Sales Proposals that Convert with Adam Hempenstall [Episode 753]

Joining me this week is Adam Hempenstall, the CEO of BetterProposals.io, UK-based, digital proposal platform. We discuss how to build a proposal that converts and Adam shares data-driven insights gleaned from the experiences of their customers. Learn why a proposal is not meant to educate your prospect, what you should absolutely NOT include in your proposal and so much more!

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul 0:00
Hey friends, this is Andy. Welcome to Episode 753 of accelerate the sales podcast of record. Joining me as my guest this week is Adam hemp install. Adam is the CEO of better proposals.io It’s a UK based digital proposal platform and we’re going to talk about how To build a proposal that converts, and I was going to share a bunch of data driven insights that his company has gleaned from the experiences of their own customers. Now, among the topics we’re gonna get into today are, why proposals still matter in sales? why they’re important for sellers, while important to get right. Why proposals not meant to educate your prospects, if you’re putting new information into the proposal that you’ve never exposed to your buyer for to before? generally not a good idea. Talk about which section should be in your proposal, in what order? And we’ll talk about pricing in terms of how many different offers should you put in proposal, and how should you write those? How should the word choice actually turns out to be very important in terms of how you, you phrase your pricing offer, so it’s all very interesting beginning that and much, much more.

Okay, let’s jump into it. Adam, welcome to accelerate. Thank you very much for having me. And you’re joining us from Brighton, England right?

Adam Hempenstall 9:02
That’s close enough.

Andy Paul 9:02
Yeah. So where is it precisely?

Adam Hempenstall 9:05
So I’m in a town called Shoreham, which is close enough to Brighton. But for anybody that doesn’t know Brighton is directly south of London. So draw a line down to hit the sea. And there you are.

Andy Paul 9:17
And there we are.

That’s right. And you are a follower of the Brighton Hove Albion football team, right.

Adam Hempenstall 9:25
Don’t admit it at the moment, but….

Andy Paul 9:29
Struggling a little bit this year. They’re entertaining to watch them.

Adam Hempenstall 9:34
Yeah, as long as you stay up.

Andy Paul 9:36
As long as we don’t get relegated. So we often get sidetracked with soccer talk, but we’ll spare people today. So you started a company called better proposals, and it’s a very interesting product. It’s just like, so what was the impetus to start this company.

Adam Hempenstall 9:59
So I ran a web design agency for 10 1214 years, something along those lines. And then we sort of switched into running a software company. So as a custom software company, we’d go in and do a lot of consultation and present a big solution. The common theme through both of those different iterations of the business was presenting proposals in order to win business, right? No point during any of that, was it fun, easy, quick, effective use of time, anything along those lines? But it always made the difference of whether you won the job or whether you did, so. Everything else is fairly constant.

Andy Paul 10:40
Why went digging that for a second? So your experience was that Yeah, you could have been chatting with people, you know, had multiple conversations, interactions with a potential prospect or a prospect potential buyer. And yeah, you are educating them but you got to point out You know, the proposal is gonna make a difference. So if you fully educated them, what were you saying in your proposals that was going to make a difference that was different than what you had told them before as part of your sales process?

Adam Hempenstall 11:11
The question, I suppose in my mind, in order to do the proposal effectively, I needed to ask good questions in the meeting or in the discovery session. Oh, I suppose it is like, some people would consider the proposal to be the document or the thing that you press send on, but to me in order to do that part, well, I had to ask your questions in the first place. So to me The proposal was asked good questions that write about it, and send it to them. That was that was to me what it was. So if we’ve got the questions wrong. Oh, but their office? No good anyway. So to me, they were kind of connected. But yeah, if I did a good job of asking the right questions, and I understood that business, and then I could convey that well in the proposal, and then send it and do all of that. in a timely fashion and give it to the way that they wanted to consume it, that that worked perfectly.

