The leaves are changing colours; the air is getting crisp – fall is all about making changes and starting fresh. That’s why we’re giving you six new, free, FRESH, business proposal templates to help you close your next deal.

(Did you just get as excited as you got picking out new shoes and a backpack for school? Thought so.)

No one likes being in a time-crunch, especially when you’re trying to get a proposal ready and making sure it looks impressive. We have more than 50 professionally written and designed proposal templates for an array of services, industries, and projects to choose from. Get sending, and never worry about writer’s block again!

Our latest templates are for services like: workshops, professional speakers, security, executive coaching, content marketing, and commercial leasing.

Our business proposal templates provide suggestions for layout and copy, but if it doesn’t quite fit your needs or your brand, change it up! All of our templates are 100% customizable, including text, layout, design, and images.

We know that when it comes to proposals, timeliness can make or break the deal. To keep you closing faster, our proposals feature the ability to add legally binding online signatures, making it easier for you, and your client to seal the deal.

Getting the signature isn’t everything though. Once you’ve created your proposal, sent it off, and your client has signed it, you obviously want to get paid. Thanks to our integration with Stripe, you can request a payment from your client right in the proposal, making cash flow seamless. Create, send, sign, and GET PAID in one fell swoop (cha-ching!).

Time is money, so stop wasting yours (and your sanity) getting tangled up in boring Word docs when you could be creating beautiful, client-pleasing proposals in record time. Check out our full gallery of free proposal templates to get started.

Workshop Proposal Template

Professional development companies can use our free workshop proposal example to guide them through preparation of workshop training proposals, including sections for objectives, outcomes, and testimonials. This workshop proposal template includes sections that highlight your expertise in the professional development industry, and what you provide to clients, including analysis and assessment, training materials, implementation and delivery of workshops, and evaluation of workshops. Check out our free workshop proposal template.

Speaker Proposal Template

Professional speakers will find this free speaking proposal example helpful when preparing quotes for public appearances and keynote speaking engagements. This proposal sample features sections that include information about the speaker, your level of communication with your client prior to and following their event, and what is provided to the client during the event. There are also sections to highlight speaking services, any event promotion you will assist your client with, and terms and conditions specific to your company or speaker. Check out our free speaker proposal template.

Security Proposal Template

This free security proposal template helps illustrate your philosophy and your expertise as a security service. Showcase the full range of security guard services you provide, examples of technology you use, and testimonials. Also, provide your client with a thorough description of their plan, including customized or standard plans, site security analysis, plan presentation, and implementation. Check out our free security proposal template.

Executive Coaching Proposal Template

Companies and certified business coaches who provide executive coaching can pitch objectives, deliverables, and their process with our free executive coaching proposal template. Explain how your business coaching works, your process from consultation to implementation, and provide clients with a detailed timeline. This executive coaching contract template also features sections for what you provide, what you will need provided from your client, fees and any specific terms and conditions you have.  Check out our free executive coaching proposal template.

Content Marketing Proposal Template

If you’re a marketing agency, content creator, or freelancer that provides writing services, our free content marketing proposal sample will provide a clear guide for pitching your services. Highlight design and implementation processes, provide examples of analytics and reporting available, and outline your strategy for preparing a full plan for your client. Explain how documenting opportunities and obstacles, along with initiating a content marketing strategy can aid in increasing online business, and provide a clear timeline for your client.  Check out our free content marketing proposal template.

Commercial Lease Proposal Template

Commercial leasing companies can pitch their process, including initial consultation, search and viewing of commercial real estate, and lease agreements to potential clients with our free commercial lease proposal template. Explain your objectives, reputation in the community, and how you work with your client every step of the way. This commercial leasing proposal sample also provides sections for proposed investment from your client, and any terms and conditions specific to their agreement.  Check out our free commercial lease proposal template.

SPOILER ALERT - This post contains spoilers about season one of Stranger Things. If you haven't yet watched it, get binging, and I’ll meet you back here.

Full disclosure: The '80s were my time, the cast of every Steven Spielberg /John Hughes/Rob Reiner movie were my people. The music, the hair, the clothes, the food, the bikes. I lived it in real-time, un-ironically.

Case in point: the doomed BFF character, Barb from Stranger Things, setting of 1983:

And this is me in real-life, 1983:

I wasn’t kidding when I said the '80s were my time, my people. I’m just glad I stayed clear of Steve’s pool.

So not surprisingly, I loved season one of Netflix’s nostalgic and creepy series, Stranger Things, set in 1983 Middle America. I watched the entire season twice last year when it first came out, and I'm waiting with bated Gen-X breath for season two to air on October 27th.

While there were a lot of things I thought the creators got right about season one of Stranger Things from an entertainment perspective, I couldn't help but think about some of the takeaways from a business perspective.

Maybe I’m trying to justify my binge watching by turning it into a clickbait, work-related blog post. But there are aspects of the show that resonated with me in terms of managing a business, creating ideas, and marketing it all back to the people.

Make an emotional connection

If you’re in marketing or sales, you already know that you need to make an emotional connection with your audience, regardless of what you’re selling. It’s like the golden rule. The stronger, the better. Emotion is what moves people to buy, sell, change their behaviour, and do what you want them to do.

There are always skeptics that say, “Well, I didn’t buy my bathroom cleaner based on emotion.”

Yes, you did.

You bought that bathroom cleaner because the spokeswoman reminds you of your beloved grannie, so you trusted that when she said in the ad, “This will take the stank out of your sink,” it was true.

Or maybe cute baby ducks always make you go ‘awwwwwwww’ so you were drawn to that particular cleaner’s label. But the bleachy smell of a different cleaner reminds you of that university summer job as a chambermaid. Not a pleasant memory so there’s no way you’d choose THAT product.

We are emotional drama queens all day long, even if we’re not conscious of it.

And that’s where Stranger Things starts off on just the right note. It uses nostalgia marketing as its secret weapon.

I knew nothing about Stranger Things before I watched the first season, other than it was rumoured to be very authentically set in the '80s. My people, my time. Just that tidbit alone was enough to pique my interest.

Then I heard there were a lot of influences from, and nods to, classic '80s movies like E.T., Stand By Me, Poltergeist, The Goonies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movies of my time as a teenager when I didn’t just watch a movie, I consumed it, I felt it.

That’s about all I knew when I started binge-watching Stranger Things.

It’s also why on any given night last summer, the streets were swarming with people bumping into telephone poles. Pokémon GO was another brilliant, albeit short-lived, example of nostalgia marketing.

But Pokémon GO is not part of my nostalgia. I was well into my 20s when Pokémon came out the first time; I was off chasing boys and bears in the wilds of Canada’s Yukon (you should go, BTW), not playing with a Game Boy. So I wasn't as ‘touched’ by the resurgence of Pokémon’s popularity as my younger Millennial co-workers who relived their childhood fun.

Different generations have different feelings about the same events or cultural symbols and even within demographic groups there can be a lot of variation.

With nostalgia marketing, you need to be very clear who you’re marketing to, and how you want them to feel in association with your brand.

And just because someone didn't actually live through a particular generational event, they can still have a nostalgic relationship with aspects of that time.

Think of fan-obsessed shows like Mad Men or Downton Abbey. Only a small percentage of the viewers of those shows would have personally experienced those times and situations (even less so in the case of Downton Abbey), but most viewers felt a connection based on their perception of those eras.

With nostalgia marketing, you usually you want to focus on happy, more idealistic times in your target audience’s past – or at least what they perceive were happier times.

Maybe Don Draper explained nostalgia marketing the best during the Kodak ‘Carousel’ pitch:

“Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”

Be authentic

If you’ve watched Stranger Things, you know about the set design. Your mind has been blown by the set design. Authenticity is a critical part of getting nostalgia just right.

The Stranger Things set doesn’t look like someone is trying to recreate the '80s in a goofy Halloween costume kind of way; it actually feels like the real '80s. The phones, the hair, the clothes, the houses, the cars, the music, the decor. It IS the '80s, not a parody of it.

Just after Stranger Things first launched last year, I heard an interview on CBC Radio’s Day 6 with the prop master, Lynda Reiss. Reiss talked about the crew’s commitment to authenticity and how props played a powerful role in achieving it.

For example, the Dungeons & Dragons figurines the boys play with throughout season one:

"I didn't want to put plastic and have it painted. Even as far as sound goes, when the boys clunk those characters down on the board, there is a different noise a lead character makes than a plastic character." - Lynda Reiss

This level of authenticity helps deepen the emotional connection viewers have with Stranger Things. It evokes feelings of respect and admiration for the show’s creators for committing to this level of authenticity and for treating the viewers’ memories with care and attention to detail.

Everyone talks about the importance of being authentic, but what does that mean for your business?

Being authentic in business is about doing what you promise, whether that’s in relation to your customers, your employees, your product /service, or your community.

It’s about defining your mission and goals, or brand, in a way that connects with all your stakeholder groups, and in a way that you know you can follow through on.

Rustin Hanks, the CEO of TapInfluence says authenticity works for businesses because:

• It elevates your business above the competition
• It builds your identity and image into something influential
• It gives substance to your business, services, and products
• It enables people to relate to your business
• It helps people understand how what you offer is of benefit to them
• It tells people that what you offer is of high quality
• It marks you out as a reliable, trustworthy company
• It encourages engagement and can turn audiences into advocates

The key to authenticity isn’t just being real; it’s being consistent.

As Seth Godin puts it:

“If it acts like a duck (all the time), it's a duck. Doesn't matter if the duck thinks it's a dog, it's still a duck as far as the rest of us are concerned.”

If Linda Reiss had spent all that time sourcing just the right metal Dungeons & Dragons pieces but then had Steve and Nancy making out to a song released in 1988 instead of 1983 when the show is set, it would have annoyed viewers like me who know the difference. We would have lost trust in the show’s authenticity and as a result, weakened our emotional connection with it.

So if one of your company values is about committing to environmental sustainability but the manufacturing of your product contributes to the poisoning of local wetlands, you’ve got an authenticity problem. We did a great podcast interview with Organik SEO about this very topic.

If you say on your website you’re committed to customer service but don’t train, empower, or invest in your customer support team, you’ve got an authenticity problem.

Do what you say you’re going to do. Consistently.

Be who you say you are. Consistently.

Remember:

Sometimes, we all need the Upside Down

OK, so maybe your business doesn’t need the terrifying, goopy, evil, dark, monster-ridden alternate reality that is the Upside Down of Stranger Things.

But what you do need, what we all need sometimes, is a different perspective.

I love that the Upside Down isn't a faraway planet or an evil lair. Instead, it's the same place - Hawkins, Indiana - just a different version of itself. The woods, Will’s fort, Joyce’s house, the bathroom.

Creepy evil stuff aside, it made me think about the importance of looking at a situation from another angle, or using a different lens.

It can be easy to get caught up in seeing things the same way all the time; how you approach problems, ideas, business opportunities. It can be stagnating, frustrating, and detrimental to business growth.

And yes, there are times when the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” may be true, but something doesn’t have to be broken to make it BETTER.

So how do you get that new perspective on something you look at every day, like your company, your product, your sales process, your team?

Get outside inspiration

Although businesses vary, they often share the same kinds of challenges, and in turn, solutions. Expose yourself to industries different than your own, in other countries, and to people using a different model. You may discover a solution you hadn’t considered.

My version of this is often my husband. At first blush, we had very different careers. Me in marketing, he in the Canadian military, and a good chunk of his military career was in intelligence.

When we first started dating and I would tell him about what I was doing at work - developing messages for a client, trying to find the right tone, trying to convince or influence behaviour, creating key messages - surprisingly, he could relate.

Some of his team’s intelligence work involved developing messages that would resonate with people in other countries and cultures; to earn their trust, gain their confidence, to win “hearts and minds” as it were. We had different terms for things but we quickly realized how much crossover there was.

And although there were a lot of particular details he could never divulge, it was interesting and helpful to me at times to hear about different general approaches they used and challenges they encountered. For example, how a symbol of a dove on a postcard was supposed to represent peace but the locals mistook it for a chicken and thought NATO was going to hand out free chickens.

Talk to your customers

There’s no better way to escape the ivory tower of your stale perceptions about your business than to talk to your customers.

We do that here at Proposify. Part of our onboarding process after signing up for a paid plan involves asking each of our customers for a 15-minute phone call either with our CEO, Kyle Racki, or our chief product officer, Ricky Ferris.

Not everyone takes us up on the offer but a number of our customers do, and we are grateful for the frontline feedback. They tell us about their experience with our product and also about their particular business, their challenges, their opportunities.

These conversations allow us to recognize any false assumptions we might have had and help us stay focused on creating a product and service that is actually valuable to our customers.

So don’t leave feedback to just impersonal surveys and the customer support team. Get on the phone, have coffee, fly out to see them. Find out directly what they think and what their business challenges are. It could lead to a new service, redesigned feature, or an improved process.

Ask your team

This seems obvious but it’s amazing how often owners can overlook the rich resources and fresh perspectives right under their noses: their team.

Your employees aren’t there just there to crank out stuff; they’re your team. Meaning, you’re all working together toward the same goal.

If you’re the company founder, it can be an easy habit to get into of trying to do everything yourself because you had to do that in the early days of your company.

But that’s why you now have a team; to help share the load, and to bring diverse experience and perspective. So open up discussions, and not just with people in one particular department, ask everyone. You may be surprised by the innovative approaches that rise to the top given a supportive environment.

You don’t have to be big to be mighty

It’s not the CIA, or the cops, or the adults who save the day in Stranger Things. It’s the kids.

Yes, the adults get involved later on but really it’s the kids who figure out there’s something very wrong in Hawkins and are very determined to start putting plans into action.

And then there’s Eleven, a small, young, waifish girl who wields incredibly strong and special powers. But nobody would know by looking at her.

It can be easy when you’ve got a small business, or you’re just starting out to feel like you can’t make an impression until you’re bigger, you have more money, more clients, or a larger team.

But sometimes being small means you can be agiler than a large company. You can change direction quickly, you can try new things because you haven’t yet been pigeon-holed, or you can create a new brand because you’re not locked into an old stale and crusty one.

You can experiment and fail because not everyone’s looking at you so it gives you time to learn and gain more experience before you have to perform on the big stage. You can fly under the radar and then take your competition by surprise.

“Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big.” ― Seth Godin

Not the Harvard Business Review

Let me be clear that I’m not suggesting Stranger Things is The Harvard Business Review or Gary Vaynerchuk.

It’s a fun, well-done show, and I do think there are keys to its success that can offer real-life business lessons to all of us.

And if that helps assuage your guilt for binge-watching the upcoming season two of Stranger Things, I'm not one to judge. I’m just not sure you can claim it as overtime.

In the long, often arduous, process of crafting a proposal, design is frequently relegated to the lowest priority. It’s understandable; as a business owner, or the person in charge of getting proposals out the door, your chief concern is with the content, rather than the proposal layout.

A concise cover letter, content that will sweep your sales lead off their feet, competitive pricing options, and, hopefully, a captivating case study or two that show off your expertise with real-world examples. That’s the stuff that sells your business, so why does it matter if the proposal is pretty looking or not? You’re trying to close this deal, not win a beauty pageant, right?

Poorly designed proposals can be confusing, hard to read, cumbersome, and fail to effectively communicate with your client. Your proposal design has to be functional as well as beautiful, or else all that good stuff you’ve put into your proposal can go to waste. And that’s a cryin’ shame.

Laying out a proposal is not just about how it looks (although it’s certainly a factor); it’s how the information in your proposal is communicated. If your proposal looks unfocused, you look unfocused.

If the proposal doesn’t clearly show your deliverables or process, your potential client will take one look and hit the road. Taking the time to focus on your proposal format (and getting a sober, second set of eyes to look it over) can ensure your offer stands out in an overfull inbox.

The layout, typography, images, and aesthetic of your proposal design all work together to give the reader a sense of who you are, what you can do for them, and why they should hire you.

Bad proposal design can make your clients feel underwhelmed by what they see, or worse, overwhelmed and confused by a messy layout. If your competition is delivering sharp-looking and well-designed proposals, your chances of closing the deal are going to take a significant hit right out of the gate.

Good proposal design makes you stand out from your competition and communicates your company’s services and differentiation efficiently and clearly. People remember things that stand out from their peers more when they’re distinct, and a rocking proposal design is a surefire way to put you top of mind.

Creating well-designed proposals is an investment, but it’s one many companies may not have experience in. So where do you begin?

Saving you time and energy creating proposals is near and dear to our hearts (it’s why we created Proposify!), so my design colleague Lindsey Ward and I prepared some tips and resources you can use to help kick-start your proposal design revolution.

And, as a bonus, we reached out to some of our Proposify customers to see if they would share their best proposal design examples. We picked our five faves to give you an idea of just how powerful good proposal design can be.

Powerful proposal design elements

We won’t go too deep into the principles of design in this article (here’s a handy cheat sheet if you’re curious though). Instead, we’ll focus on some practical takeaways you can use right away to improve your proposal design and wow clients.

Follow your brand guidelines

Keep in mind that your brand is more than just your logo. Your brand is your identity as a company and your promise of quality to your clients represented through factors like graphics, imagery, and tone of voice.

If you’re a design or marketing agency, you probably have brand guidelines established already. But for other businesses, creating brand guidelines might not be something you have or have considered investing in. MailChimp has a simple example of their brand guidelines, as well as an idea of how their brand is used.

Without getting too far into the weeds on how to build a successful brand, consistency is key. Your colours, imagery, typefaces, and tone of voice should reflect who you are, and how you want to be perceived by your target audience.

Logo

Your brand is more than your logo, but the logo is still the flagship of your fleet, so it’s gotta look good. Make sure you have large, high-resolution .png files of your logo and/or wordmark that work on white, dark, and coloured backgrounds, so they aren’t blurry.

Again, if you have an in-house design team you’ll have this already, but if you outsourced to an agency or a freelancer and are missing anything, contact them to get what you need.

A good logo makes a good first impression, so it should appear on the cover of your proposal, and, in most cases, be a repeating element on your other pages without taking over.

Colour

If you have an established brand, you probably have a colour palette already. Those are your colours, so use ‘em! Adding colour to your proposal text headings, page numbers, and any repeated elements is a quick, simple way to establish a consistent feeling of your brand throughout your proposal. We’ll look at some examples later in this post.

If you’re looking for a new colour palette or you don’t already have one, there are lots of free resources online to help you out, and our favourite here at Proposify is Coolors. With Coolors you can quickly generate a random colour palette, customize everything, and save and export your palette in a bunch of formats.

Or, if you’re really strapped for time, you can pick from the thousands of palettes other people have created. Don’t be afraid to be bold and creative with your colours –  just make sure that everything remains legible.

Photography and Graphics

There’s no golden rule that your proposal must use photos; if you’re sending something like a contract or a quick revision to a long-standing client, you can get away with just copy. But by and large, proposals with great images that reinforce your brand’s message and show off your work are more impressive and impactful than those without.

Once again the internet comes to the rescue for those of us who lack the time or skill to source great proposal images. There are many free stock image websites featuring photos from professional and amateur photographers alike that give you free reign to download, modify, and use their photos however you need. Our king of the castle, in this case, is Unsplash.

All the photos on Unsplash are curated by their team so you can expect incredible quality, and there are over 300,000 images to choose from. They’re also large and high-resolution so they’ll look sharp wherever they’re used.

The only real drawback with a site like Unsplash is that the types of photos are determined by what photographers upload. If you need beautiful photos of nature, hands holding things, or well dressed young people having non-specific types of adventure, you’re in luck. However, depending on your business, you might not be able to find the specific image you need on a free site like this.

Traditional stock image sites like iStock and Shutterstock might be a better option in that case. Their photos cost money, but good quality photography that you can reuse in multiple proposals is worth it.

