Since businesses nowadays have gone entirely digital, it has become essential for marketers to pitch themselves in the market with groundbreaking proposals. They need modern and on-brand proposals that could streamline their sales process. Better Proposals covers you here.
Trusted by more than 8000 small businesses and freelancers, better proposals is a tool that guarantees you to get more deals with boosted sales using 200+ free templates. We got a chance to cover the success story of Better Proposals, and here we are sharing this with you.
The Beginning
My partner and I (Adam Hempenstall) used to run a digital agency, and a massive part of that was writing business proposals. To be precise, we would send 5-6 proposals per week. When that’s what your week looks like, you quickly find out that your monthly revenue will suffer if you do a bad job.
It would usually be a hit or miss type of deal with proposal writing, and it used to be a nightmare. Writing proposals is actually tough if you have to do it from scratch every time. It would be best if you made sure that your proposals were easy to read, informative, and engaging at the same time.
Being web developers and having spent lots of time on proposal creation, we decided to build our own internal tool that would help us write, send and track proposals. We had to do something because I just got sick of sending classic proposals out (in the form of PDFs) and having people either read them and not reply or open them up, look at the price and close it down. I wanted to be able to track what people were looking at so I could follow up accordingly.
Once we created the tool and started sending proposals through it, we had more and more people buy from us and ask if they could get access to the software in which we created the proposals.
We were smart about it and kept it to ourselves, but as time went on, I thought maybe we could actually put this idea into reality. And that’s how Better Proposals was born.
We created a landing page and some ads just to see what happens. In 24 hours, we got more leads than in the previous 12 months. That was the turning point for us. We slowly transitioned from turning off the agency and becoming a software company.
Luckily, we haven’t faced a lot of challenges. I would single out the only thing is not hiring more people sooner. We grew drastically as a team in the past year, but realistically, we should have probably hired more people earlier on as it would support our business growth even more.
Building a Better Workplace
If I can be completely honest, money aside, seeing my employees grow and learn is the best thing. I’m not going to name names, but seeing people come out of their shells and become leaders who run departments on their own while dealing with things like a literal war never ceases to amaze me.
Like the other day, we had a Zoom call with every employee, and I saw how an idea I had years ago turned into a company with 30+ employees. That was unreal. I love moments like those because it shows me how far we’ve come.
Building Better Teams
Sabrina and I are co-founders. I’m a CEO, and she’s a CTO if you’re looking for official titles. That hasn’t changed from day one.
Our first hire was Trixie. We hired her as a customer support agent because we got overwhelmed with the number of questions we were getting, and we quickly realized we needed someone to take care of that if we wanted to get any other work done. She is no longer with us, but she definitely helped us out a lot in those early days.
After that, we hired Zakk and Nic for the design team. They are still with us, and I’m so grateful we’ve been able to grow our team over the years.
Now we have a design team, a marketing team, a sales team, and a customer success team. Every team has a leader, and we make sure to regularly check in with everyone and listen to everyone’s ideas.
Learning With Lessons & Experiences
I never wanted to rely on any outside investment. Everything we did, we did on our own. The biggest lesson in that was to work hard. If you want to build anything of value, it’s not something you can skip.
If you’re not a hard worker, you won’t get far no matter your circumstances. If I could add another thing, it would be to learn how to say no.
The quicker you manage that, the better.
Building Better Resources
We create a lot of helpful content on our blog that targets freelancers, sales professionals, small businesses, agencies, etc. I’ve also written a number of books, which you can read for free.
Another thing I would like to highlight is our document templates. Whether you’re looking for business proposals, quotes or contracts, we have amazing templates that are ready to be customized and sent.
There really isn’t a lot of work that needs to be done – once you select the right Proposal, you can literally change a few sentences, and you’re ready to go.
Every year we also create a big proposal report that analyzes the previous year and all the successfully signed and paid proposals our customers created in order to show the new trends and how to best structure your business documents.
These reports cover everything from how many sections your proposals should have to the structure of your pricing section and more.
Our Secret Recipe to Success
I don’t think there is one universal way to succeed. However, I have a few tips.
Don’t get stuck in your ways and think that you need to do everything on your own. You will drown yourself in work that way. Learn to delegate early on and hire the right people to help you out.
I wish we had hired one designer and one developer sooner. We were great at these areas from day one, but we could have used some help to get things done faster.
Furthermore, invest time and money in content marketing. It won’t provide you with overnight success, but the earlier you start, you’ll see better results. I wish I had done more content back when we started. If we had started earlier, perhaps we would have made a more solid foundation in terms of content.
My last piece of advice is to start acting like a CEO sooner. Have a plan to grow from where you’re to where you want to be sooner, make sure you have a dedicated path to follow and don’t get carried away with anything.
Also, be confident about your choices in order for everyone else to believe in you. As the company CEO, your people look up to you. Every decision you make needs to be firm, and you need to be certain that you are making the right choice. Not everyone has the right answers all the time, and that’s okay — just make sure to believe in the choices you make, and others will follow you.
Building a Better Future in Sales
In the future, I would like to expand our solution to cover the majority of the sales process, from securing a lead to closing the deal. We have a number of loyal customers who like the way we operate and the benefits of our solution, so it makes sense to offer them more than proposal creation.
Expanding our service is something I’m very passionate about, and I want to widen up Better Proposals to other parts of the sales process.
Better Proposals Look Forward to Contributing & Improve
In the past, we used our Facebook group quite a lot and what we would do was – announce a feature about 3 weeks before we launched it. For those 3 weeks, we would take their feedback and make any last-minute changes that made sense.
Then we would launch the feature but only announce it in the Facebook group, and we got to see how our customers were using it and whether they found it helpful before announcing it to everyone else.
Even now, when we launch a new feature, we like to reward our paying customers by giving them access to it first, and it’s a great way to nurture the relationship with your customers.
Social Champ wishes the entire team of Better Proposals huge good luck and a successful journey ahead.
