A practical sales playbook for turning a good discovery conversation into a proposal that makes the scope, proof, pricing, and next decision easy to understand. This written playbook focuses on the activities and decisions demonstrated in the video, so you can adapt the approach without needing to copy the exact words or setup.
What this playbook covers
The video packages a practical working session around This Simple Sales Change Has Made Me $50k+. Read it as a guide to the underlying activity: identify the situation, choose the right next move, and build a repeatable way to do the work well.
Start with the discovery, not the document
The useful work happens before a proposal is written. Capture the buyer’s language, the business problem, the people affected, and the definition of a successful outcome. That gives the proposal a job beyond listing deliverables: it shows the prospect they have been heard.
Use the proposal to reduce uncertainty
A strong proposal makes the path visible. It connects the recommended work to a clear plan, relevant proof, practical constraints, price, and timeline. The goal is not to overwhelm someone with pages. It is to help the right people reach a confident decision.
Schedule the decision while the conversation is warm
Send the proposal with a short walkthrough and a review call already on the calendar. That creates a useful moment for questions, keeps follow-up human, and prevents a good opportunity from turning into an open-ended inbox thread.
Take the useful part into your own work
Use the framework, then tailor it to your audience, offer, capacity, and goals. The goal is not to reproduce the video. It is to make one useful improvement in your own work.
- Review one active proposal against the discovery notes. Add the prospect’s own definition of success and remove one generic section that does not help them decide.
- Before sending your next proposal, book the review call and record a concise walkthrough that explains how to read it.
Continue learning
Explore more marketing playbooks from the Columbus community for additional field notes, tools, and retrospectives.
For a local conversation about the work, see upcoming Columbus Marketing events.
Watch the source video
Watch the full recording on Andy the Marketer on YouTube. The complete transcript remains available below for reference.
Read the video transcript
Kind: captions Language: en Hey there, my name is Andy. I own a solo marketing business in Columbus, Ohio that generated $28,000 last month. This is my channel where I build and strategize in public and share with you everything I'm doing to get the results that I am. If you guys are new to the channel, this is the format that we usually follow. First, we're going to start with a little bit of my lead genen. I'll prioritize my outreach, share with you guys my pipeline and everything I'm doing to build on that front. Step number two is we build and strategize in public. I'm going to share with you my daily schedule and everything I'm doing to plan ahead and make sure I'm staying ahead of the eight-ball. And number three, updates and growth stats. So, I'll share with you the latest and developments of how all my channels, two YouTube channels, LinkedIn, and the podcast are growing and have some accountability on that front. Today, especially, I'm diving into this a little bit late. I've already done a lot of my most pressing outreach work. So, a reminder for you guys, how to prioritize our outreach that I've talked about here in a past video is essentially focusing on the highest leverage activities, active conversations, follow-ups, and inbound. Then moving on to colder conversation, non-time bound, and then moving on to things like cold conversations, content, and communities. I have a lot of active conversations that I need to already follow up on. But what I wanted to share today is transitioning your existing conversations and when to add those to your pipeline. So just yesterday we had four opportunities kind of come into play. And I'm telling you guys if you've been in marketing for any amount of time when it comes to stuff like this it is very often times when it rains it pours which is just the name of the game. So, we have to make sure that you have capacity when it comes time to reach one of those pouring seasons. So, yesterday we received two inbound booked meetings. And if I go to my updates tab here, every time I get an update from Tidycow, I know that a call has been booked. So, I'll just search Tidycow. The way our funnel works currently is we have a call intro call on our site right here. Obviously on the Jesus Pete on the contact page talk to web expert. this form right here. To fill out this form, what they need to do is they need to enter their phone number and they also need to enter their uh like booking information and things like that. One booked for tomorrow and ideally I would be doing this sooner. So, what I'm going to do is I send an email to these people here. I'm going to hide their information. Send an email to them before the call occurs. So, this is how you qualify them. I've looked at their website. I can tell that they're an ICP fit. What I'm going to do is reach out with an email saying what I say and you'll see to then qualify them and make sure that when we get onto the call obviously the website is a huge filter for people booking a call. It clearly states pricing. It has dense FAQs. It clearly positions ourself. So I've had it ever since we niched into healthcare. We've had all of almost all of our booked calls have been ICP fits which is great. Has our case studies answers all of their questions there. We haven't had a lot of issues with that recently, but just to be safe, it also is helpful to, like I said, introduce yourself and just personalize the intro so that when you