When corporate buyers are ready to purchase carbon credits, they’ll likely release a request-for-proposal (RFP), calling on developers to present their project as a potential solution to help them meet their climate and sustainability objectives. It’s then up to project developers to craft a proposal that speaks to buyers’ unique needs, all while accounting for the considerations of each relevant corporate buying stakeholder. For example, a corporate buyer’s finance department may be concerned about carbon credits’ return on investment (ROI), while its sustainability team may be wondering how credits align with evolving climate regulations and standards.
While developing a project proposal for carbon credits is a unique task, the overall process isn’t too different from what other start-ups experience in more mature industries. Moreover, many corporate buyers looking to purchase carbon credits are often sophisticated and accustomed to a formal sales cycle. For instance, it’s often large public companies — like Microsoft or Boeing — that are searching to buy credits aligned with their climate and sustainability strategies, making it all the more important for project developers to ensure their sales processes are simple, transparent, and professional. The importance of maintaining a structured and organized sales process means crafting a straightforward, customer-centric proposal is essential to developing trust and closing deals.
Carbon credit project proposal best practices
There are several principles to keep in mind when crafting a clear, customer-centric carbon credit project proposal. Many of these can be borrowed from more established sectors — like enterprise technology or professional services — that are accustomed to the corporate RFP process. However, there are a few unique components to the voluntary carbon market (VCM) that developers should consider, including alignment with buyers’ overall climate and sustainability goals, as well as the priorities of each corporate buyer persona.
Corporate buyers have different goals and priorities, making it essential to develop a customized proposal that aligns with buyers’ specific sustainability strategies. Moreover, the carbon credits that buyers choose to invest in are part of their organization’s broader brand story. This focus on storytelling means it’s important for developers to include enriched project data and compelling visuals in their proposals, allowing buyers to communicate a project’s impact to stakeholders.
- Conduct thorough buyer research
Building a winning proposal often requires project developers to conduct extensive research to understand their buyers’ markets, needs, supply chains, and climate and sustainability strategies. This research can sometimes be done during prospecting discussions, but other times, it requires external work and investigation. For instance, project developers should ensure they’re reading corporate buyers’ climate and sustainability reports — especially if they’re made publicly available.
- Align your project with buyers’ objectives
This step is arguably the most important part of the proposal process because it shows corporate buyers’ how carbon credits can help them achieve their climate and sustainability goals. After carefully reading over a buyer’s net-zero and sustainability strategies, make the business case for how the project’s credits will help buyers reach their targets, drive climate and/or social action, and improve their reputations as climate and sustainability leaders.
- Substantiate your claims
Corporate buyers want to ensure the projects they’re investing in are credible and high-quality, which means they’re looking for developers to substantiate their climate and sustainability claims with quantifiable metrics. When building a carbon credit project proposal, make sure this information is transparent and high-level — especially when it comes to important data points, like project additionality, quantifiability, permanence, leakage, and co-benefits.
- Be transparent, clear, and concise
When crafting a proposal, developers should ensure they’re communicating their project openly and clearly. Oftentimes, developers provide lengthy project design descriptions in their carbon credit project proposals, which has the potential to deter buyers that are looking for a project’s pertinent details. To make their proposal more engaging, developers can use customized images and testimonials to gain buyer trust.
- Include proper pricing breakdowns
A carbon credit proposal should include clear and detailed pricing information so buyers understand what they’re getting and can calculate credits’ ROI. Oftentimes, this requires project developers to consider a cost-based model that accounts for their capital and operating expenditures, as well as a market-based approach that accounts for buyers’ demand of a project type. Developers should also include volume-based and multi-year contract discounts in their proposals to further garner buyer interest.
Deliver a winning proposal with cutting-edge tech
In today’s VCM, many carbon credit project developers are working off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, converting their proposals into PDF files to send to corporate buyers. These manual methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive, slowing down the sales process and limiting project developers’ scalability as they acquire more customers. Manually creating proposals also increases the risk of inconsistencies in proposal branding, formatting, and messaging, which has the potential to undermine a project’s presentation and reduce buyer confidence.
To deliver a winning proposal and minimize sales pipeline leakage, project developers should invest in technology that streamlines and simplifies the process. Digital proposal builders, like the one featured on Cloverly’s Catalyst platform, automatically populate proposals with project content templates that speak to buyers’ key interests. These can then be customized to include additional data that’s aligned with buyers’ individual goals. Automatic proposal builders also draw on the real-time inventory of developers’ available carbon credits, ensuring numbers are both accurate and reliable with the click of a button.
Streamline the proposal process
Typically, building a proposal that’s perfectly customized to corporate buyers’ needs requires several iterations. However, these can be difficult to keep track of, lead to potential miscommunications, or the sharing of inaccurate information. To ensure a seamless buyer experience from end to end, automatic proposal builders provide a historical record of earlier proposal drafts. Plus, when a buyer finally accepts a proposal, downstream workflows — like payment tracking and carbon credit deliveries — are automatically triggered to deliver a quick and streamlined buying experience.
Streamlined proposal processes signal professionalism and reliability. If developers can quickly deliver customized, high-quality proposals, it reassures buyers of their ability to execute on projects effectively and manage long-term partnerships. A simplified proposal workflow also ensures project developers can manage multiple buyer demands simultaneously, allowing them to capitalize on different opportunities and quickly respond to buyer feedback. This speed and efficiency professionalizes buyer interactions, helping developers build trust and close deals.
Craft a winning carbon credit project proposal
Are you spending time manually creating proposals and tailoring them to meet buyers’ unique needs? Cloverly’s Catalyst proposal builder helps project developers scale their business and deliver a seamless buying experience from start to finish. From providing real-time access to a project’s carbon credit inventory to sales enablement through omni-channel distribution, Catalyst helps developers manage the full lifecycle of their credits in one place. Request a demo to learn more.
