I want to tell you about the dumb way I sold for over a decade.

It would start with a great discovery call. The prospect would be nodding, laughing, sharing things they probably should not share with someone they met 40 minutes ago. I would do my Recap - Relevance - Roadmap follow up. Real connection & understanding, the solid bones of the WTF sales process, firing on all cylinders.

And then I would disappear into a dark hole for a minnit, emerge with a 22-page proposal that I was sure was going to blow their mind, send it over with a little note that said "Let me know what you think!"

And then I’d wait… Crickets. Silence. Ghosted.

Or worse, they would come back with:

Concerns. The most terrifying word in the English language when it shows up in a prospect email.

Every-FREAKING-time, I would think:

No, Tim, you idiot. You were not aligned. You assumed you were alignmed and then built a 22-page monument to that assumption. And you know what they say about when you assume? It makes an ass out of the person making the assumption. In this case, and all other cases like it, that ass was me.

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If your proposal is where the negotiation starts, you are pretty effed.

Most agencies treat the proposal like it is THE selling document. The big reveal. The crescendo. They pour hours into formatting, team bios, case studies, fancy timelines, and a pricing page that they have rewritten four times because they cannot decide whether to lead with the number or bury it.

And then they lob it over the wall and pray.

This is flippin’ insane.

The proposal should be a confirmation document. It should be the paperwork version of a handshake that already happened. If your prospect is seeing your proposed scope, timeline, or pricing for the first time when they open your proposal, you have just actually started the sales process.

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You already know the first two bars to this song. The Discovery Call is where you understand their world. The Recap Call is where you demonstrate that you were actually listening, establish relevance, and lay out a roadmap.

Most agencies jump straight to "I'll get you a proposal by Friday."

Instead, I want you to add a step:

And before you groan about adding another call to your sales process, hear me out, because this call is going to save you more time, more heartbreak, and more "we decided to go in a different direction" emails than anything else I can teach you.

The Alignment Call is a dry run of the proposal.

That is it. That is the whole concept.

You put together a simple document, not a proposal, not a fancy PDF, just the bullet points.

You send it over before the call - not too far in advance, but enough time for them to read it. Then you get on the phone and say: "I want to walk through this together so we can make sure I have my marching orders right. I want to know that you understand exactly what we are going to do, and I want to make sure that I understand exactly what you need. Let us figure out where we agree and where we need to adjust."

I can hear you. "We already did discovery. We already did the recap. Now you want me to do a whole other call before I even send a proposal? That slows everything down."

Au contraire, dear reader, it is going to speed everything up.

Because here is what actually slows deals down:

Surprise pricing: The prospect sees the number for the first time in a formal document and gets sticker shock. Now they have to go have a conversation internally about budget that they were not prepared for, and your beautiful proposal sits in somebody's inbox for three weeks while they "discuss."

Scope confusion: You thought you were clear about deliverables. They thought you were clear about deliverables. Turns out you were both clear about completely different things.

The invisible stakeholder: Your champion loved everything on the recap call, but they forgot to mention that the CFO has final sign-off and the CFO has "concerns" (there is that FREAKIN’ word again) about the timeline.

The Alignment Call surfaces all of this BEFORE it gets baked into a formal document. You are pulling the discomfort of negotiation forward and out of the proposal, where it gets weird and adversarial, and into a collaborative conversation where you can actually work through it together.

Think about it this way: you are not adding a step. You are removing sand from the gears in the final step.

Before the call: Send a one-to-two page document. Bullet points, not prose. Cover what you know about their situation, your proposed approach, timeline, and pricing. Make it clear that the pricing is a starting point for discussion, not a take-it-or-leave-it number.

On the call: Walk through every section & ask questions. "Does this match your understanding?" and "Is there anything here that does not feel right?" and "When you think about this timeline, does it work with what is happening on your end?"

The magic question: "What would need to be true for you to move forward with this?"

After the call: You now know exactly where you stand. You know what they agreed to, what they pushed back on, and what still needs work. Your proposal becomes an exercise in documentation, not persuasion.

If you sell to organizations with multiple decision-makers, the Alignment Call becomes even more powerful.

You run the Alignment Call with your champion, you know… the person who has been your primary contact through discovery and recap. You co-create the scope, the timeline, the pricing. You get them to a place where they are nodding along to every line.

Then, when the proposal goes to the broader committee, your champion is not presenting your proposal. They are presenting their proposal. One that they helped build. One that reflects their understanding of the problem and their confidence in the solution.

The rest of the committee would have to actively overrule your champion to make significant changes. And while that can happen (I will tell you about the CEO who big-footed me out of a deal in a minute), it rarely does, because nobody wants to be the person who torpedoes a plan that a colleague clearly put thought into.

Oh, and about that CEO. In my entire career of using the Alignment Call approach, I can think of exactly one time where an aligned deal fell apart. A CEO swooped in at the last minute to hand the work to someone they had a prior relationship with. It was disappointing as hell. But one loss out of... I have lost count how many aligned deals? Those are numbers I will take every single day.

While we are here, let me say this - never just send a proposal.

I do not care how clear the alignment was. I do not care if they told you to "just send it over." Walk them through it.

A proposal sitting in someone's inbox is a document. A proposal being discussed on a call is a conversation…documents get misread, forwarded without context, and picked apart by people who were not in the room. Conversations allow you to address reactions in real time, clarify stuff, and reinforce the partnership you have been building.

If you did the Alignment Call properly, the proposal walk-through should feel like a final walkthrough before you get the keys to your new place, not a pitch. Everything in the document has already been discussed and agreed to…you are just making it official.

Here is why this works at a level that most sales tactics do not.

By the time your prospect opens that proposal, their fingerprints are all over it.

Their language is in the problem statement. Their priorities shaped the timeline. Their feedback adjusted the scope. Their concerns informed the pricing structure. This is not a document that was done to them. It is a document that was built with them.

And people do not say no to things they helped create.

The Alignment Call is not a sales tactic. It is the opposite of a sales tactic. It is the point in the process where you stop trying to convince somebody and start building something together. That is what co-creation looks like. That is what partnership feels like before the contract is even signed.

You have already defeated all the "no"s. You have already shored up all the "yes"es. The proposal is not a question. It is an answer that both of you already know.

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