Andy Paul 12:05
Yeah, my question was perhaps a little bit different. This is, and this is, yeah. Because I think proposals are used differently now than they’ve been in the past and so on. But yeah, if I go into discovery and or a salesperson goes into discovery, the asking questions, sir, the implication for many salespeople as well, I’m going to answer those questions. In our proposal. I’m going to answer those questions in a big presentation we do. But increasingly, you answer the questions are on the spot, because it’s it’s part of it’s part of being able to ask the next question after that is to be able to provide an answer to the buyer to say, okay, there’s some context or an answer to your question then, based on that, what they’re based on their answer what’s Yeah, what’s the next next question I should be asking. And so, oftentimes, I found that you sort of answered a lot of the questions. You’re not saving up The answer to your questions for proposals, but maybe the proposals are just I’m summarizing, once again, what we’ve committed to is that is how you sort of see it?

Adam Hempenstall 13:07
Yeah, that’s, that’s fair. So I think if you are an experienced salesperson or you’ve been around the block bear, and what have you that you can actually do an awful lot of question answering objection, handling all that kind of stuff there. And then you can mitigate it. And you know, when you get really good, you can actually bring things up that make them object, and then you can handle it, instead of trying to brush it under the carpet and hope they don’t mention it, provoke them into bringing something up, and then you’ve got the perfect cancer. So that’s when you can start to sort of stoke the fire and get quite good. But yeah, there’s always going to be an element, especially in complex sales, you send in tins of baked beans, you don’t you don’t I mean there’s the value proposition is quite clear as hungry, right? Well, but in a complex sale or anything that’s kind of involved or something technical or what have you. There’s always going to be an element of trying to summarize what it is that they’re trying to achieve the goals, the problems, they’ve had your solution, how you’re going to do it, what makes you different? All that kind of stuff that needs to be summed up and presented somehow you have to get that information back to them. Otherwise, they’re not going to feel heard. So yeah, I don’t know

Andy Paul 14:20
why. But I think it’s a great point. And we should focus now for a second because, again, this is I see sellers that Yeah, to sort of save stuff up for the proposal. And my belief is that proposals are not really meant to be educational. I mean, that to your point, is there really a summary of the commitments you’ve made of the points you’ve made? And if perhaps even born saying to your last point you made about they don’t make sure they’ve been heard? I would phrase it slightly differently as the customer wants to make sure that you understood that they were understood. Right. And you convey that through your proposal.

Adam Hempenstall 14:59
Yeah. I think extends beyond just the proposal. I think that’s the, if I had to make a point about any of this stuff, it would be that it would be that this all extends beyond that you can’t do a good job of the specifics of writing a proposal without having done a good job of the discovery you met. If you make that bet up. You’re really you into guesswork. So

Andy Paul 15:22
I call at that point, if you muck that up, you’re fighting for second place, and you don’t know. Yeah.

Adam Hempenstall 15:29
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, I mean, I think you know, if there’s any if there’s any takeaway there, it’s, you know, ask really good questions and don’t skimp on that part. And yeah, you know, the proposal can be, you know, should be a summary that shouldn’t. If you’ve done everything perfect, and you’ve done everything in the textbook, there actually shouldn’t be any surprises in the proposal.

Andy Paul 15:50
That was my point, right? You’re not educating them as they’re confirming what they thought they heard from you. Or you’re confirming in their minds what they thought they heard from you and But really important point is that you understood,

Adam Hempenstall 16:05
which is kind of why I’ve always recommended that the introduction or the executive summary or the overview or whatever it is that you want to call the first or meaningful piece of text should always be about explaining to them or getting across the point that you’ve understood what their issues are, by by highlighting them by highlighting them exactly. So you’re stating exactly what it is that they’re trying to achieve? You know, what the situation is now, where are things going wrong? What does this mean, if you don’t do anything about it? What’s it going to look like if you do, Rand, you know, here’s a brief kind of one sentence summary of exactly what we’re going to do and the rest is in here. If they read that part we know from the data like you know, anybody that uses our software will be able to already use similar software to be able to see what is going on once people read the proposal. You’d see that this is this is true that people will read that part perfectly in relation to how much text is there. But a good couple of minutes reading that part. And they’ll spend a good amount of time on the pricing page. And the rest of it will be fairly skimmed over most of the time,

Andy Paul 17:14
right? So on your system, you can track specific time on each page of the proposal.

