As sales become more and more automated, how do you commonly get proposals into the hands of your clients? Do you prefer using email as it’s quick or do you like the more personal approach and actually bring it to them in person?
I always walk a prospect through a presentation in a virtual or in person meeting, very rarely would I ever just email a presentation without being there to walk them through the strategy and commercial terms. I ALWAYS email a presentation after a virtual meeting, or leave a hard copy after a in person meeting. Ensures the prospect you have presented to has a reference document to share with other stakeholders, or to ponder while moving towards a decision.
I have recently started using DocuSign with Salesforce. It’s great to know that your prospect has received and also let’s you know if they are reviewing and revisiting the proposal. Also reminds me to follow up to get the close.
Those are great points, it’s always good to leave them with something to reference as you can’t always meet with every decision-maker. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks David, knowing what software you use to follow up with your prospects helps us a lot, and welcome to the community!
It would be great if the platform had a feature that can generate proposals from chosen packages or products/services.
@Bryan_Larson is working on the design for this as we speak! I will let him weigh in here.
Frankly, the proposal business has gotten out of hand. LinkedIn has a proposal tool and there are quite a few other subscription as a service proposal tools online. The best one, for our model, is www.betterproposals.io. Several years back, we stopped sending out long form proposals because they require hours of work.
We’ve moved to short form proposals, and if clients agree to move forward, we send a contract and negotiate over the terms of the contract. I’d like to see how others do proposals. It would be great if we had access to a proposal too, like www.betterproposals.io along with credit card and ACH/ Bank Debit processing.
We also have an estimation and payment system on our website, but rarely have prospects follow through with it. I would prefer if clients used it, but they don’t.
Please share your questions/ comments.
Thanks Daylyn, we hear you and agree on keeping proposals easy to build. Here are some concepts and ideas that we are starting to iterate on. Feedback welcome. https://xd.adobe.com/view/0c430089-52c7-4afa-6994-ff19dbd747c9-7a72/
This is great. My only recommendation would be to make sure that you have the option to only show the total cost instead of being forced to show the price of every individual product. I know alot of customers that will nit-pick you to death!
Great feedback @Ryan_Mason - totally agree. I’ll look into a some advanced pricing configuration as we work through future concepts.
I would prefer to send them out of SSC (email and print options)
Things to consider:
- how we display pricing (package and additional line items)
- option to include product information, coverage ect…
@Jeff_Moore Those are some great things to consider, and good to know that you’d prefer to send out proposals directly from SSC. Keep the ideas coming as we want to make sure this tool is as helpful as possible!
I prefer to send electronically. I think we need to be showcasing latest technology in everything we do. With the numerous devices available a personal presentation of a digital proposal could still be made. I see many advantages in creating digital proposals and none for paper based.