Sales proposals: can difficult reading make a project seem more demanding?
In high-value-added selling, customers also assess the work a purchase will impose on their organisation. The management question is precise: does a proposal's reading difficulty increase the implementation effort customers attribute to it?
What the literature establishes
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz (2008, Psychological Science) experimentally showed that instructions presented in a difficult-to-read font could lead readers to anticipate greater effort in performing the activity described. The presentation also affected motivation to undertake the activity. The finding concerns experimental tasks, not professional purchasing: it establishes a possible mechanism, not a demonstrated effect on sales.
When reading effort becomes a cue
Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2009, Personality and Social Psychology Review) review research on processing fluency: the subjective ease with which information is processed. That ease can become a cue in judgements concerning something other than presentation itself. For a sales proposal, the resulting hypothesis is that readers attribute to the project a difficulty that originates partly in the document.
The premature conclusion
It is tempting to conclude that an easier-to-read proposal necessarily sells better. These studies do not demonstrate this, and fluent reading does not make technical integration less demanding. A reasonable objective is to make the actual effort understandable, not to make it seem artificially smaller. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These articles do not allow us to estimate the effect of readability on signing a B2B contract in Berne. A proposal is also examined for its commitments, compliance and technical soundness, sometimes by several functions in succession. A shortened version that removes dependencies or responsibilities no longer tests presentation alone: it changes the information available.
A practical check in Berne
As part of SHR's « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, one exercise is to prepare two layouts of the same proposal, keeping the wording, commitments and appendices strictly identical. For proposals aimed at the federal administration, public health, telecoms or precision industry in Berne, reviewers familiar with the sector are randomly assigned to the versions, using the same reading language. Record the time needed to locate deployment responsibilities and prerequisites, answer accuracy, and perceived implementation effort on an identical scale. Faster information retrieval without reduced accuracy documents a readability improvement; it proves neither a reduction in actual work nor an increase in sales. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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