14 – Should you be doing custom proposals?

A custom proposal is often less about serving your client and more about a lack of clarity, confidence, or conviction in your own offer — and it rarely delivers your best work.

If you've ever spent hours crafting the perfect proposal only to get ghosted, this episode is your wake-up call.

Tune in to discover why the custom proposal trap is often a symptom of a deeper business problem — and what to build instead.

LINKS:

Blog post 👉 Why every established coach needs a signature framework

Beth’s program, The Brand Reset

transcript

Hello my friends, welcome back to the show. Today we're diving into a topic that I know a lot of you are dealing with, or have dealt with at some point — custom proposals. Should you be doing them? When do they actually make sense? And if you've ever spent hours putting together a beautifully designed, amazing proposal only to get ghosted, this episode is for you.

I'm going to share my own journey with proposals and many of the mistakes I've made, and we'll look at why coaches and consultants end up in the custom proposal trap in the first place. I also have a blog post I want you to check out on the benefits of establishing a signature framework — just click the link in the show notes.

So here's a fun fact you may not know about me. In my corporate career, I veered off for a few years into the architecture world, where I spent four and a half years as a proposal writer. In that industry, the primary way that you win work is by responding to RFPs and crafting custom proposals. After years of doing them, you can imagine I got very good at them — and also very burnt out on them.

But when I launched my own business as a marketing freelancer many years later, guess what? I defaulted to custom proposals. Old habits, right.

Now when I started back in 2017, I was not working within any kind of structure. I was doing a little bit of everything, and because my business and brand was so unclear, every new prospect felt like — okay, this is a completely custom situation. So I'd sit down and build these beautifully designed, thoughtfully worded proposal documents from scratch every time.

And I'll be honest, part of me got a little satisfaction out of crafting them and applying those skills I had honed for years. But the truth is, proposals are tedious for everyone involved — the person writing them and the person reading them.

Over time, as I evolved my business and evolved into being a Business Clarity mentor, I developed two signature offers, put all the details including the price on my website, and finally started to break that proposal habit. Mostly. Because I would still get tempted in certain situations and backslide. But I'd force myself to communicate the details of a custom offer in a simple text-based email — no more fancy design, just the facts. So that was progress.

And sure, AI can do this in an instant now, but it still takes human thinking and time to figure out a custom scope, timeline, process, and price.

So let's talk about why this happens — why we end up doing custom proposals.

Reason #1: Your niche isn't set. What you do, who you help, and how. If your business and brand is sort of loosely defined, if your offers aren't set, then of course you're building proposals from scratch.

Reason #2: Lack of confidence. And I say that with so much empathy, because it's real and I know from firsthand experience. When you don't fully trust your expertise, your offer, or your price, there's this tendency to hand the power over to the prospect — to let them decide the offer, to let them define what they think they need, rather than you, as the expert, diagnosing the problem and confidently directing them towards the right solution. So if self-doubt creeps in, that can lead to a custom offer.

Reason #3: Desperation for the sale. Hey, we've all been there, right? When things feel slow, or when you really want to land a client, it's tempting to say yes to whatever the prospect wants. And by the way, it can work — but it creates problems down the line, because you're not delivering your best work. Instead, you're delivering a one-off, improvised version that doesn't serve them as well as it could.

A custom proposal rarely delivers your best work. Let me explain.

When you're in year one or two of your business — or let's just say in the early stages of offering a particular service — you are of course in an experimental phase. You may be trying out different services, offer types, client types, and ways of working. But once you have a certain amount of experience, you gain an understanding of what the client needs to learn and do in order to get the full transformation. You develop materials and incorporate certain tools or modalities into your process. You can identify common problems, issues, or patterns — and you know how to address them.

When you get to that point, you're ready to package up your approach into a signature program with a signature process. And how cool is that? This is where entrepreneurship gets creative and personal — you are the program designer.

When you take a step back to create this kind of dream program, one that is grounded in your unique brilliance, your approach, your skills, and who you are, it is so energizing to see that program and framework come to life. It's an opportunity to create something amazing that you know will create the best results for your client — and at the same time, create a more sustainable business for you.

When you look at it that way, why on earth would you want to give that power away and have your prospects dictate the program?

And look, it's not that we shouldn't listen to what people are asking for. That's good feedback, that's important information, and we should always be open to adapting — especially the first few times that we run a new program.

My signature program, the Brand Reset, is a three-phase, nine-step process, and it's rooted in what I now know works and what I believe is the very best approach to evolving your business and brand. If someone came to me and said, "Hey Beth, I just need Phase 2" — the answer is no. Because Phase 1 lays the necessary foundation for all the critical decisions we make in Phase 2, and it would be doing the prospect a disservice if we skipped over it.

And you know, that's a mistake I've made in the past — being willing to skip over essential pieces, or cut the timeline in half, or add in some kind of custom component in order to please the prospect and make the sale. Or because of self-doubt. Or because the price was too high for the prospect and I genuinely wanted to help them.

