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Proposal software

[Music] what's going on everybody welcome back to my channel my name is jun k lee and i am a struggling entrepreneur and a agency owner like maybe many of you and i talk about a lot of different sas tools that i use at my agency i'm very passionate about sas tools and i think it's an integral part of any online business speaking of integral today i want to talk about proposals and of course proposals there are many different sas tools out there that you can utilize you can go the old-fashioned route and do pen and paper i don't think anyone does pen and paper but you can do pdfs uh custom build pdfs but obviously the purpose of a sas tool is to make your life easier and proposals i think they suck so i want to use the best proposal tool out there and i've tried many i've tried a lot of them i've also tried you know custom built pdfs and out of all the ones that i've used so far the one i come back to the one i rely on the one i close six seven figure deals on is [Laughter] better proposals that's the one with better proposals it just you have better proposals it's a great name stands out uh it does what it does and uh today i want to talk about it i'm gonna give a quick run through i wanted to give a quick review and show you what it looks like how you can utilize it and why you should use better proposals to stand out from the crowd and again every time i talk about a sas tool i want to say it's not one size fits all you might find other tools other proposal tools that might fit better you might prefer custom build pdfs uh because you have total control over them um so it you know to each day's own and to me the best proposal tool out there is better proposals and you might feel the same way and so check out the rest of my video i'm going to run through the platform all right let's check it out i'm going to share my screen we're going to go check out the better proposals website so i am on better proposals dot i o and the very first [Music] text that you see the copy on the website in the hero is close more deals get paid faster i love it it's true and if you if you have any experience in an agency business or you know any other provider or service provider business closing deals is obviously very important and proposals rfps rfqs they're just it's a part of the game and there's no way around it so as much as i hate proposals hopefully this will make your life easier so i'm not going to go through the website because we're going to see most of it in um in the dashboard so let me go and log in this is i'm actively using this of course so i will be blurring out some things because they're actual real leads real companies all right so i'm logging in to my live dashboard i actually use this um so this is what the dashboard looks like you're going to see a few things blurred out that would be client names lead names um because obviously we don't want to or i'm not i'm not sure if i'm allowed to because some of these people we haven't signed anything with um okay so on the dashboard you get a bird's-eye view of what is going on um you'll see here january this year february there wasn't much going on it's because we were i was in in another tool um and in the middle so january and the end of last year like i said i went back to custom build proposals and pdfs uh because we had some uh big projects a lot of scope a lot of details i had more control over it now because we're sending out maybe i don't know between 10 and 20 proposals per week i can't afford to do and and spend the time and resources needed for custom build proposals uh or pdfs so i've came back and better proposals i was in before so what we're looking at right now in better proposals is their uh quote-unquote version two um obviously better or not obviously not always but version two is better than version one uh there was a little bit of slowdown in between but version one was good still and i remember it was good i moved in about a week after i moved in they upgraded to version two and i'm very happy about it anyway um what you see here we have purple is sent pink is approved you'll see in may and june we sent a ton of proposals but um nothing approved here it's because uh and i'll go over it in a second but they they have a uh a sign off on the proposal right so the lead gets to sign off and you'll see what that looks like but not all of the leads seem to do that and then we go straight into contract signing so that is why and then you see the recent documents in this case documents would be proposals and you'll see the outstanding the accepted documents which would mean they signed off on that proposal uh okay so i'm going to open up the menu we're going to go into documents so we have all documents create new documents they're called their which is a proposal they recently changed that they have templates which is very helpful it's why we came back here we have reports uh some better insight into what you're doing and settings so before we go into proposals let me show you the type of settings you can use obviously you can add in users and team members um there is the atom uh sorry there's the admin uh with the different products and services uh proposal ai so everyone likes to use the word ai but i'm sure there is some sort of algorithm behind there but it does look through your proposal and give you some tips some of them helpful i think document types custom merge tags some merge tags would be like dynamic placeholders and we'll see what that means email whitelisting then we have the account basic account details and paying for your invoices and the billing branding very great uh i always look for this for me as an agency i like everything to be custom branded and so when i send this proposal uh the recipient or the lead does not know that i'm using better proposals because i have a custom domain or c name for the proposal links i have my branding all over it there's no mention of better proposals in it um and i can add you know my logos my email uh my custom emails for example we send it out from uh my email the other thing is if you don't care what the recipient thinks or you don't care about the mention of better proposals i like what they did here because some people do not care uh and better proposals get you know free promotions because people find out that oh this guy's using this proposal looks great and he used it or he built it using better proposals what better proposals allows is they give you a referral fee and it's not small it says um they give you a hundred percent of the first month's payment of whoever your referral is right so that's really cool anyway from your fonts the thank you emails the text that goes in it custom domain and the possibility of downloading spf pdf and uh integrations so you can integrate with your crm um you can integrate live chat into the proposal which i don't like to do project management tools uh payment methods directly with the proposal however for me um we we after a proposal we send out a contract and then we send out the invoice anyway more and more things here as well um i'm gonna zoom through now uh what the builder looks like so what we'll do is we'll create a new document and we'll