The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients: 6 Steps to Unlimited Clients & Financial Freedom

can wrap them in a proposal structure that you’ll use consistently for every project. The four-to-five page format outlined below works well for engagements from $10,000 to $1 million.

What is Not Covered in the Context Discussion • The detailed approach or process you’ll propose • The number of consultants and analysts on the project • How you’re going to interact with the client • Project fees • Contract structures • Pretty much everything else

You’ve brought up keeping the cost down a couple of times now. Is there a number you have in mind or a limit we need to stay below?”

Cost basis: You determine your fees based on the cost to do the project.

How Much Should You Charge?

In other words, rather than launching into a passionate, well-researched defense of why your proposal is best for Yusimi, you’ll have much better luck if you start by defending his point of view. You sought first to understand; now, acknowledge the reasons his position could be correct.

The perfect proposal isn’t intended to synthesize your understanding into a single, ultimate submission. Instead, it affords you an opportunity to mold your offering into an even more obvious choice by soliciting your prospect’s reaction to different combinations of approaches and terms.

Clients rarely buy the services from independent consultants that are generalists. On the other hand, executives pay handsomely for specialists whose narrow Fishing Line precisely matches the problem they urgently need to solve.

Value basis: