What I Use Instead of Proposals (And Why It Works Better)

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 380
Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Are proposals killing your business? Probably not, probably not the case, but they're definitely not helping your business. In some cases, they're actively hurting your business. You think that they make you look professional, you think you need them in your business to actually get clients, but except for very few rare cases where you're actually submitting an RFP, they're the reason you're probably not closing as many clients as you could be closing. So in this episode, I'm breaking down why traditional proposals are a massive waste of your time, what to do instead, and how to close more projects without writing these 10-page, fancy pants proposals that clients sometimes don't even read, and then other times they do read and they just ghost you and you never hear from them again. Now, not only have I helped hundreds of clients get through this whole proposal trap problem and get to the other side of it and create a real process that actually closes clients, I've spent years sending proposals like an idiot before I found out a better way to sell, and I lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of paid projects that I could have gotten had I known what I was doing. So instead of you doing the same exact stupid thing that I've done, just learn from my mistakes. Learn now so you save yourself the money and the heartache. And as a bonus, I'll even show you how you can turn what was your proposal into a paid product, especially if your service is very custom or complex. And even if it's not custom or complex, you can still do this. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 380 Good God, so many episodes. You got a lot to catch up on if you're new here. This podcast is for creative freelancers like you, maybe who want to earn more money without selling your souls. On this podcast, I take a lot of influence from a lot of industries and best practices from other industries, of people that are smarter than us as creatives and freelancers because we're not very smart when it comes to business. Sorry.
And I take that and I apply it to creative freelancers and what works in our businesses so that you can earn more money, usually without selling your souls. Sometimes you have to sell yourself a little bit for the short term so you can make more money in long term without selling your soul, but that's a whole other conversation. Before I get on the topic today, there's a very important announcement for this podcast. You may have already noticed it if you're watching on YouTube. If you're not watching on YouTube, I'll just describe it to you. Behind my left shoulder, your right, if you're watching on the screen right now, is a beautiful silver trophy. It's called the Geiger. And what this signifies is that I am the champion of last season's Fantasy Football League. This is actually my third time winning this trophy. I am a three time champ, the only one in my league. And I also have a wonderful shirt on to commemorate this. So if you're wondering why I'm wearing this or talking about this, it is the start of the season right now. So this will air after the football season started. I don't care about NFL whatsoever, except for Fantasy Football. My shirt, which I'll show to you, and I'll describe it to you if you're not watching on YouTube right now, it just says Fantasy Football. And it has a wizard carrying a football and a staff and a little gnome running next to each other.
And it says, it's real if you believe it. Adorable. So for my Fantasy Football fans out there, welcome to the show. You're listening to a three-time champ, so you know you're in good hands. All right, let's get into this stuff. First of all, let's talk about why freelancers even lean on proposals in the first place. Because a lot of you, this is your comfort thing. It is your comfort blankie. It's your blankie. Your proposals are your blankie. You don't want to lose your blankie, right? Sometimes it's probably best to lose your blankie before you start. Like, do you want to bring your blankie on a date to your wedding? We got to ditch the blankie at some point. So first of all, freelancers lean on proposals because that's just, I'll say it in the accent that it deserves, because that's just how it's always been done in my industry. If you've listened to this podcast before, you've heard me talk about something called the inbred business. That is where you just look to the tiny little cesspool of just your neighbor to the left and to the right, or just your cousin to the left and to the right, for how to run your freelance business. And when I say cousin or neighbor, I just mean like literally other photographers, literally other videographers, literally only other graphic designers, literally only other music producers. You only look to the people in your little circle for how to run your business. And, oh, Bobby at the studio down the road, he just sent his proposal, so I'm gonna do the same thing. Oh, Deborah, she sent his proposal, so I'm gonna do the same thing. And that's all you ever do. And so that results in what we call an inbred business. You don't have a diverse gene pool. We don't want an inbred business. We want a good, healthy, diverse genetic gene pool. But some of you know better. You know that you shouldn't send proposals, but you still do it because you have no idea how to run a real sales process. Now, we've had tons of podcast episodes about this in the past. I'll just give you two episodes really quick. If you're like, hey, I suck at sales, I should probably learn this. Episode 350, What 1600 Sales Calls Taught Me About Closing Complete Strangers. Or episode 361, He Had 20,000 Website Visitors in a Broken Sales Process. Two good episodes to kind of dive into if you suck at sales. But that's the second reason you lean on proposals, is you just don't know how to run a real sales process. And the third reason is you know how to run a real sales process, and yet you still send proposals, and you know you shouldn't send proposals, but the only reason you still send proposals is the fear of rejection. It is so much easier to just say, cool, I'll send you a proposal, and then run off to your little dark cave and get your little cheeto fingers on a keyboard, and I'm going to send that proposal. Your little troll voice, your little troglodyte cave creature, and then just send it off, instead of actually being a human being and talking to your client. Oh God, who would have thought talking to your client might be a better way of doing it? But those are the general reasons why freelancers lean on this. It's either ignorance, you don't know how to do better, or just fear, fear of rejection. But let's talk about why proposals suck. Just some formalized points of why I think proposals suck. First is this one-way monologue. Kind of alluded to it earlier. You're in your damp, dark cave, like Schmiegel, just sitting in that weird, the animated death note where he's just like sitting in the chair with his feet up on the chair, toes exposed, really creepy. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. If you know, you know. You're just typing up the proposal, and you're just crafting this, in your mind, a masterpiece that's going to land the client. And it's basically your brain dump of how you're going to help this client out. And it's one-way. There's no two-way dialogue. There's no conversation here. That alone should show you how flawed it is, because the more complex it is, the less likely this is going to actually work, and the less likely you're going to be able to convert somebody through a proposal with no actual conversation.