create it for a new contact uh company name i will call it uh pizza joes and here you have the templates we have a bunch of different templates although it's not cleaned up i'm not going to use a template we're going to build it from scratch and here you saw we have documents right so what they've added or or changed is before instead of just proposals maybe if they had maybe they had other ones but just proposals now we can do quotes uh brochures statements of work contracts and sign offs so i'm gonna be honest i didn't know they had a contract section here so i will take a look at that although for us we do contracts and then we send it out through uh so maybe i can save some money on subscriptions and use better proposals anyway today i'm only looking at proposals currencies also if you're a digital marketing agency you're working with clients from potentially all over the world who don't who might not work in usd and so you can select a specific currency if you're adding that or any other taxes uh you can select that here as well afterwards oh i need a template and i will click start from scratch i haven't started from scratch in a while all right so we have start from scratch i'm gonna use um a template but uh you can what you can do is if you do start from scratch you can add in a background although this is a little messy your logo these are the dynamic placeholders or the merge tags so i will show you again in a quick second and you can add in the buttons you can add in dates and time and stuff like that after the cover page now this is what the builder looks like so there's not much here i can show you what our current one of our templates look like but basically on the left hand side you have the table of contents um you can pull from a library library being templates and and template blocks from your own quote unquote arsenal so let's create a blank section first and i will call it uh hello and you saw there you can save it into the content library and we can add in more pages and i'll call this your services um or oh sorry i'll call it your campaign and the last page i will call it uh pricing or your fees no let's call it pricing all right so we have a basic uh structure of a proposal i have the first i will uh call it hello now what we can do in the we'll we'll call this like the header or the hero now it's integrated with unsplash pixels up uh you can upload and uh youtube and vimeo um what you saw earlier in the settings with the branding part i've set our brand colors in that settings panel so that for every proposal that i create i've already have i already have our set brand colors you know at the tip of my hand uh tip of my finger i don't know the phrase but it's right there so uh let's say i make it dark blue i can apply it to um to all with the same color maybe i want to add in um a image in the background i can search for it directly in uh better proposals so i picked this one it's very nice uh you can select the trim of the block so i like to use double arrow it's just cool and they have a new feature here animation uh add a subtle yet classy look by fading the content this is something that i'm really happy about uh before they i think they only had one single layout and it was a uh they say normal width but it was too narrow for me so they have full width or wide width mode and then they have uh columns right double columns i'm going to go with wide width and uh so that's what it's this is what it looks like now with the plus sign just like a basic website builder you can start adding in blocks and stuff so maybe i have an intro video or i film a video i can add that in or i can just sync it with or plug in youtube i'm going to add in a content block and uh hello again and i'm gonna do these last changes uh so background i don't want color but maybe i can add a little bit of flair in the background uh tiles and again i'll go with the double arrow and because my background is white i want the background to be dark gray and add that animation keep it full with mode there we go so i write stuff out here as well right i would write an intro blah blah my campaign i'd break down the services i'm providing what the kpis may be uh what the deliverables are or the full scope of work here and with the pricing uh i want to i just want to show you what you can do with the pricing again if i click this block there is the content library so this is where you would save certain block templates this is the pricing block so here let's uh let's add a section title maybe we have a ppc here and [Music] i'll add a line item we should add a new item called ads up and i charge this as a one-off i'll add this item and i'll give it a price maybe 500 and this is setting up your ads right so it's very simple to set up a quote too anyway with the pricing you would add it into the proposal and again within the block we can break it up by another section title maybe we're doing seo as well and so on and so forth right and within here you saw i added one a one-off payment but uh maybe we're doing ppc management every month for a six-month term then you would call you would do that monthly um i've had some clients pay annual it's a very good day when they do so they have annuals as well you can show the quantities allow your clients to set the quantities right maybe you have some great custom package plans uh quantity limits you can make it optional make it a choice at a discount so you can you can pretty much set your full services listing with prices save that pricing section as a template and just reuse it every time and it just saves hours and hours of work versus customized proposals for every single lead now about the custom or the dynamic placeholders so if i'm playing with dynamic playstore placeholders excuse me what that means is uh let's say i want to address the poc or the point of contact that i am referring to for the lead i would do double curly brackets and i'll open up a menu here uh navigation or drop down and you'll see you know the company name what we put in for the template was pizza joe's first name surname etc blah blah blah blah so i put in the first name but i i didn't i didn't add one for this sample sake but if i you know hello first name from double brackets company name it would show up and so when you save this as a as a template block or a proposal template you'll never have to go back in and and and find all the places where you mention company a uh first name their email their industry etc because the next time you open this proposal template if you save it as a template it'll it'll load the same way it's not gonna it's not gonna load pizza joe's it's gonna load curly bracket curly bracket company underscore name curly bracket curly bracket right and that will be replaced in the live version of the proposal with the client the leads uh or the prospect's company name uh afterwards you can save that save and exit uh oh sorry there's one more thing i wanted to show uh let's say down here we're gonna add another block the digital signature so you saw mine where not all my leads or prospects signed off even though we didn't close them but i i do leave this here but the reason why it's not a big deal for us is because none of the legal contract uh