“We recently launched a new product and would love the opportunity to collaborate/do business with your company. Attached is our product introduction — feel free to reach out to learn more!”

How do you handle “collaboration proposal” emails?

As the person responsible for external business partnerships at a company, my inbox is constantly flooded with this type of email, and most of the time they go straight to the trash. The reason is simple: I know I’m just one small recipient on a mass email list. I’m not special to you, and you don’t necessarily need to work with me. Most importantly, I have absolutely no idea what value your so-called “product” brings to our company.

Before we begin, let me clarify some terminology: Whether you’re in BD, marketing, sales, strategy, or planning, in this article I’ll refer to you as a “business development professional.” Any opportunity you encounter for pitching, proposing, or inviting will be called a “proposal,” and whether your proposal target is an individual, a group, or a company, I’ll refer to them as the “client.” This article aims to highlight four essential pieces of homework that business development professionals must do, offering some methods and strategies for improvement, along with foundational concepts and advice for newcomers entering this field.

Any proposal is essentially a fair “barter” transaction. (pixabay.com)

1. Understand the nature of business proposals: An equal exchange between you and your client. Aside from pure sales transactions, in the world of business partnerships, most BD proposals are essentially “barter trades.”

Since before currency even existed, humans understood how to trade to obtain the resources they needed. For example, trading an axe for a sheep, or exchanging labor for food — this form of transaction without currency is known as “barter.” In the internet era, the “goods” being traded are no longer limited to “money” or “physical products.” They can also be a service, an emotional connection, a customer base, or a period of time. For example, a well-known fast food chain recently integrated a startup’s self-service ordering kiosks for free — in reality, they traded “their employees’ operational time costs” for “the startup’s opportunity to showcase their new service.” Many people say “barter isn’t always an equal exchange,” but this is often because we tend to treat transactions we don’t fully understand as “unequal.” For instance, you hear that your friend traded an “oven” with their neighbor for a “brand-new 100-inch TV” — sounds like an absurdly unequal trade. But the reality is, the neighbor won that TV in a raffle and couldn’t even fit it in their home. Your friend seized the opportunity, knowing the neighbor happened to need an oven, and with years of neighborly goodwill factored in, the deal came together naturally. These are all hidden pieces of information invisible to outsiders. That’s why barter transactions are hard for outsiders to replicate. While they may look unfair from the outside, for the parties involved, this may already be the most reasonable “equal exchange” they could find.

“Anyone can make a plain equal-exchange proposal.” If you want to create a groundbreaking one, you need a much deeper understanding of your client’s background.

Use various research tools to thoroughly investigate your client’s background. (pixabay.com)

2. Understand your client’s background: Pre-proposal Due Diligence (DD).

Although I feel like phone cold-calling is a relic of the last century, the reality is that this approach of bombarding random strangers with product information, hoping they’ll nod along, has simply evolved into sending product advertising emails. While sending product information via email is cheaper than phone calls, this spray-and-pray, shotgun approach still wastes enormous amounts of your time that could be spent reaching clients who might actually be interested in your proposal.

This process is typically called “DD (Due Diligence),” a term commonly used in financial M&A transactions. In the context of proposal preparation, when business development professionals use various channels to learn more about their target’s background, I call this the Client DD Process.

If your target client is a “company,” then pre-proposal DD is absolutely essential homework. If your client is a relatively well-known startup, a Google search for the company’s press coverage, official website, and social media should be a simple way to conduct your DD. If the company has no relevant press coverage, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs Business Registration Public Information website is also a great resource for DD on Taiwanese companies. By entering the company name or tax ID number, you can obtain information about their business categories, registered capital, and directors. You can then use the company name along with the directors’ names to find their personal social media profiles, where you should be able to see relevant posts that shed light on the company’s operational status.

Crunchbase’s industry category feature is incredibly useful for filtering out similar companies globally. (pixabay.com)

If your target is a foreign company, LinkedIn and Crunchbase are also great tools for quick client DD. Crunchbase in particular not only provides company summaries but also financial and scale information. More importantly, in more mature industries, Crunchbase lists companies with similar businesses, helping you quickly identify other potential clients for your proposal. For Taiwanese companies, the “Companies you might be interested in” sidebar on the 104 Job Bank page has a similar function, though it’s not quite as precise yet.