And there’s no need to stop at photos; graphics are another great way to add some extra flavour to your design. Free Design Resources and GraphicBurger are two great sites where you can nab free icon packages. The best part? You only need to gather them once for your design toolkit.

So, whether you use a free image site or a traditional stock site, taking a couple of hours out of your day to gather a small collection of great photos for your brand is an investment that will pay off in the future.

Copy

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that great copy lends itself to great proposal design. If you have someone on staff with a silver tongue, use those talents. If you don’t have someone who can write compelling, clear, and persuasive proposal content, consider outsourcing to a freelance copywriter.

Again, it’s a valuable investment to develop copy you can use over and over again. Is your brand quirky? Cool and edgy? Professional and direct? Whatever it is, find your tone of voice and stick to it.

Typography

Sometimes we spend so much time concentrating on the words in our proposal, it’s easy to overlook the typeface they come delivered in. Once again, if you have brand guidelines or a designer working with you, the question of which typeface to use should already be answered.

Google Fonts is a great resource for completely free fonts (currently 846 families) that are web and print friendly. You can sort the fonts by font category (serif, sans-serif, etc.), width, and thickness, then simply scan for the fonts, and download them. (Did we mention Proposify has access to the entire library of Google Fonts?)

Find one or two fonts that are easy to read and work with your brand. Keep your headings bold, and make sure you have a comfortable line-height (which is the space between your lines of text), so your body text is highly readable. The easier it is for your clients to read your proposal content, the easier it will be to convince them that your company is the best choice.

Layout

With your brand guidelines solidified, some amazing photos added, and copy that will knock the socks off your client, how should you actually lay out your proposal?

Here are a couple of quick and handy proposal layout rules:

• Reading long paragraphs of text is taxing on the eyes, so keep your line length (the width of your paragraphs) to somewhere in the 50-75 characters per line range

• Break up long passages of text with images to give your client a little break from reading.

• Keep everything aligned in a way that doesn’t confuse the reader’s eye. Typically, left aligning text is your best bet. This practice creates a consistent line for the reader's eye to travel down, making it easy to consume a large amount of text in one go. The more evenly things line up, the easier it is for the eye to move around the page.

• Use white space. Give the elements on your page room to breathe, and they’ll have much more impact.

Seeing is believing, so let's look at some real proposal layout examples from our amazing Proposify customers!

Meet your proposal design all-stars

These companies were gracious enough to let us show off their rocking proposal designs to the world, and they were all created using Proposify. Let’s see what makes them so good!

Note: These proposal designs aren’t ranked or in any particular order. If we had to pick a favourite, we’d pick all of them! Who cares if that’s cheating.

Chillisauce

Who they are: Chillisauce is an event agency that creates tailored events for stag parties, corporate outings, and adventure-filled weekends.

Their Proposal Design:

Why it works: You know that feeling when a coworker or friend shows up with a great haircut or spiffy new clothes, and you just can’t help but compliment them on it? Well, that’s the way you want your clients to react to your cover page. A good cover page immediately makes your sales lead engaged and interested to dive into your business proposal.

Right off the bat, we see that that Chillisauce’s branding is featured creatively, working their logo into a descriptive graphic that highlights the Big Brother theme. This is a great example of taking that extra bit of time to really drive home your product. The cover is simple, informative, and impactful.

Leading with a page detailing your understanding of your client’s needs is a great way to begin your proposal. This section reinforces that Chillisauce has done their due diligence while at the same time welcomes the client into the experience of the event by referencing their needs and providing a sample of the forthcoming fun with clever photography.

The proposal sections are separated by simple cover pages. This is a great way to organize your content and break up the flow for a better reading experience. They used simple but effective graphics which are on brand in both style and colour.

Chillisauce makes great use of graphics and photos that keep their copy concise and focused. This proposal is easy to read, thanks to a clean layout (an image covering a third of the space, followed by text), large headings, colourful subheadings, and organized body copy.

Their pricing table is super clean and readable, and they close their proposal with a perfectly placed pun and a simple contact page. Overall, their proposal is to the point, colourful, and you get a sense of who they are as a company. Well done, lads! (That’s how people talk in the UK, right?)

• Typefaces used: Montserrat, Open Sans

• Effective graphics

• Section cover pages

• Well designed send off which clearly displays their contact information.
  
  

Vendic

Who they are: Vendic is a full-service Magento partner in the field of web hosting, support and marketing.

Their Proposal:

Why it works: A minimal cover like Vendic uses in their proposal design can be risky, but if you follow it up as they do with a page containing all the vital introductory information of the proposal, you can get away with it.

Their second page lists the person delivering the proposal and the recipient, the title of the project, and a quick cover letter/message detailing the project. Our Dutch is a little rusty (Oh, we’re like about 0% fluent) but we can tell what’s on the page.

Social media button links at the bottom of this page is a nifty idea as well. This saves time explaining that you’re active socially while giving your client the option to knock on your door through other avenues.

A simple watermark repeating element that sits behind the text is a great way to add a little texture to your page. The well shot, embedded video efficiently communicates what your company’s about without a lot of descriptive text. Even if your video production skills aren’t quite Spielberg-esque, shooting a quick one-minute, targeted video speaking directly to your client and including it in your proposal can effectively communicate your message.

• Typefaces used: Droid Sans, Montserrat

• Soft, on-brand watermark repeating element adds texture to the page

• Clean and simple layout with great use of their brand colour

• Inclusion of well shot and descriptive video

ThreeSixtyEight

Who they are: Threesixtyeight is a company of designers and communicators whose specialities include marketing, website and web design, branding and brand strategy.

Their proposal:

Why it works: ThreeSixtyEight has created a seamlessly on-brand proposal template that references their product in both design and text. From beginning to end, the target audience is addressed and the company's mission clear.

“We are still learning and improving, but our overall philosophy is that simplicity is key. Proposals that are heavy-handed are less likely to close because in trying to say everything, the proposal says nothing.” Jeremy Beyt, Chief Strategy Officer

The minimalist cover is really striking, it’s sort of reminiscent of a book on Swiss Design. You would expect a web design agency to have a well-designed proposal so ThreeSixtyEight’s clean layout, demonstrated by consistent text alignment, and in this case, minimal photography is a great sign right away.

“Much like the work we produce, we’ve chosen to adopt a visual, simplistic style that is human-friendly. Ultimately, the person on the other end is busy and doesn’t have time to read three paragraphs about our design philosophy. I think one of the best things we’ve done is adopt an executive summary page as part of the proposal. If we do include detailed content, it always follows an executive summary page, which condenses the proposal into a one-page summary with critical information like price and timeline.” Jeremy Beyt, Chief Strategy Officer

Notice that they’ve used their square logo element in multiple places, from the Project Summary section to the creative way they’ve framed their team members. This is another proposal that uses simple internal cover pages for each section of the project summary successfully, so you know exactly where you are in the flow of the document.

This proposal design is a good example of one that doesn’t necessarily need a lot of images because the content is spaced out well and given room to breathe. ThreeSixtyEight’s proposal design might not look the flashiest, but the elegant and professional design makes it stands out.

• Typefaces used: Montserrat, Open Sans and Lusitana

• Design follows the identity and branding of ThreeSixtyEight well and is highly consistent

• Good typeface hierarchy – the headings, subheadings, body copy, and quotes are all distinct from each other

• Pull quotes that reiterate the success of the project. All done in a format that can be repeated throughout proposals.

Apples & Arrows

Who they are: Apples & Arrows is a branding agency who help their clients discover and celebrate who they are and what makes them remarkable.

Their proposal:

Why it works: Apples & Arrows makes it clear that they are taking their client on a journey. This is demonstrated through beautiful photography, clearly displaying adventure. At the same time, concise headings help the client follow that journey, with no fear of getting lost in text or misadventure.

Their header images help the proposal stand out in this way, like a beautiful, bold trail of breadcrumbs. Apples & Arrows noted that they feel this is a simple design element, but by using the reversed text on the bright backgrounds, it makes the headings look quite distinct when compared to their previous, mostly generic design.

Almost opposite from ThreeSixtyEight, Apples and Arrows’ proposal design is a great example of using images to describe their purpose. Discovery, adventure, and a new beginning are all communicated through their imagery.

“We’re in a creative industry, so we need to maximize every opportunity we have to communicate our thinking, processes, and abilities. For some of our leads, the proposal is one of the first points of contact they may have with us, so having a non-standard, visually interesting proposal is a critical component of our new business efforts.” Todd Ramsey, Founder & Chief Strategist

The cover letter describes their company and abilities, and the imagery remains clear and on-message.

Apples & Arrows’ proposal has a simple layout, and because they have a good catalogue of high-resolution images, their design can remain in whole the same, without looking dull or long.

• Typography: Raleway

• Engaging and varied photos

• Consistency in typography, headings, page numbers

Ice Nine

Who they are: Ice Nine Studios is a Squarespace Authorized Trainer that designs websites and inbound marketing systems for businesses.

Their proposal:

Why it works: Ice Nine’s proposal is in sync with the web development market, and highly focused on messaging. The professionally-created graphics demonstrate the quality of work in store for Ice Nine’s clients.

This proposal is quite different from most we’ve seen in that you really get the sense that each page has a clear, targeted objective or message. Ice Nine has clearly put a lot of thought into their understanding their target audience and how to communicate with them. This is shown in their strong use of graphics. They elevate the proposal to take on a web page feel rather than a document.

They’ve done a good job keeping the page limit down, something that can be challenging when you have a lot of information to get across but don’t want to overwhelm your client. While sometimes this means that the pages can verge on being cluttered, Ice Nine’s good use of icons and graphics help segment the information to make it easier to read.

This proposal is a great example of carefully-crafted copy. Throughout the proposal, Ice Nine references how they can help their client. Not by just saying so, but by demonstrating why in their design and text.

“The page that talks about Squarespace with the white iPhone — one of our top challenges when courting a website client is that they often have a firm opinion that a good website is one that is custom coded or running Wordpress. This page serves the purpose of establishing the reliability of using Squarespace by providing examples from Tony Hawk, Lyft, and Pixar, and the imagery of a full inbox communicates that having a Squarespace website will lead to more website leads.” Collin Belt, Founder

This is reinforced by the headings, where the text is presented as concise and clear. The client can understand each stage of the web design process and that leaves them feeling confident that they are taken care of.

Another solid tip is to re-use any graphics you might already be using on your website or other marketing materials. You don’t necessarily need to recreate everything for your proposal from scratch.

Finally, a great idea from Ice Nine is that they don’t put their terms of service into their proposal, but instead have them on their website. This significantly shortens the length of the proposal and reinforces their brand’s impression on their clients by having them visit the site.

“Something more specific to Proposify is giving people the option of making choices using checkboxes. By making a part of the proposal interactive, it really gets clients thinking through the care package that’s the best fit for them.  One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was offloading the terms of service to our website. It gives us massive flexibility to always keep it up to date, and it means that our proposals are about 14 pages shorter — reducing the friction between reading the proposal and signing it.” Collin Belt, Founder

• Typefaces used: Lato, Montserrat

• Copy and messaging that understands the target audience

• Use of graphics provides a lot of energy

Design is communication

Way back in design school, the message that we received over and over from instructors was that design is communication. Your goal with design is to transmit a message to the person viewing the end product, whatever that message may be. The choices you make in your determine how effectively your message is received. And having no design? That’s a choice too –one you don’t want to make.

Well-designed proposals that effectively, clearly, and engagingly communicate their content immediately have a competitive edge. Putting in a few extra hours of time and or hiring some outside help to improve the design of your proposals will pay dividends for you in the future.

The tips in this article are meant to help you design better business proposals, but there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing to a talented freelancer if you’re strapped for time or lack the skills. Whatever your route, we hope this helps to transform your proposals into beautifully designed gems that give your clients no choice but to sign on the dotted line.

Thanks to everyone who submitted their proposal designs to us. We had an overwhelming amount of responses and can safely say that it was hard to only choose five.

Do you have any design tips that give your proposals an advantage? Think we overlooked something? We’d love to hear from you so give us a shout in the comments!

To all the Proposifiers out there: If you think your proposal design takes the cake, let us know. If we get a big enough response, we might do another installation of this with more smart, deal-closing designs!

Design resources featured in this article

Principles of Design

MailChimp Brand Assets

Coolors

Unsplash

iStock

Shutterstock

Google Fonts

Free Design Resources

GraphicBurger

Starting out in sales can be scary. You need to find quality leads, make connections, close deals, and it can feel like there should be some secret formula to do it all; like if you say the magic word, every lead will turn into the perfect client. But you can’t spend your entire career working out of fear.

Finding your footing can be difficult enough in a cut-throat industry like sales, but couple that with some less than sage sales advice and it can be a down-right scary situation. We’ve all received well-intentioned but bad advice at some point, and I’m sure you’ve never forgotten it because bad advice sticks with you, like a cobweb in a doorway.

Since it’s October, and there is an eeriness in the air, I asked some sales pros to tell me the WORST sales advice they’ve ever received. Get your treat bags ready.

Worst Sales Advice

Just imagine everyone you’re pitching naked; it will take away your nerves.

Mary Nichols- Account Director, Murmur Creative

“There are few people in this world that I would ever care to see naked,” says Mary. “Thinking of potential clients sitting naked around a table makes me want to vomit versus helping my nerves.”

Obviously, Mary hasn’t used this sales advice, because even if you’re picturing Brad Pitt in place of who you’re talking to, it’s just plain weird. It creates an awkward and unpleasant image of your potential client in your mind and can end up distracting you when you need to be focused.

If you’re nervous about an upcoming sales pitch, practice it in front of friends or colleagues. Preferably ones who are clothed.

Do what you need to do to get the sale.

Amy Sears- Sales, Proposify

“It’s just wrong for so many reasons, and I think it’s why sales can have a negative connotation,” says Amy.

The last thing you want is for your prospect to feel that you don’t care at ALL about them, their needs, or their pain points and that all you do care about is making your commission. Push a client too far, and you’ll put a bad taste in their mouth that will stick with them for years. Instead, focus on building a relationship with them. Understand their needs, their goals, and any issues they’re having that your product or service can solve.

Keeping clients’ needs in mind will avoid perpetuating that negative stereotype of the pushy salesperson, and can lead you to more prospects in the future from recommendations.

Thankfully, Amy didn’t actually use this sales advice, because she’s smart, and knew it doesn’t help build a relationship between her and her client.

"From bad leads to bad advice, sales can be scary. Don’t believe everything you hear and find a mentor to guide you."

Fake it ‘til you make it.

Matt Buckenham- Senior Director Business Development, FCV Interactive

“It just shows a complete lack of authenticity and is doomed to fail as your blind spots are revealed,” says Matt.

It didn’t take Matt years of experience to realize this was some of the worst sales advice he’s heard because for him, showing vulnerability through sharing your weaknesses is a strength.

People can smell bull**** from a mile away. They want to be able to trust you, and if they think you’re deceiving them, they definitely won’t.

Opening yourself up to your clients helps build trust, and shows them the experiences you’ve had. Maybe something you reveal is similar to a pain point they have that you can empathize with.

Throw your beliefs out the window to make the sale.

Ryan MacDougall- Sales, Proposify

“Reputation is everything,” says Ryan. “If you want your clients to trust you, they need to know they can believe what you’re saying, and that you’re consistent with them.”

It’s hard to shake a bad reputation, so it’s best to avoid getting one at all costs. Speak to your clients with honesty, integrity, and manage their expectations. Even if what you believe, or say, doesn’t make them happy, they will have more respect for you because you were honest.

Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Scott Tower- Sales, Proposify

“Maybe it’s not the ‘scariest’ sales advice ever, but if you don’t recognize when the timing isn’t right for a prospect, you might lose a sale by trying to force a client’s hand when they aren’t ready,” says Scott.

It takes time to find your stride, and you need that to build the confidence to recognize opportunities, communicate clearly, adequately prepare for first conversations, and follow up with leads.

Recognizing when to push a client and when to back off will help you gain more clients over time, and build stronger relationships with the prospects you reconnect with. Remember, no doesn’t mean no forever; sometimes it means ‘not right now.’

All of the people who just explained the less-than-great advice they’ve received wouldn’t still be in sales if they had followed what they were told – they know the good apples from the bad ones.

Poison apples and advice aside, let’s hear what these sales professionals have to say about the best sales advice they’ve received, and how they apply it.

Best Sales Strategies

Mary’s best sales advice:

Speak more about your client than about your agency. Talk about how you can solve their problems, not just about how competent and amazing you are.

“If a client comes to you, they’re experiencing a challenge they want to overcome, and they want to hear your solutions. They’ve likely already done some research about your company before reaching out, so don’t waste their time explaining who you are and what you do. Instead, focus on them, and allow them to do most of the talking.”

Mary’s Little Pro Tip: Research all your potential clients online before meeting with them. You’ll be able to find little nuggets of information that might surprise them to hear, and it will demonstrate how well you know them during a pitch.

Amy’s best sales advice:

Never make assumptions about a client.

You know what they say about assuming - it makes an a** out of you and me.

“Instead of making assumptions, ask questions. A lead you think is ‘bad’ initially may turn out to be a great lead if you dig for the right information,” says Amy.

Ask open-ended questions to avoid making assumptions. It will allow you more room for follow-up questions, and won’t pigeonhole you into getting preset, yes/no answers.

Matt’s best sales advice:

Speak one word to their ten and become an expert in listening.

“Salespeople tend to have a need to drive the conversation, but you have to let that go and let your prospect do it instead,” says Matt.

What you’ll be able to take away when you start listening is honest information, and the answers you need to form a solution that works for your client.

Matt points out that there are some salespeople who are prone to over-sharing, feature-dumping, and believing whatever comes out of their mouth will help them close a deal. He suggests taking a step back and really listening because it’s the things you HEAR that affect outcomes.

Ryan’s best sales advice:

Be yourself, find sales techniques you’re comfortable with and use them.

“Everyone has a different style of selling,” says Ryan. “To really get comfortable in sales, you need to be yourself and stick to your style, rather than trying to replicate your co-worker’s method of selling.”

To figure out which sales techniques work for you, Ryan suggests approaching your prospects with the idea of solving a problem, instead of trying to pushing a product on them. Honesty will go a long way.

Scott’s best sales advice:

Be prepared.

“Being prepared was something I learned while playing basketball,” says Scott. “I had coaches tell me that failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

When it comes to sales, preparation is important. Without understanding your client, having some background information on their business, or even reviewing what you’ve discussed with them in the past, you can miss key talking points, and forget to bring up elements of your product or service that could impact their business.

Being prepared can give you bonus points because when you’re unprepared, it’s pretty obvious. If you’re going to do something, put in effort, prepare, and show up on time!

Put your sales fears to rest  

Sales should get easier and more comfortable the longer you do it. To get stronger at your craft, take note of good sales advice, and document techniques that have worked for you in the past. They will be the building blocks for developing future sales strategies.

As is evident with the advice our sales pros received in the past, not everything you hear will valuable, so don’t believe ALL the sales advice you hear. To avoid the poison apples of “advice”, find a mentor you admire, trust, and can speak with about your personal sales journey. Not only can they serve as a great sounding-board, but they can also be a valuable connection to have in the industry.

Apart from getting bad advice, the only part of sales that should instill a bit of fear is setting up your client’s expectations only to let them down with a promise you can’t fulfill. If your product/service can’t meet their needs, don’t promise them that they can. Honesty will earn you more street-cred down the road.

Now, avoid walking-dead leads, and start adding full-size candy bar leads to your treat bag.

In this post, we’ll cover the ten best practices for pricing digital marketing services, from the presentation of costs to conversion optimization. You’ll likely need to do some testing before you decide which combination of pricing models are best for your company, but don’t get discouraged! No one model works for all, so expect some trial and error before you find the right pricing strategy for your business.  

