Are you ready to close more deals with a repeatable, scalable sales process?
Sell, bill, and fulfill in one place with Proposal Builder, the only proposal software solution connected to Vendasta's Marketplace. Whether you're managing a sales team or struggling to find time to sell while wearing multiple hats, Proposal Builder makes it easy to standardize and streamline how you bring opportunities across the finish line as your business expands.
How to Get Started
Go to Partner Center > Sales & Success Center > Proposals > Manage Proposals
Is there a way for us to have our proposals display in landscape view?
@gavriellegynd thanks for the question! Currently proposals must be in portrait orientation, but the ability to set to landscape will come.
Let me start by saying, I very much appreciate the concept of proposal builder and look forward to it advancing beyond Beta.
But in its current state, I find it simply unusable because, beyond all the minor buggy things that will come up in a Beta product, the Text Editor is broken: the cursor jumps around, it inconsistently inserts versus overwrites, the delete button doesn't function the way you would expect in a text editor, and there seems to be hotkeys assigned (or some other logic) resulting in whole text fields being highlighted and overwritten.
Aside from this one major problem I'm having, I do have a few suggestions for improvements:
- Insert page breaks - When building a Recommended Services table, or using some longer marketing material, if the content exceeds the length of a Portrait page then its simply unprintable and it appears there is no easy way to move content to a new page.
- Edit marketing material - The Marketing Material for Advertising Intelligence, for one, doesn't publish with its White Label. It'd be nice to be able to edit inside the marketing material for our proposals. This would also partially solve the page-break problem.
- Edit element properties, not just page properties.
- Define styles. I should not need to change the font style in every text field.
@DanBranda thanks for these suggestions! My comments are in bold.
"The Text Editor is broken: the cursor jumps around, it inconsistently inserts versus overwrites, the delete button doesn't function the way you would expect in a text editor, and there seems to be hotkeys assigned (or some other logic) resulting in whole text fields being highlighted and overwritten."
Any details or recordings you can provide to detail the editor issues you are experiencing would be very helpful.
"Insert page breaks - When building a Recommended Services table, or using some longer marketing material, if the content exceeds the length of a Portrait page then its simply unprintable and it appears there is no easy way to move content to a new page."
We are currently working on an update that will help you manage page breaks, and another that will improve formatting for PDF downloads. The current functionality is designed primarily for digital viewing where page breaks are less relevant. Do you or your clients download and print proposals regularly rather than viewing them online?
"Edit marketing material - The Marketing Material for Advertising Intelligence, for one, doesn't publish with its White Label. It'd be nice to be able to edit inside the marketing material for our proposals. This would also partially solve the page-break problem."
At this time, you'll find that all of the marketing content is editable except for the "long description" sections. This is to allow for videos and other complex content to come through.
"Edit element properties, not just page properties."
Can you clarify which elements and properties you'd like to be able to edit?
"Define styles. I should not need to change the font style in every text field."
This is a great suggestion. Font styling is preserved in any proposals you save as templates, or any pages or widgets you add to the content library. Another way to carry font styling is to duplicate a previous text widget.
Thanks again for sharing your experience! Please keep the feedback coming.
@Jehan following up on this because I'm having new issues with Proposal Builder.
Unfortunately, I don't have recordings of any of the issues that I continue to experience. I'm not sure that its practical to record my sessions while I'm actively working in proposal builder. But the text editor does continue to perform poorly for me. I have formed the habit of writing in Sublime and Ctrl+Shift+V into the proposal builder to save time and frustration.
The biggest problem I am experiencing right now is that the Save functionality is losing my work. I'm watching the "Saved a few seconds ago" constantly appear in the top toolbar next to the Save button, and I do manually save at times as well.
However, I have twice in the last 3 days seen the "Saved a few seconds ago" become "Saved 43 minutes ago." When this happens, the Save button stops working (it idles) and I lose a big chunk of my work.
@DanBranda thanks for sharing this! This has been identified as a bug pertaining to long proposals, usually over 20 pages. The issue is intermittent which made it difficult to diagnose. When a proposal is large the auto-save can time out. We are working to resolve this. In the meantime I would suggest trying to maintain a more concise format for proposals. With regards to recordings, these are always helpful for our dev team so feel free to share any that you make going forward!
I second all the other improvements listed above. Specifically, the option to switch the layout to landscape.
I'd also add
- the ability to add lines to the Pricing Table that aren't a product yet (like you can do when creating invoices)
- be able to drag/drop/reorder the individual line items on the Pricing Table
- Have Bitly style code-generating button in the header that would allow for click tracking. Suggested metrics: Viewers(Name), Last Viewed, Time on Page, History of Views (Tracks the count of unique views for each day)
@DaveForman thank you for sharing your thoughts here!
- Landscape orientation will become available at a later date.
- Product pricing and descriptions can be edited right within a proposal. The best way to add custom products like consulting hours is to create a generic custom product, insert it into the proposal's pricing table, and edit the description, quantity, and price as needed.
- Easy re-ordering of products will be included as part of a major update in the works for Proposal Builder's pricing table
- Many of the tracking specs you note can be found by clicking on the activity tracker icon (shown in red square below) within the document editor of Proposal Builder.
Thank you again, and please keep the feedback coming!