The questions I hear most often — and the tools that answer them without me.

A client asked for a proposal — where do I start so I am not guessing?

By settling four things before you open the proposal document.

• What problem the client wants solved — in one sentence they will confirm themselves. Not "they want a new system", but what happens today that stopped being good enough.
• Who signs and who can block — the names of specific people. The person you are talking to is often neither.
• How they will know it worked — which number or which situation has to change. This is also your strongest argument on price.
• When the decision has to be made — and what happens if it is never made at all. No answer here usually means the project is nobody's priority.

If you cannot answer any one of these, the proposal will be guesswork — and guesswork loses to someone who asked. Call back and ask directly. The client will not read it as incompetence; they will read it as something previous suppliers did not do.

The useful order is the opposite of the instinctive one: the discovery conversation first, then the agreement written down in one document, and the proposal last, as a summary of something already settled together. Then the proposal is not a pitch, it is a confirmation.

This is day one of the Value-Oriented Consulting Pre-Sales workshop. The ready-made list of questions to ask yourself before a proposal is in the tools below.

How much time do I lose on proposals that never had a chance?

I do not know how much in your case — but it is the one number here worth working out yourself. Take the last ten proposals, add up the hours, and divide by the ones you won.

The signals that give away this kind of deal in the first conversation are always the same. Nobody on the client side can describe the problem except through the solution they already want. There is nobody who loses if the project never happens. The decision date keeps moving. You only ever talk to someone who does not decide, and you get no access to anyone above them. The request went to five firms at once, and you found out by accident.

None of these on its own is a verdict. Three at once means you are writing the proposal for yourself. Walking away from that request is not losing a client — it is a week returned to a request that has a sponsor.

The hardest part is saying it out loud when you work alone and every request looks like an opportunity. One reframe helps: the question is not "can I win this", it is "does anyone on the client side have a real reason to push it through". If that person does not exist, the project does not either.

Qualification and warning signals are block five of the VCPS workshop. The ten-question list below lets you check your last sent proposal in ten minutes.

How do I walk away from a project that makes no sense, without losing the client?

Say it early and say it plainly. Bad news delivered in week two reads as competence; the same news in week five is a problem you built together with the client.

The conversation that works has three parts. First the fact: what exactly you checked and what came out of it. Then the consequence: what that means for the goal the client set. Last the proposal: what to do instead, even if it means less work for you.

That last part decides everything. A consultant who says "this will not work, I suggest we stop here and do something smaller" stays in the client's contacts for years. A consultant who delivers something pointless gets paid once.

The precondition is that it was written down at the start of the project how you would know it was going wrong. Without that, every such conversation sounds like backing out of a contract rather than following an earlier agreement.

The principle that bad news is better said early, and the document that makes it possible, are blocks five and six of the VCPS workshop.

How do I prepare a company for client conversations when everyone does it differently?

A standard is not a document for the intranet. It is three things the sales people and the delivery people agree on — and you have to start there, because without them any training will come apart within a week.

• What must never be promised without talking to the delivery team. One sentence, everyone knows it.
• The minimum a request must contain before the company starts writing a proposal. Problem, sponsor, success criterion, decision date.
• Exactly what passes from sales to delivery and in what form. One document both sides have read.

Once that is settled, training has something to stand on — people learn tools for a standard that already exists. When it is not settled, they go back to their own habits, because they are rewarded for something other than what they were taught.

That is why the closed edition works on your own real requests rather than textbook examples. You finish with filled-in documents for actual projects from your pipeline, and an agreed version of those three things.

A closed VCPS edition costs 20,000 PLN net for a group of 6–8; the terms are on the page for companies. Before you ask for a quote, run the ten-question list against the last proposal your company sent — the result is good material for an internal conversation.

How do I tell the problem is the client conversation and not our price?

By the point at which you lose.

• You lose after sending the proposal and the client asks nothing further. Nobody on their side confirmed what should change, so the only comparable thing left is price.
• You lose to someone more expensive. Then it is settled: somebody described the outcome better.
• The client buys, but the project starts drifting in month two. That is not price and not delivery — it is the agreements nobody wrote down before signature.
• You lose by 30–40% to a large vendor on an identical scope. That one can genuinely be price and scale, and a workshop will not fix it.

There is a test that takes half an hour. Take your last five lost opportunities and, for each, try to state the client's problem in one sentence they would have confirmed themselves. If you can do it for one or two, the problem sits in the conversation before the proposal. If you can do it for all five, look elsewhere: at price, at references, or at the fact that you are reaching clients who do not need you.

The test is expanded in the ten-question checklist (PDF). If the result points at the conversation, the closed edition programme describes what we do about it.

Send one person, or train the whole team?

One person is enough when it is about their own craft. A team is needed when the problem sits between roles.

Send one person if they want to develop, they have real influence over how they run their own client conversations, and you want to test the method on one individual first. Cost: 3,000 PLN gross for a seat in an open cohort, taught in Polish.

Train the team if “that wasn't in the agreement” keeps coming back, sales and delivery describe the same project differently, and you want one standard where the two meet. Cost: 20,000 PLN net per group of 6–8.

With eight participants the cost per person is practically the same as an open cohort seat. What differs is something else: work on your own real projects, one team in one room, and a follow-up after 30 days for that same group.

There is also a scenario where the money is lost. One person comes back with tools they cannot use, because nobody else in the company changed how they work and that person has no mandate to change it. It is the most common way to burn a training budget — and the reason the company brief asks who is meant to be in the group.

Terms for both versions: the page for companies and the open cohort.

What should we measure 60–90 days after the workshop?

Four numbers you can collect without a new tool, and one thing not worth measuring in that window.

• Proposals sent without a confirmed sponsor. The one metric that should fall to zero. If it does not, your people have no mandate to say no.
• Median time from enquiry to a go / no-go decision. It should shorten, because the decision starts being made deliberately rather than by default.
• Share of enquiries that ended in client silence. The most expensive category, because nobody closes it and nobody writes off the loss.
• Projects that needed a scope renegotiation after kickoff. The slowest signal to appear, and the one that reaches margin.

Plus one thing that is not a number and is visible in week one: at handover into delivery, does a document exist that the delivery team does not have to supplement with a conversation? That question is binary and needs no report.

What not to measure in this window: win rate. Sales cycles in IT projects run longer than 90 days, so you will see noise from the previous quarter rather than the effect of the workshop. That needs two or three quarters.

The full metric set with thresholds is in the manager briefing (PDF). The 30-day follow-up session exists for exactly this: checking which of these numbers moved.