And you may be nodding your head right now. Maybe you've been there too. And maybe you're thinking about how in your heart you just want to help people and do what you feel called to do. But let me be real with you — operating in this loose, custom way does not make sense on so many levels.

One of my clients told me, when we started working together, that she was finding herself agreeing to certain services that she doesn't even feel passionate about or want to take on anymore. So she was making money, but feeling very frustrated and drained by those certain aspects of her business. And I so relate to that.

As business owners, we're always so focused on winning clients and making clients happy that we can lose sight of what we want to do — and what we know works best to solve clients' problems and get them that ultimate outcome.

A little bit of courage and a whole lot of clarity on your who, what, and how avoids these problems. When you clarify what you do, who you serve, and how — that's the framework. That's what scales your impact and income. Because you simply cannot scale a business that runs on custom offers.

And I know the number one concern here — I had it once too. This worry that a set offer and framework means you can't personalize the client experience. Not true, not true my friends. You can absolutely operate within a framework and still adapt to individual client needs.

For example, if I have a client who gets a bit stuck at step four of my process, I have a special exercise I can pull out from my files, and I will chat with them more to get to the heart of the issue and solve it. Different clients have different sticking points, and there's plenty of room in my process to address them within the program I've designed.

If you're a coach and you find the client needs extra sessions, you can always offer the option to buy additional sessions. Or you can have a continuation offer as part of your offer suite, so that once the signature program is complete, they can continue working with you.

The defined framework also helps from a brand and sales angle too. When I put the framework on my website and in my marketing, it helps prospects really see the value I offer and how I'm different from competitors. It doesn't give anything away, because the content of the program is not public at all — just the nine steps and the broad highlights of what it covers.

At this point, I can tell you that behind the scenes of my business, I'm now delivering my best work in less time. So clients are getting better results and a better experience, and executing it is a lot less heavy for me. I have completely changed my opinion on this aspect of business — I am a true, true fan now of frameworks, and I think they're so effective and so liberating.

So obviously I'm making a strong case here to ditch custom offers and ditch proposals. But do proposals ever make sense in certain situations?

For coaches selling to individuals — B to C, in other words — no. I don't think it makes sense once you reach a certain level of experience. I think you can create an offer suite that works for you, and you can potentially look at offer add-ons, tiers, or variations. But you really should standardize your business model.

For consultants selling to businesses — B to B, in other words — that's another story. In that world, proposals are such a deeply ingrained, expected way of doing business. So you may not be able to completely stop doing proposals. But there is a lot you can do to simplify them, and a lot you can do to standardize your offer.

Both coaches and consultants can offer a signature program and process, and two things that will help you sell it are effective messaging and a visual diagram. I have a visual diagram of my nine-step process right on my website, and it gives me something visual to show while I verbally explain it. As part of my program, I help clients create their own visual diagram as well.

But back to the proposal question for consultants. First, I recommend you standardize your offer suite as much as possible. Let's imagine you own a restaurant, and the only thing you offer is a special four-course tasting menu. That's it. If you want to add more complexity, maybe you offer four, five, or six courses. You can offer wine pairings as an additional add-on. And if you want to sell a few more items and options, you might provide an à la carte menu as well — but all the dishes are set and clear. You're not changing the menu for each and every person that comes to the restaurant. I hope that analogy makes sense.

The thing is, I want you to simplify and standardize as much as possible, even if you're offering a lot of different things in your business.

Next, when it comes to providing a written proposal — if you have to, make it short. Can it be four pages or less, plus the contract or whatever legal documents need to be signed? I think we overload proposals with way too much information, and somehow we let them become the star of the sales process. It's like we're making the proposal do all the work — the selling, the convincing, the explaining — and it ends up becoming this massive thing that nobody really wants to deal with.

There are three buckets of information that we need to get across. The information that prospects need to be sold on your expertise and approach. The offer details that they need at the decision stage. And the finer details they need during onboarding once they say yes. Do not try to stuff all of that into the proposal — it's overwhelming.

When you do get to the proposal stage, present it live and not in a document. Present it in a proposal review meeting with all the key stakeholders, and see if you can come to a consensus in that meeting and get verbal agreement right then. The written proposal should simply sum up and confirm what you've already discussed live.

And although I'm not a fan of custom offers, if it's a complex project where the scope and price genuinely depend on a range of factors that really requires a custom program, you can offer a paid discovery phase. Have you heard of this before? A paid discovery phase. A lot of consultants will do this — they do the work to clarify what the client truly needs and wants, a type of audit or deep analysis. And out of that discovery, they'll create a custom roadmap and strategy. That work, my friends, is highly valuable and takes time — so you absolutely can get paid for it.

Now, to bring this home and bring it full circle — custom proposals are often a sign that something isn't yet clear in your business, or a sign that you're lacking confidence and conviction. If you're finding this is a hard habit to break, ask yourself: what is the underlying reason why I'm doing this? Because if you can name it, you can fix it — and probably save yourself countless hours of wasted time.

If you're ready to stop building from scratch and create a more cohesive business and brand, I'd love to help you inside my signature program, the Brand Reset.

Until next time.