Different types of clients have different rules around how you become their supplier, how they become your customer.
Many large organisations require you to go through a tender process - you spend a lot of time providing them with information in a format that suits them, so they can compare you to the other applicants in a generally standardised way.
Most smaller businesses go through a series of meetings and interviews with people, then ask you to put together a proposal describing your offer and how it's going to work for them. You submit your proposal then they evaluate it against the other proposals they have received and choose a winner.
Both of those have something in common - it's all about how the client evaluates you against the competition.
In my software business I do things differently.
I don't do tenders - because describing what makes me unique and a good fit is difficult to fit into someone else's template. And I don't blindly submit a proposal and wait for them to evaluate it.
Instead, I set up a meeting; a video call or even just a phone call. And I say "we will go through the proposal together".
At the start of the meeting, I have a bit of general talk, with some carefully seeded points I drop into the conversation. And then I email them the proposal while we are on the call and we go through it, page by page, together.
The proposal itself follows a set format - objectives, metrics, value, options, testimonial, next steps - which in turn gives a simple structure to our conversation. This is what we are hoping to achieve, this is how we will measure progress, this is the impact it will have on your business, here are three different ways (at three different prices) to achieve those objectives, here's another project that went well and this is what we do next.
Firstly, that proposal is really quick to write. I rarely spend more than an hour on it - because it doesn't really contain much detail - it's all about where we're going to go rather than how we're going to get there.
Secondly, any questions or objections that the client has, they can ask me as we go through the proposal. Rather than having to sit there, squint at it, not understand and then stew on how this might not be a good fit, I can get ahead of the game and pre-empt any potential objections before they happen.
This simple act - delivering the proposal one-to-one - has meant that 86% of the proposals I wrote for my software business resulted in contracts. And you have to agree, that's a pretty good conversion rate.