During the preparation of the countless number of proposals I worked on during my years in the agency trenches (and sadly we had no Proposify back in those dark ages), inevitably someone would raise the question, “Do you think we should include case studies?”.

As if it were a choice.

My strong belief is that you should ALWAYS include sales case studies with your proposals, especially when going after new leads who don’t know your experience, ability, or successes.

The exception to this rule might be when you’re doing up a quick proposal as a formality for a new project with an existing client. But be careful. It can be easy to assume existing clients already know everything you do and have done, but often they only know you in the context of the work you’ve done for them already.

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can do it. 

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can actually do it. 

No matter how many times you claim to have “extensive experience”, without a case study to back it up, those words can be meaningless, and risky, to a new prospect.

Businesses are often resistant to including proposal case studies because it’s more work to create them on top of everything else, especially when you’re in the time-sensitive throes of preparing a proposal.

The key is to stop seeing case studies as optional and instead view them as an essential selling tool; the tool that just might be the tipping point between you and competition.

Here at Proposify, we've seen a really good return from featuring case studies on our site:

Proposal case studies don’t have to be complicated; they just have to be convincing.

Here’s a simple guide to creating compelling case studies that close deals. You can expand on these to make your particular case studies more elaborate if you like, but as long as you have the basics, it should do the trick.

1. Develop sales case studies before you need them

I admit I have groaned at the thought of doing up case studies when we’re T-minus zero trying to get a proposal out the door. But the trick is to have them ready to go BEFORE you need them in a crisis.

Assign case study writing to your team as a proper internal project and start developing them between proposals.

It will be a lot easier if you’re regularly doing debriefs with clients after each project to see how things went and then following up a few months down the road to track results. This way you’ll already have source material to work with plus compelling stats that make your case studies stand out.

You can customize them to fit the particular need of each proposal once the time comes, but at least you won’t be running around trying to decide which projects to do, getting permission from clients, writing the copy, getting approval, hunting down images, and designing them all at the last minute.

2. Make them representative and recent

When deciding on which projects to turn into case studies, make sure they represent the range of your services. That way you have case studies ready to go that reflect all the types of projects you might be bidding on in a proposal.

Ideally, you have a couple of case studies for each service and main industry but if you can focus on having at least one good, results-driven case study for each area of your business offering then you’re covered.

Also, make sure each case study is fairly recent. Technology, markets, and industries change quickly, so you want to be sure you’re demonstrating that you’re relevant, leading edge, and in demand.

Depending on the industry and service two years, three tops is a good life cycle for a case study.

3. Get client permission

Once you have your list of projects you want to feature as case studies, the first thing you should do before actually going to work on them is to get permission from the client to feature their company.

Some clients don’t want their business challenges or practices talked about publicly for a variety of reasons. Issues related to liability, privacy, and competition can make clients a little shy of the spotlight.

Government clients can be hesitant about case studies, but sometimes they’ll work with you to omit sensitive details so you still get a solid case study that makes everyone happy.

For other clients, case studies can be a great way to promote their business. You can let them know the case studies will be featured on your website and blog in addition to being included in proposals.

Since you’re only going to feature projects that had a positive outcome, clients will be happy to be seen as “successes”. It makes them look smart for choosing the right solution, and they get to show off their good results.

4. Get a client testimonial

You can say all you want about how great your work was for Client X but a direct quote from Client X, about how awesome it was to work with your company or how their business improved as a result of your solution is GOLD.

Ask your client for a quote on the project you’re highlighting and make it as simple as possible for them respond. It’s helpful if you give them some direction, but you want to be careful that they don’t feel you’re putting words in their mouth. Sometimes a client will prefer to have you to write it for them, and then they tweak and approve it. You can offer that as an option to make it easier for them.

If you can, get a couple of quotes related to different aspects of the project that way you can mix and match depending on what you need for the proposal. You can make this easier by giving the client some framework for their testimonials by asking them questions like:

• What was it like working with the team at our agency? Did you find the process simple? Did you find people knowledgeable? Easy to work with? Flexible?
• What kind of benefits have you seen in your business since we did X project for your company?
• Would you work with us again? Why?

Here at Proposify, we book calls with our customers to get their feedback and we use this information as the basis for our proposal case studies. 

We like the direct contact with our customers and it’s sometimes an easier way to get information from them compared to waiting for a response to an email when they’re super busy. Plus it allows us to get quotes that sound like they’re from real humans as we use their owns words. 

We usually asks these five questions:

• What made you try Proposify?
• What was your ‘a-ha!’ moment to sign up for a paid account?
• Has Proposify improved your sales?
• Does using Proposify influence your close rate?
• Was there a situation where Proposify saved the day? Or helped you out?

We record the call so the content team can listen to it later and transform the conversation into a case study that we'll feature on our website and promote through social media. Check out some of our business case study examples on our site.

Obviously, you’ve picked this client because you already know these types of questions are going to prompt positives answers. Depending on how complete the answers are you may need to edit the testimonials a bit and if you do, be sure to send them back to the client for their approval.

5. Tell a story

When it comes to writing a case study, lead your reader on the journey of the project and keep it focused on the client. Don’t just say, “We built a new website for Bob’s Burgers because the other one was really out of date and not responsive.”

Tell a story that includes the following elements:

Background: Briefly introduce the company, what they do, their industry. It gives some context for the reader.  

The Challenge: Why did the client come to you? What problem were they looking to solve? What issues were they facing in their industry that made them reach out? Why did they choose your company to help them? Be careful that you don’t paint your client or their business in too negatively when describing their challenges.  

The Approach: What did your team do to address the problem? What was the process you went through to come up with that solution? Why did you decide that solution was the right one?

The Result: Explain the results your solution delivered to the client, whether anecdotally or even better with hard numbers if you have them. How it made life better for them, how it helped them achieve their goals, solved their challenge, 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. Results are everything.  

In fact, we put results front and centre by including them in our case study headlines.

I find breaking a case study down into these chunks makes it less daunting to prepare, giving you a clear framework to follow.

6. Keep the format simple

There are lots of different formats for case studies. I like my case studies to be concise (one page TOPS, including images), easy to skim, and easy to determine the result of the project.

You don’t have to literally use the subheads of background, challenge, approach and results but like blog post subheads, it makes the whole thing easier to read and they get right to the point.

Just like your proposal, the client is likely skimming everything but the pricing page so make it easy for them to get the important juicy bits you want to drive home.

7. Use beautiful images or video

Include images of your work in your case study and for the love of PNG, make sure they are high res and LOOK GOOD.

If the project is non-visual like strategy, design a sharp-looking infographic that demonstrates some aspect of the project, like the results or something related to the client’s business.

Where appropriate show before and after shots but again tread carefully in this area. While it can illustrate how far the company has come and the awesome work you did for them, you want to be sure the company is not made to look bad.

To make your testimonial even more powerful, include a video clip in your proposal of the client talking about the project. Online proposal software like, oh, I don’t know...Proposify?...lets you seamlessly add videos to your proposal. But just like images, make sure the video quality is good, the sound is clear, and the whole thing is professionally shot and edited.

8. Customize case studies to your proposal

The question often falls to “how many case studies should we include?”. I think three is plenty and you can always direct the reader to the portfolio/work/customers section of your website for more (you do have a portfolio section on your site, right?).

The case studies you include should correspond to the needs of your prospect for the particular proposal. Maybe it’s a client who had a similar challenge or who experienced benefits from a similar solution that you’re proposing.

Take the time to review each case study before including it in a proposal to find ways to tailor it to help demonstrate to your sales lead that you have experience solving their particular challenge and you know how to deliver.

For example, if your prospect is looking for a new website that’s responsive with an e-commerce solution and requires copywriting, don’t just send them a case study about how you built a kick-ass website. Make sure it demonstrates all those services.

9. Practice plain language

As with anything you write, be sure to follow the rules of plain language writing. Don’t use jargon, be concise, be straightforward, be positive, avoid the passive voice, and if you need to use technical terms or acronyms, include explanations. Don’t assume your client knows what CSS is.

Conclusion

Case studies are the best way to put the walk in the talk of your proposals. They can help build trust with a prospect with whom you don’t yet have a relationship.

They don’t have to be long, complicated, or with earth-shattering results for the biggest brands in the land. They just need to demonstrate that you can do what you say you do and when it comes right down to it, that’s all a client really wants to know.

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 SCARIEST 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 authority, 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.

Proposify is all about streamlining your sales process. We help you create proposals faster, we help you get client sign-off faster, and now, we help you get paid faster!

Thanks to our newest integration, when you connect your Stripe account to your Proposify account, you can request payment from your clients right in the proposal. Get paid, TODAY.

How it works

Once you connect your Stripe and Proposify accounts, you can set a payment default. This allows you to request payment for a specific percentage across all new proposals. So, if your payment policy is that clients need to pay 50% upfront, you can set the default payment to always request 50% of whatever the total project proposal is.

If you prefer to set different payment amounts for each individual proposal, you can do that, too. You can also edit existing proposal settings to enable payments, so even if a proposal has already been sent to your client, you can still add the Stripe payment to it.

Once your client has signed the proposal, they will be prompted to make the specified payment amount right then and there. Making a Stripe payment is quick and easy for clients - all they need to do is enter their credit card details.

If your client decides that they don’t want to pay right then, you can always send the proposal later as a friendly reminder.

If you have international clients, Stripe supports 135 currencies so you can collect payments from around the world. 

Let’s get this payment party started

If you already have a Stripe account, follow these instructions to connect it to your Proposify account. Please note that not all plans include Stripe. Check now to see if your plan includes Stripe or if you need to switch plans. 

If you’re not already a Stripe customer, you can create a new account with Stripe and then connect it to Proposify. Stripe is free to sign up.

Now, get out there and wheel some deals! It might be summer, but (iced) coffee is still for closers.

If you’re in a business that’s dependant on customer subscriptions, I’m sure you’re very familiar with churn. It’s that pesky little metric that’s a downer at marketing meetings and when you’re trying to forecast growth.

It’s a hole in your bucket when you’re trying to carry water; it’s a pinprick in the balloon you gave your kid. Left unabated, churn can drain you dry and leave you without air.

Customer churn is often viewed as the bane of a company's growth plan, and don’t get me wrong, it sure is. If you’re losing five customers for every five you gain, you’re quickly going nowhere. You need a solid customer retention strategy.

But instead of just saying, ‘Churn sucks!’, and throwing your hands in the air, read on. I’m going to show you the silver lining to customer churn and how it can provide valuable insights into product development, marketing, and customer service.

What is customer churn?

Churn is the percentage at which customers cancel their subscriptions compared to the total amount of new and existing subscriptions you retain. It can be measured by the number of customers you lose per month (customer churn), or by the amount of monthly recurring revenue they represent (MRR churn).

Keeping your eye on both metrics can give you insights into your company's health and make sure you’re retaining customers.

Breaking down customer churn

If your company offers different subscription bundles or plans, it’s useful to break churn down into separate buckets for each one. This way you can see which plans are experiencing the highest churn levels and make decisions based on that information.

Say for instance you had 1000 customers and three different subscription plans -  small, medium, and large. In one month maybe you had 100 customers churn, but most of them were all on the small plan. This would make your customer churn rate high, but your MRR churn would be low. On the flip side, if you had twenty large customers churn, your customer churn rate would be low, but your MRR rate would be high.

Fighting churn company-wide

Here at Proposify, we’ve noticed that our smaller plans churn at far higher rates than our larger plans. Although the smaller plans represent a bigger portion of our customer base, we decided to focus on increasing subscriptions to our larger plans.

A higher percentage of customers on larger plans would increase our lifetime value (LTV: projected revenue for the lifetime of each customer) as well as significantly lower our MRR churn. Growing our larger subscription base has been a combined effort between the product and marketing departments.

On the product side, we know that people on larger plans write more proposals, so we created features aimed at that market, making it easier for them to manage their accounts and workflows. We added the 'roles and permissions,' and 'teams' features.

The 'roles and permissions' feature allows our account holders to create roles for different types of users on their team, and then restrict their access to certain parts of the app. They have the power to control which proposals certain roles can view or edit, and whether they require approval from the account holder before sending a proposal to a client.

For companies with multiple or regional brands, our 'teams' feature allows each team to have their own branding, pipeline and content, while still being managed under one account.

We received great feedback on these features, and they resulted in two key benefits. Not only did new customers start converting at a higher rate into larger plans, but our existing customer base also expanded up into these plans.

