You and your sales team may have a complicated relationship with proposals. On the one hand, proposals bring money into your firm. Without proposals, you don't have a business. Winning proposals is awesome.
However, creating proposals can be painful. If you don’t have a proper process in place it can be time-consuming - writing, pricing, designing, proofing, and then finally sending to your lead who, hopefully, hasn't switched to your competition in the time it’s taken you to get back to them.
If you want to close more deals faster, the only solution is to automate your proposal process.
Online construction proposal software is the only solution
Online proposal software is designed to streamline your entire bid process. From writing to design to sending and tracking, it unites all your separate tools and steps under one efficient roof.
There are a few ways that proposal software can help you create, send, and close proposals faster.
Proposal templates
Most online proposal products provide templates for a variety of construction services as part of your subscription. The templates are professionally written and designed to help kickstart your proposal process.
Writing your proposal can be the most time-consuming part of the whole process. With a template, the sample text can help get ideas moving and provide a guideline for the kind of information you might want to include.
Don’t worry about submitting the same proposal as your competition - most construction bid templates are customizable so you can tailor them to your specific company and project.
The same applies to the design. Online proposal software makes it easy to insert images, change fonts, and add color, without needing a professional graphic designer. Anyone on your sales team can make your proposal look sharp and professional, no experience necessary.
Content library
Pulling together all the different pieces of content for your construction proposal can be a bit of a scavenger hunt.
Maybe someone on your sales team wrote an excellent summary of your contracting services, but now, no one knows where it is. And where are all the photos and descriptions from past jobs for the portfolio section of your proposal? Can’t find them? Guess you’ll have to start from scratch.
Meanwhile, every day that you don’t get that proposal to your lead is one more day the deal can go dead, and one less day your sales team has to bring new business in the door.
Good online proposal software offers some type of content library where you can store all of your different proposal sections in one place so anyone on your team can access them at any time. No more hunting for bios, images, case studies, or pricing tables.
The types of construction services you’re selling are probably the same from proposal to proposal, so why recreate the wheel? You’ll need to customize some sections to fit the particular needs of the client or project, but that takes far less time than going back to the drawing board to rewrite every section from the beginning whenever you have a new proposal to deliver.
To benefit from the content library, you’ll need to do some upfront work to create sections and tag them so they’re easy to find later. Once it’s all stocked up, you can drag and drop each section into your proposal where you need it, making it faster to pull everything together.
Online proposal views
If you’re printing proposals, assembling them, and then making the trip to the post office, you’re adding days - or maybe even weeks - before your clients receive anything. And every day they don’t have a proposal from you is one more day they can accept a proposal from your competition.
Attaching a PDF to an email can also be a problem. Large files often get caught in spam so the client might not even receive your proposal.
Proposal software lets you email your client a customized link to view the proposal online on any device, at any time. That means your proposals arrive quickly, with no issues, and look professional. There's no faster way to get your proposal in front of your client.
Online signatures and payments
You want more than to just deliver your proposal quickly; you want to close the deal quickly. So you need to make it easy for your client to say ‘YES’ right away.
Adding online signature buttons to your proposal will help get 60% faster approval. Good online proposal software will have an online signature tool that allows your clients to sign your proposal right in the browser, making the contract legally binding.
Even better is the ability to add an online payment request to your proposal, so you get paid as soon as your client signs off.
Proposal Metrics
While online proposal software helps you create and deliver construction quotes faster, some also provide valuable insights into your proposal status.
You can find out things like when your client opened the proposal, which sections they viewed and for how long, and close rates stats across sales teams and individuals so you can track overall results.
All of this information gives you insight into what’s working and what isn't so you can improve your approach to your next deal, making it easier and faster to create a winning proposal.
Practice makes perfect proposals
Here's the thing: you can streamline your process, but if you don’t stick to it you’ll never enjoy the benefits that come from automation. If you want to close more deals faster, you need a system, and you need to stick to it. The best tools are worthless if you don’t use them consistently or correctly.
About Proposify
Until now, managing construction proposals has been a tedious, painful chore. Proposify changes all that. We’re revolutionizing the entire process, from creation to close and every deal-closing moment in between. We’re online business proposal software that gives your team the competitive edge.