Adam Hempenstall 17:21
Yeah, so you’d split this thing up into your sections. So you’d have kind of like your overview you’ve had you’d have like your, you know, your breakdown of what you’re going to get. You’d have your timescales, your pricing, you know, your staff, what, you know, all that kind of stuff. And you see that Oh, okay, interesting. They opened up, they read the first bit for a minute and a half, then they jump to the pricing page, looked at it for four seconds and then closed it. Hmm. Okay, sticker shock, and they didn’t like it, so they didn’t bother reading the rest.

Andy Paul 17:48
Well, that’s an interesting question, though, but I think what you’re describing is sort of typical behavior. Yeah. Is your data showing that you know, if they only do that, that they convert at lower rates or If they, if they do that, but then they go back later and read it, then they convert at higher rates. So what’s your data telling you on that?

Adam Hempenstall 18:06
on that, um, it’s individual. So we don’t there’s certain stuff that we look into and certain stuff that we don’t. So that would be private data to me. It’s, I’m writing the rules on ethics here. Tthere’s not enough there to try to draw a conclusion. But, you know, on an individual case by case basis, you could go in and have a look and see that that is generally true. In terms of conversion rates on that it’s, it’s difficult, but what I would say is it gives the salesperson a fighting chance to be able to follow up in an appropriate way. Mm hmm. Right. If somebody has opened it, read the first bit for 20 seconds now on a phone and you can see the devices as well so you can build a bit of a picture as to what they’re doing. So they’re on a phone at 630 in the evening and they’ve read the intro and looked at the pricing page, and then they’ve closed their property on the train on the way home cooking. You know what I mean? It’s like, you could start to build a little bit of a picture. So you wouldn’t call them immediately like, hey, Sir, did you get it? It’s like, Alright, chill there. They’re out, you know, they’re not, you know. But if they’ve opened it up, they’ve looked at everything, they forwarded it to six different people. It’s been 40 minutes total looking through every little bit. Well, now they’ve gone through and made a sensible decision every night. So when you’re following up with them at that point, you know, it’s you’re dealing with a different stage, it just does it change the outcome? I don’t know. It’s hard to say, but it just gives you a little bit more visibility. So you can sort of plan your attack. Sounds a bit aggressive, but you know what I mean? Yeah. And get your game plan together. And you could come in with a little bit more visibility and you don’t come at it from this kind of weakness. Hey, did you look at my proposal? Did you know it’s a really weak position to come up? From you know, it just allows you to come across with a little bit more confidence and a little bit more, you know, owning it a little bit more Sure.

Andy Paul 20:09
Well, I think you’re also making a case that if this is a good prospect you’ve been dealing with, and you feel like you’re in a strong position, you’ve, you’ve gotten the commitments to that point that you’ve wanted to get in terms of them moving forward and their commitment to the, the the approach you would take for solving the problems, all that stuff, that it’s really just confirmation. So I send a proposal, they read the executive summary, look at the pricing, oftentimes, with my expense benefits, make sure it’s the same as what they heard before and they could be ready to go. Yeah,

Adam Hempenstall 20:41
That’s also true. And I think, you know, that’s, that’s the next thing is is, you know, if they are ready to go, Well, what next? What’s the next thing? Right, and I did a little like, we did a little YouTube show a little while back, I’m done. I think we did four seasons of it. We call it proposal breakdown. And what it was was people sent through real proposals. Some more customers, some weren’t. So quality was buried.

And it was really, really staggering to me how many people didn’t put any sort of next steps on the proposal in the proposal. So they’re just giving the info, but no instructions. It’s not a guided tour, which is what it should be. It should be like, cool. So here was this thing we discussed, and there was this. And there was all the details I promised you. And there’s this bit and there’s this bit, and this is how much it’s gonna cost. This is how long it’s gonna take. And here’s what you do next, right? You know, here’s where you sign, then this is going to happen, then that’s going to happen. all nice and simple, or very cool. Just type your name and press go. That’s it. Like, that’s what it should be like,

Andy Paul 21:47
right? Well, one of the values of doing an online proposal system is that Yeah, you integrate signature and even payment depending on the type of product you’re selling. Right there.