meet, it's like they're already meeting with a friend. So, the earliest one was with Adele here. So, what I'm going to do is send her an email. Morning Adele. Exclamation point. So thrilled to see you on my calendar for tomorrow. Period. Looking forward to meeting with you guys and discussing the website. Period. As a brief intro, this is what we use our time for tomorrow. corn. Thanks for grabbing a time comma and I'm looking forward to chatting tomorrow about the website exclamation point Well, discussing any current issues you have with the website. defining a scope and outlining next steps either with us or with a trusted partner that we can refer you to. Also, some ball knowledge here. Never have two straight sentences with an exclamation point. You want to be enthusiastic, but not like hopelessly. Oh, feel free to send over any specifics in advance that I should keep an eye out that I can dive into or have ready. Period. Otherwise, I'll see you tomorrow morning. Exclamation point. face emoji. Make sure you spell their names correctly. I've actually looked at their website and they would be a great fit company. They are local. They are a healthcare compounding pharmacy and they have multi-loss. This is primo ICP fit and this is why positioning helps because they recognize you and their solution and they don't need a referral or someone to send them to you. So this is why I love when this happens because it reinforces the effort that I put into positioning. So I'm going to go ahead and send that You book for tomorrow 10:30 proms. super quick. Okay. Forward to Adele Paulins. Adele PKI. Now, when you get a call in, it's very important that you also add them to your pipeline. So what we want to make sure we do is within folk here is we go to our sales pipeline and we add a contact. What we can also do is use the I have to update this. I haven't updated this in a while. Okay. So we can actually use the folk integration here. Go to scent. Adele f add her there. Add to group of pipeline person. Add to group. And here go here and hit refresh. should already be added. Should be she's under status. Okay. Try to read her status. Ski actually see if I can find her LinkedIn profile. Always helpful to connect with people on LinkedIn too first before you meet them. Yeah. Find her on there. focus. Interesting. All right. Usually they sometimes they hire an external contractor for the website, but I know this is a real company because I validated them. So the important part is that they're added to our CRM. Now after that call, it's important when you guys have a CRM too to have some monetary pipeline. So I have proposals and putting them each right there. So boom, proposed close one. I have to update this too. That one close lost. That one followup one [snorts] or still a weed. After you have the call and you get a sense of monetary price, then you submit the proposal. Ideally, you do that after one call, which I will as well. And then until you add them to sales pipeline and and fork, you can attach a numeral value to each. So then you can kind of get a stage of what the total deal value is. in each status of your pipeline makes it easier to keep track of. So yes, next up for me there is two of them. So let me do kind of run the same process here with um the latest one that booked autumn Miller here. and box. It's kind of just copy paste from the last ones. 2%. I call for time next here's a good one I should have added last Um, That is a wee ball knowledge. hard w to our FAQ section. Otherwise, I'll see you then, my friend. Here is to these from sent. I know I should set up an automation to do this, but I just anything customer centric, happy to do it. You know, we probably get three or four of these a month cold from the website. I can personalize the intro, clearly say the date and things like that. I'm okay with doing that three or four times a month. You know, that's like the the ultimate question in mine is finding out what you should and should not automate in your business. And you know, with this stuff, I'm still still on the side of not automating. But what I will do is add her to folk as a sales pipeline and qualified contacted Bum. See if we were able to enrich the last one here. Get her LinkedIn profile. Come on, give me a link to profile. Hate to see that. Find their company profile. I think that's the right company. Yeah. ECI. No, that's the right company.com. Damn. E3 Consulting. That's what it's called. It's their real estate because it says that they're a health and wellness brand. Health and wellness specialist. Very interesting indeed. Anyway, I know this is not worth it, but here we go. People, always helpful to go to the company page and cross reference people. See if you find anyone with the same name. Looking for someone named Anna. This guy booked the call. This guy was included on the call as well. He is a product engineering consultant. Let's connect with him and then if they accept then reach out to intro yourself personally. All right. So that is how you make sure that you add opportunities to your pipeline. Um the moment someone becomes a marketing qualified read. I think I've explained this before just in terms of a uh like a prospect client funnel here, but just in terms of your general funnel, you always have contacts slash reads. Pretty much the same thing. Then you have MQL. I've answered this in a past Q&A, but just clarifying sales qualified and then close one course lost. So right now the people that I just added are now in the sales qualified weeds meaning they are ready to receive an offer. Um they were already sometimes when weeds come in cold they automatically start in these buckets right here because you didn't have their contact beforehand. They opted in, which is again the benefit of the positioning that lets you get