services.

Ability to work with documents

The way the document is named, how it is formatted. How short and clear its content is. Ideally, a document should contain maximum information in a minimum of text. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a letter, a message in an instant messenger or a text file.

If they send me continuous unformatted text; if there are no subheadings and paragraphs, then I am mentally prepared to waste my time in the next stages of work, if I agree to cooperate with the author of such a document. This time, time will be spent trying to understand the poorly formatted results of the freelancer's work, as well as the direction of his thoughts during negotiations.

Let's try to take into account all the points above and write the text of a commercial proposal for designing the interface of an online store.

Ready to take on the task of designing an online store. As a result, I will provide an interactive prototype that meets the functional requirements listed in Appendix No. 1 to the contract. The work will take 30 calendar days from the date of prepayment. You will be required to allocate up to 10 hours of personal time for interim negotiations during this period. Cost of work: 250,000 rubles, 100% prepayment. I have a simplified individual entrepreneur, without VAT.

Not a lot of text, is it? However, after reading it, it is unlikely that the potential client will have any additional questions.

Usually, I immediately attach the contract and invoice to such a letter so that the potential client, if he agrees, can immediately complete all the formalities. And if the work was so small that it did not require a contract, then I would indicate the card number for transferring money in the CP. In this way, I try to eliminate even the slightest possible obstacles to cooperation.