1. Public pricing

One strategy is to provide your prices to potential clients upon request only; however, we believe public pricing is a better option. This allows clients to easily compare different digital marketing agencies, saving them time. Not only does public pricing improve the user experience, but it also lets your target audience know that you’re transparent with your costs and there are no hidden fees.

If you’re confident with the value you offer, then public pricing shouldn’t be a problem. Private pricing is often only successful if you have a reputation that precedes your work, or you don’t have much competition in your niche.

That said, there aren’t many digital marketing agencies that are without competition. Considering there are hordes of other agencies waiting to steal your potential clients, you’ll have more success if you are upfront about your pricing model.

We’ve found that there are three main reasons digital agencies with public pricing are at an advantage:

No invasion of privacy  

Having your prices posted publicly allows potential clients to review your costs without having to provide an email address or phone number. People can be wary about giving their personal information because they don’t want to be harassed by unwanted calls and messages.

Option to compare agencies

Sales leads will (almost) always strive for the best deal. If your competitor’s price is just a click away, but people can’t find your information, they may not include you in their options.

No time wasted

If you have to request a price through a contact form, you’ll typically wait 24-48 hours for a response. Would your business want to take a chance at losing those conversions during that period? Agencies that display their prices are demonstrating that they value customers’ time.

Pro: You will be viewed as a transparent and honest company if you’re upfront about your pricing.

Con:  Potential clients might exclude your services from their ultimate choice if they see your price as too high without understanding the value offered. With public pricing, the numbers speak for you.

2. Packaged pricing plans

Digital marketing pricing packages can help simplify the selection process for clients. You can combine this with add-ons or custom packages that can be quoted on request.

As a digital agency, you should provide packaged pricing plans if you have the experience to deliver the project. Packaged plans are also useful for startups or people who are somewhat clueless when it comes to digital services.

Let’s look at a sample pricing package from SpiderHousePr.

They offer a variety of services and divides them into packages with clear pricing for each.

You’ll notice SpiderHousePR also provides a contact form so potential clients can easily get in touch and discuss their digital goals.

Pro:  Packaged plans can make the process easier for clients who are new to digital marketing.

Con:  If you don’t have the experience or expertise to deliver a project, you will have trouble marketing a packaged plan. You may also lose out on more seasoned clients because your services are targeted to inexperienced ones.

3. Highlight the ‘best’ pricing plan

Clients new to digital marketing can struggle to choose the right pricing plan. You can help them by highlighting the package that you believe provides the best value, usually a mid-range package.

Highlight the package by using a different colour or a phrase like “most popular.”

Pro: You’re helping your clients to choose a popular option (and the one you want them to pick!) so that they don’t feel overwhelmed by choices.

Con:  You may miss out on a customer choosing a more expensive or comprehensive plan because they were drawn to the highlighted plan.

4. Table vs plain text

For the display of your packages, user experience is again paramount. You should try to fit all your digital marketing pricing packages on the same page for simple comparison (a comparison table is perfect for this), or iconify the packages with brief explanations. Check out the table from WooRank, an SEO audit tool, below:

Not only is this table visually appealing, but it also allows potential clients to review and compare how each pricing plan differs. This makes it easier for a user to choose the plan that’s right for them without having to navigate multiple pages on your site.

Pro:  Pricing tables give your customers a chance to review their options in a comprehensive and visually competent way.

Con:  Clients might get overwhelmed with information and need help deciding what option is best for them.

5. Custom quote calculator

If you do want to use private pricing for your digital marketing services, a custom quote calculator can be a great option as it provides the client with a quick quote, without them having to provide their contact information.

Webpagefx offers a quote calculator, which shows exactly how much something will cost based on project needs. This shows that Webpagefx values a client’s time and understands that some users are unwilling or reluctant to share contact information.

Pros:  A customized pricing plan allows your clients to pay only for what they need, making your services very cost-efficient and valuable.

Cons: Your potential clients may choose another digital marketing agency because they can’t immediately see a cost for your services.

6. Recurring revenue model

SEO and digital marketing projects tend to be long-term, so a recurring model is needed. The client is offered a discounted annual price on a flexible program, which also benefits the agency by developing an enduring client relationship.

Retainers are most valuable for larger projects that can be split into smaller segments over time. With a retainer rate, a client pays a discounted yearly price rather than a more expensive monthly rate.

Pros:  You can attract clients who know they need your digital marketing services for an extended period. You’ll also develop a long-term relationship with your clients.

Cons:  You may lose some revenue by giving a discount on a yearly rate.

7. Value, Time, and Cost

Always consider these factors when determining how to price your digital marketing services: value, time, and cost.

Value provided can be the hardest one to qualify without promising a result to the client, such as a traffic increase, which can be difficult to deliver definitively. Analyze the value you promise carefully. Conversions or traffic increases can only be determined by looking at your individual client’s resources and capabilities.

If deducing value is too difficult, then time and costs incurred (i.e. hours spent working and salaries) can be used as a pricing model instead.

Pros:  Your clients know exactly the value they will get from investing in your company. You can tailor your services to your individual clients by analyzing their needs.

Cons:  It’s hard to keep value promises to your customer when dealing with specific goals, such as conversions and traffic increase. In contrast, if you price your services based only on time and costs incurred, you may be undervaluing your company.

8. Multiple pricing models

Some clients may only want to try your services, whereas others are looking to create a lasting relationship. Combining hourly rates and recurring revenue models can accommodate everyone.

• Hourly SEO Consulting = $250/Hour
• Standalone SEO Projects = $2,000+
• Monthly SEO Retainers = $1,500 - $5,000
• Two Day SEO Boot Camp = $3,000

Pros:  You’re providing clients with more options so that they don’t feel as though they’re wasting time or money. Clients who only need your services for a brief period will appreciate that you offer consulting services on an hourly basis.

Cons:  You may find that you’re losing out on long-term clients with hourly services.

9. Competitor research

Regardless of which pricing model you choose, competitor research is essential. It allows you to see the pricing margins in your niche and shows you where you fall in the market.

By looking at your competitor’s pricing models, you can see if you’re overvaluing your product, or not pricing yourself competitively. If a competitor company has private pricing, you can ask for a quote using an unbranded email or phone number.

Pros:  Potential customers will consider your services against your competitors.

Cons:  You won’t know if you can necessarily offer the same services or value that your competitors can. Alternatively, you may be undervaluing your services just because your competitors are offering a specific rate.

10. Charge for technical support

It’s a critical question: should you charge for technical support? If you’re spending a large amount of time on maintenance for past projects without passing those costs on to the client, it’s time to start charging.

To do this successfully, you should define your policy well in advance, and you need to communicate it clearly to your clients. You need to establish what your post-project technical support involves, and when it takes effect. You can choose to set it up like an insurance policy or as one-off fixes. You can also include tweaks to your project in the original pricing model, such as offering two fixes before you start charging for maintenance.

If you’re a software development firm, you can charge for monthly maintenance at a discounted price.

Pros:  Charging for technical support can be a new revenue stream. After all, it is a service. By being upfront about your post-project charges, you show your client that you are transparent about your pricing. It also demonstrates that your team will still be available and valuable to them even after the project has been completed.

Cons:  By offering post-project maintenance, your clients might assume that your services are faulty and need major updates and changes long-term.

Pricing digital marketing projects might seem complex, but considering these approaches will benefit your agency in the long term with better quality lead generation, higher conversion rates, and improved profitability.

Which pricing model do you prefer? Have you had success with any of these models? Let us know in the comments.

Most people have a love/hate relationship with proposals. On one hand, proposals bring clients, work, and money into your business. Without proposals, you have nothing. Winning proposals is awesome.

However, creating proposals is an entirely different beast. Creating proposals can be extremely time-consuming - writing the proposal, designing the proposal, pricing the proposal, proofing the proposal, and then finally getting the darn thing out the door and into the hands of your sales lead who, hopefully, hasn’t gone cold in the days or weeks it’s taken you to get back to them. Creating proposals is painful.

But here’s the thing: proposals that get to clients faster, close faster, so you don’t have time to waste. You need to get that proposal out before your big deal moves on to your competition.

How can you create proposals faster?

Know what you’re selling before you sell it

Make sure you know exactly what you’re going to propose before you start working on your business proposal. You should already clearly understand what your sales lead needs and what your solution is before you type a single word.

I’ve worked with people who made up their strategy as they wrote the proposal, which is incredibly inefficient. It increases the amount of time you spend writing because you’re busy thinking and strategizing.

Your services should already be set and easily articulated; you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel for every proposal. Whether you sell digital marketing services, architectural design, or solar panels, you know what you offer, and, if you’ve done your homework, you know what your client needs. Put the two together.

This isn’t the time to let the ingredients simmer on the stove - this is time to plate the food and serve it up.

Use online proposal software, period.

OK, obviously I work for Proposify, which is online business proposal software. The BEST online business proposal software in my oh-so unbiased opinion, but definitely not the only one in the market. While it would be fantastic if you checked out Proposify’s free 14-day trial, I’m not here to sell you on our solution specifically.

However, I am here to sell on the fact that if you want to create proposals faster, you must use some type of online proposal software.

Online proposal software is designed to streamline your whole proposal process. From writing to design to sending and tracking, online proposal software unites all your separate tools and steps under one efficient roof. No more juggling Word docs, Google docs, InDesign files, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides.

Here are a few ways that online proposal software can help you create proposals faster:

Business proposal templates

Most proposal software products offer templates as part of your subscription. Proposal templates are professionally written and designed to help kickstart your proposal process.

Often, writing a proposal can be the most time-consuming part of the whole process, and writer’s block can plague even the most seasoned writer. With a template, the provided sample text can unlock your ideas and provide a guideline for what you might want to express in your proposal.

Don’t worry that you might submit the same proposal as your competition - most proposal templates are customizable so you can tailor them to your specific service, brand, and client project. The template just gives you a running start.

The same for proposal design. The great thing about templates is that they’ve already been designed so you don’t have to wait around for your designer to be free, or hire a freelance designer who could take even more time to do the job (not to mention money). Online proposal software makes it easy to swap images, change fonts, and add colour, without needing a professional graphic designer. You can do it!

Templates often cover a variety of services and industries so before choosing online proposal software, have a look at their selection. But if they allow customization, you can choose any template you want and fine tune it to quickly create your winning proposal.

Content library

During my agency days of writing business proposals, the most frustrating and time-consuming part of the whole process was pulling together the content.

Maybe we wrote a great description of our branding services for our last proposal - or was it the one before that? But now no one knows where it is. Is it on my computer? Is it on someone else’s computer? Is this even the final version that was used in the proposal? And how about the description of our digital marketing services? I think that was in a proposal from a few months ago. Can’t find it? Guess you’ll have to start from scratch.

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 the team bios, the ‘About Us’ description, case studies, or fee tables. Much of what you’re selling to potential clients is repeated from proposal to proposal so why recreate it every time? Yes, you’ll need to customize some things to fit the particular needs of a client, but that takes far less time than going back to the drawing board to rewrite every proposal section every time you have a new proposal to create.

To maximize the time-saving benefits of a content library, you’ll need to do some work upfront to create the sections and input them into the library, so they’re easy to find. But, once they’re in there, you can drag and drop each section into your proposal where you need them, significantly reducing the time it takes to write a proposal.

Online proposal views

Can we all agree that snail mail is great for birthday cards, but it’s not so great for closing deals quickly?

If you’re printing proposals, assembling them, and then dropping them into the mail, you’re adding days - or maybe even weeks if something goes awry with your printer or the postal service - before your clients receive anything. And every day they don’t have a proposal from you is one more day they could receive a proposal from your competition.

Even emailing a PDF can be troublesome as large attachments get caught in spam, so the client doesn’t even see your proposal, or something goes wrong with the file and they can’t open it.

With online proposal software, you email your client a customized link to view their proposal online on any device, at any time. It arrives quickly, with no issues, and looks professional. There’s no faster way to get your proposal in front of your client.

Online signatures and payments

You want to get a proposal to your client quickly, but it doesn’t end there. What you really want is to close this deal quickly and to do that 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, according to our analysis of more than 20,000 proposals. Good online proposal software products have an online signature tool that lets clients sign your proposal right in the browser and makes the contract legally binding.

Better yet 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 proposals faster, some products like, ahem, Proposify, go a step further by providing metrics to keep you informed of everything that’s happening with your proposals.

Proposal metrics let you see when your client opened the proposal, which sections they spent the most time viewing and how long they looked at it, along with close rates broken down across teams and individuals so you can track success.

All of this information gives you insight into what’s working and what isn’t so you can improve your approach for your next proposal, making it easier and faster to create a winning proposal.

"Every moment you waste getting a proposal to your client is an opportunity for your competition to get ahead of you"

Practice makes perfect proposals

Overall, if you want to improve the time it takes to create a proposal, you need a system and you need to stick to it. That includes online proposal software, but even the best tools are worthless if you don’t use them consistently or correctly.

Be as prepared as possible before you start so you can snap all the pieces together instead of wasting time creating the pieces as you go. Look for as many ways to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies as possible.

The more proposals you create, the easier and faster it will get over time. But be sure to learn from each proposal - if it won, why did it win so you can repeat the same formula. If your proposal didn’t win, find out why so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

And one last piece of proposal advice: don’t procrastinate. Remember, every moment you waste getting a proposal to your client is an opportunity for your competition to get ahead of you.

The hard truth of the day: the janitorial industry is known for contractors who compete primarily on price.

They swoop in with their promises of being the best / the greenest / the most reliable, then they underbid on the contract, and underperform on the job.

Ugh.

This means that janitorial companies like yours — who work hard, pay their employees well, and keep happy customers — need to bake your unique awesomeness into every aspect of your sales process to win the contract without lowering your bid.

In other words, your efforts to impress a potential client can’t stop when you leave the walk-through.

The good news is that a cleaning services proposal is a great tool for driving home how your company is different from the competition — and it’s one many janitorial businesses don’t use to its full potential.

In this article, we’ll look at how to write a commercial cleaning services proposal that allows you to seal the deal, without lowering your price.

We’ve divided this article up into one major “DON’T” and a few key “DO’s”.

First, let’s get that “don’t” out of the way:

Don’t focus too much on cleaning

Say what?!

That’s right. If you got as far as sending your potential new customer a cleaning services estimate, then they trust that you have the proper supplies and equipment and that your staff knows how to clean.

And believe it or not, the average person isn’t all that interested in commercial cleaning (strange, I know).

Instead, your business proposal should focus on a few key things that make you stand out to get the prospect excited to hire your team.

Side note: I know the client getting excited about their cleaning company sounds unlikely, but when Swept CEO Mike Brown ran a janitorial business he had a client tell him his company was “cool.” A cleaning company? Cool? Mike thought he misheard the person.

But the lesson here? That is exactly the kind of comment you should aim for!

So now that we have the “don’t” out of the way, here are six things your company should communicate in every cleaning services proposal, introduction letter, quote, or any other communication you have with your sales lead.

1. Communicate why you do what you do

If you’re a business owner and have never heard Simon Sinek talk about starting with “why”, it’s worth the 18 minutes.

If you don’t have 18 minutes, here’s the Coles Notes version:

Most businesses understand the need to communicate what they do.

Example: Janitorial services in Philadelphia.

Some businesses talk about how they do it.

Example: Quality services dedicated to meeting all client expectations.

Very few businesses communicate why they exist.

Example: To create meaningful jobs where cleaners feel valued, recognized as individuals, and that their work impacts the lives of others.

Sinek lays this out in what he calls, “The Golden Circle”:

What Sinek shows is that shifting the conversation to talk about your ‘why’ can have a huge impact on a customer’s perception of your business.

Using this approach, the what you do is simply the proof of what your company believes — your why.

So the question becomes, what is your why?

The best place to describe your ‘why’ is in the introduction letter at the beginning of your proposal. For a great example of an introduction letter, check out this cleaning services proposal template created by Proposify.

2. Communicate how you’re different from the competition

This is probably the most important “do” on the list. How you’re different from the competition shouldn’t live in just one specific section, five pages in. It shouldn’t be subtly hinted at, as if you’re afraid someone might notice you do things differently.

Your differentiation should be woven throughout your whole business proposal, loud and clear.

As I eluded to earlier, so many companies refer to themselves as ‘the best.’ Hopefully, I don’t need to explain the problem with every business owner and their dog using that title.

As long as you know that ‘the best’ isn’t a great way to make yourself stand out, we can move on to more unique qualities you can highlight for prospective customers.

If you’re not sure what makes you different, think through the various processes in your business that impact customer satisfaction.

• Do you have low cleaner turnover rates because you treat your employees so well? That certainly benefits the customer, although if this is the first time they’ve hired a cleaning company you may need to explain how you make it a great place to work.

• Do you use a unique strategy for ensuring a certain standard of quality? We’ve heard of companies who go into each location they service and hide a small coin or object, and the cleaner who finds it while working receives a prize!

• Do you use innovative technology? When asked if the use of technology to improve communication and quality by a cleaning company would influence their decision to hire one company over another, 96% of business owners said yes!

3. Communicate what your clients think about your services

The fact that you think your company is the bee’s knees is good (confidence is crucial!), but what’s even more important is what others think about your cleaning company.

That’s why every good cleaning service proposal has social proof sprinkled throughout. Social proof is when you use the opinions or actions of people to influence behaviour, so like reviews, case studies, ratings, endorsements, and number of customers or products sold (Think McDonald’s – “Over 99 billion served”).

This is where customer testimonials come in.

Businesses in some industries might be able to get away with generic testimonials from any Joe Schmo, or even go the other direction and quote a client with some level of celebrity status.

You know, like Betty White endorsing Snickers:

But the janitorial industry is way too competitive for irrelevant testimonials to have an impact, and it doesn’t exactly lend itself to celebrity endorsements, either.

Your best bet is to have testimonials on hand from a variety of existing customers so that you can choose the ones that are from clients who are most like the business you’re selling to.

For example, if the proposal you’re working on is for a dentist’s office, choose a testimonial from another dentist office that you clean, if possible. If not, try to look for a testimonial that speaks to the same pain point your prospective client described to you in the walk-through.

4. Communicate how your services will impact their organization (or life!)

As a B2B (business to business) salesperson, it’s easy to forget that even though you’re selling your services to other businesses, it’s a real human being deciding to hire you, and signing the cheque.

In a large organization, the impact of a fresh, clean space could improve team morale, result in fewer sick days, or even increase productivity if employees are otherwise left to do the cleaning themselves.

In a smaller organization, the impact could be more directly on one person, such as the administrative staff responsible for ensuring the space makes a good first impression on clients who come into the office.

Be specific enough that your potential client can picture what that improvement will look like. For instance, at a daycare, a cleaner space means fewer runny noses and feverish kids — something every child care worker (and parent!) loves to hear.

5. Communicate your commitment to them

This one can be tricky.

How do you get across just how serious you are about customer satisfaction to someone?

When the founders of Swept ran their own cleaning company (before transitioning into janitorial software) they told clients this:

We’ll pay you to fire us.

Yup, you read that right.

They offered to pay the bill for their client’s last month of services if they wanted to find a new cleaning company.

A bold statement, but guess how many times they were taken up on that offer? None.

No matter what your schtick, clearly communicate what the customer can expect when they hire your commercial cleaning company.

6. Communicate the next steps

This is less about selling and more about ensuring your first few interactions in your new relationship as client-contractor are positive — that you start off on the right foot.

The most important thing to outline here is how and when you’ll collect payment so that there are no surprises.

Hint: A word of advice — especially to those of you just starting out — bill at the beginning of the month, not the end. It often takes customers two, three, even four weeks to pay you. Best practice is to charge them on the day you begin working so that you have the cash to pay your cleaners for that period of time.