cold inbound. Traditionally though, you'll have them here, here, here, and your job is to accelerate ones. Get as many as possible to here and avoid as many possible going to quotes lost. Um, and based on where you're at in your situation, assess where the biggest hangup is, and then you can start to calculate other figures like cost per lead, cost per customer lifetime value, and things like that. So, just to help you conceptualize that there. Now, what I'm going to be doing is sending my LinkedIn connect because those are all my urgent activities. I'm going to be moving on more so to the colder non-timebound activities which include but are not limited to sending LinkedIn connects, answering DMs, and things of that sort. But for the life of me, I can never get this to work the way I want it to. Great. Anyway, I had another opportunity come in from Maria as well from a LinkedIn inbound. So, she sent a message that said, essentially had a weed for us because they acquired a pharmacy and I was trying to budget qualify her pretty much as soon as I could. So I basically said she said hey how many apps pharmacy and pharmacy called clear water pharmacy old not a far had a website but it's pretty generic on flexy old branding we just got new brand the website on go the ecom proponent bro mentioned pricing as early as possible but made it easy for her to connect and say got time to chat and she saw it and didn't respond so probably wasn't budget qualified which is Okay. Um, better to budget qualify early and not take the project on rather than do it and hate ourselves afterwards. But the important thing is that you can still preserve the relationship, which is what I did a good job of there. So yeah, um, now it's time for LinkedIn connects. What I'm going to use now is quad to help me send more connection requests. So I go to my project here, go to code, LinkedIn API outreach system and okay, log back into LinkedIn and go ahead and send 30 new connection requests aligned with our ICP from the spreadsheet. Make sure that they are healthcare focused and fit within our buyer bucket. I may have to log in here quickly. May have to do two factor again which will be unfortunate because I'm using the link didn't log in here. So while that gets set up we yeah right even when I click automatically keep me signed in it never does but I want to show you guys how this works. using SMS. Okay, so I should get a text here. 92 34 6 and my name I will keep you. Okay, we're all logged in. Please proceed and don't bug me again until you sent 30. Awesome sauce. Uh, we got a pressing message here as always. Damn. Okay. So, while that loads, let's get on to responding to messages. Coffees lower urgency conversations. This is a lead for Columbus Marketing Jobs. Hey, Jacob. Exclamation point. Sorry, I didn't I assume by your response that you weren't interested. Laughing face emoji. Hope you're doing what? Good as well, brother. Exclamation point. What email works best for me to add? I will say too on a daily basis it probably takes me 30 to 60 minutes to respond to everyone on here. So yeah, still not letting AI do that and probably won't ever will. Hey Paul, loved our meeting yesterday. I said it earlier, but you are incredibly easy to talk to and I loved our conversation. Period. Let's get a coffee on the radar in a few weeks and I would love to hear the latest from any travels you go on. Exclamation point. You forced me to think critically and those are the types of chats that I love having. I was surprised to see that we had chatted for so long. It went by incredibly fast because I enjoyed it. Period. Keep paying a light meeting with Aaron. I'll get to that later at the co-working space above two. I just sent her a nice email, introduced her to someone at 900,000 clients. Positioning, baby. That's how we get in touch with the right people. Thank you for the lovely intro. It was so great meeting you earlier this week and it felt like we already knew each other. Exclamation point. Kim Tony K, [snorts] it's great to meet you. Period. Kim spoke highly of your expertise and I'm always looking to meet smart and intelligent people in our space, especially here locally. Smiley face emoji. I would love to get you coffee sometime soon. Period. What does next week look like for you? Also, feel free to text me or email me any of the contacts below. And if you'd like to save Kim's inbox, Kim's inbox smiling face emoji. Looking forward to it, my friend. Period. my name. I can reach you there. I'm going to tear pretty much set there on the LinkedIn follow-ups. Um, yeah. So, that's about all I wanted to cover in this video. Essentially, the moment biggest gist of this conver this walk through here, the moment that you guys get an inbound lead immediately adding it to your pipeline, like speed to weed is just so important and I can't seriously cannot emphasize that enough. And also, don't be afraid to qualify early. Mention pricing as soon as you can in a conversation. And regardless as to whether or not it works out with the weed that comes in, I promise you it's going to feel better to put off to directly address the money conversation earlier rather than having a minimalist mindset saying yes and putting out the conversation till the last possible moment. So that is qualifying leads. Thank you guys for joining me. Be sure to check out the community in the below. If you're trying to grow as a marketer and are looking to better automate, better get better at your sales process and things like that. I talk about this all the time. Join a community of high performing people that are doing the same. And feel free to drop any questions below as well. I always answer questions. DM me on LinkedIn and I will answer you one to one as well. But yeah, I appreciate you all and see you in the next one. Bye.