Adam Hempenstall 21:58
Yeah, exactly. No But what was incredible to me Was it okay, let’s just pretend that you’re not using fancy online proposal software. And you’re doing it with, you know, word and a PDF and say hi to the dinosaurs for me.

Andy Paul 22:31
Yeah. If people like to be told that’s okay.

Adam Hempenstall 22:38
And it doesn’t have to be complicated, like keep it simple, like, you know, print this out sign. send it back. Okay, that’s a bit annoying. Obviously, it’d be better if it was online, digital signature fine. But keep it simple. Don’t have complicated stuff in there. There was one proposal we reviewed, and it was I think the theory was good. It was a list of expectations. So I think the idea behind it was quite good. It was like, here’s what you can expect from us. And when we expect it.

Andy Paul 23:26
Someone starts looking really complicated. I deal with it. I just get the tribe.

I long talked about, you know that one of the most important sales calls you ever make is the first call you make after you sign the deal with the buyer because that’s, that’s when you really start dealing with expectations. Again, it’s because if you’re dealing with a buyer, and they’re talking to five different vendors, potential vendors for a product solve their problem. I guarantee you that when they think Sign on the line with you. What’s in their mind about what they’re gonna receive is some mix of all five products from the five different vendors. And so your job, first call after they sign the order is to call back your customer and say, Hey, I just want to review with you, what you’re going to expect to happen at this point and what you’re going to receive when you receive it and so on. And it’s a beautiful way to start a relationship on a good foot otherwise, now your prospects are a little confused when they after they sign. So yeah,

Adam Hempenstall 24:32
That was interesting. Sorry, I’m just gonna say it was an interesting story where one of our customers or one of our oldest customers, actually a chap caJled Gack, found a web design agency and he sent a proposal to one of his clients. They didn’t look at the terms and conditions which he includes in his proposal. Just a simple sort of Freelancer contracts, nothing heavy, but she didn’t look at it at all. And she also did look at the part where he explained what was So I was going to do so with the features specification of dialogues and stuff. So she signed it. And immediately he sounded right to me. So he called her up and was like, Hey, I just wanted to check. Basically do exactly what you said, I just run through, just re summarize. And he was like, wow, we went through that first page. We weren’t miles apart. She thought we would be getting one thing we were building another another thing that she’d signed. So you could say, well, you signed it, you know, today, that was it. But that might be great and cool. But is that good for a relationship? Not

Adam Hempenstall 25:41
Yeah. And she would have felt, you know, heavily aggrieved that this wasn’t what was delivered, but she had a massive misunderstanding because she didn’t bother reading it. So he cleared all that up with her. There were a few differences. They sorted out, resigned the new proposal, she definitely read at this time. It was all good. But it was interesting. He couldn’t have done that. If he didn’t know what she’d read? So if that was just like a PDF that was just either signed or not right. Now then,

Andy Paul 26:05
Well, that’s interesting. Yeah, that’s true. It’s great to have a record of what people actually went through and what they looked at. But yeah, I would say even in the case of an online proposal system, like better proposals or physical yeah call the customer after they’ve signed the order, just walk, spend 10 minutes just walking them through, as you said, Hey, this is what you told us you wanted. This is what we understood. This is why I proposed this. And this is what you’re really getting and when, and I know so many salespeople that get frightened by that prospect. Oh, they’re gonna cancel the order and to your point. Yeah, jack jack got the order. Yeah, he was upfront with her and explained it. That’s what happens people. Yeah, always take that step. So I want to go through some data that you had talked about in some of your articles you’ve written and so on that I thought was interesting. So um, We are covered, but you’d said, Don’t send a PDF, I think the data was you increase your chances by 78% was that conversion present, if you don’t send a PDF versus some sort of interactive online,

Adam Hempenstall 27:14
This is a little bit tricky to fully work out. But basically, this was about whether people print out the PDF on our platform. So if it was printed out, there was less chance of being digitally signed, which stands to reason, because it’s been taken offline, right? So generally, you want to keep it online, keep it where they can sign it, I think this is the message here. But generally PDFs are as well designed as they can be, even if I don’t know who’s the best design company in the world, Apple or something, you know, if you’re Apple design, it’s still a PDF, right? And I’ll get away from the fact that it just looks like one whereas when you’ve done something else a little bit more interesting, a bit more engaging. It’s just got that extra sort of feel of dealing with the proper company, you know, right?