Some final thoughts…

At the end of the day, bidding on cleaning jobs is hard work.

It requires you to identify the prospective client’s daily challenges and needs, the reason they’ve decided to hire a new contractor, and how your company can fill that gap.

From time to time you’ll spend several hours speaking with a customer, walking through their space, and writing a proposal — only to have them go with the lowest bidder. 

While this can be incredibly frustrating, (you know as well as I do they won’t be satisfied with the lowest bidder’s services in two months time) it’s often better to dodge those bullets altogether than to invest more time into the relationship.

If you take nothing else from this article, know that each quote you deliver should be wrapped up in a well designed, well thought-out proposal.

It takes time to communicate each of the things we’ve listed above, but doing so will often mean the difference between winning a commercial cleaning contract at the rate you quoted, being bartered with, or worst of all, losing the bid to a competitor.

And the good news is, by using Proposify’s cleaning services template you’ll only need to do most of this work ONCE.

It is (or, can be) the most wonderful time of year – the first snowfall, fantastic food, spending time with friends and family, and the constant holiday hustle and bustle in all our favourite shops.

It’s also the time of year a desperate parent (not naming any names) will happily pay a 400% markup on what's essentially a glorified Kinder Surprise, without the chocolate. 

But when you’re in sales, December can feel very different. As a sales professional, you may experience a whole new level of stress as you struggle to get hold of clients to close the deals you need to make your Christmas bonus so you can buy said overpriced 'surprise' for your child and more of life’s necessities.

Welcome to the official seasonal sales slump!

Any of these December challenges ring a holiday bell for you?

1. Client budget and decisions are on hold until January.
2. Everyone is out of the office most of the month.
3. Clients would prefer to drink rum and eggnog than hear your incredible sales pitch (go figure).
4. You’re struggling to keep sales momentum and would also prefer to be drinking rum and eggnog. But rum and eggnog aren't going to get you to your Christmas bonus.

Having worked in B2B sales for over 11 years – eight in a fortune 500 company and three in a medium-sized company before I joined the wonderful world of Proposify – I have a few December sales slumps under my belt, and I used to DREAD this season.

After a few years of succumbing to December sales hell, I couldn’t do it anymore. My bank account and sanity relied on maintaining momentum through to the end of the year.

Fortunately, after more than a few trials and tribulations, I made peace with December and now know how to make it a great month. Or at least one I can live with.

I rarely see my old friend desperation in December anymore so in the spirit of giving I’m going to share my 'Seasonal Sales Slump Survival Plan' and holiday selling tips with you.

Control your controllables

The first key to Seasonal Sales Slump Survival is an important one that you can also apply in many situations: control your controllables. Salespeople like to be in control of every aspect of the sales cycle, but at this time of year, there are many outside variables that we just can’t control.

So what can you do?

It may sound glib, but all you can do is control what you can control and be proactive as early as possible.

So let’s revisit that list of things we think we can’t control and see what we can do:

Client budget on hold until January/Everyone is out of the office most of the month.

This took me awhile to figure out, but the big change I made was to set up as many meetings as I could in November or early January so I could prep for the new year, or at least get some face time before everyone goes merry M.I.A.

Typically, there’s a sense of urgency in November because everyone knows the holidays are fast approaching so use this to your advantage. You may be able to close a few quick deals and avoid the purgatory of out-of-office replies.

Everyone would rather be drinking rum and eggnog (including you)

Overcoming this particular December obstacle was the hardest and most painful one for me to figure out. The worst side effect of being in a sales slump is it can start to negatively affect your motivation and sense of urgency.

It’s not an easy feeling to shake. Salespeople thrive on life being fast-paced, so when we lose that drive, we feel like crawling under our desks until Groundhog Day.

The lesson here is, don't take December personally. There are lots of things at play during this season that have nothing to do with how great your sales technique is or how awesome your product is.

Sulking and being lazy isn’t going to help your bank account now, or in the year ahead.

Time to brainstorm

When I finally reached my sales slump breaking point, I decided to do an old-fashioned brainstorm on an actual piece of paper (also old fashioned, I know) and wrote out whatever came to mind.

I wish I still had that paper as it was pivotal to creating the sales process I follow to this day. It even had some pretty kick-ass dinosaur drawings on it for creative inspiration.

I started with a list of questions:

1. What makes me want to buy from someone?

Easy! I am sold by any sales person who asks the right questions and remembers who I am even when they’re trying to sell me.

2. What drives me crazy about salespeople?

PUSHY salespeople, anyone who feature-sells to the max (don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!), anyone who does not follow through, and, of course, greasy salespeople. I am the first person to not sell something unless it’s the right fit for my client.

3. What can I do NOW that I can control?

This was tricky; all I came up with was to try to think of creative ideas to build my sales pipeline – but how?

4. How can I make sure I am memorable?

I like to think I'm memorable, but I took a step back and thought about what made my partners, both external and internal, stand out.

As I read over my list of questions, I started to notice a recurring theme.

Relationships, duh.

I buy from, and remember, salespeople I trust and have a good relationship with. This made even more sense for December since the holiday season is all about relationships - family, friends, colleagues, and clients.

It was my ‘a-ha!’ moment. This was what my focus was going to be from now on: building better relationships. Not just for the sake of a sale, but to make long-term and genuine connections.

Maybe you were expecting something more earth-shattering?

It’s probably not the first time you’ve heard about relationships being at the heart of sales. But it’s surprising how no matter how prevalent the concept is, people still don’t get it. Or they don’t get how to authentically build relationships. And they don’t do it.

All the right people

Before I figured out how I was going to connect with people, I needed to think about who I wanted to connect with.

I thought about who was important to me. Who did I truly want to say “thank you” to?

Current clients - Who did I work with over the past year?

Top potential clients - Who do I want to work with in the coming year?

Internal partners and coworkers – You may be surprised that I included coworkers to help my December slump, but I’m a big believer that it’s extremely important to thank the people you sit with every day.

My favourite part of working at Proposify is the endless support everyone gives – even if it is the same question 100 times, or a moment of panic when you break your work email (was totally my fault), everyone will drop what they're doing to help each other out.

Beyond the animated elf email

So, the question now was, how could I try to make a genuine connection with the groups on my list without looking like a typical salesperson sending out the typical generic and impersonal holiday email?

Current Clients

I decided to go back to basics with this group.

While the big company I worked for sent out ecards to all our clients, I wanted to be more personal.

I bought some appropriately themed holiday cards and a big roll of stamps. People glaze over emails but notice a nice hand addressed card.

Whether your cards say Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, or Season’s Greetings is up to you. I like to be as inclusive as possible while still communicating the happy collective spirit of the season.

Then, I wrote each of my clients a note and tried to make it as personal as possible to demonstrate that I was specifically writing to, and thinking of, them. A good salesperson remembers the details, so include your client's pet’s name in the card, for example.

Depending on your budget and the size of your client list, it’s not always realistic to send a fancy gift basket, but you may want to send a few key clients a small token of appreciation. I have sent movie passes, coffee cards, and some random things like dog treats before. Again, I try to match the gift with what I know about the client.

Top potential clients

Trying too hard and looking tacky is the sales kiss of death. With this group, I didn’t necessarily have the same kind of relationship yet as I did with my existing clients. So I kept my interaction simple with a handwritten card saying I was looking forward to working with them in the coming year, without being pushy or presumptive. It’s a good way to keep yourself top of mind even if you haven’t quite closed the deal.

Internal partners and co-workers

Remember this whole exercise is all about genuinely saying thank you. Bring in homemade or store-bought treats for everyone and take the time to write a nice card to truly show your appreciation (I am ruining my Christmas surprises with my Proposify coworkers now). If you have the means, take a few people who really saved your ass this year out for lunch.

Don’t underestimate the role your team members play in your success. Their support and resources have no doubt made your job easier or helped you close a deal. We salespeople can be highly competitive by nature, but it’s important to remember that no one is an island - we’re all in this together.

Rules of the road

I established a few rules when I hatched my holiday plan. But, as the saying goes, rules are made to be broken. You know your own business best, so do what feels right for each client and your business.

1. Avoid emails as much as possible. ‘Tis the season for snail mail.
2. Do not include business cards but still make sure they know who you are.
3. No trinkets and trash! A company I worked with decided to buy little bags of jellybeans to send to clients and it was a disaster. Do NOT mail people jelly beans, trust me on this one.
4. NO GLITTER – This may sound silly but lots of holiday cards come with glitter. You and your clients will have glitter annoyingly everywhere for months. That’s not how you want to be memorable.
5. Most importantly, BE GENUINE. You need to be genuine with any interaction and personalize your messages. If you can’t, you’re better off sending a boring generic email.

The result

That first year I decided to send personal cards, the big corporation I was working for sent out generic ecards to all our clients and partners, as they did every year.

That year though, the people I sent real cards to CALLED ME ON THE PHONE to say thank you, or they at least sent me an email. I didn’t get responses about the generic corporate ecard. I only received reactions from the personal holiday card.

And what was really remarkable was that some of those people had been difficult to get on the phone in the first place and now here we were, chatting. All thanks to a card with an adorable snowman on it. That opened the door for us to connect in January and it helped revive my sales mojo!

You probably thought that I had some secret weapon to keep my Seasonal Sales Slump at bay, but it is really that simple – it’s all about showing real gratitude. And that shouldn't be season specific. You should be building connections all year round.

When you’re genuine with and truly grateful for your clients, or anyone you cross paths with, you will be remembered. And the effect is more impactful than a few quick sales in December.

Full disclosure: Sometimes I still have lower sales in December, but my gratitude approach helps me manage my anxiety about it, knowing I am ready to hit the ground running for a lucrative January, and that I’m sowing long-term seeds for fruitful relationships.

Knowing whether or not your agency is profitable isn’t something you feel in your gut. Profitability is based on real, factual numbers. To keep your business running smoothly, you need to keep a sharp eye on specific metrics, like key performance indicators (KPI). Understanding your KPIs will help you make better business decisions, and allow you to spend more time enjoying your life and less time worrying about whether you have enough cash to make payroll. Let’s look at the profit metrics your agency needs to stay on top of to stay in the black. We’ve organized them under the general categories of acquisition, retention, and profitability.

Acquisition

1. Number of pre-qualified leads

Hopefully you already have a system for bringing in new leads and converting them into clients, but how do you measure that?

In a given time period, let’s say, a month, how many new qualified leads are in your pipeline? Just knowing that number gives you a starting point for predicting where your sales will be in the next quarter. The key here is to focus on qualified leads, not every tire kicker who comes looking to price shop.

As your sales team tracks new leads coming in the door, they should make note of where the best ones are coming from. Are they referrals? Personal contacts? Subscribers of your agency’s content? Google searches?

Once you establish where your best leads are coming from, then you can double down on what’s working.

As you monitor the number of leads coming in each month, you can better predict your revenue. Knowing that information helps you to decide whether you need to hire new employees soon, stay the course with your existing team, or lay people off (which hopefully you don’t have to do).

2. Number of sent proposals

It goes without saying that great proposals are a critical part of closing deals.

While you shouldn’t send a proposal to every Tom, Dick, or Harriet who comes knocking, all of your qualified leads should get to the proposal stage as quickly as possible.

If you have lots of leads coming in but your business development team isn’t sending proposals, something is wrong. Either the leads are weak and not making it through the qualification process, or your biz dev team is sitting on the leads too long, and you run the risk of them going cold.

A common issue many companies face is that sent proposals sit in the pipeline for 30, 60, 90 days (or even longer!) without closing.

3. Value of pipeline + close rate

Your pipeline consists of draft and sent proposals. In other words, proposals you’re working on, or proposals on which you’re awaiting a decision.

Much like the number of leads and number of proposals, the pipeline value helps you anticipate the coming months, for better or worse.

However, it doesn’t matter how massive your pipeline is if deals aren’t closing. That’s where your close rate comes into play.

Your close rate is the percentage of proposals that close. Ideally, you want both a big pipeline and a high close rate, but of the two, it’s better to have a high close rate.

For example, let’s say your pipeline contains ten deals for roughly $100,000 each. Your pipeline is $1,000,000, and your close rate is 40%. You can reasonably predict that you’ll close $400K within the next 30-60 days.

On the other hand, you might have a smaller pipeline with ten deals for $50,000 each. You have half the pipeline size ($500K), but at an 80% close rate you’ll close the exact same in revenue ($400K) but with less effort.

While this may seem oversimplified, the lesson is: be judicious about which leads are proposal-worthy so you spend less time writing proposals and pitching to close work, which brings us to...

4. Client acquisition cost (CAC)

Every business, no matter the industry, needs to consider their client acquisition cost.

Basic economics would tell you not to spend more money to acquire a client than you’ll make off them over the course of their lifetime as your client.

While flying your team across the country to pitch a new client in person may virtually guarantee the deal, if the value of the deal isn’t much higher than the cost, you’re going to lose money.

You calculate your CAC by totalling up all of your sales and marketing costs in a given time period and divide it by the number of new clients you closed during that same period.

Let’s say you have four salespeople who each make $5,000/month + 10% commission. You also spend $10,000/month on marketing activities like PPC, marketing automation, and webinars, for example.

Your crackerjack sales team’s 80% close rate netted you eight new clients, each deal valued at $60,000.

Base sales and marketing costs are $30,000. You also closed $480K total in business, so the commission is another $48,000.

Your sales and marketing costs were $78,000 for the eight clients, so your cost to acquire each of those clients was $9,750.

A CAC of one-fifth the value of the deal may seem pretty good, but if you’re in a service based industry, you still need to perform the work involved in the project or retainer to fulfill the contract. So you’re not quite in the black yet, which is why you need to focus on profit.

Looking at your acquisition metrics helps you predict what your sales will be in a given month or quarter, you’ll know which salespeople are underperforming, and which marketing channels to spend more money on.

Retention

5. Lifetime value (LTV)

A client’s lifetime value is not the initial sale - it’s the total revenue you’ll receive from them averaged across all of your clients for as long as they are clients, which could be years.

So even though the initial value of a contract might have been $60,000, you could end up making 10x that over the course of the client’s lifetime. LTV can be tricky to calculate, and you need a significant amount of historical data to do it accurately.

A simplified version of LTV takes the average value of a transaction x average transactions per year x the average client lifespan. If your average contract is $60,000 per client, and each client signs two new contracts per year, and remains a client for an average of three years, your LTV would be $60,000 x two per year x three years = $360,000.

By keeping an eye on your LTV, you can determine how much to spend on acquisition costs and whether you’re retaining customers over the long term.

To maximize LTV, you need to emphasize, encourage, and train your account managers to upsell and cross-sell clients so you can extract as much revenue as possible while providing value. It’s much easier and cheaper to sell to an existing client than a new one.

It’s critical to keep good clients happy and retain them. It increases their lifetime value and means you don’t need to overextend your sales team to constantly bring in new clients to replace the existing ones you lost.

Profitability

6. Billable people utilization rate

If you want to improve your agency’s profitability, you must track your employees’ time. Your people are your assets, and their time is your currency. At the end of the day, you’re trading hours for dollars. This is true even if you charge fixed cost or employ value-based billing (such as the percentage of sales you generate for clients).

Most agency employees hate filling out timesheets, but there are great tools out there like Timecamp, Tick, or Harvest that make it easier and a little less painful. They’ll probably still hate tracking their time, but that’s OK, it’s how you pay the bills, and them.

Each of your billable employees (not including sales, controllers, or admin staff) has a utilization rate, which is the percentage of their time that is billable.

The best way to calculate the utilization rate is to take their billable hours – in-scope hours you can attribute to a client – and divide them by the 40 hours in a workweek.

So if 35 hours in an employee’s recorded time sheet are billable, 35/40 gives them a 90% utilization rate.

If they’re working more than 40 hours/week of in-scope work with no overages, it is possible for them to have a 100%+ utilization rate. Give those people treats and presents to thank them, but be careful they don’t burn out.

Next, average out the utilization rate across the whole company. The overall utilization rate will help you determine billing targets.

While you should never expect the utilization rate to be close to 100%, you do need to keep a reasonably tight grip on the metrics and push your low performers to up their game, perhaps providing a reward to people with the highest number each month.

7. Profit margins

This is what it’s all been leading up to. At the end of each month/quarter/year, are you taking in more money than you spend?

The show Mad Men may have given the impression that being an agency owner is about well-tailored suits, office flings, and straight whiskey (not necessarily in that order), but the truth is, running a profitable agency is damn tough.

Due to the nature of the business, agencies run on notoriously razor-thin profit margins, so if no one is keeping a close eye on the numbers, the whole thing falls apart. You should be making at least 10-20% in profit margins at the end of the year outside of your salary. Otherwise, it’s hardly worth the stress and risk of running a business.

That said, here’s how to calculate your margins:

Sit down with your accountant and take all your monthly expenses - salaries, contractors, rent, supplies, software, food, travel, etc., - and total it up.

Let’s say it’s $100,000/mo or $1.2M/year. Your minimum goal is to invoice $120,000/mo or $1.44M/year. That leaves you with $240K in profit at the end of the year.

That’s not terrible, and it would make for a more than a decent bonus, but it won’t make you rich, which is why most agency owners aim to scale their agency while keeping a healthy margin.

Once you’re at $10M in revenue, 20% margins mean you’re running a lucrative business with $2M in profit each year. In this example, let’s use $120K as our target for the month.

Look at all your billable staff’s hours and utilization rate. Let’s say you have ten billable employees. A 40-hour work week x 4 weeks per month x 10 employees = 1,600 hours. Your average utilization rate is 75%, which gives you 1,200 of billable hours each month.

$120,000 / 1,200 hours = $100 is what you need to bill per hour to be profitable. $83/hour is break even, and any less you’re losing money. If you can get away with billing $200/hour, all the power to you.

Remain Vigilant

Keeping a watch on these agency metrics and knowing how to act on the information they provide can help you build a more profitable business.

When you can look at a spreadsheet and know which client projects are profitable, then you’ll know which clients to phase out, and which ones to double down on. And be sure to avoid doing things that kill your agency’s profit margins, like working for free.

Depending on your company’s size, you may have a controller who oversees agency profitability and monitors the KPIs. If you’re the owner, you should still be familiar with what’s happening, but it's beneficial to have someone on your management team whose core job is to monitor metrics and put pressure on project managers when projects run over budget.

Project managers will then, in turn, put pressure on account managers to promise less to clients, and on production staff to turn things around faster and work more efficiently. Profitability should be everyone’s responsibility at your agency.

There are lots of great reasons to start an agency: you can control the type of clients and projects you take on, you can handpick your team, and, if you play your cards right, it can provide financial wealth.

But running an agency can also be extremely challenging, even downright miserable sometimes, although few people admit it.

If you’re starting your own agency, chances are you probably worked in one before. You have a general idea of how they run, who does what, how clients get pitched, how work gets invoiced, and so on, so it can be tempting to plough ahead with your new business without taking the time to think it all through.

While there is no silver bullet to ensure success, here are 10 things to keep in mind as you start to build your business.

1. Find a co-founder

There are people who will disagree with the suggestion to find a co-founder: “I run a great agency, and I don’t have a business partner, plus I get to keep 100% of the profit.” But for most people, having a business partner reduces the loneliness, stress, and isolation that can come when you’re a sole founder.

“As a single founder, I felt like I was carrying a weight that I couldn’t share with anyone,” Alex Turnbull, CEO & Founder, Groove

Have you noticed anything among some of the most famous advertising agencies?

• Ogilvy & Mather

• Saatchi & Saatchi

• Wieden + Kennedy

• Goodby Silverstein & Partners

• Teehan+Lax

They’re all named after the partners who founded them. Running a business is hard, especially at the beginning, and it’s twice as hard doing it alone. Finding a good partner can be challenging, but the pros will outweigh the cons.