On the marketing side, an effort was made to target small and medium business more through content and social marketing, as they have a greater demand for proposals and a solid sales process.

This interdepartmental effort helped us successfully increase the percentage of larger sized plans to exceed the lower tier plans. This has reduced our MRR churn considerably, making it more stable and less affected when smaller plans churn.

Ask your customer why

It’s important to know which plans are churning and at what rate, but wouldn’t it be more valuable if you knew why customers left? There’s an easy way to find out…ask them!

One of the things we do at Proposify that has been invaluable to understanding churn is to ask the customers why they’re cancelling their account when they deactivate. They have to select an option to be able to click on the ‘delete’ button. Once they select a ‘why are you cancelling?’ option, we go a step further and ask them to tell us more.

What’s been really interesting to see is the number of people who honestly answer the question and give us more information about their reasons for cancelling their account.

Before we started asking the follow-up question, we wondered if people just randomly selected an option just to get out the damn door quickly. But after analyzing the results, we could see that people actually told us why and gave more detail. Although some of the feedback is difficult to hear sometimes, it provides us with a deeper understanding of our customer churn.

Each month I get a CSV with all the results, and I pour over them to get a larger sense of why people are leaving. Based on this information, we make product decisions to improve the Proposify experience and ensure that our customers continue to get value from the product.

About a year ago one of the top reasons our customers gave for cancelling their account was that our product was “too buggy,” followed by a mention about the undo feature. We were already aware of the undo problem by listening to our customer support team, but seeing it listed so often in cancellations made us stop in our tracks and set out to fix it.

It did take considerable time for the undo feature to be fixed and shipped; since then we’ve seen a drop in that reason being selected for customer churn. It’s one thing to know why things are happening, but it is an entirely different thing to take charge and make changes.

Voluntary churn vs. involuntary churn

So far I have mostly talked about voluntary churn — people who take action to cancel their account — but there is another kind of churn that can often account for 30 - 40% of your total churn. This silent killer is named ‘involuntary churn.’

Involuntary churn happens when the recurring payment gets blocked by the bank, or the credit card is expired, or the customer simply doesn’t have enough room on their credit card to cover the subscription fee. While there are many reasons why a payment gets declined, the result is the same: a lost customer. Even though you may send failed payment emails to customers when their payment doesn’t go through, it doesn't mean they’re going to come back.

Digging deeper

Part of our weekly and monthly metrics review is looking at how many transactions are declined. Three months ago we noticed that the number of declines was spiking, so we decided to investigate why.

We poured over the metrics available to us and ended up no further ahead. We spoke with Recurly (our subscription management service) and Stripe (payment gateway) to see if anything had changed on the banking side of things.

We assumed that the banks were being more stringent on which payments were allowed, as we had issues in the past with cross-border payments. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn anything new to help us solve the problem.

After about a week I was pretty frustrated. I could see more and more declined payments and the rate of accounts suspensions going up. 37% of our churn was involuntary when this started, and with the increase we would be at 45% by the end of the month.

I reached out to Recurly again asking what I could do to help this negative trend and ended up on a phone call with their support. We reviewed our dunning process, which is the email campaign that gets sent to a customer if their credit card fails, asking them to change or update their card so they can reactivate their subscription.

We discovered that our dunning process was too short, lasting only seven days, and that the emails contained too much information. We came up with a plan to extend the dunning process to give customers more notice and to simplify the content of the emails.

Once this was in place, we had to sit and wait.

The new extended dunning process meant Recurly made more attempts on the credit cards, which resulted in an even higher failed transaction rate, but it also lowered our involuntary churn rate, which was the real metric we wanted to affect. 

Six weeks after the change our involuntary churn rate has dropped to 33%.

Takeaway: Although this story doesn't relate to any epiphany about our customer base, by keeping a watchful eye on our churn and related metrics, we saw a problem before it got out of hand and worked to find a solution.

Understand your customer life cycle, from beginning to end

Having a clearer picture of the breakdown of your churn rates by plan and by churn type can empower you to fix holes before they sink your ship. Although churn is a negative metric, there’s still some value that can come from it.

Since churn is at the end of a customer life cycle, knowing your customer personas and the reasons why they buy or don't buy is a critical aspect of your company’s profitability.

You can apply a lot of the techniques for understanding customer churn to other parts of your customer life cycle to uncover issues before they become problems. The key is to gather data, analyze it, make changes, and measure again.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is big business — As of 2016, it was a $26.5 billion-dollar industry. It’s no surprise then that hundreds of products have emerged over the years, all with their own pros and cons, making it tricky to choose the CRM that’s best for your business. If you’re going through this now, hopefully this post will offer some guidelines on how to choose a CRM.

At Proposify, the CRM we’ve been using isn’t meeting our needs. We originally chose Hubspot because we aren’t a sales-heavy startup, meaning our product is fairly self-service and doesn’t require a human touch-point from lead to close. At the same time, we knew we needed a CRM for some sales tasks, primarily a way for my co-founder, Kevin and I to share contacts with each other.

When we first hired our two-person sales team in 2016 to handle demos and lead qualification for larger tier customers, a CRM became much more important.

We did our best to make good use of Hubspot CRM. Using Zapier, we integrated it with Intercom, Aircall and ChartMogul, but ultimately we were looking something that was a better fit for our team. (I wrote a post on how to get better SaaS reporting by using Zapier to connect Hubspot with ChartMogul).

So I sat down with our sales team to get their feedback, and went on a hunt for a new CRM. Starting out, I wanted a CRM that not only made it easier to add leads, track deals, and produce better reports, but also one that I could use to keep tabs on people other than just customers, like podcast guests, influencers, journalists, and other professionals with whom I want to nurture relationships.

A few notes about selecting a CRM before we begin:

• I haven't tried every CRM on the market; there are a lot. I chose the ones that seemed like the best fit for a small but growing SaaS business, had a reasonably strong brand, and enjoyed some degree of popularity among the sales professionals and entrepreneurs I know.

• I left out SaaS products that include CRM functionality, but aren’t dedicated, standalone CRMs, like InfusionSoft, Podio, and Harvest. These may be awesome products, but with invoicing, e-commerce, and project management components, they’re more than what we were looking for.

• Not all of the criteria listed below had equal weight. Some factors were more valuable to us than others, and this factored into the final score.

• We’re still only in the trial stage of using the shortlisted CRMs mentioned in this post. No doubt we’ll learn more over the coming months as we use the product on a daily basis.

Here are the CRMs we evaluated, listed alphabetically: 

1. Agile

2. Capsule

3. Close.io

4. Highrise

5. Insightly

6. Nutshell

7. Pipedrive

8. Salesforce

9. Zoho

Criteria for choosing CRM software

These are the twelve criteria we used to evaluate the best CRM options for Proposify:

1. User experience

In the product itself, how polished is the UI? Does it feel/flow nicely, or is it old-school, clunky and ugly? Does the sales team enjoy logging into this CRM every day, or does it hurt the eyes? Are there bugs or workflow issues that cause pain, or does it feel seamless?

2. Adding/importing contacts

How easy is it to add contact details and notes? Can leads automatically be imported from spreadsheets, web forms, and other products we use, like Intercom and Aircall?

3. Deals/pipeline

The deal/opportunity feature is an important part of a CRM so you can clearly see what’s in your pipeline, what stage everything is at, and what a deal or opportunity is worth.

4. Tasks, follow-ups, calendar

We don’t want anything slipping through the cracks, so it’s important to be reminded of next steps and the best time to follow up with someone.

5. Tagging/search

Our sales team wanted to be sure they could tag contacts and easily find them later.

6. Reporting

Reporting is an important one for me. Recurring revenue is difficult to accurately report since a deal isn’t one size. It can include monthly and recurring revenue, and the LTV (customer lifetime value) varies, so it’s hard to tell what a deal is really worth. We want reports that clarify how much is in the pipeline, how much we’re closing, and how well each sales rep is performing.

7. Integrations

Our primary tools for communicating with customers at Proposify are Intercom and Aircall, so we want to make sure that when a salesperson is having a conversation with a lead in Intercom, it’s feeding pertinent information into the CRM. Similarly, when they’re talking via Aircall, the call should be logged in the CRM.

When a lead becomes a customer, the CRM should automatically push that to ChartMogul, where we track our recurring revenue, lifetime value, churn, and other SaaS metrics. We don’t want a salesperson to have to manually log it (Chances are, no matter which CRM we go for I’ll still need to use Zapier to automate this).

8. Mobile apps

I’ve stood in line at the grocery store wishing I could quickly respond to a lead or customer, so having a dedicated iOS app is important to me (or I suppose an Android app for ‘those’ people).

9. Email

Kind of a no-brainer, but you should be able to send emails to leads through your CRM and have them delivered reliably.

Are you able to you see if the recipient opened it? This isn’t the biggest feature priority for us since Proposify already does this with proposals that get emailed. It’s still nice to have if it doesn’t mean adding any tacky links to emails or needing to switch to a specific email client.

10. Phone calls/VOIP

Some CRM’s offer phone calls natively (you call leads through the app using headphones) but an Aircall integration would be ideal since this is what our entire support team uses for incoming and outgoing customer phone calls.

11. Text/Chat

Text/chat isn’t a huge deal for us, but still, many people are swamped with email, and it’s easy to ignore a salesperson’s message in your inbox. I’ve often had better conversations with leads via Facebook messenger, text messages, Intercom chat, and Slack than via email so any alternative way to communicate scores reasonably high in my book.

12. Price/value

Finally, what does the CRM cost, and how does that cost scale over time? I don’t mind paying good money for something that offers many times the value, but we don’t want to be paying enterprise prices at our current size.

CRM Candidates

Agile

Agile CRM has a well-designed marketing website and some nice shots of the product.

I’m always a bit skeptical when I see “All-in-one” as it usually means a large, clunky piece of software with tools that are only average, instead of a specialized product with all resources dedicated to making it the best.

I’m also curious about whether signing up to Agile means I’ll be inundated with up-sells to their marketing automation and helpdesk software.

User experience

Agile’s UI is fine, but with a lot of icons in the nav bar, on the left-hand side and above, it’s a bit hard to remember where everything is without hovering to read the labels.

There’s a lot of polish when it comes to slick animations, like on the timeline. However, there were some bugs around importing (see below) that hurt the experience. Other times, I would click on a button that would fail silently without any errors. Just one example: When adding a company to a contact, I hit TAB to go to the next field and it wiped out the entry.

Adding/importing contacts

Importing contacts from a CSV looked relatively easy, although it would be better if it auto-detected the fields when it comes time to match them.

After I clicked the import button a modal told me the contacts were importing and that Agile would email me when it was done. It seemed slow to import, considering I only had 72 contacts with about three fields, and I was still waiting after about 10 minutes with no contacts to be seen. After an hour there was still no progress, so it seemed something failed silently in the background. That definitely detracted from the experience.

Deals/pipeline

The deal pipeline looks great and has nice columns where you can drag deals between stages, along with a simple list view.

Unfortunately, you can only add a fixed amount for deals, no recurring revenue.

Tasks, follow-ups, calendar

Scheduling and calendar built right in makes this very nice, along with a Google Calendar integration.

Tagging/search

The tagging and search functions are simple but robust, allowing you to filter results and even search by voice.

Reporting

Agile offers a lot in the way of reports. There are so many ways of reporting data that it’s grouped by deals, calls, activities, and growth.

Integrations

Agile has a pretty large list of integrations, but it’s hard to find them all without digging, as they are spread all over the place.

In Agile they are called “widgets”; Agile integrates with a decent number of calling, support, invoicing and social apps. This way you can call through Twilio, sync messages from Zendesk, manage invoicing/billing through Freshbooks and Stripe, and pull in social data through LinkedIn and Freshbooks just to name a few. Sadly, it doesn’t integrate with the apps we use, Aircall, Intercom, and ChartMogul.

Another thing I like is their integration with document tools, so you can add docs from Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, etc.

Mobile app

Agile offers Android and iOS apps.

Email

There’s an email tool built right in, and you can send from your own domain by adding your IMAP and SMTP to bring emails from an address directly within the CRM.

Phone

Agile does pretty well when it comes to calls, allowing you to add call scripts based on certain rules, and add voicemails directly through the app. To make calls directly you need to integrate with another provider like Skype or Twilio, but not with Aircall, as I mentioned earlier.

Text/chat

You may be able to text contacts using an integration but not natively.

