Whether you’re working to change direction in your engagement with a partner company, or pitching your services to a new local business, you’ll need an outstanding proposal to make the sale. What resources do you have at your disposal to make your proposal stand out from the rest? One option that many companies overlook when crafting their B2B proposals is the use of pictures and other visual enhancements.
How can pictures make your proposal stand out? They can make your proposal clearer, more engaging, and bolster the concrete details of your plan. Much like in their use elsewhere on the web and beyond, effective image use will hold your readers’ attention as they work through your proposal. Images guide and clarify where words leave things up to the imagination.
It’s time to start writing better B2B proposals. Organize and communicate your ideas with images.
Informative Images
There are many different types of images that you might use in a business pitch, including photographs, diagrams, graphs, tables, and even infographics. In fact, when working with other businesses, you have more options than companies that sell to the general public since other professionals will have both the interest and understanding to engage with technical graphs in a way the general public may not.
Using a graph to break up long stretches of text is a great strategy for B2B proposals because it can keep the reader from skimming the text rapidly by offering a seeming diversion from your body paragraphs. In fact, they are absorbing at least as much information by reading your graph, but the change in visual modality and processing structure is valuable from an attention and comprehension standpoint.
Another reason graphs are great for business proposals is that they allow you to make projections. It’s one thing to say that a certain outcome is likely based on prior events – but no matter the factual support, readers may disregard the assertion. When reading a graph, however, extrapolation based on clear data points tends to be more convincing. Offering an image, then, does something you words may not do successfully.
High Speed Processing
Visual content can also be used in your B2B proposals to provide order and organization, such as by using diagrams that grow more complex as each new phase of an operation unfolds. You might offer these diagrams each with an explanation, or you can put them side by side and show the progression using only images.
Most people would think that using only the images would be the less effective communication strategy in a proposal, but studies have shown that visuals are processed many times more quickly than text. If your reader spends significantly less time on visuals, it isn’t because they aren’t paying attention – it’s because they already have read and understood what they say. This can have incredible results in terms of selling power.
Images sell because they stick in the mind and that’s what will help you grab clients. The more clients can remember about your proposal when they think back over the review process, the more likely they are to choose your business over your competition. A proposal that leaves them wondering about the details or execution, on the other hand, may get shuffled to the bottom of the pile. With images, there’s no wondering – the process or product is right there in the proposal.
The Comparison Factor
Another way you can use visuals in your business pitch is for cross-industry comparison. Is there a way you can visualize how you do business and the services you offer as they compare to the lesser services of others in the industry? Since any good pitch should offer an industry review, providing a visual guide to the benefits of your services is a great way to angle this review.
Infographics are a great visual method for presenting this industry review since they cull all of the key data and show the relationships between them. Your infographic can show everything from technical product improvements for a particular product to industry awards and reviews. Presenting this information as an infographic is significantly more interesting than doing a standard side-by-side comparison with a chart and the increased complexity indicates your commitment to a job well done.
The Key To Completion
Using images in your business pitches isn’t just about flash – it’s a serious part of how you choose to present your company. That makes it vital that you make sure all the details are complete. It’s easy to miss a few things when using visuals – numbering your tables, adding units to your graphs, or offering price quotes alongside your technical diagrams. A thorough pitch will include all of these things and missing them may lead intended clients to believe you’re sloppy.
For each visual you include, do a full review: is something being measured, is a cost or timeline needed to describe this, is it absolutely clear what the image is about and what it’s intended to do? Go through a complete evaluation and ask others to double-check your work.
One effective way to make sure your images aren’t missing anything important is by giving just the visual to your proofreader without the surrounding context. If they don’t know what they’re reading, you may have missed a few details. Back up, reevaluate, and make sure everything is expressed clearly.
Correct Quotes Quick
Need correct quotes to go with your diagrams or your service descriptions in that business pitch. Contact iQuoteXpress to streamline the process and measurably improve your sales success.
Every business wants to know what they’re committing to up-front. iQuoteXpress supports this process through our configure, price, quote (CPQ) software as well as our innovative Quotation & Relationship Management (QRM) software. By synchronizing many phases of the proposal process, we serve the software as a service industry, helping you do your work more effectively.
Now is the time to learn how CPQ and QRM software can work for you. We’ll walk you through how we’ve transformed industry relationships and how we can increase your efficiency and boost sales simultaneously. Proposal by proposal, we help you do business better.