Andy Paul 28:00
Why do you also say that based on your studies, the data your customers use as a system that yeah, that fancy cover, and cover art doesn’t buy anything.

Adam Hempenstall 28:12
So much. The main, the most important part of the proposal is the introduction part, that is the most important part. It’s always the part that’s read the most. It’s always the part that we never actually published this in the, in the reports. We can put a link to the show notes, but it’s from if we just go to better proposals.io forward slash reports. So you can see a couple of years worth of reports there. So nice little visual graphics, you can go through them and have a look through and there’s a ton of different data points there. But one of the things we just researched and decided not to include was a relationship between the amount of time people were on that first page what would be the intro pain, the word count So we were trying to work out a difference there, and it did stack up. But we couldn’t find a sort of, suppose a nice sort of friendly way of portraying the data, but it does hold true. Like, the word count matches the, you know, the average reading speed and all that kind of stuff. It matched up with what text was there. Whereas on some other pages selected at random, it wasn’t quite the case. So generally speaking, so meaning so meaning that they read the intro page, but they scan the rest.

Adam Hempenstall 29:38
An optimal length for the introduction, we didn’t look into it. We didn’t look at it also, again, a little bit complicated at that stage. But I would say and this is just got this is this is not this is not data, this part but I would say, you don’t want it to be too mad. You know, it’s got to be very readable. I think the second you start going over to three paragraphs that’s going to get pretty, pretty heavy pretty quick. So, you know, you’re asking someone to do a very boring job. You’re asking them to sit there and read a really boring document. That’s, that’s what you’re asking them to do. It’s, it’s not really that fun. So, if you make it engaging, and if you include nice imagery, does it really help with conversion? No, but it makes it a bit more readable. So it’s one of those things it helps a little bit just to kind of break up some blocks of text, make it a bit more engaging. bullet points a great big was a text on good. They don’t look at you know, it’s like basic readability skills are pretty important, especially in you know, like in dry. If the document is quite dry and the subject matter is dry, then you need more stuff to kind of make it a bit more interesting.

Andy Paul 30:57
Yeah, I’m a big fan of bullet points. proposals and important documents more so than ever these days because again, as you look at, look at your inbox, right, you’re scanning your inboxes there’s no one goes through it methodically, step by step by step or, you know, email by email by email, you know, they sort of treat their inbox like a social feed, you sort of scan what what catches your eye. And so if people, you know, people are gonna be scanning the document, then yeah, the blocks of text, they’ll look like, yeah, solid chunks of ink as opposed to bullet points that can catch their attention. Yeah, one thing you said that was interesting, that sort of runs against conventional wisdom was that in your proposal, you should only have one offer. And, and there’s books written saying that, you know, you need three offers, you know, or you need two offers and just interested your perspective on how you

Adam Hempenstall 31:56
so I’ll explain where the data came from. And that’s it. It gives some context. So in better proposals in our pricing table feature, when you sell your pricing, you can do things like bolt on options. And you can give people multiple choice. So package a, package B, package C, that kind of thing. And what we found was that the conversion rate was higher if you didn’t give people options, so just a single option. So single option, his word is, and that was it. So if you didn’t give people options, and you didn’t use those options, then we found the conversion rate to be slightly higher. Now, there’s a caveat to this because I’ve kind of matured in the last couple of years since we started doing all this kind of stuff. Obviously, it’s just one data point. It’s not cross referenced with a ton of other things. So take it with a pinch of salt, but there is an element of perhaps some truth to it in the sense that maybe it’s like if you are going to do package offers, really think them through and make sure that they are done. With best practice because what some people do is to explain this, so Okay, so let’s say you’re in a supermarket and you’re looking at the value brand, the mid range brand and the store, right? You look at it biscuits or something super high end what right? The difference in price there is going to be a maximum of say $3. And that isn’t going to make any difference to your life whatsoever, you know, given us ones, but it isn’t going to make a big difference. It’s like you just go with a gut feel, and that’s it. But the impact of getting the wrong choice doesn’t matter, right. Now scale up and add some zeros.