The key is to find a partner you know and trust, and preferably one who has a skill set complementary to your own. If your background is in design and development, a great potential co-founder might be someone with sales and account management experience.

There’s not much point in two founding creative directors, neither of whom are experienced with sales, client management, or operations. While you might both share some knowledge and skills, your agency leadership needs a broader spectrum. You need to be able to define yourselves from each other, as well as your roles.

2.Get a physical location

Working remotely is very popular; you’ll hear about the pros from many people who prefer working from home, and from business owners who love the cost savings. But does working remotely work for an agency?

When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to forgo bricks and mortar to save money. However, to be taken seriously by the kind of big paying clients you want in your roster, you’ll have to show them that you are a legitimate firm and not a fly-by-night operation running out of your basement.

Like it or not, inviting a prospective client to your studio impresses them. And while they should hire you based on your agency’s abilities alone, a stylish, well-designed workspace can help you stand out in their minds as an established, successful firm.

To work well, agency teams need to be in close communication every day with opportunities to brainstorm together. While email, Skype, Slack, and other collaboration tools are fantastic for keeping in touch about minor things, they’re cumbersome and impractical for brainstorming and creative meetings.

Whether you’re working on a visual identity, a video concept, or a social media strategy, creativity flourishes when people get together casually. This bonding is what creates culture, and the work improves as a result. When people work from home on a regular basis, it hurts the culture because they work in silos and don't collaborate.

Culture is difficult to change once it’s established. It’s tricky to tell people they need to come into an office by 9:00 am every morning if you've already let them work from home in the past, so start out on the right foot and invest in a decent workspace to start building your agency culture.

3. Figure out your unique value proposition

So many people start ‘agencies’ and leave it at that. But starting an ‘agency’ is like a retailer saying they’re opening a ‘store’. No one opens just a ‘store’. A retailer picks a specialty - shoes, books, makeup, clothes, toys - and then positions themselves within a niche. So women’s shoes, children’s books, men’s clothing, educational toys.

Even general retailers like Walmart have a niche - they may sell ‘everything’ a household needs, but they do it at the perceived lowest price. They position themselves as the most affordable option for the everyday, average person. That way customers know why they should come to that store, if there’s anything there they need or want to buy, and if it’s in their price range.

More agency owners need to think like retailers. Yet there are countless full-service agencies. ‘We do it all!’

Positioning is your first step when starting an agency, and essential if you want to scale. Before you pick a name, rent the office, hire the people, or look for clients, you need to define your positioning:

This is who we are.

This is what we do.

This is who we do it for.

When you’re a small agency looking to get big, it can be tempting to look at the large agencies for inspiration to see how they’re positioning themselves. But if you visit a lot of big agency websites, many of them are terrible.

They talk about the awards they’ve won, how great they are, and how cool and quirky their team is. Everything is about them. “Me, me, me.”

“If we’re supposed to be storytellers, we need to tell the right story,” says Jason Swenk, an entrepreneur who grew his digital agency to more than 100 employees, sold it for a profit, and now works with other agency owners to help them scale. “If you start positioning yourself as the star, then that delegates the client to the sidekick or damsel in distress. No one wants to be Robin in the Batman story.”

The key, according to Swenk, is to position yourself as Alfred, Batman’s trusted advisor who will guide your clients to success. Positioning is critical, and your position as an agency should never be ahead of your client.

Whatever service you offer, you need to double down on a niche. No more generalizing. Look at what specific problem your company is really good at solving (and one that you also enjoy doing) and specialize in that.

Is there something innovative you can do that most of your competition doesn't talk about? They may be doing it, but if they don’t talk about it or promote themselves doing it, then you have the competitive edge.

Agencies are often wary about defining a unique position or niche because they’re afraid they’ll alienate leads. But you need to filter out people who aren’t your ideal clients and attract those who are. If you don’t define who you are and what you do, you’ll end up with clients who aren’t a good fit.

Clients who aren’t a good fit become unhappy clients. Because they’re not a good fit, you can’t please them, you can’t deliver the best results for them, you can’t solve their problem, and they’re probably not going to make you much money. Meanwhile, because they’re unhappy, they might be complaining publicly about you and damaging your reputation.

It may mean that inevitably you’ll lose clients who don’t value or even need your services. But that’s OK because then you can focus all of your time making the people who want to spend money on your agency, the people whose problems you can solve, happy.

So it’s critical to define what your agency does, who you do it for, and then stick to it.

4. Flex your brand power  

Your brand is one of the most important assets of your business. No matter how great your product or service is, if your brand is weak or misguided, you’re going to have a hard time differentiating yourself in the market and connecting with your target audience.

Brand is the deciding factor for most people when it comes to purchasing decisions, even if they don’t realize it. Your brand can be the tipping point, good and bad, when all else seems equal.

The right brand can help you survive the roller coaster of the business world. It builds connection, loyalty, fans, and champions. The right brand strategy can turn customers into ambassadors. It can help you win the unwinnable price war.

Your brand can provide a roadmap for making decisions about your marketing strategy, public relations, product/service development, customer support, communications, hiring, and employee performance.

You may not be a household name (yet), but for anyone who interacts with you, you need to make an impression of value and expertise, which will help you escape being pigeon-holed as a commodity.

You can’t charge premium fees if your branding looks like the Dollar Store. It’s not enough to buy Facebook ads or post on Instagram; the design and the messaging are what make an impression and convert customers. If you look high quality and have a strong positioning, this will start to build your brand as a premium service. Then you can charge premium prices.

You need to start developing your brand right from the beginning of your business, and constantly monitor it.

5. Hire these three roles first

When you’re starting an agency, your first three hires need to come rather quickly. Every hire should free you up as the founder so you can get out and sell, bringing in more clients to grow your agency and expand your team.

Let’s look at this scenario as an example:

You’re starting a digital agency with a focus on the automotive industry, and it’s made up of two founders; one of you is a designer/developer, the other is a marketer.

There’s only so long that the two of you will be able to execute the work you bring in. Every hour that you as co-founders spend designing a website or managing a marketing campaign is an hour when you could be out selling to potential clients and closing deals.

So your first full-time hire should take care of whatever is chewing up the most of your time.

If the designer co-founder is slammed with design work, then hire an experienced designer who can take the reins, not a junior or an intern who the founder will need to mentor and monitor.

Every hire should be able to jump in with both feet to take on client projects and execute them extremely well.

You’ll need to oversee the work at the beginning to make sure the quality is in line with your agency vision, and that clients are happy. You need to make sure the jobs are profitable but don’t get too hung up on micromanaging every detail.

Once you hire your head designer, developer, and marketer to lead and execute client work, you’ll be free up to manage accounts and bring in new clients. Your main job at this stage should be getting more clients in the door.

Eventually, you’ll need a project manager so the team can focus exclusively on executing on deliverables. The project manager should also ensure profitability of projects. Later, as you grow, you’ll want to hire account managers to manage relationships.

6. Resist the temptation to hire cheap labour and interns

If you freelanced before you started your agency, you’re probably used to controlling every aspect of every project that comes through your door, and that can be a hard habit to break.

Now that you own an agency, you may be tempted to continue managing clients yourself and hire a junior person to take care of the monkey work. Before you take that approach, stop and think big picture about the type of agency you want to build.

Do you want an agency where you’re tied down to every project and need to attend every meeting because you don’t trust your employees to lead? Not only will that earn your agency a poor reputation, but it’s also incredibly inefficient. It will hold you back from getting out and selling, which is the most important thing you can do as the founder.

On the other hand, maybe you’re thinking about outsourcing production work to freelancers on a per-project basis, so you don’t have to commit to paying someone a regular salary. This is a terrible long-term strategy.

For starters, freelancers are generally more expensive per hour than employees, which will eat into your profit margins. More importantly, you can't build a great team culture with contractors, especially when you're a new and fragile agency.

You need a team of full-time, experienced professionals who will grow with you, give you their best work, and help build a great reputation for your agency.

There are only two situations where you should hire a freelancer for your agency:

1. If the work is one-off, transient type of work
   If one client needs a promotional video and you don’t ever intend to offer that as a core service, then it’s OK to hire a freelancer videographer to partner with you on the project to execute the video.

1. If you’re temporarily short on resources
   Maybe somehow all your clients ended up with deadlines in the same month (you need better planning if that’s the case, but we know how clients are…) and there’s no way your team can humanly complete everything you’ve committed to in that time frame. If there’s no chance of moving deadlines, then hire freelancers to help with copy or design work to get your team over the hump.

7. Implement systems and processes

Systems and processes provide leadership, set expectations, and ensure consistency without you needing to micromanage every action. You need to empower your team to succeed. Proper process and defined systems are essential to successfully scaling your agency.

Systems and processes are like recipes. If you’re building a fast food chain, you don’t leave it up to each cook at each location to cook things the way they want. There is a strict recipe to follow, so the client gets what they expect every time. Afterall, managing client expectations is at the heart of every successful agency.

While every agency is going to do things a little differently, there are some standard processes you should define so everyone knows what happens when, who does it, and what the outcome should be:

• Sales

• Human resources

• Proposals

• Pricing and billing policies

• Pitching

• Onboarding new clients

• Development

• Creative briefs

• Presenting

• Tracking time

• Disputes with clients

• Delivering work

• Managing client expectations during a project

• Attracting new talent and retaining your existing team

• Generating and qualifying new leads

8. Don’t burn people out

Generally, when you ask a client about their deadline, you’ll get one of two answers: yesterday or ASAP. Sometimes both.

You don’t have to accept that. Agency people are routinely chewed up and spit out by expectations to regularly work until late into the night and during weekends.

Let’s say you run a pizza shop where customers expect their pizza to be delivered in 15 minutes. But, for you to deliver within 15 minutes means the pizza won’t be fully cooked, and you’ll have to speed, risking damage to your car and the safety of the delivery driver and the general public. So, would you give in to customer demands, or put your foot down and tell them you’ll need the full 40 minutes?

Allowing clients to dictate insane deadlines will burn out your team and result in sub-par work that no one is proud of, or happy with.

9. Don’t micromanage; make your people the stars

One of the hardest things to do as an agency owner, actually almost any owner, is to step out of the spotlight.

Some agency owners want to be the stars and micromanage their employees. The question to ask is, “Is this really in the best interest of our clients, or it is in the best interest of my ego?” Your agency will suffer on many levels if you don’t stop doing it.

You hired good smart people with specialized skills for a reason: you can’t do everything, and you don’t know how to do everything. Let them do what you hired them to do. Empower them to flourish. If you keep interfering, it breeds resentment and diminishes confidence with the result being weak work and a desire to leave your agency. 

Nothing hurts an agency’s reputation more than staff turnover. After all, in a service business, your people are your product. If your team is different every month, clients will get frustrated, they’ll lose confidence in your agency, and they’ll end up moving on to another shop.

10. Make sales and marketing a priority

Clients are the lifeblood of any agency. But you don't get them if you can't sell, and unfortunately, most designers, developers and marketers hate to sell. If you’re starting an agency, you need to get used to the idea that your main job is selling.

When it comes to sales, you might be tempted to do one of the following:

• Hire a salesperson right away

• Outsource selling to a partner/referrer

• Position your agency as a subcontractor to bigger firms that will feed you work

These are all short-sighted mistakes. If you want your agency to be successful, you need to start out by selling to clients yourself. Here’s why:

• A hired salesperson will never be able to represent the agency like the founder would.

• An outside partner/referrer will only bring sales contacts to the table, and doesn't have the knowledge and passion about what your agency actually does. They likely won’t be able to bring in the kind of long-term clients your agency needs.

• Working for a bigger agency means you get the scraps of their projects and you won’t be able build relationships directly with clients or take credit for your work.

The most successful agencies are built off of the blood, sweat, and tears of people who could sell. They took a chance by picking up the phone or booking a plane ticket to pitch a client, and they were told no a lot more than they were told yes. Once you land a big client, it gives your agency the cash flow and breathing room you need to develop more business.

It's easy to focus on selling when you don't have any work. The hard part is sticking with sales after you land a couple of clients. You should be able to let your team lead projects, and you should only stay involved at a high level to ensure quality control and offer insights.

Selling is your job now, so you better get used to it.

May the Force be with you

Owning an agency, or starting any kind of business, is not for the faint of heart, but if you want to evolve past a one-person shop and compete for great clients, keep these points in mind. Take the time to plan out what kind of company you want to build, make sales your focus, and invest in a team and culture that will make your job of selling an easy one.

You’ve been there before; you’ve sent a proposal and are anxiously waiting for your client to send it back, fully signed so you can close the deal. Weeks later, you’re STILL waiting, and it’s making you nervous. Did the client change their mind? Is the deal dead? More than likely it’s taking them forever because they have to physically print the signature page out, then sign it, then scan it, and then email it back to you. This kind of tedious process would bring out the procrastinator in all of us, and your client is no exception.

Most proposals are open, reviewed, and signed off on within seven days if they are sent with a digital signature. SEVEN DAYS. That alone should be enough to convince you that online signatures make the proposal process smoother for you and your client. Just in case you need more convincing though, or are still a bit lost on the differences between digital and esignatures, and are curious to know the benefits of them compared to your standard print-and-sign document, then read on.

The difference between digital signatures and electronic signatures

Digital signatures

A digital signature is encrypted, which in layman's terms means your “signature” is turned into data that prevents unauthorized access. This secures the information of the document and also certifies that it’s been signed.  

Electronic signatures

An esignature serves as an intent to sign a document and can be as simple as checking a box, typing or drawing your signature, or even verbal authorization. For esignatures, authorization is any form of sound, symbol, or process that shows the sendee that you have gone over the document and intend to sign. The mark you make IS the data that secures your document and certifies it’s been signed.

Proposify provides two ways to sign your proposal digitally to give you more customization. You can either draw your signature or type it out:

“Most proposals are open, reviewed, and signed off on within seven days if they are sent with a digital signature.”

Whether you choose to type or draw your signature, it certifies your intent to sign, and secures the document.

So now that we’ve covered the difference between a digital signature and an esignature, what else is there to know?

The benefits of signing digitally

It saves time

We can all agree the print-sign-scan process is not only annoying, it’s downright time consuming for your client, and it delays the close of the deal. They need to download the document, print it (probably get into a fight with the work printer), sign it, scan it (probably get in a fight with the scanner), save the new document, and then email it back. Or worse, they may decide to put it in the mail (gasp!). Every delay provides another opportunity for this deal to go cold.

The fastest process is for your client to be able to open your proposal, review it online, then sign-off right then and there. BOOM.

According to Ombud Open Research, digital signatures significantly increase the turnaround speed on proposals – an 80% time reduction, in fact!  Which means increased productivity and the opportunity to close more business per year.

Closing a deal can come sometimes come down to timing, so why make your process longer than it needs to be?

You’ll have a better proverbial paper trail

If you’ve ever printed something important, you probably know the fear of losing sheets of your document or misplacing the whole thing. Why do you think filing cabinets were invented?

Storing paper documents takes up space, and it’s bad for the environment (FACT: it takes 13 litres of water to make a standard sheet of paper like you might find in a printer), not to mention there’s a higher risk of losing important documents.

In the U.S., it is mandatory to retain records of any electronic transaction, in case you need to reproduce any of those documents for reference. When you sign digitally, a copy of your transaction is stored on the hosting site. Having a digital paper trail allows you to store your documents in multiple places, like secure email, flash drives, and external hard-drives, making it easier to track or look up each document sent – soooo much better than flipping through a filing cabinet forever!

Increased security

It might seem like requiring your client to physically sign a piece of paper to approve your proposal is safer than emailing them a document they can sign online. However, most office printers are located in open areas and are shared by all employees. With lots of people printing at the same time, sheets of confidential paperwork run the risk of getting picked up along with another print job, filed away in the wrong place, or lost altogether.

Esignatures and digital signatures can be protected with passcodes, eliminating the possibility of unauthorized people gaining access to confidential documents. With a password protected signature, your clients can only access proposals with credentials you provide, so both you and your client have to sign into a password-protected account to view or sign the document.

Requiring someone to sign into an account before they can send, view, or sign a document ensures that it will not end up in the hands of the wrong person.

Electronic signatures and digital signatures are legally binding

Another reason some people are reluctant to use electronic signatures is that they incorrectly assume that it’s not as legally binding as a paper signature. The truth is, both esignatures and digital signatures are legally binding.

At Proposify, we use Square API, which allows parties to sign their name with their mouse or finger if they’re using a touchscreen device. Then, we record the IP address of the signing parties, along with the date and time it was signed. Once it’s all said and done, we offer both signees electronic copies of the signed document and store them on our servers to retain a record of the electronic transaction.

To ensure the contract isn’t changed or modified after it’s been signed, we lock it down. If anything is changed or edited, all parties involved are notified, the signature is removed, and the document will need to be re-sent and re-signed by everyone.

We follow the steps outlined in the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act and European Directive (EC/1999/93), to confirm both digital signatures and esignatures in Proposify-generated proposals are legally binding.

While these acts give digitally produced signatures the same stature as hand-written signatures, they do not cover some documents that demand more legal requirements, like divorce papers, or last will and testaments, for example.

If you’re ever unsure whether a contract is legally binding, get your lawyer to check it over.

Digital signatures save money

If you went to an office supply store to buy a package of standard, 8.5 x 11 white printer paper, you probably wouldn’t end up with sticker shock when you got the register. But if you think about all of the other steps that go into sending those hundreds of sheets of paper related to all the proposals you send every year, things can start to add up.

• Paper cost

• Printing cost

• Copying cost

• Scanning cost

• Delivery cost

• Safe document storage cost

Companies that use online signatures save up to $20 per document when they integrate digital signatures across various departments and processes. The return on investment can be significant, and businesses can start to see it almost immediately.

Time to get closing

If you’re still signing documents with a pen, you’re living in the past. Online signatures are the most efficient way to sign proposals, and with the ultimate benefit of closing more deals per year faster, it’s easy to see why more businesses and successful salespeople are using them.

If you’re already using Proposify and need help adding digital signatures to your proposals, check out this helpful video.

Metrics and milestones

First, let’s dig into a few numbers. Over the course of 2017, we saw 1 million new visitors to our website and 300,000 visitors to our blog who spent 20,000 hours reading our content.

40,000 new people started Proposify trials, and we gained 4,600 new customers. Our annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew by 122%, netting us out to just under $4 million at the end of 2017.

To keep pace with growth, we added a lot of new members to our team across all departments - marketing, sales, customer support, engineering, QA, and product development. We now have an HR manager and office manager, as well (Hi, Jennie and Cavell), bringing us to just under 30 Proposifiers.

As a company that (so far) hasn’t raised any significant investment capital, we’re thriving and profitable, and we owe it all to our amazing customers. Thank you!

Growing the product

We got to see what real growing pains looked like in 2017, which slowed down the evolution of our product. Our engineering team was hit with scaling challenges like dealing with spammers (Note to spammers: WE HATE YOU.) and certain APIs that connect with Proposify hammering our server.

One of the most exciting things we’ve been working on is a complete revamp of Proposify, designed and coded from the ground up. It’s a necessary evolution of the product to keep pace with new technology, infrastructure, and to solve fundamental design challenges. Proposify 2.0 is in alpha right now so keep your eyes peeled for a more detailed announcement coming this month about its release. We’re pretty pumped about it!

Unfortunately, creating Proposify 2.0 was such a massive project that the entire year was focused on its completion. However, even with these challenges, we were able to launch a couple of notable features in 2017. Earlier in the year, we launched Streams, a feature that allows you to keep proposals separate from other documents like contracts, reports, estimates, and statements of work.

