5 Sales Documents your Team Needs to Close More Business

If you’re looking for a way to supercharge your sales process, you’ll need to create a number of sales documents. It may feel like there have never been so many competitors for your audience to choose from, but if you know how to stand out, this won’t be a big problem for your company.

With that being said, your sales process needs to be developed and shaped based on the current market and customer expectations. 

The customers are expecting to be spoiled and want you to go the extra mile to win them over. That’s why you need to have a certain number of sales documents, based on your industry and business model.

What is a sales document?

Sales documents are information sources that guide your sales process. They aid your sales pipeline and help you engage with potential customers at different stages of the sales process in order to win more deals. 

The importance of sales documents

Documents like these are essential because they showcase your products and services to interested buyers. Since different companies will use your solution in different ways, you need to make sure every sales document is personalized for the end reader.

It goes without saying that your sales documents need to be carefully created. Make sure that both the marketing and the sales team work on these documents. 

Moreover, once you create a sales document, make sure it looks good on a mobile device as well as on a desktop. That way you'll provide a better customer experience.

Whether you're using sales document templates or creating your documents from scratch, make sure that all of them are true to the brand. Make sure that all your documents have logos, follow your colour palette, and use the same typography.

Types of sales documents 

While the variety of your sales documents will depend on your industry, we’re sure all sales teams will have the need for these five documents - business proposals, case studies, sales decks, invoices, and contracts. 

These are the essentials for winning new deals and all sales professionals should be able to create such documents.

Let’s take a closer look at those documents and what makes them so important in your sales process. 

1. Business proposals

Business proposals are one of the first sales documents that your sales team will send to your clients. They can serve as a vehicle for making a good first impression. In order to win a new deal, you’ll have to have a great offer and a great proposal. 

All your proposals need to be well-written, well-researched, and look professional. After all, we're talking about documents created with the sole purpose of persuading your clients to work with you. 

If all of this feels like information overload, don't worry. We have a great guide for creating proposals written in plain English. It's a deep dive into the art of creating a winning proposal in no time.

In order to start the relationship with your clients on a good foot, you’ll have to have a fruitful discovery session before you start working on your proposal. That is when you find out all the necessary information that will help you shape your offer. 

During this meeting or call, your sales rep should find out the client's budget, why they chose your company and whether they have any special segments they would like you to include in the sales proposal.

Your proposal should explain why you’re the best person for the job, which can be done by listening to your clients closely. It’s essential to know when to talk about your expertise and when to listen. 

With the number of proposals your potential customer surely receives on a regular basis, our best tip for standing out is to use their own words to describe the problem they’re facing and don’t go assigning any blame. 

You’re brought on to help them solve a problem and the best way to do that is by showing your understanding of the situation.

Only after you show your customer that you’re here to help can you showcase your previous work and talk about what differentiates you from the competition. That way your sales document will help you move prospects down your sales funnel.

How to structure your proposals

The structure of your proposal should include:

• Executive summary
• Description of your process
• Timescales
• Social proof
• Pricing
• Guarantee
• CTA
• Terms and conditions

Our library of proposal templates will help you create a well-designed, professional-looking proposal with a high chance of converting. All of our sales document templates come with a prewritten structure, meaning you won't have to worry about forgetting a step.

As you write your document, there is a lot of helpful material you can refer to.

Once you finish it, our proposal AI will kick in and compare it to other successfully signed proposals and give you tips on how to improve it. 

Helpful proposal features

An integration your clients will especially love is live chat which gives them a quick way to provide feedback. 

As you can see in our proposal report that analyzes $1,480,000,000 of closed deals, integrating live chat helped conversion by 18.2%. 

Furthermore, our proposals help you speed up your sales process with an integrated signature option. This means that your client can use our digital signature to agree to your terms and by doing so, avoid the need for printing out your sales proposals.

The digital signature is legally binding and can be traced by time stamps and the signer's IP address.

You can also integrate a payment option and have your client pay by using one of these 3 gateways: PayPal, Stripe or GoCardless. This option helps you get paid quicker as it speeds up your sales process.

2. Case studies

Case studies are the best way to prove you’re the right person for the job. They are great for proving your past successes and providing your clients with a third-person perspective on your expertise. 