clauses or or all that legal speak is in this proposal that is all in our contract and you know the schedule the scope of work that is added into the contract finalized and then signed off so this part doesn't hold too much weight for me but it might be different for you your process might be simpler maybe you have a productize service and this is just the generic you know listing of prices and so on so it depends it's by person anyway going next uh this is that proposal ai you know they've the ai you know skynet has now looked through my proposal and letting me know if it's good i have three pages it's very good i don't have a live chat so they called it moderate and i have a digital signature anyway it's uh it's okay it's fun okay then i can send it when i send it you'll see my email or my company email here this is because i've already set it up in the settings and then i can send it to the the people i need to send it to they can sign it in order just like if you've used it you can add additional recipients and if some of them are just supposed to be cc'd you can turn off the requirement to sign and you can fix you know what the emails are i love your pizza and uh this is what it would look like you can edit these things in another place password protection now you can protect your proposals with a password if need be for me i don't find it too much of a necessity and i have to save money on expenses because if you want to utilize this feature you have to upgrade to enterprise and enterprise is a little too expensive for my taste no i don't i don't really need it so and then we send now anyway i'm going to save and exit and what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you what um you know the proposal might look like so let me see what i can do i will create a new proposal and i will pull fro or sorry i will go to templates and i will open template a full proposal template um some of a lot of these are going to be blurred let me just find something recent that i can use all right so i'm gonna show the preview of the proposal not the actual live builder uh so we can see what it looks like so when the client or the prospect opens up the proposal they will see um what we did earlier like a menu hero of course they'll see the cover first in this case we don't see the cover right now and the way i've broken up my proposal um for me we we work mainly with uh companies trying to enter the korean market so we have an introduction we have some marketing processes uh core service offerings our processes and how we work um uh who we are and and things like that uh then the campaign so the stuff that we'll we'll build or do the deliverables and things like that your investment the pricing and all that again this might be blurred out i'm not sure yet my editors will figure that out and also the next steps so we have the signing here right and and so on so this one is i think around four three months old uh this this template itself not happy with it but it's it's still so here's the thing i might not be happy with it but it's it's still better than what my competitors have been sending not that i know but because we're closing a lot more than some of our competitors are i i i'm assuming our proposals look a lot better and compared to myself so our proposals when we first started uh it's just a ton better for sure um with the builder there's just a lot more that we can do all right so that's a quick breakdown of better proposals uh of course there's a few more things here that you can look into so that was my quick rundown through better proposals as you saw the builder is very easy to do with with version two that better proposals came out with i think earlier this year everything's a lot easier um it always was easier i mean sorry it always was relatively easy compared to you know designing an entire thing out yourself um but what really stands out is to me the ui ux from the of course for for me too but from the prospects point of view or the leads point of view when they open up that email from your branded email and they click the button and leads them to the uh live proposal which is on your brand domain so whatever proposals.yourbrand.com and they go through a cover page they click it they get to the next it's it's it's not interactive but there's a table of contents on the side side with live buttons right you can click it get to the specific section you want um pricing is there there's options within there where they can click how many packages or quantities of the service they want they can sign off with a digital signature and the more creative you are with it you saw you saw my my old template it's not that creative but the more creative you are with it there's a lot you can do you can add in intro videos something we had planned but my own agency we didn't have time to get to is to have a video introduction and explanation for every single service that we provide right it's going to take time but that is something that we can do and it helps a lot and video will stand out because as far as i know none of our competitors are are doing that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna work but the whole thing about marketing or business is testing out new things and seeing what sticks and improving on that so that being said will i stick with better proposals forever no probably not there's always other tools coming out but as of today and as of years ago when i first used it there's been nothing close to better proposals in my opinion if you disagree or you know some great tools please let me know but i definitely think better proposals is worth your time and your money so go check it out and like i said earlier in the video to me proposals are everything of course there is the retention side of your business and you have to deliver and all of that but you that part doesn't even matter if you can't close the lead right and to close the lead there's yeah of course there's a sales call if you do calls if you don't do calls there's emails or or your landing page and things like that but the proposal is the big step it is the deciding factor of the lead or prospect to if they want to work with you or not and so i wouldn't skimp out on any tool um that will help improve the your sales and for me again better proposals have increased the number of closes that we have done uh of course there's many variables and factors that apply but if you're just starting out your agency and you need to start working on proposals and you've never done one before i highly recommend you check out better proposals because they also have templates you can go through and there's just a lot of control you have over it in a easy to use and pretty ui builder so if you like my review you like my walkthrough let me know if you don't like it you don't like my face please let me know and if there's any other tools out there uh proposal tools or other anything that will help people grow their business their online business please let me know like i said in the beginning and on all my videos i am a struggling entrepreneur just trying to make it and live a good life so hope you enjoyed and i'll see you on the flip side [Music] uh watch this video or watch this video thank you [Music] you