Price/value

Their pricing is a bit odd, as the pricing tiers align with separate products. The CRM is mostly free; the next tier is a marketing tool, followed by a help desk. It seems like Agile wants you to move your entire business into their platform instead of just focusing on one core product like most other CRMs we looked at.

Final score: 40/60

Bottom line:

Agile’s timeline and deal views are very slick. The overall UI and animations look great. It’s also nice that a call scheduler like Calendly is built right in. However, the bugs in the UI made it frustrating at times, and the lack of recurring revenue reporting make it unlikely we would upgrade.

Capsule

The marketing site is clean and simple. It outlines its features clearly, and shows off just enough of the product UI to allow the user to get a sense of how it feels.

User experience

The UI is clean almost to the point of sterility, using Bootstrap so it feels very familiar.

However, there are some usability issues throughout, like entering tags in one place uses auto search, but in other places it doesn’t and requires comma separation.

Onboarding was unnecessarily clunky, forcing you to get email verified before signing up, making you enter your user/password next, and then dumping you into an empty UI with just a long list of things to do instead of walking you through the process.

Still, the Capsule interface is overall easy to use and understand.

Adding/importing contacts

Importing contacts was reasonably easy, but had a few annoying things like needing to select “ignore” on every field. It also doesn’t seem to auto pull any company data.

Deals/pipeline

The deals work pretty well and allow you to add recurring revenue, although it makes you specify an amount per month.

You can view the pipeline in a list or as a dashboard, but there is no columned set of stages you can drag deals to and from.

Tasks, follow-ups

When adding a task if you choose the wrong contact and then want to change it to another, you can’t do it without clicking cancel and then adding the task again.

There’s a calendar feed to add to an app like Google Cal, Apple Cal, etc. and there’s a calendar built into the UI.

Tracks are interesting, allowing you to create a sequence of tracks for opportunities so that you can easily standardize your process.

Tagging/search

You can add tags but can’t search by tag. The data tags are kind of confusing as opposed to just adding a field.

Reporting

Pipeline reporting is good, but there’s not much else.

Integrations

Pretty big list of integrations, although none that work directly with Intercom or ChartMogul. On the plus side it does use Zapier.

Mobile apps

iOS and Android mobile apps.

Email

There’s no ability to email directly from within Capsule, instead you need to use your own email client.

Capsule uses “Mail Drop Box” (not to be confused with Dropbox the company/app), so you can add a BCC address to automatically add emails to and from contacts. You can even add to-dos via email by changing the address to “todo@”.

Phone call logging

There’s no phone call logging or built in calling, but you can choose a provider like Skype so you can click to call phone numbers.

SMS/Text

No functionality.

Price/value

Capsule is very affordable. It starts out free and then begins at only $12/user/month.

Final score: 40/60

Bottom line:

Capsule has very useful and unique features, such as tracks, but it lacks when it comes to pipeline, reporting, and UX issues. It’s a good, but not great choice for us.

Close.io

I’m a big fan of the founder of Close.io, Steli Efti, who produces a lot of great content for startups, including The Startup Chat with Hiten Shah, so I wanted to be sure to include Close.io on this list.

Close.io’s marketing website is a lot like the product itself, nice enough to look at but very pragmatic.

User experience

The Close.io interface is clean, minimal, and intuitive. It’s not the flashiest or most exciting design, but it’s fast and practical.

Adding/importing contacts

Importing leads into Close.io from a spreadsheet was quick and painless. After hitting import, it showed me the progress of my import, and it only took a few seconds to add my 72 contacts.

Deals/pipeline

I really like the way Close.io displays opportunities. It works well for a SaaS company that deals in monthly and annual billing. Having a confidence gauge is also a nice touch as it helps to see what percentage of your pipeline is likely to close.

Tasks, follow-ups

The tasks and follow-up functions work well and integrate with Google Calendar.

Tagging/search

There are lead and opportunity statuses in Close.io but no tagging. However, their powerful search function makes it easy to search for your leads.

Reporting

I’m very impressed with the reporting in Close.io as it seems made for SaaS companies. You can track activities like calls made, emails sent, opportunities created, and status changed, plus you're able to filter it by sales agent.

Integrations

It appears that integrations are one of the weaker points of Close.io. Their integration list is small, mostly relying on Zapier and third-parties. I would have loved an integration with Intercom and Aircall.

Mobile apps

Close.io has no mobile apps at all. Bummer.

Email

Close.io offers a lot of email options, allowing you to send email from within, forward emails into the CRM, and two-way integration.

Phone calls

One of Close.io’s strongest selling points is the ability to make and log calls directly within the CRM. You have to use their desktop app to do so, and it doesn’t appear to integrate with Aircall.

SMS/Text

You have the ability to text people from within Close.io if you have their cell number, which worked well.

Price/value

Close.io is not a cheap CRM by any means. Their smallest package is $65/user/month, and their largest is $165/user/month, so for me, my co-founder, and two sales reps it would be in the $400/month range. Still, Close.io is a very solid CRM focused on inside sales teams at SaaS startups — exactly what we are.

Final score: 48/60

Bottom line:

While being one of the most expensive CRMs, Close.io is a good fit for SaaS companies, offering a simple and functional user-interface, and great phone, text, deal, and reporting capabilities. Feature improvements would be a mobile app, more integrations and tagging functionality.

Highrise

Originally created by the makers of Basecamp, Highrise has been run by CEO Nathan Kontny since 2014. I used to use Highrise when I ran my agency, Headspace.

Highrise markets itself as a simple CRM, and their marketing website reflects that. There are no embellishments at all, just a logo, headline, and sign-up form.

The watercolour illustrations create an airiness and calming feel, which is what you want if you’re marketing yourself as the simplest of products in a competitive category.

User interface

Highrise’s UI is fine, if not a bit dated. It hasn’t evolved much since I used it five years ago. They have these things called cases, which are ways of grouping related tasks, notes, deals, contacts together, but it just seems like you would either add it all under a contact or a deal - case seems unnecessary.

Adding/importing contacts

Highrise’s massive volume of possible fields to match was confusing, and it took a long time to sort through. There were fields that were so similar that I couldn’t tell which to use, like “work website,” or “company work website”.

The email field, arguably the most important unique field for contacts, was buried in a massive list of hundreds of others and difficult to find. For a “simple” CRM, it wasn’t very straightforward!

Deals/pipeline

Very simple, maybe too simple. No deal stages or organized column lists, and recurring revenue isn’t well accounted for. I also don’t like that Highrise forces you to enter an amount of months/years for recurring deals - it’s not well suited for subscription services like ours.

Tasks, follow-ups

Pretty straightforward and easy to use, plus there’s a calendar feed we can plug into Google Cal. Tasks are nicely done, and you can add a task feed to your Google Cal.

Tagging/search

Tagging and search in Highrise is very fast and efficient.

Reporting

Not much for reports other than forecasting sales based on deal close dates and amounts, and filtering by candidates.

Integrations

Highrise has an API and mostly integrates with Zapier, but they don’t have many native integrations, although a fair amount of other products integrate with Highrise (including Proposify). I would have loved an easier way to connect Aircall and Intercom.

Mobile apps

Highrise has mobile apps for iOS, Android, and a responsive mobile site.

Email

Highrise only connects with Gmail or Outlook, so can’t it won’t integrate with my email other than via the dynamic BCC address for adding emails into the CRM

Phone call logging

None.

SMS/Text

None.

Price/value

Highrise doesn’t charge per user, putting it on the lower pricing end so a small team can get a lot out of Highrise for only $24/month.

Final score: 34/60

Bottom line:

Highrise is perfect for small teams who don’t require a lot from their CRM and who value strong core functionality and low pricing over advanced features or visual pizazz.

It’s not an ideal fit for SaaS companies due to the lack of support for recurring revenue, reporting, phone or text, or integrations with tools we use. I do love Highrise as a company, and had a great chat with their CEO, Nathan Kontny.

Insightly

Insightly is certainly going for a polished and professional look with their website. From the copy on the page, it is clear that Insightly values more than just the sale.

They feature three categories: “Accelerate Sales”, “Build Relationships”, and “Deliver Projects”, touting that Insightly is a CRM that offers project management features beyond the sale.

User experience

The user interface is logically laid out, with a collapsible toolbar on the left-hand side that lists the main features of the CRM with clear icons. Insightly seems to be putting their utilitarian foot forward here, creating an interface that might not be described as beautiful, but it gives you everything you’re looking within one click.

Adding/importing contacts

Adding contacts to Insightly via a CSV was simple and straightforward. It auto detects fields like first and last name or allows you to pick a category or custom tag based on the data from the CSV.

Deals/pipeline

The Insightly opportunities pipeline prominently features the state (Open, Won, Lost, Suspended and Abandoned) and the stage (Prospecting, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Proposal, and Negotiation) of each opportunity.

The value of the opportunity and the close date are included in the pipeline but aren’t prominently featured. Each opportunity includes a “Probability of Winning” variable, although it’s not featured in the pipeline, and is only visible once you view each opportunity.

Tasks, follow-ups

Insightly includes fairly robust task features with almost any feature you might want. Tasks are assigned to a user, a category (email, follow-up, meeting, phone call, to-do), opportunities, and contacts. You can set reminders, show the progress and priority of the task, and choose to make it public or private.

Tagging/search

Through custom fields, tags, and categories, Insightly provides several ways to categorize, filter, and manage your data. Each has their own benefits and best-use cases, which Insightly outlines in this support article. With these customizable filters, you should be able to create a solution for filtering data regardless of the type of business you’re in.

Reporting

Insightly’s reporting feature allows significant customization, letting you pull reports on almost any data point in their system. Insightly has certainly invested in the reporting side of their platform to make it work for a wide range of businesses, updating the reporting features and name to “Advanced Reporting” back in 2016. Insightly does not specifically measure recurring revenue in the same way as a typical SaaS business, but you can enter the opportunity value by a fixed period, i.e. $X for X months.

Integrations

Insightly does not integrate with Intercom or Aircall, but they do have over 40 integrations listed on their site, including Zapier. They also have a public API, which Proposify uses to integrate with Insightly.

Mobile apps

When signing up for Insightly, their welcome email highlights their companion mobile apps for iOS and Android to view your data on the go. Unfortunately, their web app is not responsive.

Email delivery

Insightly allows you to connect your email via Gmail, Office 365, Outlook.com, or other email accounts through an SMTP server. Once setup, you can send email messages from within Insightly and receive replies directly in your email account inbox.

Phone call logging

Currently, Insightly doesn’t do call logging, although according to their Help Centre community, it has been on their roadmap since 2015. Insightly recommends logging calls as a note within the applicable contact, lead, organization, project, or opportunity. I was able to find several VOIP service providers that integrate with Insightly as another workaround.

SMS/Text

Similar to calls, there are no native SMS features built into Insightly, but I was able to identify a few integrations, including some via Zapier.

Price/value

Insightly bills per user, potentially making it price prohibitive for larger sales teams. For small to medium teams, the pricing is competitive given the features available with Insightly.

Final score: 42/60

Bottom line:

Insightly is a well thought-out CRM with great task managing abilities and reporting, although in their attempt to be everything to everyone, they may lack the specialization of other platforms. I would keep Insightly on the list for anyone considering a CRM, especially if you want your CRM to help with project delivery after you close the deal.

Nutshell

Nutshell is a well-designed CRM that offers a solid amount of features at a reasonable price.

User experience

Nutshell’s UI is pretty good overall, although it does tend to be a bit busy and cramped here and there.

Adding/importing contacts

Their import UI is nice and easy to understand. Updating duplicates is helpful, and the preview works well. I like that Nutshell automatically detects certain fields, like email addresses, and allows you to re-import the spreadsheet and update your contacts if the import went wrong or you missed certain fields.

It does a good job of scraping the information of people to show their social media accounts and approximate location.

Deals/pipeline

This feature is only available on midsize and larger tier plans, and is called “funnel” in the reporting section, but you can add it to your dashboard.

Nutshell has a good customizable dashboard.

Leads is basically opportunities or deals.

I really like the map view that shows where your leads are. It’s not overly useful for us here at Proposify, but I could see this being neat if you need to visit your leads.

Tasks, follow-ups, calendar

Exactly what you’d expect from to-dos and follow ups.

Tagging/search

Searching by people works pretty well, but I couldn’t seem to search by tag. When I added a tag to a contact and then searched for that tag, nothing showed up.

Sad face indeed.

Reporting

Nutshell seems to offer a lot reporting - almost too much, as looking through the help docs there were 11 different articles based on reporting. I almost didn’t know what I should be looking at.