Andy Paul 33:42
You know, something complex will make it something that somebody has, right though there’s something somebody has something at stake in the decision, right?

Adam Hempenstall 33:51
So that’s exactly this is my opinion on the data and I’m trying to make sense of it, but my theory on it was that sometimes people don’t get the package offers, right? And because they don’t set them out how some of these great famous books suggest that you do it by framing one of them as the better deal and kind of edging them towards a certain one, which is the whole point of the pack selling in the first place. Now, if you do that, and you do it correctly, then I think it could work brilliantly. But I think what a lot of people do is they go, Oh, well, package a is this one, package B is this one, package C is this one. And they genuinely can’t tell the difference between or not can’t tell the difference. They can’t make a choice, right, because they haven’t engineered a decision out of them. And I think that’s where people fall down. When

Andy Paul 34:42
I think back to the whole philosophy of the proposal, the type that that you were talking about, especially if it is a summary of what you’ve gone through before, is at least in a b2b sale with any sort of complexity. You shouldn’t be getting to that point of the deal where you’re saying, Well, you know, you could do a walk? Or you could do B, which one do you want? Right? I mean, as the salesperson, it’s your job to have led them to what is the choice of what is the best approach they should use to go forward? And, yeah, I think you can come across looking, again, my experience is not based on 10s of thousands based on hundreds, if not thousands, of deals, but like, yeah, the customer wants to think that, you know, right, you’re making the recommendation, what’s best for them.

Adam Hempenstall 35:32
It’s the lab coat thing. It’s the it’s the white coat, take the doctors approach to it, you know, it’s like, so that, you know, it depends on your positioning, it depends on the position, if you’re an order processing kind of salesperson, I’m not downplaying it, but if that’s your role, then sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to play that consultant. But if you’re in a position where you can play that consultative role and you can be that sort of trusted advisor and come across as the person that knows what they should do, then. Yeah, you should be guiding them to a solution. And you should have already done that. By that point. It seems backwards to me that you would get to the pricing stage of a proposal, which is pretty far through the process. I mean, in terms of like, initially speaking, right and right away point, you’re almost at the end there. Okay. So which one do you want? It’s almost like that should have happened three weeks ago or seven phone calls ago? Yeah, it’s so it’s weird. It’s like that’s, you know, it’s almost like you’re almost home and then you’re like, Why just go back out? And I was like, mentally I was

when I’d go out anymore. Why done?

Andy Paul 36:42
Right. I think salespeople oftentimes panic with a single option because they think that’s the single option. What if they don’t like it? Well, point that we made earlier is there’s nothing you should say in a proposal. That’s news to the prospect. They should know all of it. something you’ve told them before.

Adam Hempenstall 37:06
Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s a massive point. I think if there is a takeaway anywhere, it that that could be, you know, that’s that’s a massive point is you should never ever ever send a proposal or a price to anybody and it be a surprise to them daba Well, they should know, within a range. Right?

Andy Paul 37:25
Well, I think a second point sort of allied with that is I’m a huge believer that you just never send a proposal without having a meeting or you know, online meeting call where you review it almost in real time with the buyer. So hey, I just I just sent this to you. Hop, let’s hop on this call. Here’s the link. Let’s walk through

Adam Hempenstall 37:48
what a lot of people do actually. It’s really, it’s really interesting, especially with things like zoom and, and this kind of stuff is they will build a proposal not send them the link, then jump on zoom, and we’ll screen share the proposal. So they can’t skip ahead. Well, we can’t skip ahead. But then they’ve got it ready on the center page in another tab. And when they get to that point, if they’re thinking, yeah, this is good, this is there, go there, just press enter, they call check your email. And you can open the link and then you can go and sign up. It’s like they guide them all the way through, handle the objections, and they go, yep, brilliant. Let’s go for it. You go cool. Check your email. And there it is. Perfect. And there it is. top nine. pesco. Brilliant. It’s awesome. Really, really, really good way of doing it.

