The Best Proposal Management Software for Marketing Agencies – Better Proposals Review

If you’re an entrepreneur like me and you’re running your own marketing agency, then closing deals with clients is an everyday aspect of your business. You may be searching for an easy-to-use proposal management software that lets you quickly prepare professional-looking proposals and share them with your prospective clients. After using Better Proposals for some time, I can confidently say that it does indeed make your agency life much easier. Let’s find out what proposal management features it provides to ease the proposal creation process as well as how marketing and sales teams can use them in this in-depth review of Better Proposals, the best proposal software tool for marketing agencies.

Why Proposals Are Important for Marketing Agencies

You create proposals to describe the goal of the project and the scope of work to be undertaken. This ensures that both your client and you, the service provider, are on the same page about what is included in the project before any contracts are signed. 

Your proposal will communicate how you plan to fulfill the client’s requirements, why you are the most qualified to take on the job, and the price for your services. After going through the details of the solution and pricing, the client can then compare it with proposals from other suppliers to decide who their service provider will be. 

Your proposal needs to stand out from amongst many other competitors and present all the relevant information clearly so that your client can make an informed decision. This is why crafting professional-looking proposals are so important to convince your client and close the deal. This is where the right proposal management software can simplify your proposal creation process so that you can focus on the more important details like nurturing customer relationships and pricing. 

What Is Better Proposals and Who Is It For?

At its core, Better Proposals is an online proposal management software that lets you design and create proposals using an intuitive set of tools. It includes many proposal templates that you can readily use with a few tweaks. You can customize these templates with your company branding or start fresh to make your own proposal templates. You can add pricing details for your services and save all of this content for easy access later.

The next step in your proposal process is to share it with your clients for their consideration. Better Proposals enables you to do that via email and even prompt the client to sign it directly to seal the deal. Depending on your Better Proposals subscription plan, you will be able to send your emails from your own brand domain. There are also more advanced proposal management tools included, like integration with existing business applications like CRMs, project management software, and analysis tools that provide useful insights to improve your future proposals. 

Project proposals used to be custom-built using Microsoft Word or a PDF maker. While this offers more control, there’s also plenty of room for errors. It becomes cumbersome to maintain consistency in your branding as well if multiple sales teams are working on proposals simultaneously. Not only that, custom-built proposals can be time-consuming to make on your own and expensive to outsource. 

For a freelancer or a small business owner with a marketing agency, you’ll want a better solution if you’re planning to send out 10 to 15 proposals a week. Better Proposals provides the robust and streamlined proposal management software that you’re looking for to help your company stand out from the rest. 

An Intuitive and Clean UI for Creating Proposals

Better Proposals offers a modern-looking user interface that is intuitive, clean, and user-friendly. The proposal editor might look a bit familiar to those who have used website-building tools like WordPress. It’s neatly designed without any clutter so that new users can start creating proposals without getting distracted or confused. The editor layout of the proposal management software can also be modified to your taste, with a normal view and a wider view available. 

Adding Content Blocks to Build Your Proposal

When you’re in the proposal editor, you get a table of contents on your left, which gets updated as you add new pages. Inside a page, you can add blocks of content like paragraphs, titles, pictures, videos, etc. It is a guided experience with on-screen prompts to add new content blocks, so you always know what you can or cannot add. All of the blocks you add and modify can be saved to your content library and recalled later with a few simple clicks, eliminating the need to duplicate your work.

If your business is just starting out, you might not have prepared your own library of images. There’s nothing to worry about since Better Proposal’s content library provides plenty of stock assets for you to use. You can browse for a suitable image with the given search function and add it to your proposal. 

Ready-Made Templates or Create Your Own

Better Proposals has more than 200 ready-made templates for you to use, including marketing research proposals and marketing plan proposals that will surely be useful for an agency. When you start on a new proposal, you can choose from these templates or from your own saved templates that have been modified from a drop-down list. Just remember to give your templates descriptive names so everyone on your sales team knows what each is for. There are also additional templates for quotes, brochures, contracts, and many more, in addition to the standard proposal templates. 