In the summer, we launched Stripe Payments, which allows clients who sign your proposal to also make a full or partial payment towards the contract. So far Proposify customers have been paid a total of $1.3 million using this feature.

With Proposify 2.0 almost ready to go into beta, we’re stoked to begin work on some highly requested features, like custom fields/variables. In 2018, expect to see everything you love about Proposify taken to a whole new level.

Book launch

Our marketing team accomplished a lot last year, but the project we’re proudest of is the launch of our first book, The Full Scale Agency: How to Build a Profitable Business (Without Burning Out)

It’s based on our most popular blog posts over the years that provide advice to small business owners on the mindset, tools, and processes needed to scale clients, employees, and revenue so you can be more profitable and less stressed.

We’ll be printing a limited edition of the book and selling it on Amazon, but you can get your free digital copy here.

YouTube and podcast

In 2017 we rebranded our podcast as The Proposify Biz Chat and made it available both in audio form and as a YouTube channel.

We released 69 episodes, the podcast had more than 32,000 downloads, our YouTube videos got 22,918 views, and we gained 389 subscribers. We’re not about to retire from Proposify to be YouTube stars, but it’s a good start!

Lessons learned

It wouldn’t be a proper ‘year in review’ without discussing lessons I learned as an individual and that we learned as a company.

It’s not done until it’s done

As much as we like to announce good things coming up, it’s important to keep your cards close to your chest until everything is truly complete. Throughout 2017, I got excited about some of our initiatives and talked about them too early. Then, when things changed, or they didn’t come to fruition it caused friction, disappointment, and embarrassment.

I really enjoyed this post by Joel Kelly called Don’t Make Resolutions: How to be a better person and a better marketer. I guess you could say my, ahem, New Year’s resolution is to not make resolutions.  

Go with your gut and don’t make decisions based on what other people expect

There were times when we made decisions based on traditional startup wisdom and didn’t listen to our gut. Then we got burned. I’ve learned to listen to opinions but ultimately trust my gut, because decisions that work for one company won’t necessarily work for you.

Don’t avoid tough conversations; they’ll only get harder the more time passes

As a business owner, you can’t make everyone happy. Not customers, not investors, not employees. You’re bound to make decisions people don’t like. You’re going to need to share feedback that might sting. That’s life. In 2017 I delayed or avoided having difficult one-on-one chats because they were uncomfortable. Problems only get worse when you do that. Embrace discomfort, and do what needs to be done sooner.

Teams that pulse together grow together

Near the end of 2017, we hired a business coach (discussed in this episode of the podcast). Our one-day session with Dan Martell, and the subsequent webinars and phone chats we participated in afterwards have been extremely helpful in leveling up our leadership team. The idea of cadence - where we use yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly goals, and schedule meetings to talk about them - is already paying off. Expect a full blog post about this in 2018.

Processes need to scale with your team

What works when you’re small won’t necessarily work as you grow, but you can’t know all the answers or pick the perfect process without jumping in, trying stuff out, learning, and iterating. All of our departments spent 2017 learning how to split large projects into manageable tasks, delegate each task appropriately, and measure progress while avoiding bottlenecks. We've seen a lot of improvements already in how we operate as a team, and our ability to push through projects.

Great leaders listen

This is where regular feedback with your team and really listening to what they say is important. What’s valuable to you as a boss or manager may cause needless frustration for your employees. Good leadership is about helping your team first and foremost, and aligning their personal goals with those of the company’s. If you’re looking to learn more about what makes a great leader, I highly recommend reading Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek; it was one of my favourite reads of 2017.

What 2018 will bring

Every year around this time I’m inspired to set goals and create a plan of action to realize them - I’m sure you’re no different. I am proud of what our team accomplished in 2017, but this is just the beginning. We’ve got a LOT in store for 2018. This is going to be our best year yet, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

The challenge when pricing a business proposal is that if you set your proposal fee too low in the hopes of winning clients, it won’t necessarily make you profitable, help your business scale, or win you the kind of quality clients you need; clients who value your services beyond just a number, and with whom you can build a sustainable relationship. On the other hand, price it too high, and you risk losing the entire project.

There are different approaches you can take when pricing your proposal so it’s a win-win situation for both you and your client.

How to develop a quote price for your proposal

Pricing your proposal will depend on which model you follow; do you keep clients on a retainer? Are you following the Agile method and charging per sprint? Maybe your proposal charges clients a daily rate.

Figuring out your proposal fee can be complex. You need to develop a proposed price that’s crystal clear and highlights the value you and your team will bring to the table.

Charge by the day

Charging by the day is one approach to pricing your proposal. Break down the project into daily tasks, and charge your client based on the number of people and hours required to complete everything.

When pricing your proposal by the day, think simply in terms of dedicated days it will take to complete this project if it’s the only one you're working on. Multiply that by the number of people required for the project to find your daily rate.

If a team of four is needed, but some team members aren’t required until mid-way through the project, then account for that in your pricing.

This approach can work well if you’re freelancing, just starting to gain clients, or are proposing a project that requires a lot of flexibility.

Agile Methodology

Agile Methodology can be the most functional way to price your proposal and keep your project on the right track. In particular, Agile makes it easier to define and manage the scope of any project since it allows your team to break projects down into smaller segments called sprints, then plan and budget each sprint separately.

Not only does this help prevent scope creep, but it allows for any changes that might need to be made along the way, and clarifies timeline and budget expectations for your client.

The beauty of planning and executing proposals with the Agile method is that you get paid for every sprint, which means no need to work for months on end, waiting for a cheque to arrive in the mail. The client buys a sprint, pays for it, and you don’t start another one until you receive final payment (cha-ching!).

Sell clients on monthly retainers

Retainers can bring stability to your business and get you out of the firefighting mode of needing to win new projects all the time. They are all about proving your value to your clients by regularly delivering results.

Similar to the Agile method, selling clients on monthly retainers lets you break the project into smaller segments, which holds you accountable to your timeline, and helps predict any changes that may be required for your client’s next project proposal. Retainers also provide you with more consistent cash flow each month, helping you to build your business faster with more security.

Propose a discovery session

The first time your client sees your proposal should not be their first interaction with you. The fee table should not give them sticker-shock or leave them confused about how you propose to complete their project. This is where a discovery session is key.  

A discovery session is like a fact-finding mission so you can gather all the intelligence you need about your client, their business, their challenges, and the results they’re looking for.

This way you can take the proper time to plan any features or functionality, design interfaces, and if needed, create a rough prototype. Once everyone agrees on what you’re developing, you’ll be able to provide a more accurate proposal estimate, and manage expectations.

The discovery will also provide your client with a better sense of the value you are delivering throughout the process, and not just focus on the final number at the bottom of their invoice.

Involve your team in quoting the project

Before finalizing deliverables, timeline, and budget in any proposal consult with your project team members first. These are the experts in the work you want to execute, so having their input is vital to ensuring your proposal pricing and timeline are accurate.

Sometimes the project team has considerations or suggestions that wouldn’t necessarily occur to anyone else; things that could either complicate or simplify the proposal, and that need to be addressed up-front, before you present a final quote.

Give your clients choice when it comes to pricing

People want choice, but too much of it can cause choice paralysis and result in the buyer choosing nothing out of fear of making the wrong decision. That’s why it’s so much harder to choose what to order in a restaurant if the menu has 100 items – it all looks good, and you don’t want to waste your money on the wrong choice.

Here at Proposify, we looked at more than 20,000 proposals to see how many pricing fees most proposals contained and discovered that the average proposal contained eight fees. But out of all the winning proposals – the ones that closed – those proposals only included two fees. In your proposal, only include a couple of pricing options; too much choice is just as bad as not enough.

One way to ease your client into the pricing discussion is to tell them up front that you’re going to give them three pricing options:

1. What can be achieved as a minimal solution to their problem. An MSP.

2. What can be done with their available budget.

3. What can be done for more than their budget, to knock their socks off.

You can present each of these options easily and clearly in Proposify by including optional fee tables, which allows your client to select which fee they would like to opt into.  

Giving your client pricing options will give you greater insight into their budget, requirements, and timeline. Knowing which requirements they consider to be mandatory, which deliverables are important, and which elements they would be willing to trade-off in the interest of time or money will help you clarify how to price each section of your proposal.

Show your clients the value you bring

Sure, pricing your proposal is primarily about setting your business up for long-term profitability. However, your client will be more inclined to work with someone they trust to deliver on both price and value.

While you can base your proposal estimate on the hours you think it will take to complete the work, a more financially rewarding option can be to put a real dollar value on how much money you can make your client with the deliverables of this project.

If a potential client asks about your fees, change the conversation to be about results, like what your agency can do to bring more customers in the door, build awareness around their brand, or sell more stuff. What would increasing a client’s profits by 10-20% be worth to them? Position the value your agency can deliver rather than focusing on the price you charge.

Conclusion

Business proposal pricing is truly a challenge. Between building trust with your new client, getting them to open up about their real budget, convincing them of the value you’ll deliver, and trying to make it all profitable can be an uphill battle.

Find the pricing method that works best for you and focus on your own profitability. You don’t want to be known as the lowest-priced agency on the market. Clients who chase the lowest price rarely turn into valuable long-term relationships - they’re too busy jumping from agency to agency, seeing you as disposable as soon as they find a cheaper deal.

Don’t be afraid to lose a lead – if you want your business to grow, the price of your proposals needs to grow. If everyone accepts your price without pushback, that’s a sure sign that you’re charging too little.

Good microcopy can improve customer retention and increase conversion rates. However, marketers, writers, developers, and designers each approach microcopy differently, because they have varying ideas of what “copy” is and how it fits into their tasks. This can lead to confusing or misused microcopy, which is the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

If you’re looking for tips on how to approach microcopy differently from other types of copy, how to avoid misusing it, and how to create eye-catching microcopy that enhances your UX, read on.

What is microcopy?

Think of when you’ve visited a company's website for the first time. Chances are you went there in search of something specific – contact information, a product, or perhaps a service.

You may have looked for words to help you navigate the site. Things like page descriptions, form labels, instructional tooltips, button text, error messages, and on-boarding copy. All of those magical bits of text are called "microcopy," and their purpose is to increase understanding between a product and its users.

Why microcopy is different from other copy

While it is still a form of copy, and one you want your customers or users to take notice of, microcopy differs from other copy that lives on your website, app, or product.

Regular copy might include your company’s missions, values, goals, or information about who you are. Microcopy, on the other hand, is geared toward helping the user of your product or website understand how to navigate and use different elements or features. Because of this, microcopy needs to be more straightforward than other copy, and should always have the user in mind.

Show, don’t tell

Product microcopy should use a filmmaker’s philosophy of “show, don’t tell,” since most products are a visual medium. It should enhance user experience (UX), not compensate for bad design.

For example, rather than including microcopy that says “click the button to the right,” design your page so it’s clear to the user how to navigate your app or website. There’s no need to use words to describe what should be obvious to the user.

If your microcopy is clear, users should be able to easily maneuver your product or website. On the flip side, if it’s being used to explain what isn’t immediately apparent, chances are you have a design problem. Work on that first, THEN tackle your microcopy.

Avoid jargon in your product microcopy

Good microcopy is clear, concise, and free of jargon that your average user might not understand. Your product copywriter, UX copywriter, sales copywriter, and marketing team probably know all the special words you use internally; your users may not.

For example, your team may use words like “modal window,” “input,” or “tooltip,” but the average user may have no idea what those things are, or what they mean in the context of your product.

By avoiding jargon in your microcopy, you’ll avoid any confusion your users might have while using your product.

Alleviate fears

When people aren’t familiar with your product, they may fear what could happen when they click a button that does not have clear instructions or directions on what will happen next. Your goal is to eliminate that fear with your microcopy.

For example, when preparing to email a proposal to a client, if a user sees a button that says, “Send”, they may worry that it will go out before they’ve had an opportunity to compose the email, when actually it takes you to the send review page. Using microcopy that says “Next" or “Compose email” clarifies the following action and relieves any fears.

Notice how Campaign Monitor makes their sending system clear with a big green button that says, “Send campaign now,” stating that by clicking it, it will send your email campaign. There’s even small copy below to drive home the point.

Another example is when you’ve hit your usage limits, and it’s time to upgrade your account. Instead of a button saying “Upgrade now” you should instead use “See plans and pricing” so the user knows their card isn’t going to be immediately charged some unknown amount.

Focus on the context

As mentioned before, the purpose of microcopy is to enhance the user’s experience with your website or app and should work in conjunction with your User Interface (UI). It’s not there to sell; that can be achieved with your advertising, landing page, or feature tour. Your UI should be the star, with good microcopy supporting it.

For clear, concise microcopy, focus on the context – the where, why, and what.

Where

Microcopy can be used in various areas of your website or product to make it easier for users to navigate, which will also make your product more inviting.

That said, you don’t want to add microcopy to so many places that it irritates your users or have it serve as a plug for holes in your design. Your microcopy should explain to a user where they are in your interface, and allow them to figure out where they want to go next.

Why

So you’ve provided your users with microcopy that explains where they are in your product or page, but people like to be in the know. They want to know the purpose behind each step they’re taking to meet their end-goal.

For example, when you’re creating a new account with Facebook, they ask you to provide your date of birth. Some people may question why they need to provide personal information like this to gain access to a website, so this is a great opportunity to use microcopy to explain why.

Explaining different steps to your user can eliminate frustration and confusion, and can lead to a better experience with your product.

What

Now that your users know where they are in your product, and why they are being taken through different steps, you need to explain what they can/should do next.

This is where you can get your user excited about all the features you provide and ensure they are comfortable using your website or app. Dropbox does a great job of this by explaining the names of different features, and what the user can do with each one.

Keep it light, but not too light

While you can reinforce your brand with snappy microcopy, it should be kept to a minimum.

Jokes are great for showing off your brand’s personality but use them sparingly and in the right context. If a customer sees an error screen, gets a blank screen after they search for something, or are confused while being on-boarded, the last thing they want to read is a quippy joke that makes it seem like the product is laughing at them.  

Slack does an excellent job of keeping their microcopy on-brand with light humour at the appropriate time.

Keep any error messages sincere, and save messaging that shows off your personality for other areas of your product.

Keep your product microcopy short

People read a fraction of what you write in a product. Why? Because time is money. Whatever you write, cut it in half.

People don’t want to spend precious minutes sifting through every page of your website to find a small detail that will answer their question. As an exercise, pretend you’re writing copy for a tweet or a billboard, platforms that require you to keep your thoughts concise, yet effective.

For product microcopy, ask yourself, “Is this helping someone?”. If the answer is no, then leave it out.

Deliver a massive punch with micro copywriting

Microcopy may be teeny tiny bits of copy, but those bits of copy can deliver a punch when done well. It can boost your customer retention and conversion rates, which is always a plus.

To create killer microcopy that matches your website, product, or app, write as you go through an interactive prototype, rather than in a spreadsheet or Word document. As the writer, it will help you understand the context of where the user will be, why they need to do something, and where they need to go next.

If you keep your language clear, concise, and free of jargon, you’ll have microcopy that can KO any confusion among your users.

When I was a designer working at an agency early in my career, a senior designer mentioned that he was building up his ‘toolbox’. By toolbox, he meant different design styles and approaches that he could apply to specific circumstances; not literal tools, like say, InDesign.  

The hardest part when starting out in the design field is to know what ‘good’ looks like; your head is empty. The only way to fill it is to look at examples of great design and deconstruct them. Over time your design brain becomes like a well-trained muscle - you know instinctively what works and what doesn’t. You develop new styles, templates if you will, of what typeface/colour/image styles go well together in given situations.

Why am I talking about design when this post is supposed to be about sales?

Because whether you’re a salesperson by title or you just happen to fill that role in your company, you need a sales skills toolbox - a list of strategies that you know work.

Think of it like a magician's coat – full of pockets that contain tricks of the trade a salesperson can pull out to woo a prospective client and prove that their product/service is worth believing in. These ‘tools’ help your sales team move leads through the sales funnel, explain your product or service confidently, and allow them to close more deals, faster.

Roleplay

I recently sat down with Kevin Springer, co-founder of Proposify, to talk with our sales team about our current sales process and some issues the team was having. During our discussion we discovered that the sales reps who were finding the most success were using go-to statements, questions, and rebuttals they had built up over the years – a sales skills toolbox they could rely on to help them connect with their customers.

To get our entire sales team comfortable with the sales process, and to ultimately help them succeed, we knew they would each need to build their own sales toolbox. To do that, we decided to roleplay different scenarios. I played the salesperson while our salesperson played the lead. They threw objections my way, and I’d attempt to knock them down. Anytime either one of us was stumped, we stopped to discuss the situation.

Here’s what we uncovered during our sales roleplaying:

Qualification calls

Qualifying sales leads isn’t hard if you have a good process. No one wants to spend weeks nurturing a lead who ends up declining your proposal or doesn’t have the budget to work with you. On the other hand, you may pass on talking to someone because you thought they were too small, but it turns out they were a hot lead.

To quickly uncover whether a prospect is the right fit for a large-tier Proposify plan, we created a general qualification call approach.

What makes an ideal prospect?

It’s easy to think an ideal prospect is based on industry, company size, location, or job title, but those are just hints at who that prospect is, and the amount of work they do. To find this information quickly, sales automation and data-enrichment tools like Clearbit scan the internet and pull the data for you.

Even with this information, it’s still essential to examine your existing database of customers.

Sometimes you’ll find that your highest-value customers don’t fit perfectly into your qualified lead criteria. There may be smaller companies that value your product/services, for example. Or a prospect might use what looks like a personal email address, so you disregard it as a low-quality lead, but it turns out to be a CMO who’s logged into their personal laptop. Definitely a high-quality lead. You just never know.

For the same reason you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a lead by only your base criteria. You need to dig deeper into what makes a good lead, and if possible, assign a value metric. For us at Proposify, it’s the number of proposals our leads write each month.

Our sales reps qualify a lead based on how painful proposals are to them. They ask questions like:

• How did you find out about Proposify?

• What caused you to look for a solution?

• How many proposals does your team write each month?

• What’s your average deal size?

These are the most important questions to ask because:

• Knowing why a lead visited our marketing site, reached out to sales, or signed up for a trial tells us what problem they’re trying to solve.

• Knowing how many proposals they create tells us how important writing and sending proposals or other sales documents is in their overall sales process. The more people writing and the more proposals they create, the more value we can provide.

• Proposify helps companies close deals so knowing their average deal size helps us determine what closing one extra deal per year is worth to them. Helping them close a $2K deal is very different from a $500K deal.

Because we are able to pull base information (company size, location, and job title) from our sales automation and data enrichment tool, it allows our sales reps to spend more time figuring out if we can help each lead, and to what extent.

Handling objections

Your salespeople always know the least about your product or service; it’s just a fact. Your designers and developers can answer your lead’s questions about their design process or how an integration works better than you can.

Unfortunately, leads aren’t given the opportunity to talk to those experts. Instead, they are forced to talk to sales reps, which is why part of your salesperson’s toolbox should be knowing how to turn questions around and own the qualification call.

Bad salesperson:

Lead:  “Do you have feature X?”

Sales rep:  “Um, yes I think so.”

Lead:  “How does it work, does it work like this?”

Sales rep:  “Um, I don’t really know, but I can find out.”

Good salesperson:

Lead:  “Do you have feature X?”

Sales rep:  “That’s a really interesting idea! No, we don’t have that specific feature, but just so I’m clear, what problem are you hoping to solve with that feature?”

Lead:  “Well, here’s my current situation…”

Sales rep:  “Oh, well in that case, here’s another way to solve that problem using our product.”

By turning questions around on the lead, it forces them to explain the reason for their question. Instead of the sales rep just answering yes/no questions, they can take command of the call and find opportunities to solve a customer’s problem.