Andy Paul 38:37
There. I agree. Yeah. And that, so just make sure people understand as you prepare the proposal, but you review it with them first before you send it to them. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So last, last bit to talk about and again, I interested you data supporting the system because you’re pretty strong about it, but as you say, never labeled the pricing section. pricing, an idea of data that supports why that’s a bad idea or do what they should do have data about ROI or return on investment or investment or so on any data that supports that one or another service?

Adam Hempenstall 39:14
Yes. So I am just scrolling to report and I will find it for you.

But yeah, the general idea is that, obviously, it depends what you’re selling. You know, if you’re selling a You’re joking about early biscuits or a lot of ROI on biscuits. Yeah, tastes good, but that’s

Andy Paul 39:37
great. Thanks droids.

Adam Hempenstall 39:42
But yeah, no, we the way that we came to the conclusion with the, with the pricing section and working that out was we we simply looked out which one we had a feeling it would be the word investment, that would be a trigger point because it was built into an awful lot of our templates, we knew that would have happened. Have you been waiting? So we simply just looked through, did a search for conversion rate of proposals that use the word investment on the pricing page versus, or naming it broke with investment in versus not and the conversion rate was higher. We didn’t publish the conversion rates. But that was that was how he was, that was how he came to it. I do remember being quite significant. I can’t exactly remember the numbers, but I remember thinking, yeah, that doesn’t surprise me that it’s higher. But I’m surprised it’s that high.

Andy Paul 40:34
Right. Yeah. And I think that that’s an important takeaway for people because, yeah, a lot of people will see that and say, well, Oh, come on. Just one word pricing investment. It’s like, if you’re using investment, the customer thinks you’re trying to hide something, but I think it’s really just the opposite. I think words do matter. And for the most part in b2b sales, your customers are making an investment in your solution and your system. I think If you think words matter, I think but I think it’s a good choice.

Adam Hempenstall 41:04
And it’s sort of, you know, even if all things are equal, right, and you think, well, I don’t care what I use, it doesn’t it doesn’t matter. might as well use it because there’s some data somewhere that suggests that it works best. If you’re on the fence with it, you might as well

Andy Paul 41:22
You can always test these things and and, to your point is, yeah, man, we don’t have data from millions of examples. But the fact is, the margin between winning and losing sales is so slight, so small, I tell people, imagine that it’s 1% difference between you and the next guy. So if that’s the case, all these things are important to test and to try and see what works for you.

Adam Hempenstall 41:51
Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, in this day and age, a lot of people want like this golden nugget and this sort of silver bullet kind of solution and No as as we’ve sort of grown better proposals, and it’s, you know, decent sized company now I’ve kind of realized that there really isn’t anything, there’s no one thing that really moves the needle that much. It’s very rare. It’s very, very rare to find something that’s genuine, like lottery wins style. Victory. It’s a it’s, except maybe this podcast.

Adam Hempenstall 42:24
But yeah, you know, there’s very, there’s, there’s very few things that truly move the needle, that much like most everything is a touch of a of a, you know, fraction of a percentage, right. And so you might as well take as many of them as you can.

Andy Paul 42:43
Yeah, well, and also given that you have so many tools and technologies enable us to test these things out. Test it out. Yeah, test it out, see what works best for you for your customers. What’s congruent with the way you sell the congruent the way the customers buy? Yeah, and all those things. So Alright, Adam, we’ve run out of time, but it’s been great talking with you. And I really appreciate you. Yeah. I think it’s getting close to 11 o’clock at night for Adam.

So thank you for

staying. Thank you for staying up to talk with us and really appreciate it. So how can people find out more about better proposals and how can they connect with you?

Adam Hempenstall 43:21
So the best way to have anything to do with what I do is follow our blog. That’s where I write, that’s where I post all my thoughts. So that is housed on our better proposals website, which is better proposals.io. And then you can find the blog there. Sounds of books and things like that, that I’ve written. And that’s a nice feedback loop there when people will read, read some of the books that I’ve written over the years and then you know, sort of reach. That’s always really, really cool. I have on LinkedIn, but it’s not something that I particularly engage with much. Yeah, it’s Yeah, any feedback for the for the books is always nice.

Andy Paul 44:03
Okay, excellent. Well, Adam, again, thanks very much and look forward to talking again.

Adam Hempenstall 44:07
Thank you so much, take care.