Merge Tags For Lead and Prospect Details

It’s important to always address your lead or prospect correctly since this shows that you’re paying attention to detail. Better Proposals has minimized the chance of making mistakes for newcomers to your sales team. By using merge tags, this proposal management software ensures they don’t miss out or get client details wrong in the proposal. 

You can save your templates and content blocks with dynamic placeholders for the client’s company name and point of contact details during the editing process. When the proposal is completed, the saved details of the client that correspond to the relevant merge tags will automatically fill all the placeholders. This also makes it easier to prepare many proposals by having a proposal template with merge tags added in. You don’t have to carefully comb through your proposal if you’re in a rush. 

A Content Library for Your Brand

Apart from the saved content blocks and templates, your company’s brand details can be added to the settings. This will set your company name, logo, brand colors, etc. to ensure this information stays consistent throughout all of your project proposals. Better Proposals allows you to save the custom fonts, background images, and various other things that are important to your brand image so that everyone on your team can share these common resources. 

Pricing Blocks and Quotation

Now we come to what is probably the most important page in your project proposal and a must-have feature in any proposal management software. You can add the pricing for your services as line items using the pricing block. You can select a payment type as one-off or subscription as it applies to your services. The currency and taxes will be calculated based on the settings you chose at the start of creating your proposal. Discounts can also be added. 

When you’re done, Better Proposals will display your pricing information like a table in a quotation, but unlike in MS Word, you don’t need to fiddle around with the table properties to make the information look presentable. The proposal management software calculates the totals for you, so there’s no need to pull out a calculator or a spreadsheet. 

These pricing blocks can be saved to your content library, allowing you to reuse them whenever you desire. This saves hours of work since you no longer need to type in the pricing for every single lead. Better Proposals has also added the option of letting your client decide the quantity of items they want to purchase from you as they examine your offer, adding functionality that a traditional proposal cannot offer. 

Proposal AI Driven Suggestions

At the end of the proposal writing process, you can let the Proposal AI take a look at your work and offer some tips to improve it. The AI will usually encourage you to add a cover page, use a recommended number of pages, a custom domain, and add live chat, among other things. It will also advise on the use of language, helping you keep your tone professional throughout. All the tips given by the AI might not be useful or applicable to you, but it’s a nice addition to the proposal management software. The Proposal AI is also a helpful reminder if you forgot to add a cover page. 

Sharing Finished Proposals

After reviewing your proposal, you can share it via an email link with your clients. The details of the email, including subject, message text, and other info, can also be modified, with the option to set your outgoing email address included in the settings for your brand. You can also password protect your proposal for added security. 

Third-Party App Integrations

Better Proposals can also be integrated with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like Hubspot, Zoho, and Salesforce. You will be able to leverage your existing database for contact management. You can import contact details, keep track of your ongoing leads, and nurture them towards a conversion. 

There are also options to integrate with project management solutions like Asana and Trello, as well as workflow automation with Zapier. For a full list of available third-party tools, check out Better Proposals’ Integrations. 

Use Your Custom Domains

If you have a custom domain, you can add that in the settings as well. Your brand will be front and center, removing all mention of Better Proposals from the proposals you share with your clients. Your client will not know what proposal software solution you’re using since the shared links will display your domain. However, you also get the option to earn a little extra cash as a form of referral by allowing the mention of their brand in your proposals.

The Client Experience on Better Proposals

Your client will be able to view the proposal by simply clicking on the link included in the email they receive. It’s easy to access and looks great whether they’re using a mobile device or a desktop computer. The proposals open in browser and look exactly the same as how you built and designed them. Not only will your clients be able to view a professional-quality proposal, but the option of choosing the quantity of items adds a layer of interactivity to the client experience that is not present in traditional custom-built proposals. This is something that only good proposal management software like Better Proposals can provide. There are more ways that Better Proposals will add to your client experience. 