Integrations

Unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of integrations and the ones they do have are for products we don’t use. I would love an Aircall or Intercom integration, but at least they have Zapier.

Mobile apps

Nutshell does have both an iOS and Android mobile app.

Email

You can add your SMTP information into Nutshell to send emails directly from your own email address, and they offer view tracking.

Phone call logging

Nutshell has built-in calling and recording on paid plans, or you can integrate it with another service like Skype, RingCentral and other VOIP services. Unfortunately, no Aircall integration :(

SMS/Text

No texting functionality.

Price/value

It’s not the cheapest nor the most expensive. Like the product overall, it’s right in between super simple, and feature rich.

Final score: 48/60

Bottom line:

Nutshell is a well-designed, feature-rich product that offers great value for the cost. Their search functionality could be improved, as could their integrations. I wish their reporting were better suited to SaaS/subscription companies, but overall, they are a top contender.

Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by two seasoned sales managers, Pipedrive claims to be “The sales CRM built by salespeople for salespeople”.

Pipedrive’s front-end website is clean and simple, showing off a few product shots, key benefits, and testimonials. It is interesting to note that they redirect returning users a different version of their homepage, with calls-to-action for support, product updates, and 'getting started' videos. This is a nice touch and shows that Pipedrive really puts effort into their sales and marketing funnel.

User experience

Pipedrive’s UI is fast and clean. The black and white interface with bright red and green seemed a bit stark at first, but I think the colour choices are intentional to draw your eye to activities that are late or overdue, so things don’t slip through the cracks.

Adding/importing contacts

Importing contacts from a CSV was fast and painless. Pipedrive does allow custom fields for contacts, so it would be important to have those set up first, before importing your contacts.

Deals/pipeline

With the name “Pipedrive” you would hope that they would have a good pipeline, and they do. The agile kanban-esque layout of their pipeline is great. The process of dragging and dropping deals between different stages of your pipeline is extremely satisfying. The configuration of the pipeline, combined with the sorting and filtering options, makes Pipedrive one of the best CRM pipelines.

Tasks, follow-ups

Pipedrive’s activities default to “call”, “meeting”, “task”, “deadline”, “email”, and “lunch”, but admins have the option to create custom activities. Each activity is assigned to a user, and can be linked to a deal, contact, and organization. Pipedrive uses activities to prioritize deals for salespeople, sorting the most timely to the top of each stage.

Tagging/search

Pipedrive does not allow tagging the way many other platforms do. However, they do have custom fields which they recommend you use to filter in a similar way to tags. Logically I think this makes sense for larger teams, as multiple user-generated tags can get out of hand pretty quickly.

Searching requires a custom filter to be in place for whatever you’re looking for. The filters can be customized for almost anything, but this adds an extra step if you were only looking to search for a deal or contact name.

Reporting

Pipedrive offers a top-level metrics dashboard as well as a reporting interface to produce detailed reports with graphs and charts. The default reports combined with filters by salesperson, product, stage, etc., would be valuable for sales managers to dig into their team’s performance and areas of improvement. There doesn’t seem to be any SaaS-specific features for tracking and reporting on monthly/annual fees though, which is unfortunate for us.

Integrations

Pipedrive lists over 90 integrations on their site including AirCall, Zapier, and Proposify.

Mobile apps

Pipedrive offers an iOS and Android app that allows you view your deals, contacts, add meeting and call notes, and has call tracking abilities.

Email delivery

Pipedrive does offer integrated email, but only on their “Gold” plan and higher. On their “Silver” plan they offer what they call “smart email BCC”. If you include the provided email address (i.e. customnamehere@pipedrivemail.com) in the BCC section of any email you send out, that email will be added to Pipedrive and linked to the associated contact. Any replies from your customers will need to be forwarded to the same universal BCC address. This seems like a major hassle, making the “Gold” plan necessary.

Phone call logging

The Pipedrive mobile app allows you to start your calls from inside Pipedrive, so you can log conversations, add notes to the relevant deal, and schedule a follow-up activity. The Aircall integration also lets you call prospects from your Aircall numbers and logs calls you make in Pipedrive.

SMS/Text

There are no native SMS or text features built into Pipedrive, but there are several integrations available to allow texting to your Pipedrive contacts.

Price/value

To get full value out of Pipedrive, the email sync would be necessary, making the “Gold” plan the lowest option. Even at that level, Pipedrive offers great value for a small sales team.

Final score: 44/60

Bottom line:

Pipedrive has a great user interface, pipeline, and activity features. The biggest barrier for us would be the lack of SaaS/subscription deal pricing and reporting.

Salesforce

I am constantly amazed by how successful Salesforce is considering their lack of a single design bone in their collective body. The marketing website is atrocious - black text awkwardly laid on top of dark colours, overlaying windows on top of windows, lack of hierarchy, and complex navigation.

User experience

Unfortunately, Salesforce’s UI doesn’t get much better once you’re inside the product. You can customize a lot of what you see, but making the user do the work to create a palatable interface is not the best UX strategy, in my opinion.

Adding/importing contacts

Importing contacts was painful in Salesforce; the UI is confusing (it took me at least 10 seconds just to figure out where the import button was — hint: you need to click three times to get to it), and the obscure button labels (clicking “map” to tell Salesforce what field to use) was like pulling teeth. Finally, I couldn’t import the file because my sample data included just company names and no last name field.

Deals/pipeline

The pipeline and opportunity tracking features in SalesForce are comprehensive; you can create multiple stages and filter by your own opportunities. You also have the ability to create your own views, allowing you to filter by industry or campaign, for example.

Salesforce also has a dashboard feature that gives you a quick look at either your team’s sales numbers or your own. The customization is endless, and the reports are useful. But, I couldn’t seem to use the kanban-style columns in my account, perhaps because I was on a trial?

Tasks, follow-ups, calendar

Salesforce offers easy to use tasks, follow up, and calendar and you can add as much detail as you need. It’s nice to create a task and add it to the account vs. having to be in an account to create a task or add notes.

Tagging/search

You can add multiple tags in Salesforce, as well as tags that allow you to easily run any reports required.

Reporting

Reporting, unless integrated directly with your billing system, can only be as good as the salesperson that enters the value. Salesforce makes it easy to build your own custom reports and attach campaigns to it which is a nice feature. It will also calculate annual revenue when a monthly value is entered for accurate reporting

Integrations

Salesforce offers many integrations. It does integrate with Intercom (no API access required), Aircall, ChartMogul, and Proposify. There are many resources to help you through the integration setup process.

Mobile apps

Salesforce1 is the main app for the sales CRM. It’s simple to use and gives you access to accounts, reports, contacts, etc., and is available on both Android and Apple mobile devices.

Email

Salesforce email integrates with your email, lets you send mass emails, and tracks who opened it and when.

Phone/VoIP

Salesforce offers a Phone/VoIP option as an extra fee ranging from $5 to $25USD. The premium package offers pretty cool features like click-to-dial functionality, direct dial from native dialpad, note-taking during calls, automatic call logs to related records, call history view, pre-recorded voicemail messages, call-list creation from leads, and contact list views.

SMS/Text

It doesn’t appear that you can send SMS through Salesforce, but there are likely online services that integrate with Saleforce to allow this.

Price/value

Salesforce CRM is $75 USD per user, which ranks it in the higher pricing tier, but Salesforce is also the leader in the market. With Salesforce, you get the extra confidence knowing that as your company grows, Salesforce can grow with you, giving you good long-term ROI.

Final score: 44/60

Bottom line:

There’s no question Salesforce is the undisputed champ of the CRM world in terms of size, power and ubiquity. We even had a whole podcast episode on how Salesforce can be used to create a system for startups. But is it the best tool for a small SaaS company like us? It’s expensive, complicated, clunky, and just plain ugly. I’m going to pass on Salesforce.

Zoho CRM

Marketing website

Zoho is more than just a CRM, calling themselves “the operating system for your business”. And their homepage is full of the 35+ apps that are included under that umbrella. With all of these apps, it doesn’t give them much opportunity to communicate exactly what they can do for your business.

User interface

At first glance, Zoho’s interface is overwhelming. The top menu bar features nine different features with another sixteen hidden in the “...” selector. These tabs can be managed, with the most important features available within one click.

Zoho has a lot of features packed into their CRM, giving them the hard task of developing a streamlined interface. Over time I’m sure an experienced user would navigate through all of the screens no problem, but there certainly is a lot going on.

Adding/importing contacts

Zoho has a fairly standard bulk import contacts feature via CSV, allowing you to select which column matches which variable in their system. Duplicate records can either be updated or cloned. Once the import is complete, you are notified by email.

Deals/pipeline

The Zoho deals pipeline gives you a view of all of your deals by their stage, previewing the deal/contact name, the value of the deal, close date, and an icon for a task that may be associated with the deal.

You can drag and drop deals between the stages of your pipeline. One thing I didn’t like was how you had to horizontally scroll to see more than three or four stages of your pipeline at one time. I feel as though the UI could be improved to see more of your deals at once and get a better idea of your pipeline.

Tasks, follow-ups

The layout of tasks and activities in Zoho was one of my favourite parts of the CRM. Organizing tasks by contact types and providing a quick look of what the task is, and when it’s due makes it easy to organize daily priorities. Overdue tasks pop up on your screen, making sure you don’t miss an important call.

Tagging/search

Zoho doesn’t have a tagging feature for contacts. Similar to Pipedrive, they recommend that you set up custom fields in a similar way to traditional tagging. These custom fields have to be set up by an administrator ahead of time, likely to keep things organized and consistent.

Reporting

Like many of the other CRMs, Zoho doesn’t have an easy way to track and report recurring revenue for SaaS. The rest of their reporting platform appears to include most standard sales reports that you would want to pull.

Integrations

Zoho list 68 integrations on their webpage, plus additional third party integrations. Both Aircall and Zapier list Zoho integrations on their respective sites, although there is no native integration between Zoho and Intercom.

Mobile apps

Zoho CRM features both an iOS and Android app. The web app is not mobile responsive.

Email delivery

Zoho has a separate email inbox tool called SalesInbox that’s free to use with Zoho CRM on a “standard” subscription, or separately for $15/month to use with Salesforce. Since it is a Zoho product, all contact and deal information is synced between the two systems.

This is one of the more robust email offerings from a CRM, as it is a complete email client built with sales in mind. Native reminders, tasks, and deal stage sorting are great features that you don’t find with all email clients.

Phone call logging

Zoho’s PhoneBridge supports integrations with a number of different calling systems including AirCall. PhoneBridge allows you to manage calls from within Zoho, view contact information of the caller, track missed calls, and add a call description during calls.

SMS/Text

SMS features are available via third party extensions and add-ons.

Price/value

There are many additional features that differentiate Zoho CRMs various pricing plans. For us, the $20 Professional plan would be necessary, as it includes the email integration. Zoho’s larger plans also include some interesting features, such as their AI, and Blueprint automation, which could certainly be of value for a growing organization.

Final score: 44/60

Bottom line:

Zoho has a lot of great features, but most aren’t necessary for us at this time. Like many of the other CRMs mentioned above, the lack of clear measurement for recurring revenue/SaaS is a big issue that makes it hard to choose a CRM like Zoho.

And the winner is…Close.io

Close.io feels like it was just made for us — an inside sales team at a scaling SaaS company. It offers virtually everything we want or need. Yes, it would be great to have a mobile app for on-the-go selling, but I respect that they decided to focus on their primary use case, and you can still track emails sent on your mobile device.

The pricing is also on the higher end, but this should be proof that the cheapest tool doesn’t win out in the end. If the value is there, a product targeted at a specific audience can be the most expensive and still win.

Second place: Nutshell

Nutshell really impressed me with its interface, ease-of-use, and robust features. It scored equally with Close.io.

Honourable mentions:

Salesforce, despite falling off the ugly tree and hitting every branch on the way down, is a powerful CRM. Pipedrive and Zoho also have a lot to like.

Regardless of what kind of industry you’re in, you know you need to connect with your target audience. You need to discover the wants, the needs, the challenges, and the dreams of the people you want to sell to; the people whose problems you can solve. To do that, you have to drill down to understand who they are on an individual level, and not regard them like the Borg or some massive, faceless marketing monolith.

That’s where buyer personas come in.

Buyer personas (also known as customer profiles, customer personas, audience profiles, and marketing personas) are basically character sketches of your ideal customer. Creating a general depiction of your customer as if they are someone you know personally can help inform important decisions about marketing, advertising, content creation, product or service development, customer support, public relations, pricing, and sales.