Research shows that 13% of marketers use case studies as a primary form of media within their content strategy. Since they take a lot more time to produce, in comparison to blogs they are not used as often. However, they definitely pack a punch. 

Case studies are essential in earning the trust of your audience. They are more than just numbers and infographics, they also evoke emotional responses since helping people grow their businesses has more than financial benefits. 

How to write a case study

Firstly, determine your goals - do you simply want to distribute more leads or do you want to expand to a different market by showcasing your effort to be more sustainable? Think about how you want to better your sales process.

Case studies are amazing for winning over new customers, but can also serve as an in-house document for informing your employees about a new direction you’re taking your company in - for example, if you're starting to use a new tool.

Once you decide on the goals, think about the format of your case study. We suggest relying on storytelling to tell the story of how you helped a client increase their revenue and what subsequent benefits this had. 

In the past, we made case studies in the form of interviews. While infographics can be effective in showing growth, it’s important to contextualize those stories and show real-world implications. This will make your sales document more valuable.

So once you show how quickly your customers experienced ROI, explain how they got to spend more time on different avenues of their business, making them better at a specific skill. Don't forget to do research.

Show how they managed to grow their team in real-time. Remember to include an emotional side to your storytelling. Your prospects will want to hear the details directly related to business growth.

3. Contracts

Contracts can be harrowing to create because you want to include as many details and unforeseen circumstances as possible in order to secure your revenue. 

Luckily, Better Proposals offer a variety of contract templates you’ll easily customize to your needs. All the contracts include a digital signature option, making them legally binding documents and letting you sleep easier at night. 

If you're wondering how could we possibly know whether our signatures are legally binding, we have a wild story for you. It includes going to court, almost getting run over by a former client and definitive proof that signatures collected through Better Proposals will be upheld by the court system.

There are a few types of contracts. Most of them are fixed-price contracts, however, there could always be unexpected costs. That's why you need to include a paragraph on those situations. 

Other types of contracts include: 

• Cost-reimbursement contract
• Cost-plus contract
• Unit price contract
• Bilateral contract
• Adhesion contract

4. Sales decks

A sales deck is a presentation that showcases your products and services to potential customers. It’s used as an addition to a sales pitch. The main objective of your sales deck needs to be to showcase the problem you want to solve. 

Make sure to start by showing the state of things before your solution was implemented and then transition into how your product or service helped make things better. You need to visually explain to your customers how you’ll help them overcome an issue they’ve been facing. 

The trick is choosing the right information and keeping the sales deck easy to consume, without overloading it with unnecessary information. Make sure to rely more on visual content than long blocks of text. 

Don't think that you can create one sales deck and call it a day. It should be regularly checked, reviewed and approved. Make sure that all the data is up to date and that your potential client has easy access to any additional materials.

Since your goal is to engage your audience, make sure the sales decks are short, interesting, and offer new information.

Don’t make them too product/service-driven, but rather focus on telling your potential customers a unique story of how you can help them in their day-to-day lives. 

5. Invoices

An invoice is a final sales document you’ll send to your clients. It includes the cost of the product or service and serves as a legal record for the terms of payment. They have a few different purposes:

• Payment tracking
• Legal protection
• Maintaining records
• Tax purposes
• Keeping track of business

All your invoices need to include the following:

• Your logo
• Invoice number
• Date
• Name of the seller and the buyer
• Cost per unit
• The overall cost that needs to be paid
• Tax regulations and rates
• Any other terms and conditions

The reason so many companies and freelancers are already using Better Proposals is that you can ask for payment directly from our proposals, instead of having to create and manage your invoices manually. 

This takes the pressure off your sales reps and speeds up your sales process when working on tasks such as sharing PDF documents with clients.

As you can see, our current customers get paid on average 6 hours after they send their proposal.

Conclusion

Having a good sales strategy means creating engaging sales documents that will help your company win more business. When you share these documents with your clients or internal employees, it's recommended to use an email address like yourname@yourbrand.com rather than yourname@gmail.com. There are many business email hosting providers available to offer such email addresses.

However, you don't want the creation of them to slow down your sales process.

That's why we recommend using Better Proposals and creating your sales proposal and other documents in our editor.

Make your sales team more efficient by providing them with a tool that will help them create sales materials your customers will actually want to read.

If you haven’t yet, sign up for a free two-week trial that will make you fall in love with our service.