The more detailed the answers, the faster the sales rep can determine whether or not the lead is a good fit.

What objections do your salespeople encounter?

Sit down with your sales team and make a list of every common objection they come across, then work on strategies to get around each one:

Objection: “You don’t have feature X.”

Rebuttal: “What problem are you trying to solve with feature X? OK, great. Here’s another way to solve that problem. I’ll also be sure to let our product team know why it’s an important feature to you.”

Objection: “Why should I choose you over competitor X?”

Rebuttal: “Competitor X is a great company, and we love them, but here’s why I think we’re a better fit for you: Our founders started [company_name] because they believe [mission statement]. Since [client’s core problem] is a big pain for you, it’s the thing we get out of bed to solve. If you’re looking for [unique selling point], then we’re the right product for you.”

Objection: “The price you gave me is high. I don’t have the budget for that.”

Rebuttal: “I can understand this is a decent size investment. We’re not the cheapest option around, but that’s because we believe, and our customers back us on this, that our product/service is worth it. Customers typically make back their investment within three months of engaging us. That’s because we do [unique value proposition] better than anyone else. Is that something you think is worth paying for?”

Your objection/rebuttal chart should be a document or spreadsheet that your sales reps can have open in a tab at all times. Eventually, each reply becomes instinctive; they will know the right moment to deploy each one.

Discussing price

Leads will often come calling with questions around pricing and usually, it’s about lowering the price or getting a deal. What tools are in your salesperson’s toolbox to deal with these situations?

During a qualifying call, if a lead says, “I was on your pricing page and was wondering if I can have feature X but only pay $Y for it?”, or “I’m just wondering how much you guys charge?”, your salesperson needs to own the conversation and put an emphasis on the value you can offer the lead.

Instead of just answering each question to land the deal – “Our pricing is X,” or “Sure, we could look at getting you on a cheaper plan and throw in that extra feature,” – you need to train them to ask qualifying questions, like:

“First, I need to know more. What does your current process look like? What caused you to reach out to us?”

Uncover the value and work back from there

Your sales rep’s first call to a lead is all about uncovering the value of your product or service.

Let’s say you’re a marketing agency and a lead calls to ask about pricing. You flip the script and start asking them about why they reached out, how they generate leads, and what their main problems are.

With the questions answered, the rep starts working out the math:

Sales rep: “OK, so right now you do $5,000/month in Google Adwords, and only get five leads per month. You’re paying $1,000/lead, and you can only close one deal a month. You’re paying $5K for a customer each month.

What if we could triple the number of leads for you and cut the cost of a lead down to $200? What would that do for your bottom line? Would you be able to handle more leads? Great, so doing the math quickly, that would translate into an extra $1 million in net new revenue within the first year.”

Now, because the sales rep focused on the value you can deliver FIRST, the lead will be fixated on the $1 million they can make instead of the $10K/ month you have to charge them to execute the project. They’ll look at that $10,000/month as a solid return on investment to get to the $1M in revenue.

Try this exercise with your sales team:

Give your team a list metrics to pull from the client, and show them how to then quickly calculate the value of your product/service based on those metrics.

For example, at Proposify we know that companies who write a lot of proposals and implement our software will save at least two hours per proposal. If a customer has a sales team writing 50 proposals per month, then they’ll save 624 hours per year using our software.

Multiply that by the average dollar per hour they pay their sales reps ($32/hr), and it works out that we could be saving that company nearly $20,000/year in hours alone.

Now, if their average deal size is $20,000 and we help them close even one extra deal per year, that could be a minimum $40,000 value we’re delivering the customer. So if a large tier plan costs a business $5,000/year to make $40,000, the value is pretty obvious.

Always uncover the value and work back from there.

Pitch meetings or demos

Demos are to product companies, as pitches are to service businesses. Whatever you call it, a pitch or a demo is something only offered to sales-qualified leads; ones who have shown a need for your service and have demonstrated an intent to buy.  

Here are things you need to document in your demo/pitch process:

• Standard pitch deck or proposal template that you can customize (link to Proposify)

• How to prepare for the meeting

• Standard length and structure

• How to address questions and objections

• Standard value proposition

• How to end the demo or pitch and CTA

A great resource for learning more about how to create a SaaS company demo is Product Demos That Sell, an ebook by Steli Efti from Close.io. Serped also has a great post about How to Pitch To New Clients (And Actually Get Responses), which covers some deadly mistakes you could be making in your pitches.

Closing

We all know coffee's for closers because closing is the mark of a true salesperson.

It’s not about begging or nagging for the sale, but instead guiding the lead to move further down the funnel, and nudging them to make a decision.

I’m going to share two strategies for closing here, but you can probably create more.

Get the lead to tell you their hesitation for buying

To encourage your lead further down the sales funnel, you need to know all objections or obstacles holding them back from saying yes.

"So can you sign up for an annual plan today? No? What else needs to happen? You need to play around with the product? OK, let's say you love the product, what then? Oh, you need your marketing director’s approval? Then let's schedule a call with her for next week."

Asking the lead what the obstacles are to moving forward helps the salesperson understand how long the sales cycle will be and allows them to immediately overcome objections.

Use incentives and time constraints effectively

Often salespeople will offer clients special bonuses for closing, like an added feature that normally doesn’t come with the plan they’re on, or a shorter billing cycle. Give your salespeople tools they can use as incentives, but make sure they pair the incentive with a time constraint.

“I talked to my sales director, and I can get you on quarterly pricing, but I would need you to sign up to the plan by Thursday at 5 pm EST. After that, I can only offer you annual billing.”

This is really useful for add-ons that help close the deal.

“The regular deal is this, but I’ll throw in X, Y, and Z for the same price if you decide by [date/time].”

Don’t let your tools get stale

A toolbox is only as useful as the tools in it. When you first add that hammer or drill to the toolbox, it feels great; maybe it even inspires you to DIY everything in your life. But when that hammerhead starts flopping around, or that drill starts sounding like a dying cat, it’s probably time to replace them.

A sales toolbox is no different. Your sales team should be inspired by the equipment they have readily available to them. It should make them feel ready to sell and close every lead they speak with. When the materials in their sales toolbox start to feel stale (i.e., outdated qualifying questions, or incentives that aren’t incentivising), it’s not just uninspiring, it can be downright dangerous to the health of your sales.

Keep your sales toolbox updated, and evaluate the materials you have in it regularly to ensure they are still working for your salespeople, inspiring them to sell more, and empowering them along the way.

How to apply this to your business

Now it’s your turn to look at this framework and fill in the blanks. What are the most common things leads say to you on qualification calls? What works?

Put this into a shared doc with your team that you can all keep adjusting as you learn. The most important thing is to START documenting your process.

Is there an aspect of the sales process I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments below.

People can be funny when it comes to talking about money, and that includes clients. It may be they think it’s rude to talk about money, or if they don’t know you well, they’re wary to share their budget with you as they deem it “sensitive information”. But when it comes to business, the money conversation is a necessary conversation to have.

Understanding a client’s budget is the base upon which you can build ideas that will help them find success, and help you keep the project profitable. It is IMPOSSIBLE to write a winning proposal without one.

To avoid wasting your time talking to a client who can’t afford to work with you, here are some tips on how to ask for budget.

Should you ask your client what their budget is?

Knowing your client’s budget early on is crucial to moving any project forward. Budget will determine whether or not your lead is a good fit financially, and determine the scope of the project. Asking for it up-front and will save you both the headache of unnecessary meetings, position you as a professional, and help you gain the trust of your client.

Some prospects will be hesitant to discuss the numbers with you, so you need to explain that knowing what they have to spend will help you help them.

For example, if you’re planning to buy a new car, chances are you have a budget in mind to work with. Explaining your budget to the salesperson will help them find you the right car for you faster than if you let them show you every car on the lot – 2001 Hondas to 2018 BMWs. Getting to the budget conversation early saves you time, and determines if you can afford what the dealership has to offer in your price range.

Asking for your client’s budget is no different. It is critical to creating a strong proposal that meets your client’s needs. Having the conversation early in the sales process will make it easier and faster for you both to get down to business.

How to ask for your client’s budget

How you ask your client budget questions is important. You don’t want to come off as money-hungry, but you also don’t want to come off as timid and too scared to ask. Your client should understand that you need to know the numbers in order to develop a proposal that solves their business challenges.

To start the conversation, ask your client some open-ended sales questions. This will get them to open up about what they have in mind for the project, explain their pain-points, and encourage them to share more information that will help you customize the proposal.

Explain why you need to know the budget – “What kind of budget could we expect to work with to complete this project? This will give us a better idea of what we can do to meet your needs, and help us determine the timeline we can complete it in.”

An analogy that might be easy for them understand is one of building them either a sailboat or an ocean liner. You can build both to be seaworthy, but their budget will dictate which solution is possible.

Educate your client about your business

Keep in mind that this could be the first project of its kind for your client so they may not know what kind of money they need. They may be looking for an estimate of what you would charge for the project to help define their budget.

Take the opportunity to educate prospective clients about your business and how you price your proposals. Explain similar projects you have done in the past and what the price range was for each. This allows people to see the kind of work you’re able to provide and opens the door for them to say whether or not your services and prices are a match for their expectations.  

Talking about previous project budgets also gives you the chance to gauge the client’s reactions. If you throw out a large number, and you can suddenly slice the tension in the room (or air over the phone) with a butter knife, chances are the client was expecting a smaller figure.

Whether you end up getting a defined budget, or a ballpark range, by the end of the conversation, it should be clear if both you and your client will be able to work together, and whether it’s time to move to the proposal stage.

Find out what the project is worth to them

Rather than focusing on how much the client has to spend, change the conversation to be about what the results of the project will mean to them. Highlighting the ROI allows your client to see into their future, and forecast the success they can expect.

If you explain that including a certain feature is going to cost $5,000, but that it will generate $8,000 in revenue because of X, Y, and Z, the client is more likely to focus on the ROI than on the initial $5,000 they have to shell out.

Position the value your agency can deliver rather than focus on the price you charge.

Know who you’re speaking with

When discussing available budget for a project, product, or service, make sure you’re speaking with the right person; someone who is able to make the decision when it comes signing the dotted line of the proposal.

The first person you speak with may not be the final decision maker, but it doesn’t mean this person isn’t valuable to you. They may be an influencer who convinces the decision maker that your product/service will solve their business challenges.

Whoever you speak with at your prospect’s company, acknowledge their role and build a relationship with them – make them feel as valued as the decision maker you’re trying to reach. A great way to do this is to include them in your dialogue. “Along with yourself, who else would be involved in making the decision?” and ask about the opportunity to meet with them as well.

Don’t be afraid to turn the lead away

If you’ve asked a few times, and your lead still hasn’t given you a clear budget to work with, don’t be afraid to cut the cord.

It may seem like a risky move the first time you do it, and like you’re turning away ‘good’ business, but it’s the mark of being a professional and knowing what your ideal customer looks like. Time is money. To remain profitable, you can’t waste time with dead leads who won’t finalize a budget, or seem like they are inherently flaky.

It’s understandable for your client to not know their full budget up-front, but after a thorough discussion with them, they should have a better sense of what you can provide, and what money they have set aside for those services.

If you’ve explained your services and the value you can deliver, but they’re still wary on giving you a defined budget, then it’s a red flag that they may not be your ideal client.

Knowing when to walk away is key to scaling your business and gaining customers that want to work with you.

Conclusion  

Budget can be a tough subject to broach when you’re looking to close a deal. Some clients will be more open than others when it comes to talking about money; some will be more experienced in developing realistic budgets for the kinds of projects your company specializes in.

Asking for your client’s budget is a critical part of the sales process. It will help you vet leads, focus on quality clients, and write clear proposals that are destined to be signed.

In this age of informality, manners can seem like they’ve gone the way of the dinosaur, but saying thank you in the business world may be more important than you think. Sure, it’s a polite gesture, but it can also make or break a deal or business relationship.

A simple ‘thank you’ can show your clients and partners that you value the relationship, and it helps build rapport. For employees and co-workers, ‘thank you’ can instil confidence, demonstrate that the work they do is integral to the success of your organization, and build loyalty.

To improve your relationships and ensure you’re making the people you interact with feel respected and valued, check out how to say ‘thank you’ in business below.

Saying ‘thank you’ builds loyalty

Everyone appreciates hearing ‘thank you’. Whether it’s for something small, like picking up coffee before a meeting, or something significant, like a new client has entrusted your agency with their entire marketing budget, a simple ‘thank you’ can make whatever was done and whoever did it feel worthwhile.

Verbalizing gratitude shows that you’re engaged in the work you’re doing, and are mindful of those you interact with. It can also build brand loyalty.

Customers don’t choose who they do business with based solely on products and what they cost, there are other things at play. For example, only 9% of customers said they switched to a competitor because they preferred what they were offering. And 68% said that businesses lost them as a customer because they felt unappreciated.

 So don’t shy away from those ‘magic words’ – show your thanks often.

When to send a thank you note vs a thank you letter

They sound similar, but there is a big difference between a thank you note and a thank you letter, primarily in the amount of effort that goes into each.

Thank you notes are written quickly, convey a lighter/casual tone, and can be sent in pretty much every business setting.

A thank you note may sound something like,

“Hi Jennifer,

I just wanted to say thanks, again, for organizing such a great lunch-and-learn. It was really informative, and there were some great takeaways and strategies I’m excited to implement into my team’s routine.”

The note is concise, the tone is casual, and it shows the recipient you appreciate the time and effort they put into their task.

Here’s a real-life example of a great thank you note that went viral on Reddit from Jimyz Automotive in Ohio. What’s extra cool about this note is that after it started to spread across the internet, other Jimyz Automotive customers past and present chimed in to confirm what a stellar business it is:

Some business situations, however, require a more formal sign of gratitude – a thank you letter. Letters are a great way to say thanks for more significant occasions. Like extending your appreciation to businesses who sponsored and attended a conference you organized, a major client whose large project your team just completed, or an organization who nominated you for an award.

Generally, thank you letters are written in a professional tone, are closer to a page, maximum, in length, and demonstrate that you’ve put effort into saying thank you. They can still be sent as an email, but format and personalize it accordingly so it comes across as a sincere thank you letter, and not a painfully long email.

Here’s an example of the format of a business thank you letter:

Kathy Green
Revelation Interiors, Store Manager
641 Maple Street
Anytown, USA 99999

January 29, 20XX

Jessica Mountain
Interiors by Jess, Owner
3672 Main Street
Anytown, USA 99999

Dear Jessica,

Thank you very much for your marvellous help during our recent store renovation. Your design experience and organizational skills really made a difference in how quickly we were able to reopen, and the new layout you designed already seems to be increasing sales of some items!

We are planning a similar renovation of our satellite store on the West Side within the next year, and I would like to contact you for your expertise on that project as well when the time draws closer.

I have given your name to several executives and clients who inquired about our exciting new look. I hope that this will help you to grow your business as well. Please feel free to contact me should you ever need a professional testimonial – I can promise to write a glowing one for you.

Thank you again for your flawless service, and I look forward to working with you in the future.

Regards,

Kathy

Remove “thank you for your business” from your vocabulary

Is there an email more dull or lacking of personality than one that says, “Thank you for your business”?

Thanking your customers is great, but thanking them for their “business” feels a bit cold and heartless; like you only sent the message because you exchanged money, not because you’re grateful. As short or as long as you make it, a personalized thank you note will always have a stronger impact than a cookie-cutter, generic email.

Your customers and employees want to read something that feels like you took the time to think of them and what they’ve done for you – it should exhibit your genuine appreciation for the relationship you continue to build. This isn’t to say you can’t automate a message thanking new customers for their business; you just need to make sure the automated emails you send FEEL real.

There are a few different services that can help you make something automated feel personal. Some companies like Letter Friend and Handwrytten handwrite notes or cards for you, and send them to your clients, while still allowing you to control the content.

Proposify does something similar by helping you set up personalized, automated emails to clients, ensuring you never forget to thank them after they’ve read or approved your proposal.

Automating part of your ‘thank you’ process increases productivity by freeing up the time you’d spend writing out each thank you email and allows you to maintain a strong connection with clients. Just make sure the notes you send don’t sound like you’ve just swapped out the recipient’s name  - be authentic and sincere.

Thank you from management goes a long way

Thanking your employees for their work is incredibly important. Sure, they’re doing their assigned tasks, but they could be putting in that same amount of effort to help your competition grow their business.

Hearing ‘thank you’ from management can remind an employee that what they do is valuable to the company and that their contribution is appreciated. It can also be motivating. According to a recent survey, 69% of employees said they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated.

So check in with each department on a regular basis, understand the projects being worked on and which employees are involved, then take time to thank those employees once the work is done.

Or, if you know your team is bogged down in an especially challenging project, a simple thank you midway through can be a good shot in the arm for everyone to help them push on to completion.

Thanking your employees doesn’t warrant writing and formatting a professional letter. Instead, thanking employees can be done more casually – send them a quick email, leave a note on their desk, or drop by their office to say ‘thank you’ in-person.

No one wants to feel invisible, so take time to recognize the hard work each employee puts in to keeping your business successful and thank them for it.

Two simple words that go a long way

Saying thank you for your business is a simple but powerful way to grow your relationships, build brand loyalty, and create general goodwill among clients, employees, and partners.

It’s easy to say, quick to do, and it’s never taken the wrong way. There is no downside to sending a business thank you email or thank you letter, so try scheduling time in your week to do it more often.

And thank you for reading this article.

To help get you rolling, here’s a general outline on how to structure your proposal.

So pour your coffee, take a deep breath, and tackle it one section at a time:

Proposal cover

The cover of your proposal is the first thing that your sales lead will see, so it needs to make a good impression. It doesn’t have to be flashy, simple is usually better, but it must be well-designed.

The proposal cover should include all the pertinent information like:

• Name of the project

• Any project reference numbers

• Name of the client and contact to whom you’re submitting

• Name of your company and contact info

• Date proposal was submitted

Make sure that any logos you use on the cover page, whether yours or your client’s, are high-quality, high-res versions and they look sharp in the context of your cover. It’s a bad start to the proposal process when the first thing a client sees is a fuzzy version of their logo in a white box that looks like an amateur cut-and-paste hack. Here are more tips on how to design your proposal.

Executive summary

Contrary to popular belief, the executive summary isn’t a summary of your whole proposal. It’s a summary of why your solution is the right one. It needs to outline why your prospective client should choose your company over the competition.

The executive summary needs to be persuasive and focused on the benefits of your company/product/service, rather than descriptive and focused on the features. You’ll have an opportunity to outline features later in the body of the proposal.

The executive summary should cover the following points:

Intro

Your introduction needs to be compelling enough to grab the reader’s attention right away and make them want to keep reading. This is the time to focus on the client, their issue, and the results they’re looking for; this isn’t the place to spotlight your company.

The challenge

You can’t solve a problem that you don’t understand, and people won’t hire you if they think you don’t get it. Demonstrate your grasp of the situation; include some research or refer to related experience your company has had with a similar project. The focus here is on the client and their challenge, not your team.

The solution

This is where you highlight the solution your team has designed to overcome the client’s business challenges. Outline how it will work and the benefits the client can expect.  

Keep this section fairly high level - they can read the specifics in the proposal - but provide enough detail to give your clients a sense of relief and get them excited about the results to come.

The proof

Explain why your company, your team, or your product is the right choice for this situation; why you’re uniquely qualified to do this work.

Maybe you have lots of experience helping other companies with a similar issue; maybe it’s a special skill your team possesses, technology you’ve built, or approach you’ve adopted. Talk about why your company specifically can make this a successful project and deliver the most favourable results.

Call to action

Since the executive summary’s purpose is to sell, now’s the time to close the deal before the reader even gets to page two.