Understanding your client’s real needs is what helps you create a winning proposal. (pixabay.com)

3. Understand what your client needs: 4 methods to help you uncover their true demands.

Conducting DD on a client merely helps you understand their background. What truly increases your proposal success rate is understanding what the client actually needs. “Finding the client’s needs means you’ve already done 50% of a successful proposal” — easy to say, hard to do. After all, the insight to identify client needs is an ability that business development professionals spend their entire careers cultivating, and I’m still learning myself. However, there are some foundational approaches that can give you a basic understanding of what your client needs:

  1. Search for recent media coverage and public information: Most companies address their challenges through cross-industry collaborations. Consumer-facing companies often disclose these collaborations through press releases and media coverage. Using Google and social media to search for the company’s recent news and public information is a quick way to understand their needs.

  2. Executive presentations and talks: With the rise of O2O (online-to-offline) events, more and more senior executives are participating in speeches and forums. By attending these events, you can gain insight into the company’s needs. Even if nothing specific comes up during the talk, the open Q&A at the end is a great opportunity. “What challenges do you think your company will face in the coming years?” — doesn’t this question sound familiar to those of you who frequently attend such events?

  3. Gather information from key competitors: Competitors in the same industry usually share similar directional needs and tend to understand each other’s demands better. This is why your business development targets shouldn’t be a single specific company but rather several similar companies across the industry. On one hand, you gain better understanding of each prospect during the development process. On the other hand, you can leverage competitive dynamics to quickly get their attention. At the end of the day, every client’s most basic need is to “continue being the number one player in their industry.”

  4. Gather information through actual proposals: If you’ve done thorough DD and followed the three points above, you should already have a basic understanding of the client’s needs. But the ultimate key to helping a business development professional understand the client’s true needs still comes from the client’s own mouth. The most common mistake beginners make is spending too much time “talking” about themselves and not enough time “listening” and thinking. Try preparing a proposal before the first meeting that outlines your observations and collaboration ideas. Then during the meeting, use only 10% of the time to “remind” the other party of your purpose, and spend 90% of the time “listening” to their feedback. This is the method that truly helps business development professionals grasp the client’s most authentic thoughts.

The “Five-Stage Proposal Persuasion Technique” leverages the “Foot-in-the-Door Effect” to increase proposal success rates.

4. Break the proposal into five stages: Give the client a simple and clear objective.

Once you’ve grasped the client’s basic background and needs, you can leverage your understanding to propose an “equal” trade deal for both parties. But to increase your proposal success rate, your proposal objective needs to be “simpler.”

In behavioral psychology, there’s a concept called the “Foot-in-the-Door Effect.” Simply put, people are reluctant to accept large, difficult requests because they’re time-consuming, labor-intensive, and hard to succeed at. Conversely, people are happy to accept smaller, simpler requests. The beauty of the Foot-in-the-Door Effect is that when you break one request into a sequence of small, simple requests, the other party is much more likely to accept. (Video introduction to the Foot-in-the-Door Effect) When we apply the Foot-in-the-Door Effect to presentation proposals and break the process into stages, we can identify five phases: “Cold Outreach,” “First Visit,” “Key Decision Maker,” “Deal Closing,” and “Collaboration Continuation.” By setting small, simple objectives for each stage, the overall large proposal becomes much easier for the client to accept.

Think about it — doesn’t breaking the collaboration into these five stages make it much easier to accept compared to a traditional all-at-once proposal? If you found this article’s content compelling and want to learn more about the key points and methods for creating presentations at each stage, I highly recommend checking out my recent course on Hahow: “Control Meeting Conclusions with the Five-Stage Proposal Persuasion Technique”. The course teaches you how to create all five types of stage-specific presentations, and guides you step by step through designing presentation strategies, production priorities, and tracking methods to dramatically improve your proposal success rate.

This is a fully online course with 8 chapters totaling 160 minutes, complete with practical homework for each lesson. You can apply your real work proposals to the course teachings for optimization, allowing you to truly put what you learn into practice and receive the most useful feedback. The course is currently in its fundraising phase on Hahow, and purchases made before July 27 can enjoy the discounted price of NT$2,680. I hope all partners interested in the Five-Stage Proposal Persuasion Technique will consider this course.