June 1, 2026

Don’t Overinvest In Proposals

On a recent call, a coaching student expressed severe frustration at putting a lot of time and effort into a sales cycle and proposal process with a “hot prospect”, only to have it fall apart after weeks of back and forth.

My reply:

Well, I mean, it’s really important to not overinvest in the proposal phase because it creates a bad dynamic. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in. I treat any potential projects very lightly. I put in a minimal amount of effort on the sale. If I get it, great. If I don’t, I don’t care. I’ll just get another one.

Which raises the question:

“What if I don’t have any other leads in the pipeline?”

My reply:

If you’re only having a couple opportunities to write a proposal a year, the real problem isn’t your ability to scope or price. It’s that you don’t have enough leads. When you have a lot of leads, you don’t really care. You just don’t put that much effort into it. You do enough to communicate the benefits of what you’re going to do and the prices and all that. But I mean, yeah, you just can’t put too much time into it. Otherwise, you get resentful when they don’t close.

Here’s the thing...

It’s really hard to get good at pricing when you only have a few chances to do it per year.

If you want to get better at pricing, there’s no substitute for practice.

The first step is to get more leads into your pipeline.

Yours,

—J

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