This section is your chance to convince your prospect that their only chance for success is to hire your company. Remind them what differentiates you from the competition and reinforce the idea that your solution is the only one that will deliver results.

And finally, a little flattery goes a long way. Talk about why you and your team are excited to work with them on this project.

Some people suggest the executive summary be 10% of your entire proposal, but we recommend keeping it to one page. If you’re working on an RFP there may be a set length you have to adhere to, so be sure to check out the guidelines.

Approach/solution

The next section of your proposal outlines, in detail, your approach to solving the client’s business challenges and the process involved. It’s important to be as specific as possible to this particular client and project. You don’t want them to think you sent a generic boilerplate proposal and just swapped out an another client’s name for theirs. Even if this solution is one you sell to most of your clients, make the context of the proposal feel customized.

Project deliverables

Describe exactly what’s included in the proposal and what the client can expect to receive from you. For example:

• Social media audit

• Competitive analysis

• Content strategy

It’s important that you have detailed descriptions for each deliverable. Don’t assume the reader already knows the scope of each one, or even what they mean. Providing detail and being clear will help avoid any misunderstandings about expectations later.

Project milestones

Break the project into phases. Outline the events and deliverables involved with each one, how long it will take, who is responsible for what, and what will be accomplished at the completion of each milestone.

Budget

This section is mostly made up of your project fees and descriptions.

Here at Proposify, we looked at more than 20,000 proposals to see how many pricing fees most proposals contained and discovered that the average proposal contained eight fees.

But, out of all the winning proposals – the ones that closed – those proposals only included two fees. In your proposal, only include a couple of pricing options; too much choice is just as bad as not enough. Looking for help on how to price a proposal?

One way to present your project budget is to tell your sales lead up front that you’re giving them three pricing options:

1. What can be achieved as a minimal solution to their problem.

2. What can be done with their available budget.

3. What can be done for more than their budget, to knock their socks off.

You can present each of these options easily and clearly in Proposify by including optional fee tables, which allows your client to select which fee they would like to opt into.  

About Us/team

Explain who you are as a company. What you do, why you exist, your expertise, and your unique selling proposition. Touch on all the various services or products you offer, not just the ones relevant to this proposal. It may be a chance to cross-sell your clients, or at least plant the seed in their minds of your range of abilities.

Don’t forget to show off your greatest resource - your team! Make your potential new client feel confident that they’re hiring the best by highlighting the experience and strength of your team members. Include pictures and bios of the key people who will be working on the project.

Your prospect doesn’t just want to see that you can complete their project successfully; they also want to know your company’s values so they can see for themselves that you’re reliable and will be someone they can work with for an extended period.

Case Studies/testimonials

Case studies and testimonials put the walk in the talk of your business proposals. Include examples of past projects with a written description of the problem you solved, and what the client thought of the results.

Use these four elements as a guideline for formatting your case study:

Background

Provide context for the reader by briefly introducing the client company, what they do, and their industry.

The challenge

Why did the client come to you? What problem did they need solved? Why did they choose your company to help them?

The approach

What did your team do to address the client’s problem? What was your process to develop a solution? Why did you decide that solution was the right one?

The result

Explain the results your solution delivered to the client, ideally with hard numbers, but otherwise anecdotally. Describe how your team improved their situation, how it helped them achieve their goals, and how they are now positioned for a successful future. RESULTS ARE CRITICAL. If you can’t demonstrate positive results, don’t include the case study.

Clients/references

This section is optional, but you may decide to include a client list, or just one or two phone numbers/email addresses of people your prospect can contact for a reference on what it’s like to work with your business. Remember to check with your existing clients first before giving out their names or contact information.

Terms/conditions/next steps

Show your client how to proceed to close the sale. It could be a statement of work, contract for sign off, or even just a name and phone number to call.

It’s usually a good idea to get a lawyer to help with the terms and conditions to make sure both you and your client are protected if this project goes awry.

Conclusion

While every business proposal is different, most follow a similar structure and flow. You may have to write a proposal from scratch the first time, but once you develop a process you can reuse some of the content to help save time and still deliver a persuasive pitch.

When you’re trying to scale your business, there’s no worse feeling than seeing sales drop. It’s like the feeling you get on a rollercoaster when it plummets...except less exhilarating. Several challenges during a project process can stall your cash flow and puncture your profits:

• The sales cycle can take months to close a new project contract.

• When you finally close the deal, you only get paid a deposit.

• You perform the work, and depending on the size of the project, you may not get paid again for another month or two.

• Projects sometimes go dormant for chunks of time because clients don’t get back to you with feedback or content.

• Depending on the client’s pay cycle, you sometimes have to wait weeks/months to get paid, not to mention the fact that some clients need to be chased down or they push back on paying because they don’t “feel” the project is finished (surprise!).

Needless to say, this is a nightmare for your cash flow. You may have thousands of dollars in unpaid receivables that you haven't been able to collect, but your fixed monthly expenses still need to be paid regardless. What you need is a way to regulate your revenue, and the best way to do that is with a monthly retainer fee.

What is a retainer?

A retainer fee is an amount of money paid in advance by a client to assure your services will be available to them for an extended amount of time. The client pays a lump sum upfront, or makes a recurring monthly payment, and you work with them on a long-term project, or provide them with access to services each month.

Retainer agreements can bring stability to your business, get you out of the firefighting mode of needing to win new projects all the time, and provide assets within a company or contract.

Productize your retainer agreement

Now that you know what a retainer is, how do you start selling them?

Many agencies struggle with selling retainers because a) they’re afraid to ask their clients for a monthly commitment, or b) they aren’t able to communicate the value to clients, so the clients say no.

To take pressure off asking your client to buy a monthly retainer agreement, productize your retainer by explaining the services they’ll find valuable each month. You could offer a monitoring service, marketing campaign, or anything you feel your agency can provide that will remind your client why you’re an asset to their business, and why they should work with you every month.

Not only will this help you seal a retainer contract, but it will ensure your client has a thorough understanding of the value you bring to the table. If whoever’s in charge of budgeting asks “What is this monthly fee?”, you want your client to be able to explain that it’s a necessary expense for the productivity or growth of the business, rather than have them say that it’s a monthly fee “in case” they need to work with you – that it’s an essential relationship for the advancement of their work.

Get your foot in the door first

As with any new relationship, you don’t want to overstep your boundaries with a new client. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to agree to pay a fixed monthly retainer fee for X number of months without getting a taste of what they’re buying. Think of it like test-driving a car before buying it.

Offering a free trial of your product or service allows customers to get a clear idea of how it will work for them and hooks them into paying long-term if it’s something they deem valuable. Similar to how cell phone companies give away phones in exchange for fixed contracts, SaaS companies offer trial periods to use their software in the hopes the user will be compelled to upgrade to a paid plain at the end. You need to prove to the client that to get the most value from your services, they need to use them every month.

There are other ways to get your foot in the door with your client, like selling them an upfront discovery session as a way to kick-off their project. Many agencies give this away for free at the proposal stage but it’s actually better to sell a discovery as a paid service, since selling an upfront engagement that costs $500-$3,000 is a lot easier than selling a project build that costs $5,000-$100,000. Clients don’t even know you yet so how can they trust you with their project?

Discovery sessions are a way to ease clients into a project with you before compelling them to make a big commitment. The process also makes it easier for you to develop a more accurate project estimate because you’ll know how to meet their needs. Rather than offering it as an option to your clients, instead, emphasize that the discovery phase is a critical component of the process.

The discovery session is your opportunity to build trust and to show the client the high-quality work you can do. It’s your time to shine, but it’s important to remember that during this phase you don’t want to come across as pushy or like your only goal is to sell the client.

Look for opportunities to show the client areas that can be streamlined to save them money. When they realize you’re there to solve their problem and not milk them for all they’re worth, they’ll be more inclined to trust your future recommendations.

Sell value, not hours

Now that your client is on board, they’ve tried your product, and understand the value you provide them, sell them on that rather than billing them by the hour.

The problem with hourly retainer pricing is that you end up punishing yourself for being efficient, thus limiting your profitability. The first time you do something, it always takes the longest, but each time after that you get faster and better at it. If you’re paid by the hour, the better you get at your job, the less you get paid. That’s not right.

Instead, sell your client on what you’ll do for them every month and demonstrate why it’ll bring them value in the long term.

For example, a website maintenance retainer might include these services:

• Technical support and bug fixes

• Phone/email-based help on using CMS (e.g., Wordpress) and email management tools (e.g., Mailchimp)

• Keep Wordpress CMS and plugins up-to-date

• Communicate with hosting provider regarding email/server issues

• Minor updates and enhancement to the design/content based on user feedback and testing

• Monthly analytics reports and recommendations

While an inbound marketing agency may provide these services in a retainer:

• Hubspot integration and support

• One blog post/week

• Two landing pages/CTAs per month

• One email campaign/month

• One top-of-funnel offer (e.g., ebook) per quarter

• One post on all your social media platforms per day

Listing everything included in the retainer fee manages your client’s expectations and helps them plan their yearly goals, based on the value you’ll bring them.

To really hit home why your client needs to work with you on a monthly basis, include the end-goal in your retainer proposal and explain the results you’ll deliver. “By the end of the 12-month contract, our goal is to generate 500 leads every month through your website.” This tangibly demonstrates to your clients how they’ll see a return on investment.

Keep your contracts clear and tight

The only thing worse than losing revenue is letting scope creep  take over projects because of a vague contract.

To avoid clients asking for ‘minor’ fixes, updates, or changes through each step of the project, make sure you’re clear about what is included in the retainer and what isn’t. If you use slippery words like ‘minor,’ then define what ‘minor’ means – is ‘minor’ something that takes less than three hours? Or something that takes less than one day to complete?

Similarly, if you use the word “bug fixes,’ then outline the difference between a bug fix and a feature. For example, in your retainer you could say, “a bug means when the system is designed to perform a function, and it doesn’t work. A feature is a function that is desired, or even needed but isn’t originally included in the design.”

If your client asks for something that falls outside the scope of the retainer, it’s not the end of the world. Just be sure to outline the process of additional work for them, so they know what to expect. You could pull back on other services that month or include a separate work order for the request.

Even if you aren’t charging per hour, you’ll still want to record your hours using time-tracking software to monitor your profitability.

Prove every month why you’re worth it

One of the hardest parts of working long term with clients is maintaining your enthusiasm. New projects are full of wonder and excitement, but after a while, disagreements can come up, or you might start getting bored of the work. Even if none of that happens, you never want to take your client’s business for granted and only deliver them the bare minimum.

It’s critical to keep your enthusiasm high for the length of the contract; otherwise, your client may feel you aren’t meeting their expectations, they’ll be less likely to continue working with you, and may also be less likely to recommend you to other businesses in their industry.

If you go above and beyond every month (while still maintaining profitability, of course), work to deliver clients the value you’ve outlined, and show them how much peace of mind you bring, they’ll be more likely to renew their contract at the end of the term.

Securing even a few monthly retainers can buy you some breathing room for your business. Retainers help avoid end-of-month panic as you scramble to land new clients, allow you better schedule projects, and plan for growth. Plus, working with clients over a longer period builds lasting business relationships, develops trust, and helps you reach your profitability goals.

Agencies are notorious cobbler’s children when it comes to so many aspects of their business. They develop innovative, strategic, and targeted marketing plans and tactics for their clients that deliver results. But when it comes to their own marketing, most agencies are doing a fraction, if at all, of what they recommend to their clients. Few have formal marketing plans or any lead generation process other than relying on personal referrals and getting on RFP lists.

(Are your toes feeling chilly?)

We all know that content marketing is a valuable and essential tactic for almost any business, yet it’s an area where the majority of agencies are lacking. Ironically, many agencies are selling content marketing services to their clients, for crying out loud!

One of the most obvious and simple vehicles for content marketing is blogging.

That being said, did you know that 30% of digital agencies have no blog?

And of the agencies that do have blogs, only 7% post once a week.

36% only post a few times a year.

These alarming digital agency blog stats come from Content Kite, an Australian company that helps digital agencies increase their leads through content marketing. Founder Simon Thompson kept hearing that traditionally agencies weren’t good at creating content for themselves, instead relying on referrals for 90% of their sales leads. Simon wanted to see what the data had to say, so he and his Content Kite team analyzed the websites of 1,000 digital agencies.

They categorized each agency website site as:

• No blog

• Had a blog and posted once a quarter (None)

• Had a blog and posted 1-3 times /quarter (Poor)

• Had a blog and posted 1-3 times/month/ (Mediocre)

• Had a blog and posted once a week or more. (Great)

Simon considers posting once a week as optimal digital agency blog activity. (If you’d like to hear more about Content Kite’s results, listen to our Proposify Biz Chat interview with Simon)

These results are staggering when you think about it, especially when good content marketing can help agencies bridge the ‘feast or famine’ gap that many suffer from, bringing in quality, sustainable leads. Leads that can keep their funnel, and their business afloat.

"30% of agencies have no blog, yet content marketing can bridge the feast or famine gap by bringing in quality leads"

Why your agency needs a blog

Do I really need to tell you, a marketing agency, these other eye-popping stats about the value of B2B blogging?

B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not.

SEO leads, many of which come from quality blog articles that have been optimized with keywords, have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts.

An agency blog can help you establish your position as a leader in your industry. It can authenticate your expertise in whatever service or niche your agency specializes in. It allows people — potential clients—  to get a sense of who you are as a company and whether you might be a good fit for them.

Need I go on? Pretty sure you know all about why it’s smart to have a blog.

What to write about

Many people, including agencies, are scared off by the idea of a content strategy. It can feel overwhelming. The team at Content Kite approaches it with a simple framework called ‘hub and spoke’.

They suggest that their agency clients come up with a central idea or topic that helps a specific person solve a specific problem. For example, Content Kite’s specific person (AKA target audience) is a digital agency owner, and their specific problem is getting more leads. So all the blog content they create reflects that —  its purpose is to help a digital agency owner get more leads.

That’s one type of blog, the client resource blog.

Client Resource Blog

Client resource blogs are meant to attract new clients by providing them with free, timely, up-to-date information and resources that help them improve their website or marketing strategy. Typical examples of posts would be top 10 lists, how-to articles, ebooks, and infographics.

This is perhaps the most targeted way to drive new leads into your sales funnel. Often, people who run their own business or work client-side in a company search online for tips that will help them learn design, coding, or marketing.

If you appear in a search and they find your post helpful, they’ll likely come back to your blog for new posts. Eventually, they may decide it’s easier to hire you than to DIY it themselves, and by then they already have a positive association with your brand. It’s inbound marketing 101.

Keep in mind that there’s already a lot of content online to help novices and intermediates improve their websites/marketing efforts. The hard part is standing out. That’s where having a speciality and using the hub and spoke approach is helpful.

Thought Leader Blog

In every creative industry, you have the hacks at the bottom, a vast middle-ground of mediocre-to-great, and the rare cream of the crop at the top. The directors who inspire other directors; the comedians who inspire other comedians.

Thought leader blogs are meant to inspire and educate your peers, designers, writers, coders and marketers, keeping them up-to-date on the bleeding edge of your industry, sometimes even leading the changes themselves.

While it may seem counter-intuitive — why write blog posts for people who aren’t potential clients —if done well over time, this style of agency blog can help you stand out as the clear leader in a given industry or subspecialty.

Once you become the person or group who teaches other agencies how it’s done, you’ll start to get more opportunities in the form of guest posts, interviews, awards, and speaking engagements. And with that, of course, comes traffic, exposure, and larger sales opportunities.

However, becoming a thought leader is easier said than done. It won’t happen overnight, and you have to love what you do and be committed to it to succeed - living it, breathing it, constantly experimenting and staying on top of your craft.

This takes time, blood, sweat, and tears that not everyone has to offer. It’s also essential that your thoughts are original. If you’re going to be a thought leader you can’t hack on someone else’s theories.

News Blog

Agency news blogs are like your Facebook news feed — they report what’s happening within the agency, from strategic hires and new clients to recent awards. This type of blog is usually a good fit for mid-large agencies who often have a steady stream of newsworthy activities to share. They’re pretty easy to pull off as long as there are interesting events happening in your agency.

The problem with a lot of marketing, creative, and web agency news blogs is that they are blatantly self-obsessed and can come across as narcissistic because all you’re doing is talking about yourself. While self-promotion is necessary, this type of blogging approach doesn’t offer tangible value to potential clients, and they’re hard to keep regularly updated since you can’t exactly plan for a big event to happen.

The advantage is that gives readers a sense of the kind of work you do and the strength of your team.

Daily Antics Blog

Of the agencies that have blogs, many of them take the daily antics approach as it requires very little time or energy. If someone in the office is doing something goofy or having a birthday party (or doing something goofy at a birthday party) they snap a pic, publish it on their blog and post it on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. “Aren’t we zany? #agencylife #ourjobiscoolerthanyours”

There’s nothing wrong with daily antics as long as the posts are authentic and your people are truly having fun (“Smile, dammit!”). It shows a human side to your agency and can make clients feel emotionally connected to your team. It’s a good way to showcase the culture of your office and your brand and give potential clients an idea of what it might be like to work with your agency.

The challenge is that most people don’t care if one of your developers was dressed up like a carrot last Friday. If you don’t know him, it’s one of those 'had to be there’ jokes. It can also appear to clients that all your team does is play beer pong and Playstation all day instead of tending to their marketing needs. The next time they look at their invoice for 100 hours, they might think back to your post when you were having a birthday party for all the office dogs, complete with ‘pupcakes’, and wonder, “Is that what I’m paying for?”

Work Teaser Blog

Work teasers are the more professional version of the daily antics blogs. They feature sneak peeks into the process behind the agency work. Due to the visual nature of this type of blog, it lends itself better to design agency blogs versus marketing agency blogs.

Think of the work teaser blog kind of like Instagram, where brands offer their followers the feeling of being behind the scenes, the “time to make the doughnuts” moment. Dribbble works like this too. It's a social network for designers to show off their work and process, and it’s often inspirational for other designers.

But showing off rough work can backfire if your clients aren’t aware that unfinished comps are being shown to the world. It can infringe on the confidentiality they’re entrusting you with. Also, your design work has to be damn fine if you hope to pass off even early-stage concepts as eye candy.

Drive traffic to your agency blog

Your agency blog can’t deliver leads if no one sees it. Once your content writers have a few juicy, targeted blog posts ready to go, you need to have a good distribution strategy in place to drive traffic to it. If you’re not already familiar with some of these basic blog promotion practices, you need to be:

Organic search traffic - Follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to ensure your agency blog content has the chance to appear when your leads are actively looking for a solution to their problem. Perform keyword research on topics your target audience is actually looking for and make sure you have answers to their queries.

Email - Send out a weekly email to your subscribers promoting your agency blog, and develop email drip campaigns to add value and inform leads of the value you can provide.

Social media - Regularly share your agency blog posts using the social media platforms your target audience uses and engage with influencers to get them to share your content. Build relationships with like-minded content creators who may be willing to share your agency’s blog posts and increase your organic reach.

Paid media - Experiment with paid ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords, which can have high ROI due to granular targeting. Paid social media ads have proven to be extremely effective for all types of business because you don’t need to spend a lot of money to share your content with a niche audience. Using the data these platforms have on their users in combination with retargeting visitors of your own site is a great way to drive traffic and convert leads.

Q&A sites - Sites like Quora and Reddit are great for promoting blog content because people post questions the community can answer. Answer the question in as much detail as you can, but post a link to your agency blog for people to learn more. The better your answer, the more votes you’ll get to push the answer higher on the page.

“Create blog topics around solving a specific problem for your target audience. If you put that in a schedule, then you’re doing more than 93% of other agency owners” - Simon Thompson, Content Kite