Proposal Breakdown: Being Their Friend vs Being Professional

Wedding photography is super personal. How do you keep your business processes in order while still maintaining that personal relationship?

You're not dealing with businesses who expect contracts, proposals, agreements and deals in place. You're dealing with a secretary and her engineer future husband or an accountant and his cake shop owner fiancee.

Things can get tricky when it seems like it should all be buddy buddy but to you, it's a sale. Here's how Amanda keeps things tight while impressing her clients.

Proposal Format

She's a Better Proposals customer so she has used Better Proposals to send a web based professional looking proposal to her potential client.

Cover

Her cover is absolutely gorgeous. She's a photographer so she's used a really nice photo where the subject is on the right and the leaves are blurred on the left (where the text is). This is awesome and really is probably one of the best proposal covers I've seen actually.

No Introduction but...

She hasn't included an introduction in her proposal which is definitely not good but this is softened somewhat by the fact that she does write one, it's just in the email she sends the proposal with. My suggestion is she keeps the email super simple and adds a page called 'Your big day' or something friendly, then put the intro there. Otherwise when the proposal starts getting forwarded around, the email she sent is lost and the personal touch is gone. The photos and the video of Amanda in action are brilliant and really set her apart from what most photographers are sending.

The Form

So she has this form which would usually be something she fills in during the consultation. It has things like the date, the venue, the times she's needed from, the package and various other things. The problem is, she's included this as a page on the proposal and essentially none of it is ever going to be filled in because she's never had the consultation yet. My suggestion is to get rid of the items that will never be filled in like the package and amounts paid then use the rest as tick boxes as to the shots she's going to get. This is quality information but presented in slightly the wrong way.

Examples

These are excellent. She's chosen 7 or 8 really good photos and attached a testimonial under each one. The photos she has chosen show a range of her photography ability. My only issue with the testimonials is some of them are a little too long. My advice is to take the sound bytes from these.

Packages

She's got her Bronze, Silver and Gold packages which are great. It clearly details what you get on each one. It might be worth upgrading the names of these so it's Gold, Diamond and Platinum. Makes them seems a little more prestigious even though they're exactly the same.

Contract

It's absolutely brilliant that she has a contract and she gets her clients to sign it. My only piece of feedback on this is to perhaps call it Terms and Conditions and put it as the last page then create a new page called 'Next Steps'. From there you can tell your client if they want to go ahead, choose the package using the Digital Signature box and that she'll reserve their date once they sign (or whatever she does). I do love that she's got her 3 packages and has used the options feature in the Digital Signature box to make her clients choose the package they want when signing. Not enough people do this in my opinion.

Conclusion

I would imagine this is twice as good, if not more, than 99% of photographers. It makes her stand out massively among her competition. Getting the intro in on the first page would be a great idea and turning the form into a list of shots they'll get afterwards maybe calling it 'Your Memories' or something perhaps. Really really great proposal.

If you want to get your proposal reviewed just send it through to adam [at] betterproposals [dot eye oh ] and I'll get yours in the queue.

Don't worry, we block out any details you want hidden like costs and company names :-)