Why you need buyer personas

Let’s say you have a product or a service that you believe caters to moms. Great, but here’s the thing: ‘moms’ are a pretty huge group.

There are married stay-at-home moms, married moms who work outside the home, single moms who stay at home, single moms who work outside the home, rich moms, lower income moms, middle class moms, moms who only have one child, moms who have many children, moms who are looking after both children and aging parents. There are moms who are recovering from giving birth and moms who have adopted.

There are moms who value convenience over sustainability (like disposable vs cloth diapers), moms who like brand names, moms who are price conscious.

There are moms who live in cities and moms who live in rural areas; moms who have nannies, moms who use daycare; moms who are young, and moms who are older.

There are moms with babies, toddlers, preschoolers, school kids, teenagers, or college students. Some moms might be new to your city or country, and some moms may not speak English as their first language. You get the picture.

So while there would be some traits that moms share generally, their individual wants, needs, challenges, and dreams are too specific to lump them all together.

For example, if you had a product designed for moms of newborns, you would be missing the mark, and wasting money, if you advertised to a mom who had a teenager. Yes, they’re both moms, but what they value and need from you right now is going to be very different. One might be worrying about how she and her baby can get more sleep, while the other is trying to drag her kids out of bed in the morning.

Having a detailed buyer persona for ‘Emily,’ the exhausted mom with a newborn who isn’t sleeping, will help you tailor your messaging and target your advertising directly to all the Emilys, as opposed to ‘Catherine,’ the frustrated mom of teenagers who won’t get out of bed in the morning in time to eat a healthy breakfast before school.

Product and service development

Buyer personas can also help shape the development of new products and services. By thinking about what Emily, the new mom might need and what her challenges are, you can make informed decisions about what you can do to meet those needs.

It can be easy to come up with a new idea to improve a product that seems really cool, like, “Oh, we’ll add this adorable little owl design to our product. Moms love adorable owls!” But are owls really useful to Emily in her quest to get her baby to sleep?

Instead, your buyer persona of Emily may reveal that one of her fears as a new mom is that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s a common concern among new parents. Emily may be better equipped to handle the stress of her baby not sleeping if she was less worried that it was her fault, and that she, as a mother, was doing something wrong.

So what could you add to your core product that not only might help Emily’s baby sleep through the night, but also give Emily more confidence and support about being a new mother? Not owls, that’s for sure (although Emily probably agrees owls are adorable, as do I).

Taking a step back and referring to the characteristics of your buyer personas can be that sober second thought of whether this new feature is actually valuable to your target audience and worth pursuing.

Content creation

Content creation is challenging; I feel your pain. But a buyer persona can make it easier by giving you a set of guidelines for blog posts, lead magnets, videos, ad messaging, and more.

What might Catherine, frustrated mom of teenagers who won’t get out of bed in the morning in time to eat a healthy breakfast before school, be looking to read?

Recipes for quick, healthy, teenager-approved breakfast foods they can eat on their way to school. Or maybe research-based articles about why teenagers sleep so much and what to do about it. Or tips on how to stay calm and not lose your cool when your teenagers are driving you crazy.

Target your target

In this era of incessant advertising noise, you need to find a way to break through the clutter to lasso the attention of your customers. You need to be laser-focused if you want to reach your audience.

Fortunately, innovation in digital marketing has made it possible to micro target your buyers. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram all have advertising tools that let you drill down to the personal particulars of your target audience like age, location, job title, industry, interests, hobbies, education level, relationship status, language, and more.

Armed with a detailed buyer persona and one of these powerful targeting tools, your chances of hitting the bull’s eye of your customer’s attention improves exponentially.

How to create a buyer persona

You can collect the information you need to create your buyer personas from many different sources; research, personal interviews, and surveys of your target audience. You can use prospects, existing customers, or related stakeholders outside your company who have a specialized knowledge of your industry.

The number of buyer personas you need depends on your particular business. Do you have different products or services aimed at different kinds of customers, like the Emilys vs the Catherines? Are some of your buyers direct consumers and others wholesalers? Or maybe you have pricing tiers, so you want to create personas that match the ideal buyer for each level.

If you have customer groups with challenges and goals that are distinct from each other, you want to create a buyer persona to represent each of them.

Start with your customers

A great place to start is to look at the behaviour of your most valuable customers. Obviously, those are who you want more of, and they already have experience interacting with your product or service.

Pick a few customers and reach out to them to see if they would agree to be personally interviewed. In our experience, we’ve found most people are open to interviews as long as we make clear how long it will take (try to keep it under 30 minutes), that we’ll never disclose any sensitive business information, and that we aren’t trying to sell them anything.

You can also use a tool like Survey Monkey to get similar results.

It’s a good idea to throw in a little incentive to sweeten the deal, maybe an Amazon or Starbucks gift card or some company swag, like t-shirts.

It's important to remember that you’re not just trying to get information about how much people like your company. You’re trying to find out more about who they are as individuals, what their challenges are, what they value, and what deters them so you can pick up on general patterns of attitude and behaviour.

Questions to ask customers when developing buyer personas

What you ask really depends on your specific industry or business, so you need to customize your list of questions. It should cover both demographics like age, location income, and education level, and psychographic information like personal interests, buying motivations, and attitudes. Think of demographics as the who, and psychographics as the why.

Generally, this is a guideline of the kinds of things you want to ask to get the information you need:

• What’s your role at work and title?

• What are your main responsibilities?

• How is your performance evaluated?

• What do you do during the run of a day at work?

• What kind of skills or qualifications do you need for your job?

• Are there any specific tools or products you use to do your job?

• Who are you accountable to? Are there people accountable to you?

• What industry are you in?

• What are the major challenges your industry faces right now?

• What are the major challenges your company faces?

• What are the major challenges that you face in your specific job?

• How many employees does your company have?

• What’s your company’s revenue? (This may be a touchy one so try to ask this within a general range, so they don’t feel that they have to be too specific.)

• What would you like to achieve at your job?

• What would you like to achieve in your career?

• Which blogs or other publications do you read?

• Are there particular public personalities you follow related to your career and industry (like a Gary Vaynerchuk or Seth Godin, for example)?

• What professional associations do you belong to?

• Age, marital status, gender, children, languages? (Again this is an area you may need to be sensitive to giving people a range helps.)

• What’s your educational background?

• Where do you live?

• What do you like to do when you’re not at work? Hobbies, interests.

• What is the most important thing you’re looking for when it comes to purchasing (insert your product or service category here)?

• What’s the biggest challenge to purchasing (insert your product or service category here)?

• What would make you say no to purchasing (insert your product or service category here)?

• What do you think is the biggest thing missing from (insert your product category or service)?

Talk to sales, account services, and customer support

The people on your sales, account services, and customer support teams probably have the most direct and personal interactions with your leads and clients. Get their feedback on what things they hear and observe most often, including any objections or challenges.

It’s not helpful to only get the good stuff. It’s just as valuable to know the negative things; what’s holding someone back from buying your product or service, or what they’re looking for that you don’t offer.

Add fields to your forms

Use any web forms on your site to gather information about your leads and customers. Don’t overwhelm them by grilling them right off the bat, but adding a couple of questions about company size or business challenges can give you some immediate insight. Again, the specific questions you ask depends on your business and industry.

Bringing your buyer persona to life

The whole point of a buyer persona is to take all the dry facts, figures, and research about your target audience and use it to create a living, breathing human. Or at least a reasonable facsimile of one that exists on paper.

By looking at patterns that emerged through your research and interviews, you can now use those insights to plug into your persona. You can make them as detailed as you like for whatever information will be useful to your and your team. These are the general categories I use to create buyer personas:

Name:

Pick a name that represents the generation and gender of this persona.

Age: This can be a range.

Job title

Job Description

Goals

Challenges

Buying motivation

Values

Fears/objections

Favourite channels of communication

Short bio

Repeat this process for each of the buyer personas you need to develop.

You can then use a free online persona generator like Xtensio.com or Hubspot’s makemypersona.com and punch in all your details to get a nicely designed persona. Or have your in-house designer create your own.

Example of a buyer persona using makemypersona.com

Example of a buyer persona using Xtensio.com’s template.

Be BFF’s with your buyer personas

Once you’ve created your buyer persona team, share it with everyone on your team. As discussed earlier, buyer personas can be helpful to almost every aspect of your business, so it’s important everyone is familiar with your profiles and refers to them as they develop their own policies, campaigns, products, and messaging.

You should also be aware that just like real people, your personas are going to evolve and even change over time depending on how their industry changes, how their customers change, how your business grows, how your industry changes, and how your products and services develop.

So you need to keep your eye on your personas to make sure they’re still accurate, update them as needed, and maybe even add new personas as your customer base grows.

It’s been 24 years since the beginning of September meant back to school for me, but I still get the urge to buy a pencil case and a new notebook every time Labour Day rolls around.

Actually, September usually feels more like the new year to me than January 1st does. I often do more planning and strategic thinking about both my personal and professional lives in September than I do in January.

In the fall I feel an aura of excitement and optimism about the months ahead, as opposed to January when it feels like there are more negative reasons for needing to re-evaluate. (This may also have to do with the weather where I live in Atlantic Canada - September is glorious, while January is gorey)

If you live in the northern hemisphere, you’re coming off what can be the lazy, hazy days of summer. For most businesses, things moved at a slower pace. With both clients and your team members in and out of the office on various vacations and national holidays, deals probably didn’t close as fast, work didn’t get done as quickly, and major decisions were put off.

So now with a fresh, shiny September upon us, it’s time to kick-start a new season of business growth.

Here are a few suggestions on how you can head back to work from vacation and have a successful fall (but I still support keeping that flip flop spirit alive in your heart).

1. Focus on the positive

Whether you’re a business owner or a member of a team, from time to time you can start feeling stale about your job and what you’re doing, especially when you're returning to work from vacation.

Remind yourself why you started the business, or came to work there in the first place. What you wanted to accomplish, what you wanted to build, how you wanted to grow as a person or an entrepreneur.

Think of all the things you love about what you do - selling, interacting with clients, solving problems, innovating, being creative, working with your team - and then figure out how you can do more of that.

Let these positive feelings fuel your activities for the next quarter and use them to inspire positivity among your team.

2. Focus on the negative

I’m a very positive person but I think there’s real value in examining the ‘negative,’ or put a better way, thinking critically.

It bums us out if we receive a bad review of Proposify, but I think that information is invaluable to the development of the product. How else will we know how to make it better? How else will we slow our churn rate if we don’t know where the problem lies?

So in the same way you should examine all the things you love about your business, it’s important to think about what you don’t like. What isn’t working? What’s making you unhappy and maybe holding you, your business, or your team, back?

Is it a process that needs to be tweaked? Do you need to hire someone to take on something you don’t like so you can concentrate on what you’re best at? Do you need to fire that one bad apple on your team that’s bringing everyone and everything down?

Look at what’s NOT good about your situation and then figure out what needs to happen to change it.

3. Focus on your financials

Hopefully you’re already on top of what’s happening with your bottom line but it is September, and it is a fresh, new business season. When you get back to work, it never hurts to revisit your financial goals versus your current status.

September marks the first month of the final quarter of the year so it’s a good time to reevaluate your projections, examine your expenses, and make a plan for how to make this quarter count.

But don’t stop there.The fall is also the time to start planning your financial goals for the next year, looking at what you need to do to get where you want to be. Will you require outside investment? Where will that come from? You need to start preparing and pitching for that now.

4. Give your team a pep talk

Just like your principal started the school year with an assembly, you should hold one with your team. There’s likely not been a week this summer that everyone’s been in the office at the same time so this is a good opportunity to bring people back together and remind them of the game plan ahead.

I like when it happens right after Labour Day but choose the earliest date possible when your whole team will be present and able to meet.

Make sure the tone is positive and motivational. Remind everyone of the great things you’ve accomplished as a team, and get them focused and excited about the goals for the future, both immediate and long term.

Encourage participation - have each department to give an update on what they’ve been up to and what they’ll be working on in the coming months.

This can help those people dragging their heels off vacation feel reinvigorated, and it can be a subtle reminder that it’s time to get back to business and get shit done.

5. Meet with each department

Even you have a small company, each person on your team has different objectives, approaches, challenges, and expectations related to their job.

Chances are you haven’t really connected in the last couple of months so meeting with each department gives you an opportunity to catch up on a micro level and make plans to solve any issues before they get too big (and maybe even share a vacay story or two).

Are they feeling over or under resourced? Is there a skills gap? Maybe they have ideas on how to be more efficient, bring in new clients, or develop a new service.

Taking the time to talk either one-on-one with the department head, or to the whole group keeps you better informed on what’s happening in your business and motivates your team by demonstrating you are engaged and interested.

6. Invest in your business

If your business is going to grow, you need to make an investment. Discover where the needs lie in your company, research what the options are to address the situation, and evaluate the potential return on investment (not to mention what you can afford).

That may be new technology in the office, like a server upgrade. Maybe you invest in an employee by sending them for professional development to gain new skills, or you’re going to finally hire that extra sales rep to help grow new business.

Maybe the investment is in yourself, by getting a mentor or a business coach to help you grow.

There are likely lots of things in your business that could benefit from extra time and money but even if you pick just one to kick off the fall season, you’ll likely reap the results of that investment in the coming year.

7. Reach out and reconnect

I actually find the summer really busy and so do most people I know. My friends with kids are going in twelve directions between summer camps and family trips, every week someone different is out of the office on vacation, there are a multitude of visitors to entertain, and we’re all just trying to squeeze the most out of each fleeting sunny day.

I also have a side hustle renting baby equipment to people travelling to my city and the summer is basically my Christmas season, so juggling that with my full-time gig at Proposify makes this season even more hectic for me.

As much as I love summer, I look forward to going back to work after the holiday when a routine sets back in, everyone’s focused again, and I can reconnect with people.

When I had my freelance business, I would send out a personal email to each of my clients after Labour Day to touch base. I’d ask about their summer, check in to see how things were going, and I’d try to include a few project suggestions to spark a conversation.

Maybe it was something we had talked about doing a few months ago, or maybe it was something new altogether, but the point was to re-engage and remind them I was ready to rock.

Depending on the nature of our relationship and the work we had done together, some clients I would try to have coffee with for a face-to-face, others I would suggest a planning meeting to schedule out new projects for the coming months. And for others, the email was just a gentle, “Hey, remember me?” after a beer-soaked summer.

Reconnecting with your existing clients, any prospects that might have gone lukewarm over the summer, and your network in general after vacation is a great way to kick-start new business opportunities for the fall.

Everyone will be back in the saddle and ready to do business so the timing is just right to close some new deals.

8. Find your stress buster

Life is stressful. Work is stressful. Even if you love what you do, there can be some difficult days that take a toll on your spirit. And quadruple that stress level if you’re a business owner.

While you can’t always control what happens to you at work or even your personal life, having a plan for how you deal with stress can prevent the dreaded burnout that can leave you ineffective as a leader and a detriment to your business.

Now’s the time to sign up for that recreational basketball league, pottery class, or roller derby team.

Whatever it is, make sure it has nothing to do with work so you get a chance to clear your head and reset a couple of times a week.

9. Eat...better

Notice I used the word ‘better,’ because I feel like there are so many messages yelling at us about how we eat, bossy messages about what we should and shouldn’t eat. Gluten, sugar, fat, carbs, preservatives with 22-letter names. Ugh. Instead of an all-out war on different kinds of food, why don’t we aim for some incremental improvements? Eating a little better, not necessarily the best.

I’m not going to make any judgement about what you may have eaten over the summer but I will tell you I ate enough juicy BBQ hamburgers (with bacon and cheese, natch), hot dogs roasted over a campfire, and Miss Vickie’s potato chips (my weakness) to make a clogged artery sing.

So it’s time to get back on track a bit. And not because of weight, but because of how eating all that stuff makes me feel, especially that during the week when I’m trying to work. Sluggish, cranky, moody, blahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Food is your fuel, you put junk in your tank and it’s not going to perform as well. I know you’re busy - we’re all busy - but find a way to make a least one meal a day a little better, a little more nutritious.

10. Get a good sleep

My mother is such a strong believer in the power of good sleep that back in high school my brother and I would joke that we could hobble into the house with a gushing stab wound and Mum would say, “You need more sleep!”

She was hardcore on set bedtimes and making sure we got an adequate amount of sleep. It drove us crazy when we were teenagers but I totally get it now.

If I don’t get enough sleep, I feel like I’m hungover without the fun party stories to go with it. I can’t function properly, I’m cranky, and I end up eating crap.

I know there’s this whole hustle philosophy around “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” which to me is right up there in with the absurd competitive game of “I’m the busiest!” We need to sleep to function properly, period. You can cheat your way out of a lot of things but your body’s need for sleep is not one of them.

Aside from my mum, entrepreneurs are also getting behind the sleep revolution, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and The Huffington Post’s co-founder, Arianna Huffington, who wrote a book about it, even going so far to call sleep deprivation the new smoking.

Check out Arianna’s quick TED Talk called “How to succeed? Get more sleep.”

So if you do nothing else on this list as you get back to work after vacation, at the very least make sure you’re getting a good night’s sleep. It can go a long way in affecting your mental and physical health, two things essential to keep you on your toes, and on top of your business. Don’t make me call my mum on you.

Do we really need more entrepreneurs?

Small businesses really are the backbone of the economy. Almost half of the US’s private sector workforce (49.2%) is employed by small business, and for the last twenty years, small businesses have been responsible for creating two out of every three (64%) of net new jobs.

Some of the most important innovations in the last century have come about because of scrappy entrepreneurs (Remember, Steve Jobs started Apple in his basement).

Small businesses also lead the way in innovation. A study conducted by the Small Business Administration found that small businesses produced 16 times more patents per employee compared to larger patenting firms.

We’ll always need doctors, lawyers and accountants, but we sure as hell need entrepreneurs, too.

Which is why we need to think about how we can pay it forward and help inspire, mentor, and empower girls and boys to think like early entrepreneurs.

What inspired me to be an entrepreneur

When I was younger I never thought I wanted to own a business.

Some of my entrepreneurial friends had parents who owned businesses, but not me. My dad was a maintenance worker, my mother a nurse, and neither of them felt owning a business was a viable career move.

My parents knew that 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months, and that fail rate was enough to scare them into scaring me away from the thought of starting one.

But when I was 14 my friend was looking to pass off his newspaper route, the job that funded his much coveted video game and action figure collection.

I was too young to get a job at a fast food joint so wanting some financial independence for  video games of my own, I asked him if I could take it over.

For more than three years I would spend over an hour delivering newspapers after school every day of the week and early in the morning on weekends.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my paper route job was preparing me for entrepreneurship:

• I had to be self-motivated to work; I didn’t have a boss calling me if I was late delivering. If I couldn’t do my route for some reason, like if I was sick or had a band practice after school, I had to hire one of my friends or my parents to cover it for me (and yes, my parents accepted the payment).
• It was up to me to collect payments from customers since the Mail Star would subtract their cut from my bank account automatically. I got to keep the profit. I needed to do some basic bookkeeping to make sure I wasn’t getting ripped off.
• I had to keep customers happy, deal with a bunch of different personality types, and sell subscriptions to new customers.
• I even cross-sold to customers, asking them if they needed their lawn cut during the summer months when they were away on vacation.

Newspaper routes are a great tool for teaching kids entrepreneurship. I cherish the experience, despite the click in my left shoulder I still have today from carrying the 100 pound bag uphill.

I may have ended up owning a business regardless, but this experience gave me a lot of the skills I needed later on.

The problem with school

Grade school highly discourages entrepreneurial thinking.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the most successful entrepreneurs were B students who later dropped out of college. As mentioned before, non-college graduate entrepreneurs include Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, just to name a handful.

The school system wants students to focus on the task assigned, not go off and dream up their own projects or become child entrepreneurs. Following direction is rewarded, and deviating from it or colouring outside the lines, so to speak, is met with punishment.

Guidance counsellors often encourage kids to pursue traditional careers, ones that require university education. There is very little talk of starting a business.

I am not saying education isn’t important, or that I’m representing every teacher in every school system in the world. Of course, math, English and science are important. Of course, plenty of teachers inspire kids to follow their dreams.

Instead, I believe the school system as a whole discourages entrepreneurial thinking on a fundamental level; they prepare students to become good employees.

Entrepreneurial traits, like risk predilection and rebelliousness (a trait also common to teenagers coincidentally enough) are generally considered negative, and are suppressed rather than nurtured.

Successful entrepreneur and angel investor, Dan Martel went to jail and rehab as a teenager before starting his first business at 18 and turning his life around.

Dan has said many times that computers literally saved his life. Could it be that his mentors were able to harness his reckless energy rather than condemn it? That they nurtured his rebelliousness as a quality that could be used for good instead of telling him to fall in line?

I’m not going to pretend for a minute that I know more than professional educators. All I know is what I’ve experienced first-hand, what other people have shared about what shaped them to be child entrepreneurs, and how they teach it to their own kids.

So how do we teach kids entrepreneurship?

In his awesome Ted Talk, Cameron Herald talks about the various businesses he made for himself as a kid, like selling coat hangers to dry cleaning businesses, and buying comic books from poor kids to sell at a profit to rich kids. It’s worth watching the entire video.

You may or not have children of your own, but even if you’re an uncle/aunt, or have friends with kids, you can play a role in their lives. You can inspire them to be an entrepreneur when they grow up.

Here are some key entrepreneurial traits Cameron mentions in his talk, and some ideas on how to nurture them in kids:

I also asked some friends of mine to share their stories with me, and tell me what shaped them to become entrepreneurs. I’ll share some of those stories here as well.

Problem solving

When you own a business, solving problems is a daily activity. Customers have problems. Employees have problems. Computers have problems. You can’t bury your head in the sand, you need to evaluate your options and choose a path to go down, even if it ends up being the wrong direction.

Kids are generally more impulsive than adults because they haven’t yet experienced the consequences of making bad choices.

Discipline expert Amy Morin recommends teaching children problem solving skills by:

• Identifying the problem and talking about it
• Coming up with ideas for possible solutions
• Listing the possible benefits or consequences of each approach
• Being decisive and taking action
• Allowing them to experience any fallout or negative consequences of their decision (as long as they are safe)

“What helped me most is that I was always making my own money somehow, pretty much since I was 10. The message I received as a kid was: if you want something, you have to get busy and figure out how to do it for yourself. I never expected my parents to provide more than the basics, really. Learning self-reliance, trusting in your creativity, and developing courage is a great gift.”

– Fiona Kirkpatrick Parsons, Marketing professional

The desire to make money

Once kids are old enough, teaching them to want money isn’t hard thanks to advertising. Kids learn how awesome money is at a pretty young age.

But there’s a big difference between wanting money and wanting to make money.

Making money involves work. Kids appreciate money they’ve worked for more than money they were handed. 

When grandma gives a kid $20 for her birthday the first thing she wants to do is spend it. When she had to shovel the neighbour's driveway or knock on doors selling chocolate bars, suddenly that hard earned cash becomes more valuable.

“I grew up in the US around entrepreneurs, my grandparents owned their own businesses. My parents never said 'you can't,' so I grew up believing I could do whatever I wanted. I remember working as a dishwasher at 15 years old making $3.35/hour, and then mowing lawns on the side at $20 per lawn, which would only take me 30 minutes. That's when the light bulb went off!”

– Kevin Springer, Serial entrepreneur and co-founder, Proposify  

How to sell

I love how Cameron Herald teaches his kids business and how to sell.

Instead of assigning them chores and giving them a set amount of allowance (which is teaching kids how to be employees), he encourages them to find jobs they think need doing, come to him and offer to do them, then negotiate a price.

Selling to your dad is one thing, but selling to strangers is another.

That’s why door to door sales, like selling newspaper subscriptions or chocolate bars is a valuable training ground for child entrepreneurs. It’s teaching them how to speak to grownups, to get over the fear of rejection, and to use persuasion instead of nagging to get what they want.

“I sold candy in grade 6. I learned about working with a team, making a profit, and that you need your business needs to be defensible! The cafeteria ladies found out we were selling candy, and dipping into their profits, and had us shut down.”

– David Howe, Serial entrepreneur

Customer service

Customer service goes hand in hand with sales. After all, once you’ve successfully convinced a prospect to do business with you, your job now becomes keeping that customer happy and fulfilling what you promised.

This is where jobs like cashier positions can teach customer service skills that can form entrepreneurial ideas for kids.

“I worked in a family run business from the time I was six until I moved out. I learned from pretty much day one that the money we used to buy food and to live on came from the drawer in the basement where we put it after we charged customers.”

– Findlay Hilchie, Co-founder of Hustle & Grind

Tenacity

I’ve written before about how glad I am that I didn’t give up on building Proposify in the early days, and my experience is far from unique.

Entrepreneurs are going to struggle at some point, maybe for a long time, and some of the most successful business people did not make it because they were necessarily smarter than everyone else, but because they kept pushing ahead despite setbacks.

It’s hard because as a parent you never want to see your child upset, struggling, or frustrated but it’s important to teach children that nothing worthwhile comes easy, and not to quit just because they failed or because something was difficult.

It’s better that kids learn to have grit at an early age instead of having everything handed to them, never needing to push through difficulties, and then discovering later as adults that the baby gloves are off.

“Going through two wars by adulthood, moving to Canada on my own at 19 with $1,500 in my pocket without really knowing anyone, and being homeless for the first week in Canada. All of it taught me to live day by day, and solve one problem at a time.”

– Milan Vrekic, Co-founder of Zora Inc.

Creativity

Creativity is often most closely associated with art. But entrepreneurs are some of the most creative people out there. They are perhaps the only people who create their own job.

Entrepreneurs need to be observant and notice what people need (demand), find a solution (supply), sell that solution at a price people will pay, make a profit, deal with competition... the list goes on.

How can you teach creativity as a skill?

Children should be given plenty of time for unstructured play, where they can use their imagination.

Cameron Herald has some nights where rather than reading his kids a story, he asks them to make up their own.

Some people think technology hampers creativity, but used correctly it can unleash it. Just look at games like Minecraft that encourage players to build whatever they want in a completely open, nearly infinite world. Smart phones and tablets let kids easily record their own videos.

Modern technology can be used along with more traditional activities, like learning an instrument or painting, to teach kids it’s OK to let your imagination run wild and pursue your ideas.

“In grade 12 I created a summer job with four other high school students. We applied for grants, mapped local recreation trails in our community, designed a booklet with environmental info, and paid ourselves. We learned a lot that summer!”

– Michelle Doucette, photographer

Leadership

There’s more to being the boss than just bossing people around. You need to be a leader; inspiring, teaching, and motivating your employees to be the best they can be.

There are ways to teach kids to be successful entrepreneurs and leaders, not by encouraging them to be a bossypants (technical term), but by setting the example for them and being a good leader yourself.

You can encourage them to participate in team activities and observe how they interact with other kids. Don’t jump in if they have trouble or if another kid is being unfair. Let them work it out themselves.

“Being a swim coach and camp counselor taught me how to manage people and position them for success.”

– Iaian Archibald, Co-founder of Swell Advantage

Networking

One of the most valuable things for me as an entrepreneur has been the network of friends, colleagues, and influencers I’ve acquired over the years.

Businesses are not created in a vacuum. Much like a child, it takes a village to raise a startup.

Having a wide group of people you know, locally and internationally, online and offline, provides a wide range of people to reach out to for advice, to pitch new ideas, to hire for positions, to make introductions.

Children can be encouraged from an early age to be interested in people. It starts with having them sit in on conversations between their parents and other adults, listen, and ask questions.

If you’re part of a community group or church, encourage your son or daughter to be sociable by approaching and talking to older people in addition to kids their own age.

They may be naturally shy, but with practice even the most timid of children can come out of their shell and learn the value of making new connections.

“When I was a little girl, my mom had a eclectic group of friends who were entrepreneurial, and being around them made me want to do my own thing. I think as an entrepreneur you have a huge influence on the kids in your life, probably more than you would think.”

– Krista Keough, Consultant, college entrepreneurship instructor

Conclusion

It may sound like a cliché but kids are our future, and if you’re an entrepreneur who either has children or influences someone else’s child, it’s important to think about how we can shape them into future leaders, job creators, and successful entrepreneurs.

In other words, please think of the children!

In no way do I think I have all the answers. These are ideas to get the discussion started.

I want to ask you: What experience when you were a child/teenager shaped you to become an entrepreneur later on in life, and what are some ways we can teach kids to be more entrepreneurial?

I used to work for someone who owned his business, and every morning when he arrived, he’d march right past his (mostly) bright eyed and bushy tailed employees without making eye contact, without saying ‘Good morning,’ without even a royal wave of acknowledgement.

Then he would disappear to his private office, likely never to be seen again unless you had a meeting with him.

It drove me bananas.

Not saying good morning might sound like a small, insignificant thing, but to me, it said everything about how this guy might be the owner of his company, but he certainly wasn’t leading that company.

You might be thinking, “Maybe he isn’t a morning person, maybe he needs coffee before he starts, maybe he’s super busy.”

Here’s what I say: Baloney.

A business leader sets the tone, a leader recognizes his team, and a leader acts like a grown-up, regardless of how caffeine-deprived he might be.

I know a lot of people who own businesses. I don’t know as many who are leaders in their business.

Knowing the difference between business leadership and ownership can help you motivate your employees, win the respect of your clients, and grow your business.

Owning your business vs leading your business

The business owner is just that: the person who owns the business. They likely started the company, they finance it, they hire people, they pay the bills, and they probably bring in clients or have some other function that contributes to the actual output of the company.

But just taking care of business — the daily to-do’s and don’ts — isn’t enough. If you really want to make an impact on your industry, on your bottom line, and with your clients, you need to be a leader in your business.

A simple analogy might be one of parenthood. Whether you have kids or not, we all know there’s more to being a good parent than putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads.

Those are important, basic duties that come with being a mom or dad but there are many other aspects to raising children that are critical. Like motivation, guidance, kindness, and challenging them to reach higher.

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about hand-holding your employees so they'll eat their peas. I’m talking about leading all aspects your business — not just the mechanics of it — to be better.

Here are some traits that transform business owners into business leaders:

Vision

A friend of mine was hired to do business development for an agency. When I asked her how things were going, she told me the biggest challenge was that the owners couldn’t agree on what they did, what their differentiation was, where their niche lay, or what they wanted to achieve other than just bringing in more clients. It made her job of selling their services exceedingly difficult and eventually her relationship with the agency ended.

I’ve worked in places where if you went around to all the employees and asked them about the vision of the company, you’d get a different answer from each person. Maybe the owner had a vision, but as a leader, it’s clear they should have communicated it better.

As a business leader, you need to have a clear vision that you can easily articulate to your team members so that they, in turn, can understand their role in achieving that vision.

Everyone needs to be singing from the same songbook, and the leader needs to pick the tune.

Motivation

Leaders don’t tell people what to do; they motivate them. Your employees need more than a task list; they need to be inspired and empowered to think independently and creatively in how they do their work. It’s your job to make sure they understand what you expect of them and what they can expect from you in return. It’s your job to make sure everyone stays engaged with the vision.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

So how do you motivate people and keep them engaged with the vision?

Passion

Be the champion of the company and the superhero who leaps complacency in a single bound.

When someone shares their enthusiasm for a topic or a cause, it can be contagious. It gets people excited; it triggers new ideas, it can make people feel like they are part of something important.

As a leader, you need to be the most passionate ambassador for what your company does, who you do it for, and how you’re doing it. You need to demonstrate to your team, your clients, and your industry that you believe in your vision, and in them. Because if you act lame, so will everyone else.

And a culture of lameness is more dangerous than kryptonite.

”As a leader, you're the champion of your business and the superhero who leaps complacency in a single bound”

Connect with your team

I once had a boss who was very personal (but not inappropriate) with his team. He took the time to get to know everyone, asked us about our lives, shared information about himself and nurtured a close, we’re-in-this-together kind of environment.

I had never experienced this before. Everywhere else I had worked there was a polite cold war wall between staff and owner. Where in past workplaces there was an us vs them attitude with behind-the-scenes animosity, in my new office there was a fierce loyalty, an air of camaraderie, a strong commitment to good work, and, dare I say, happiness.

Being best friends with your employees isn’t necessary, or necessarily recommended, but it is important that you take the time to get to know them. Business leaders find out what’s important to their team - their family situation, what motivates them, what they find challenging, and what they like to do, both on and off the clock.

Understanding members of your team as whole people will help you manage both your human and skills resources better, provide the key to their motivation, and make them feel valued.

For the same reasons you need to understand your target audience, you need to understand your people.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

– Eleanor Roosevelt

Collaborate

Did you know that Richard Branson hires based on his own weaknesses?

A good leader knows they don't have all the answers, aren’t necessarily the smartest person in the room, and that it’s their team that makes the company stronger, smarter, and more successful.

You’re not just hiring people to do your bidding. You’re hiring people who bring different experiences, skills, perspectives, and solutions to the table. They help you improve your offering and grow the company.

So while confidence is an important characteristic, ego, on the other hand, can be a barrier to producing better work.

The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.

– Ronald Reagan

Challenge the status quo

That’s the way we’ve always done it.

– Said no leader, ever.

One of the things I like about working at Proposify is how hungry our co-founders, Kevin Springer and Kyle Racki, are to try new things, to learn from others, and figure stuff out. It’s not only refreshing; it motivates the whole team. When they challenge the status quo, it, in turn, challenges me to think differently, to question, and to find solutions.

Leaders welcome input, embrace change, and are open to new ideas other than their own. Leading is about moving forward, and you can’t move forward if you’re stuck in the past.

Sure, there are lots of things worth maintaining — no one wants to throw the productive baby out with the inefficient bathwater — but if your first reflex is no, or stop, your business is going to go nowhere.

And by challenging your team, you’re helping move the marker on their potential, expressing your confidence in their ability, and setting expectations for even better work. The result is a win for your team, your clients, and most importantly, your business.

Are you the right person for the job?

Not everyone is up for being a business leader, and that’s totally OK. If you feel like your forté is in running the details and keeping things between the ditches, there’s no shame in that.

But that means you need to appoint/hire someone else to fill the role. As the business owner, you can still be a part of the decision-making, but you need to find someone with a different skill set who is better suited to leading the company. And doing that makes you a leader.

Anxiety, excitement, nervousness, intrigue.

When I worked as a Sales Development Representative (SDR), those were the feelings that would usually bubble up inside me before making a first call to a potential customer.

I used to really struggle with getting customers to answer cold-calls and open up about their needs. It was frustrating at the time because it made it difficult to both qualify the lead or close a deal. How could I sell someone something when I didn’t even know what they needed or what their problems were? I’ve since learned that if I had changed my angle or the way I asked my sales qualifying questions, I would have had more success.

As it turns out, the secret to getting someone to open up about themselves is all in the wording. By asking a variety of open-ended sales questions, you’ll discover the nuts and bolts of who your customer is, why they need your help, and whether or not your solution will be a good fit.

What is an open-ended question in sales?

If you’re the queen or king of conversation, you likely already know a thing or two about open-ended questions and how to get people talking. But if you feel like most people respond with one-word answers that take you nowhere, it’s probably time to change your approach.

So what exactly is an open-ended sales question?

In sales, open-ended questions can be called a few different things; sales discovery questions, customer interview questions, qualifying questions, or even sales probing questions. They all mean the same thing, and refer to questions you ask a customer during a first conversation that allow you to understand the customer better.

Say I started a conversation with you, and asked, “Are you feeling better today?” Based on how I phrased the question, you’re probably going to respond with a one or two-word answer.

The question is close-ended because it doesn’t invite you to say anything more, to elaborate, to provide more detail; it pigeonholes you into a preset, yes/no answer. It also doesn’t give me, as the asker of the question, much room for follow-up.

Had I started the same conversation with, “How are you feeling today?” it invites you to tell me more. It gives you creative liberty to lead the conversation in a direction that perhaps I wasn’t expecting and provides more information.

Why do open-ended sales questions work?

The power of an open-ended sales question is based on how it’s phrased. Open-ended sales questions work because they encourage the respondent to think about their answer and provide more detail beyond just blurting out yes or no. They draw out more information to help you decide whether this is a warm lead or it’s time to move on. Sometimes the respondent provides enough detail that they end up answering questions you may have been planning to ask later on. See it as a way to make a more natural conversation, whether it be with friends, or a discovery sales call.

Best sales questions

Open-ended sales questions can be tweaked to fit your tone, your industry, or to show off your personality, but here are some of the most commonly used ones for sales:

• Can you tell me a bit about your business?

• How long have you been in business?

• What is your current focus?

• What are your business goals over the next six months?

• What led you to explore new options?

• How does your process work now?

• What do you love about your current process?

• What do you wish to change?

• What are some of your expectations for this product/service?

• Can you help me understand that a little better?

