Creating a Proposal or Treatement Deck for Clients

If you waltzed into photography thinking it would consist of gorgeous photos and lots of money, you weren’t necessarily wrong… but you did miss out on one super important fact: 

You need to be able to pitch your idea and vision in a thought-provoking, deal-closing and “sign me up” kind of way. You know, the way you thought clients would react when you first launched your photography business. That way.

The deck that you send to a client during the pitching process is so important because it gives them a sense of your professionalism, personality, and if you will be able to deliver the images that they want. Over the last few years that we’ve had our business, we’ve lost out on jobs because we didn’t know how to put together a deck that effectively communicated our ideas and justified our rates. This drove us to develop a well-designed, clear, and convincing deck that has helped us book more clients and get more of the jobs that we want.

There are three different instances when you might need to build a treatment deck for a client. Let’s talk through each one and how they differ.

you’re cold-pitching to a client

If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you know that we’re big fans of cold-pitching. You can read all three of our pitching posts here, here, and here. We typically don’t recommend starting off the conversation with sending a deck, rather wait until there is some interest and see if you can get the client on the phone so you can create a deck more specific to their needs. However, if you are trying to pitch to a large client, it could be a good idea to include a deck with potential ideas right off the bat. Just make sure to include it as a link instead of an attachment so that you email doesn’t go to spam.

a client reaches out to you for general pricing or without specific concepts in mind

This is the dream right? A client reaches out to hire you and you get full creative control over the concepts and creative direction. The unfortunate thing is that not all clients will be the right fit and so we recommend sending a questionnaire or getting on the phone with potential clients to gather additional information before building a deck. Once you decide that the client or project is a good fit, you can create a more generalized deck or show off some of your art direction skills depending on what they are looking for.

a client reaches out to you with a specific campaign or ideas

In this case, if they give you enough information right off the bat, our recommendation is to take their concepts and use your deck to show them how you will execute their campaign with your own spin as well as give more information about your professional process.

So by now you see the importance of having a beautiful and professional way to pitch to clients, but what do you actually put in a deck? As we mentioned, we bumped along through the years with different proposal methods, and we finally created the proposal deck of all proposal decks.

And of course, we’re sharing it with you. 

This proposal deck has helped us to scale our business, book higher-paying clients, and change the way we approach photoshoots and projects altogether. It’s also allowed us to spend less time on the things that don’t light us up (like creating proposals), and more time on the things that we love: creating incredible imagery. 

Now, we read your mind and created this as a fully customizable AI AND photoshop file (you’re welcome). We’ve also included a video that’ll walk you through the download, and show you how to make changes and customize it to your brand. We’re also giving you all the questions we include in our new client intake form and questions to help you build an about page that you can use in the deck as well as your website.

If you’re ready to save some time in your business while ALSO up-leveling the way you propose your projects, we’re here to help.

Like really, what are you waiting for?

If you have more questions about our process, we would love to chat with you one on one! Read all about our coaching calls here.

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle