What is Proposal Management Software and How Does it Help Sales?
08/22/2023
6 min read
How to empower sales with proposal management software
Creating business proposals that contain valuable and personalized content requires people to collaborate and exchange ideas. Successful collaboration—interfacing productively with colleagues and customers—requires a cooperative spirit and mutual respect to achieve goals in an efficient and timely manner.
Online workplace collaboration tools provide a secure, modern, and cost-effective way to make teamwork easier. Sending business proposals that contain irrelevant, incorrect, or outdated information is a waste of the recipients’ time. And taking too long to personalize the content you send is a waste of your own time.
What is proposal management software?
In simple terms, proposal management software is a technology-based program that allows for real-time creating, organizing, and archiving business proposal contracts. This software allows companies to keep contracts current, collaborate in real time, track progress, and identify potential roadblocks that could prevent proposal finalization.
Why businesses benefit from this software
Without proposal management software in place, your employees could spend hours preparing for a single proposal. From gathering assets to waiting on information and compiling everything together, the process is time-consuming for each individual proposal. And, once the proposal is finished, the hours start over again for the next proposal.
By implementing a proposal automation system like Conga Composer, the proposal process can be streamlined and more efficient. Your sales force can create templated proposals, share documents across many platforms, and collaborate with employees and clients anywhere in the world. This shortens the time it takes to create and deliver customized proposals and helps your business be more efficient.
What should a proposal include?
A successful proposal should include a clear project overview, scope, objectives, terms and conditions, appendices, methodology, timeline including key milestones, and cost estimate that breaks down the costs associated with the project, including labor, materials, software, travel, and any other relevant expenses. It must outline the value proposition, address client needs, and demonstrate the solution's benefits. It’s also important to highlight team expertise, quality assurance, and post-delivery support.
A comprehensive proposal that covers these key components will help ensure that the proposal effectively communicates your solution, addresses the client's needs, and increases the likelihood of a successful partnership.
What are the key features of the best proposal management software?
Your proposal management software should take care of all of this and more. It should offer a range of powerful features designed to streamline the proposal creation process, enhance collaboration, and improve overall efficiency. Key features include:
- Proposal templates and template library: A variety of professionally designed proposal templates that cater to different industries and purposes and a robust collection of customizable proposal templates that cover various industries and use cases, saving time and ensuring consistency
- Content library: Centralized storage for frequently used content such as case studies, testimonials, product descriptions, and legal disclaimers, enabling easy access
- Collaboration tools: Collaborative editing, commenting, and version control to facilitate teamwork among multiple users and stakeholders
- Integration capabilities: Seamless integration with popular tools like CRM systems, project management software, and data sources to pull in accurate information
- Customization: The ability to tailor proposals to specific clients, industries, or projects by modifying content, branding elements, and formatting
- Content approval workflow: An organized workflow that ensures content undergoes appropriate reviews and approvals before being included in final proposals
- Document assembly: Automated assembly of proposals by pulling in relevant content and data, minimizing manual work and reducing errors
- Dynamic content insertion: Integration with data sources to insert dynamic, up-to-date information like pricing, customer details, or product specs into proposals
- Analytics and reporting: Tracking proposal metrics, such as open rates, engagement, and conversion rates, to measure the effectiveness of different elements
- Proposal tracking: Monitoring the status of proposals in real-time, allowing users to see when a proposal has been opened, read, or shared
- Electronic signatures: Integration with eSignature platforms to enable clients to sign and approve proposals digitally
- Security and compliance: Strong security measures, data encryption, and compliance with relevant data protection regulations to ensure the confidentiality of sensitive information
- Search and tagging: Efficient search functionality and tagging options to quickly locate and categorize content within the software
- Feedback and review: Tools for clients to provide feedback on proposals, improving client-provider communication
- Automation: Workflow automation for tasks such as sending follow-up emails, reminders, and notifications
- Scalability: The ability to handle a growing number of proposals, users, and clients as your business expands
Conga Composer + Conga Sign
Ensure that your documents have streamlined messaging through logic-based rules for including or excluding content during the creation process with Conga Composer, an innovative proposal management software. Build professional, uniform business proposals, make collaboration easy, impress your customers, and experience the huge efficiency gains that other Conga customers are experiencing.