Obviously, the number of open-ended questions you can ask someone is endless, but these are some of the best examples because they allow the customer to explain who they are in their own words. They initiate a conversation, allow the customer to open up about their pain-points, goals, expectations, and current process.

Now that we’ve cleared up what open-ended questions for sales are and why they work, let’s get into how to structure your sales process with those questions.  

"Understanding your sales lead takes time, research, and asking the right open-ended sales questions."

Do your research first

Speaking from experience, research is an absolute must when you’re generating, prospecting, or qualifying leads.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other business websites can tell you a lot about a sales lead; what position they hold, major news about their company, even if they like the same hockey team as you. Creepy? Kind of. Useful? Absolutely.

Research gives you more ammo for when you’re selling. Knowing who you’ll be talking to will help you prepare the right questions in advance, break down barriers, and make your first conversation feel more natural and less stilted and salesy.

Once your sales discovery questions get the customer talking, they will bring up pain points or talk about how things are working for them currently. This gives you the opportunity to address a solution for them, and to start building their trust.

Don't fall victim to verbal diarrhea

Word vomit? Verbal diarrhea? Call it what you will, but whatever you do, don’t fall victim to it while you’re talking to a potential customer.

Sales has evolved a lot over the past few years. Who you connect with and the industry they’re in is usually specific and targeted. Rather than fumbling for words and trying to sound like an expert in an industry you don’t know much about, focus instead on asking a question and really listening to what they have to say. Too many salespeople do waaaaaaaay more talking than they do listening, and you can’t learn anything without listening.

You know the feeling you get when you’re at lunch with a friend, you’re telling them a story, and rather than listening, they’re scrolling through Instagram? It doesn’t feel great, does it? Your customers feel the same way when they’re trying to explain what they do, and rather than listening, you’re just trying to cram your sales pitch into the conversation. They just want to be heard and understood, so listen, make a connection with them, and let them know you can be trusted.

If you go down the slippery slope of verbal diarrhea and not listening, you’re only going to get yourself into a messy situation.

Ask every question with a purpose

As the saying goes, time is money. Whether you’re waiting in line to buy a coffee, or in an important business meeting, no one likes having their time wasted.

To avoid being a time-suck for both you and the customer you’re speaking with, ask each question with purpose.

When you ask a question, don’t just take the answer at face-value. Instead, think about what else the response can tell you about the potential customer. Did your question make them feel comfortable? Did it elicit frustration in their voice, which could be a pain point? Think about the deeper reasons behind the questions you’re asking, and the answers your prospect is giving, and it can lead to a more thorough conversation.

Just about everyone hears, “How is your day going?” at some point between waking up and crawling into bed, but even that question can mean something more.

Asking about someone’s day can build empathy and invite someone to genuinely speak to you about their life before getting down to business. It can also get a customer to speak more openly about their business challenges, which is the main point of asking open-ended sales questions.

It’s not “no,” it’s just “not right now”

Rejection is inevitable when you’re in sales. As much as you’d like every lead to convert into a customer, it’s just not the way the world works, and that’s OK!

Asking open-ended sales questions can tell you a lot about your customer – who they are, their company’s short-term or long-term goals, timelines for finding solutions to problems, and areas they would like to streamline or improve upon.

Sometimes, regardless of how much you know about a sales prospect, or how much trust you’ve built with them, they’re just not a fit for your product or service. If that’s the case, either they will reject you, or you will reject them. C’est la vie.

Just because a customer isn’t the right fit for what you’re selling right now, doesn’t mean they won’t be a fit in the future. Enter, the long-con of the open-ended sales question.

Rather than saying a hard, let’s-never-talk-again goodbye, keep the doors of communication open. With all those open-ended sales questions you asked, you should have an idea of when you could follow up, and have a foot in the door for another opportunity because that first conversation is out of the way.

People prefer to buy from people they know, like, and trust, so stay connected. “No” now, might lead to “I need you” in the future.

Changing the way you speak is a learning curve, let alone the way you speak with customers. If it’s something you’re trying to improve, be patient. Try framing your sales qualifying questions differently and start thinking about the deeper meaning behind what you ask.

Keeping customer interview questions open-ended can lead to more comfortable conversations now, and even better connections to have in your back pocket in the future.

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

During the preparation of the countless number of proposals I worked on during my years in the agency trenches (and sadly we had no Proposify back in those dark ages), inevitably someone would raise the question, “Do you think we should include case studies?”.

As if it were a choice.

My strong belief is that you should ALWAYS include sales case studies with your proposals, especially when going after new leads who don’t know your experience, ability, or successes.

The exception to this rule might be when you’re doing up a quick proposal as a formality for a new project with an existing client. But be careful. It can be easy to assume existing clients already know everything you do and have done, but often they only know you in the context of the work you’ve done for them already.

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can do it. 

Proposals outline what you’re going to do for a client. Case studies prove that you can actually do it. 

No matter how many times you claim to have “extensive experience”, without a case study to back it up, those words can be meaningless, and risky, to a new prospect.

Businesses are often resistant to including proposal case studies because it’s more work to create them on top of everything else, especially when you’re in the time-sensitive throes of preparing a proposal.

The key is to stop seeing case studies as optional and instead view them as an essential selling tool; the tool that just might be the tipping point between you and competition.

Here at Proposify, we've seen a really good return from featuring case studies on our site:

Proposal case studies don’t have to be complicated; they just have to be convincing.

Here’s a simple guide to creating compelling case studies that close deals. You can expand on these to make your particular case studies more elaborate if you like, but as long as you have the basics, it should do the trick.

1. Develop sales case studies before you need them

I admit I have groaned at the thought of doing up case studies when we’re T-minus zero trying to get a proposal out the door. But the trick is to have them ready to go BEFORE you need them in a crisis.

Assign case study writing to your team as a proper internal project and start developing them between proposals.

It will be a lot easier if you’re regularly doing debriefs with clients after each project to see how things went and then following up a few months down the road to track results. This way you’ll already have source material to work with plus compelling stats that make your case studies stand out.

You can customize them to fit the particular need of each proposal once the time comes, but at least you won’t be running around trying to decide which projects to do, getting permission from clients, writing the copy, getting approval, hunting down images, and designing them all at the last minute.

2. Make them representative and recent

When deciding on which projects to turn into case studies, make sure they represent the range of your services. That way you have case studies ready to go that reflect all the types of projects you might be bidding on in a proposal.

Ideally, you have a couple of case studies for each service and main industry but if you can focus on having at least one good, results-driven case study for each area of your business offering then you’re covered.

Also, make sure each case study is fairly recent. Technology, markets, and industries change quickly, so you want to be sure you’re demonstrating that you’re relevant, leading edge, and in demand.

Depending on the industry and service two years, three tops is a good life cycle for a case study.

3. Get client permission

Once you have your list of projects you want to feature as case studies, the first thing you should do before actually going to work on them is to get permission from the client to feature their company.

Some clients don’t want their business challenges or practices talked about publicly for a variety of reasons. Issues related to liability, privacy, and competition can make clients a little shy of the spotlight.

Government clients can be hesitant about case studies, but sometimes they’ll work with you to omit sensitive details so you still get a solid case study that makes everyone happy.

For other clients, case studies can be a great way to promote their business. You can let them know the case studies will be featured on your website and blog in addition to being included in proposals.

Since you’re only going to feature projects that had a positive outcome, clients will be happy to be seen as “successes”. It makes them look smart for choosing the right solution, and they get to show off their good results.

4. Get a client testimonial

You can say all you want about how great your work was for Client X but a direct quote from Client X, about how awesome it was to work with your company or how their business improved as a result of your solution is GOLD.

Ask your client for a quote on the project you’re highlighting and make it as simple as possible for them respond. It’s helpful if you give them some direction, but you want to be careful that they don’t feel you’re putting words in their mouth. Sometimes a client will prefer to have you to write it for them, and then they tweak and approve it. You can offer that as an option to make it easier for them.

If you can, get a couple of quotes related to different aspects of the project that way you can mix and match depending on what you need for the proposal. You can make this easier by giving the client some framework for their testimonials by asking them questions like:

• What was it like working with the team at our agency? Did you find the process simple? Did you find people knowledgeable? Easy to work with? Flexible?
• What kind of benefits have you seen in your business since we did X project for your company?
• Would you work with us again? Why?

Here at Proposify, we book calls with our customers to get their feedback and we use this information as the basis for our proposal case studies. 

We like the direct contact with our customers and it’s sometimes an easier way to get information from them compared to waiting for a response to an email when they’re super busy. Plus it allows us to get quotes that sound like they’re from real humans as we use their owns words. 

We usually asks these five questions:

• What made you try Proposify?
• What was your ‘a-ha!’ moment to sign up for a paid account?
• Has Proposify improved your sales?
• Does using Proposify influence your close rate?
• Was there a situation where Proposify saved the day? Or helped you out?

We record the call so the content team can listen to it later and transform the conversation into a case study that we'll feature on our website and promote through social media. Check out some of our business case study examples on our site.

Obviously, you’ve picked this client because you already know these types of questions are going to prompt positives answers. Depending on how complete the answers are you may need to edit the testimonials a bit and if you do, be sure to send them back to the client for their approval.

5. Tell a story

When it comes to writing a case study, lead your reader on the journey of the project and keep it focused on the client. Don’t just say, “We built a new website for Bob’s Burgers because the other one was really out of date and not responsive.”

Tell a story that includes the following elements:

Background: Briefly introduce the company, what they do, their industry. It gives some context for the reader.  

The Challenge: Why did the client come to you? What problem were they looking to solve? What issues were they facing in their industry that made them reach out? Why did they choose your company to help them? Be careful that you don’t paint your client or their business in too negatively when describing their challenges.  

The Approach: What did your team do to address the problem? What was the process you went through to come up with that solution? Why did you decide that solution was the right one?

The Result: Explain the results your solution delivered to the client, whether anecdotally or even better with hard numbers if you have them. How it made life better for them, how it helped them achieve their goals, solved their challenge, 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. Results are everything.  

In fact, we put results front and centre by including them in our case study headlines.

I find breaking a case study down into these chunks makes it less daunting to prepare, giving you a clear framework to follow.

6. Keep the format simple

There are lots of different formats for case studies. I like my case studies to be concise (one page TOPS, including images), easy to skim, and easy to determine the result of the project.

You don’t have to literally use the subheads of background, challenge, approach and results but like blog post subheads, it makes the whole thing easier to read and they get right to the point.

Just like your proposal, the client is likely skimming everything but the pricing page so make it easy for them to get the important juicy bits you want to drive home.

7. Use beautiful images or video

Include images of your work in your case study and for the love of PNG, make sure they are high res and LOOK GOOD.

If the project is non-visual like strategy, design a sharp-looking infographic that demonstrates some aspect of the project, like the results or something related to the client’s business.

Where appropriate show before and after shots but again tread carefully in this area. While it can illustrate how far the company has come and the awesome work you did for them, you want to be sure the company is not made to look bad.

To make your testimonial even more powerful, include a video clip in your proposal of the client talking about the project. Online proposal software like, oh, I don’t know...Proposify?...lets you seamlessly add videos to your proposal. But just like images, make sure the video quality is good, the sound is clear, and the whole thing is professionally shot and edited.

8. Customize case studies to your proposal

The question often falls to “how many case studies should we include?”. I think three is plenty and you can always direct the reader to the portfolio/work/customers section of your website for more (you do have a portfolio section on your site, right?).

The case studies you include should correspond to the needs of your prospect for the particular proposal. Maybe it’s a client who had a similar challenge or who experienced benefits from a similar solution that you’re proposing.

Take the time to review each case study before including it in a proposal to find ways to tailor it to help demonstrate to your sales lead that you have experience solving their particular challenge and you know how to deliver.

For example, if your prospect is looking for a new website that’s responsive with an e-commerce solution and requires copywriting, don’t just send them a case study about how you built a kick-ass website. Make sure it demonstrates all those services.

9. Practice plain language

As with anything you write, be sure to follow the rules of plain language writing. Don’t use jargon, be concise, be straightforward, be positive, avoid the passive voice, and if you need to use technical terms or acronyms, include explanations. Don’t assume your client knows what CSS is.

Conclusion

Case studies are the best way to put the walk in the talk of your proposals. They can help build trust with a prospect with whom you don’t yet have a relationship.

They don’t have to be long, complicated, or with earth-shattering results for the biggest brands in the land. They just need to demonstrate that you can do what you say you do and when it comes right down to it, that’s all a client really wants to know.