How To Create The Perfect Proposal Using Word Docs

It baffles me to this day when sales leaders think they don’t have a proposal workflow problem. Ask any of your reps who are sending more than 2-3 proposals a week, and they’ll show you what you’re missing.

Let’s not even mention the value of a better prospect experience, or finding ways to make it 3.4x easier for a customer to sign. There are tons of competitive advantages you can get from having a proposal that stands out in a sea of bland documents.

Your proposal can be the difference between looking like a million bucks or looking like you run a startup out of your mom’s basement.

Let’s not focus on that. Let’s look at your team’s workflow.

Here’s what your typical rep goes through: 

• Open up a blank word doc.
• Spend an hour trying to figure out what to write.
• Give up and open up 7 other word docs you've used recently.
• Furiously copy paste from those word docs to get the right info.
• Realize, in your fury, you created a Franken-proposal that doesn't make sense.
• Spend the next 3 hours rewriting 50% of it.
• Spend an hour formatting an image that ruins the flow of your document every time you hit enter.
• Get frustrated.
• Ship it to marketing, thinking they can do it faster.
• Marketing doesn’t like the layout so they'll redo it, but it will take a week because they have other projects that are priorities.
• Worry this is taking too long for your prospect.
• Get it back from marketing.
• Looks great, but marketing completely generalized the personalization, so you need to rewrite it.
• Realize marketing did the layout in InDesign, so you have to do all edits through them.
• Get angry at marketing, because you don’t want to do this again.
• Send edits, go back and forth.
• This takes another week.
• The prospect has asked for the proposal twice already.
• Get anxious that you might lose the deal to a competitor.
• FINALLY send the prospect the PDF.
• Crickets...
• Call to realize the file size was too big, so it got caught in spam.
• Prospect asks for edits on pages 3 and 7.
• Send the edits to marketing.
• Compress the file size so it doesn’t get caught in spam again.
• Send updated PDF to prospect.
• Realize you forgot to replace a previous customer's name.
• Have a panic attack.
• Edit, export pdf, and resend.
• Hope the prospect didn't notice.
• Prospect likes it but needs changes to pricing.
• Send pricing edits back to marketing.
• Get the pdf back, compress, send to client.
• Then wait...
• And wait...
• Has the deal gone dark?
• Wait some more.
• Lose sleep knowing you need to do this 8 more times this month for a shot at hitting quota.
• Realize prospecting is on hold, and your 90-day pipeline will suffer.
• Get upset with sales leadership that they don’t see it as a problem worth fixing.
• Open up LinkedIn job search...

I can hear the laughter from your reps through the screen as they read this (it's funny because it's true). I can also feel them cry inside.

You can let this continue, and keep stressing out your reps on non-selling activities.

...Or you could use Proposify.

What are your thoughts?