Get Digital Client Signatures and Payments

You can enable your proposal to accept digital signatures from your client if they agree to choose you as their service provider. Not only that, but you can also prompt them to place an order or start a subscription directly from the proposal. This is done with Better Proposal’s integration with payment provider services like PayPal, Stripe, and GoCardless, which can be done in the settings. You can also set the currency you want to accept payments in. 

If your client has already decided, then it’s best to strike while the iron is hot without giving them too much time to change their minds. Accepting digital signatures and payments is a great feature of this proposal management software that will help you close the deal fast. 

Live Chat to Answer Any Queries

As your clients read your proposal, they might have questions about your services or may require some clarification. With a traditional proposal, it might take your client a few days to get back to you with their doubts. However, with live chat integration, they can connect to a member of your sales team directly from a widget on the proposal, and ask those questions as they read. With proposal management software like Better Proposals, you’ll be able to respond to your client’s questions in a timely manner, allowing you to close the deal quickly and get the client on board. 

How Better Proposals Lets You Analyze Your Work

When you log in, you’ll get a dashboard view of recent proposals you have sent, including outstanding and accepted proposals. By using the Reports feature, you can retrieve additional data such as the revenue generated by the product, statistics of sales teams, and sales by month, quarter, or year. These reports can provide valuable insights to improve your marketing and sales strategy. 

By using this proposal management software, you can also find the effectiveness of your proposals by looking at the conversion rate per template. You can even track your clients’ interactions within a specific proposal and see which sections they spend the most time on. With Better Proposals, you’ll be able to create proposal templates that are more capable of convincing a lead to become a customer. 

What Better Proposals Can Improve

While it handles proposal creation and proposal management very well, there are some areas where Better Proposals can improve. In the grand scheme of things, these might seem like minor inconveniences or optional features. On the other hand, ironing out these issues can greatly improve the user experience.  

Exported PDFs Don’t Look Great

While the proposals open up very nicely in the browser, they don’t look so great if a client decides to download them and view them as a PDF. The UI of this proposal software solution is clearly designed with a browser in mind. This is not a major problem since many clients nowadays are tech-savvy enough to use one. Older clients that prefer PDFs might appreciate the solution more if this PDF export feature could be improved. 

There is No Mobile App

Currently, the proposal management software can only be used through a web browser. While this is great when you’re at the office, it can be a bit limiting when you’re traveling. This is where a mobile application would’ve really come in handy, allowing you to quickly use a proposal template, add in the particulars, and share it with your client while on the go. 

Minor Lag

There was some noticeable lag in version 1, although this seems to have been greatly reduced in the current version during recent months. If you do experience issues like lagging or bugs, Better Proposal’s customer support can be reached for help. They are generally helpful and very responsive with their support. 

Better Proposals Pricing Plans

Currently, there are three pricing packages available. The $29 per user monthly subscription for the Premium Package is ideal for a small business marketing agency. However, keep in mind that while most of the proposal management software features are included here, there is a limit on the number of proposals each user can send out per month. There is also a Starter Package at $19 per month per user for freelancers and an Enterprise Package at $49 per month per user designed for large sales teams with unlimited proposals. For more on their monthly subscriptions here, check out pricing. 

Better Proposals Can Help Close Your Deals

As far as proposal management software goes, Better Proposals includes all the bells and whistles with an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allows you to quickly create proposals. There are a host of proposal management tools like templates, content libraries, and even AI suggestions that enable you to make a professional-looking document that stands out from your competitors. All of these proposal management tools can make use of your unique branding at any point during the proposal process. 

This is a proposal management software that can be integrated with your existing contact management and project management solutions for additional functionality. Its digital signatures and the option to accept payments allow your clients to get on board with your solution without any delay. For small marketing agencies and freelancers, proposal management has never been more convenient. Better Proposals are highly recommended for all your proposal management requirements. 

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