Proposal Builder

Proposal Builder overview

Your creative team writes and designs the master proposal, incorporating the full suite of available product and service content that is ever likely to be needed. We then get to work setting up the template to be fully interactive to allow fast, easy manipulation and tailoring for each prospect by the sales team.

Paragraphs, pages or whole sections can be removed from the master proposal with a click if not required, and optional content selected. Copy areas can either be fixed or editable as is required or permitted. The result is a document that is 100 per cent relevant to the prospect and 100% ‘on brand’ and beautiful.

When a prospect makes a decision between you and a competitor, they’ll look for clues as to your professionalism, preparation, process and most importantly, how much you appear to want their business. In a close race, your seemingly crafted and highly personalised Proposal Builder pitch – coupled with your speed of response – could be the difference.

Better proposals faster

You only need enter repeated information, such as the prospect company name, once into the template and all relevant content areas are updated automatically. By selecting the prospect’s industry or customer type at the start of the template, relevant content and images can populate at the click of your mouse.

If you have an external or internal team that takes care of printing and binding, the file can be automatically sent through to them on their own management dashboard, along with any relevant deadline, quantity or delivery information.

All your proposals are saved and retrievable again in the future. So if a new prospect is from the same industry or customer profile as a previous company, you can use a previous proposal as starting point for even faster completion.

Visibility and compliance

If required, an approval workflow and dashboard can be added to your proposal builder, giving the sales manager the chance to check and approve each document before it goes to market on PC, tablet or mobile.

With Proposal Builder, layout style, imagery, font and key copy can be all locked down – while still giving the sales team flexibility to tailor and personalise content to each prospect. The output is of a quality you would expect your brand designer to produce over several hours – but it has taken your sales team just minutes to put together.

All proposals are stored in the system and can be easily retrieved and reviewed. So instead of multiple Powerpoint proposals floating around various sales people’s desktops, the business has a robust archive of all proposals in market with easy retrieval and review.

What is the process for building each Proposal Builder template?

Clients supply Brand Machine with the print ready InDesign art file with all potential proposal content, along with a brief indicating the selectable or editable copy and images plus any other required features. If required we can assist with design and copywriting. From there our template team gets to work, coding the artwork to transform it to an interactive, editable proposal.

Our sales team is split into regions, each with a sales manager. Can each manager approve his or her team’s work?

Yes, we are experienced in setting up multi-approver workflows so each user’s manager is notified when a team member has produced a proposal that needs approval. They then go to the approval dashboard where they can review, approve, reject or amend the proposal. It can then be sent through to a print manager, or simply made available for the user to download and email to a prospect, or to arrange printing and binding for a face-to-face meeting.

Can we control who can use each Proposal Builder template?

Yes, you have full control of access rights to all resources on your system.

How does Proposal Builder differ from Marketing Hub?

The Proposal Builder module is typically added to a Marketing Hub to allow the templatisation of long and complex documents. It utilises the same user management and workflow platform and is managed in the same admin interface. This makes it very easy to set up and implement once you have a Marketing Hub in place – with most of the effort going in the planning and building of each proposal template.

Features & Benefits