4 Tips for Creating Signature-Grabbing Proposals
To accelerate your sales cycle and close more deals, you’ll need to create professional proposals that present information in a clear, aesthetically pleasing way.
The four ingredients to create a signature grabbing, scalable sales proposals are a custom design, accurate quotes, embedded payments, and eSignature functionality.
Effective sales proposals are more likely to be signed when these features are included because they display your product/service through the lens of a designer, and make it easy for the recipient to complete the transaction directly in your proposal.
1. Customize Your Proposal Design
As a salesperson, your job isn’t to meticulously design every single document your organization uses. Your job is to identify decision-makers, get deals signed, and meet revenue quotas.
But just because you’re focused on the green, doesn’t mean you can’t add some color to conversations with the creatives at your company and close more deals in the process.
Balance
Images in your design carry visual weight. To keep things balanced, think of your document as a playground and your design as a seesaw. If one side of the seesaw is too heavy, it’ll pull the reader’s eye directly to that heavy part, and throw your design off balance.
Emphasis
Grab your client’s attention the second they open your document by drawing emphasis to the most important parts of your proposal. This principle is pretty self-explanatory. In fact, it’s something you’ve probably used before in the form of bold text, underlined headings, or italicized quotes.
Scale
Scale is the sizing of elements. It’s a simple and effective way to draw greater attention to select images and text. It’s why headlines in newspapers appear in larger fonts. Something to keep in mind when creating your next contract is that the larger the image or text, the stronger the message.
Get it signed every time
When you incorporate the design principles of balance, emphasis, and scale you can build professional business proposals that get signed every time. Take your sales proposal a step further by embedding videos and images that speak directly to prospects and encourage them to sign even more.
2. Create Error-Free Quotes
Once you’ve captured your customer’s attention with stunning design, you’ll need the meat of your proposal to be just as impressive.
Custom pricing tables with optional items and editable quantities are easy for you to create, and make it even easier for your customers to choose the perfect price for their budget.
Eliminate any room for error and let the pricing tables do the heavy lifting. Once you fill out the required fields, they’ll automatically calculate taxes, discounts, and profit margins with complete accuracy.
When you propose a deal with complete transparency and ensure your customers have a thorough understanding of their pricing options, you’re more likely to gain their trust and their signature.
3. Add In-Document Payments
When you embed payments into your templates, you’ll not only provide a high-quality buying experience for your customers, you’ll also speed up the sales process and save a ton of time building and sharing your successful sales proposal.
Give your customers the ability to pay in seconds without ever having to leave your proposal. With a simple checkout experience they can trust, you’re sure to increase your close rate. Customers can sign, seal, and deliver your proposal through PayPal or their preferred payment gateway, like Stripe ACH, PayPal, Square, and more.
4. Digitize the Dotted Line
The days of endless follow-ups to your customers are long gone. Streamline operations with eSignature software and receive legally-binding, ESIGN, and UETA compliant signatures from your customers in seconds.
Provide enterprise-level security, even for your small business, by sending an electronic certificate with every signed document and protect your PDFs with access codes. You can even extend the value of your CRM software by integrating it with eSignatures.
Ready to Propose?
When you take the right steps towards creating a winning proposal, you’ll receive signatures faster than you can say “virtual close”. Upgrade your proposal look when you include the four basic features above and provide your customer base with the key benefits of professional design, accurate pricing, a check-out experience they won’t need help with, and of course, a user-friendly eSignature software.
Get Started with Your Free Proposal Template →
About the author
Emily Roberts is a Content Associate at PandaDoc. If she's not busy creating content in the office, she’s getting creative in the kitchen to the sound of her favorite true-crime podcast.
Did you know Close has a PandaDoc integration? Monitor the progress of your proposals, contracts or quotes right from your Close account! Haven't tried Close yet? It's time! Try it free for 14 days!