Benefits include:
- Intuitive interface: Proposal tools are arranged across the user dashboard.
- Document presentation: Control the consistency of your brand while maintaining your messaging. Make it easy to ensure everyone is sending professional proposals and documents.
- Data accuracy. Get the correct data into the right template. Merge data directly from Salesforce, or other external sources, into your documents to eliminate copy-and-paste errors.
- Content assets: Companies can create a library of standard assets that each employee can use to make proposals faster while still individualizing each one by client.
- Document tracking: Monitor tracking information such as when the document is opened, how long each page was viewed, and which recipients are spending the most time viewing the document.
+ Conga Sign
Save time by integrating with Conga Sign. Conga Sign is our secure, next-generation eSignature solution built to use via API, web application, or with your Salesforce instance.
- Access a broad range of identity verification and authentication options to ensure signers are who they claim to be before providing access to documents.
- Embed signatures into any website, portal, or application for a more seamless customer experience.
- Save time with an easy-to-execute and secure solution on any device, initiated from Salesforce.
A five-minute install of Conga Sign helps you realize a faster speed to value. It’s easy to use and integrate with Conga Composer and other systems you already use every day. Get the required signatures you need for your proposals wherever and whenever you need them.
Conga will enable you to create, share, track, sign, and store your sales documents—all from a single platform.
With Conga Composer + Conga Sign, you can empower sales reps to create personalized documents using pre-built templates, content from marketing/legal, and data from key systems of record (CRM, CPQ, etc.). Better yet, you can take advantage of the best of what the web offers by including images, videos, GIFs, dynamic forms, and more. Add custom timelines, determine the scope, and make client-specific recommendations in one convenient place.
Distribution
Share your interactive, online sales proposal with a professionally branded and personalized email. When your prospective client opens the proposal, you receive instant notification via text message so you can follow up at the appropriate time. The instant notification also prevents email delays and back-and-forth communication that can delay a final proposal.
Automation
Save hours spent on menial tasks, manual data entry, and starting each proposal from scratch by using Conga. Automate many of the business processes associated with managing online sales proposals such as sending an email, creating a task, updating fields in your CRM, or subscribing to key deal alerts. You can also house your signed proposals and agreements in Conga’s secure, central repository.
Collaboration
Working with document platforms like Microsoft Word or Google Docs limits your collaborative ability, especially if prospective clients don’t have access to your program. By choosing Conga for your sales proposal software, employees and clients can all easily access documents from anywhere, make changes in real time, and keep proposals moving forward with minimal delay.
Integration
Conga Composer works with all other Conga products, allowing for seamless integration of proposals across all platforms. You can easily get up-to-date pricing information from one system, view client information from another system, and track the entire proposal from start to finish with a proposal management system.
Protection
Conga stores all your documents and proposals in a secure cloud location. This means that all with approved access can work, no matter where they are, and you can trust that your information is secure and protected.
See Conga Composer in action
Discover how Conga helps other businesses streamline their proposal automation systems and make the entire process more efficient.
Conga Composer gives you the opportunity to use pre-built templates to create proposals from any CRM system in an online format. Create polished content that is representative of your brand that prospects review in real time, on any device, anywhere. This proposal management software is perfect for:
- Sales reps
- Marketing managers
- Other sales operations professionals
With Conga, the sales process automation has never been simpler. Conga allows you to easily create, share, sign, store, and track sales proposals on any device. To learn more about how you can deliver professional, branded, interactive sales proposals that will help you stand out from the competition and close deals faster, get a demo of our proposal and signature automation solutions today.
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