Actionable Ways to Become a Better Proposal Coordinator with Better Proposals

How much time do you invest in creating high-quality business proposals that help you secure new deals? The more time and effort you put into your proposals, the easier the whole process becomes. 

Luckily for you, we have amazing resources that can help and support you every step of the way. Here is a detailed actionable guide on how to become a great proposal coordinator with Better Proposals. 

First of all, you need to familiarize yourself with the product. Once you learn about all the capabilities of Better Proposals and ways you can automate your proposal process, you’ll become even more proficient in your sales efforts. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Better Proposals, check out our proposal university. 

What does a proposal coordinator do?

Proposal coordinators have a special role in the proposal process. They help create the proposals, talk to clients in order to customize the offer and provide administrative support to others included in the proposal process. 

As most of you already know, the proposal process doesn't start with the proposal itself, but with a client meeting. That’s when you figure out if you want to work with the other person and whether you and your company are a good fit for each other and the job. 

Communicating with clients and conducting discovery calls is an extremely important part of your proposal process and you want to leave it to a reliable and experienced person. It needs to be someone that has the technical knowledge and can understand your client’s demands and help them achieve their goals. 

If you immediately see that your potential client has unrealistic goals or doesn't understand the process to help them achieve their goals, you can resolve everything right there. 

This way, everyone will be on the same page before you send out your proposal, which will lead to a higher proposal acceptance rate and ultimately, you getting more deals and getting paid quicker. 

In that sense, a proposal coordinator already does a lot of leg work before they start creating business proposals. 

Their other duties are: 

• Making sure proposals get reviewed
• Taking care of the follow-up process
• Handing over signed proposals to the project managers
• Overseeing the proposal team
• Working with other teams in order to create up-to-date and engaging proposals
• Coordinating market research
• Providing updates to their managers
• And any other processes that need their attention

What are the key skills of a proposal coordinator?

Usually, a proposal coordinator is someone who has experience in creating and sending high-quality proposals and winning deals. 

The needed skills and experiences for a proposal coordinator are:

• Strong leadership, communication, time management and organizational skills
• A degree in business, sales or marketing
• Experience in RFP and proposal processes
• Copywriting, research and design experience
• Editing and rewriting proposals
• Problem-solving and meeting deadlines 

In most scenarios, a proposal coordinator is someone who rose through the ranks of your company. They need to have a lot of knowledge of your offer and a strong experience in sales. 

If your proposal coordinator isn’t familiar with your solution, they won’t be able to create personalized proposals. What your clients want out of your proposals are the benefits. How will your solution help them sell more, increase their revenue, grow their business and more? 

Moreover, it’s important for your proposal coordinator to understand the needs of your individual clients and how to present them with a personalized offer.  

How to become a better proposal coordinator

If you’re interested in becoming a great proposal coordinator, you’ll enjoy our actionable guide that will help you better understand the proposal process. We cover a lot of proposal processes starting with creating one, the follow-up process, speeding up the agreement and payment process and more. 

The most important step is choosing the right proposal software. With Better Proposals, you’ll not only speed up the proposal process while increasing the quality of your proposals but also make sure you get paid quicker. 

As you can see in our proposal report, which we update every year, on average it will take you 6 hours to get paid if you send your proposal through our software. 

Let’s look at other benefits of using Better Proposals for all your proposal needs. 

Use proposal templates 

We offer a large library of proposal templates you can easily customize to your needs. This means that you’ll no longer have to create proposals from scratch. All our templates come with pre-written chapters that your proposals need to have to perform better. 

Since our research shows that proposals with the best conversions have 6 sections, that’s how we structure our templates. All the pre-written texts and images will help you quickly personalize your proposal. 

Once you create a piece of content you would like to use again, you can quickly save it to your content library and use it again. That means that you’ll no longer have to copy-paste huge chunks of text from your knowledge hub. 

Our editor is really easy to use and doesn’t require any design experience. You can quickly add or delete blocks and personalize your content whether it's text, pictures, videos, pricing table, or more. 

By following our proposal templates, you’ll quickly create a branded and sleek document. 

Speed up the approval process

A lot of the time, you send your proposal and wait for a response for what feels like forever. With Better Proposals, you can speed up the approval process. Not only are our proposal templates created based on industry standards, meaning your clients will go through them easily, they are also easy to forward. 

We purposely make our proposals web-based and landscape designed in order to remove the need for printing them out. Some of our competitors offer proposals that are vertical and full of text, which might incentivize the person reading them to print them out.

Here’s why that’s a big mistake. 

If you encourage your clients to print out your proposals, not only will the approval process last forever, but you’ll actively decrease your conversion chances by 88%. 

Speed up your agreement process by explaining to your clients that they can sign your proposal digitally and pay the first fee with our payment integration. 

Furthermore, our proposals can be changed after you send them out, up until the moment they get signed. That means that you won’t have to create new proposals once you receive client feedback. 

Combine proposals with digital signatures and payments

All our proposal templates come with a digital signature option as well as payment integrations. 

Since our proposals are web-based, it means that your clients don’t have to print out the document but can sign it with a digital signature field that turns your typed-in name into a legally binding signature. 

Moreover, your clients can also pay your first fee through your proposal. We offer payment integrations with PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless, which can cover 99% of your potential clients. 

These two integrations will make your proposal really stand out from your competitors. Not only is it important to stand out and speed up your proposal process, but you also need to think of your clients. 

They will love receiving a proposal that doesn’t require them to jump through hoops in order to agree to it. 

Use proposal analytics

If you like Google Analytics, you’ll love our proposal analytics. They can help inform your follow-up process. 

We’ll send you a notification every time someone opens your proposal, forwards it, signs it or pays. Our analytics also keep track of your clients while they're reading your proposal.

By knowing how much time they spent on each of the sections, you’ll know how to approach them in the follow-up process. If they opened your proposal and went straight to the pricing section, you’ll know that they’re looking for a cheap alternative and there is nothing you can do. 

However, if they spend a lot of time looking at your timescales, you can follow up with an email explaining your process in more detail. Make sure to also include a case study that shows how you helped a previous client achieve ROI. 

The more information you have on a client, the easier it will be for you to construct your follow-up strategy. 

Integrate your proposals with your sales stack

In order to further streamline your sales process, you can integrate Better Proposals with your sales, marketing, and customer support tools. We offer more than 40 native integrations and all other tools can be integrated through Zapier or API. 

We suggest you implement a live chat of your choosing that would allow your clients to leave comments as they read your proposal. This could help you speed up the approval process since you can quickly answer any client comments. 

The easier you make it for your clients to reach out, the more incentivized they will be to do so. 

Use Proposal AI

We’re here for you every step of the way. Even once you enter the finishing stages of your proposal creation. That’s when our Proposal AI kicks in and compares your proposal to other successfully signed proposals in your industry. 

We’ll give you actionable tips to help you better your proposal. Some of the most common tips we give are:

• How to name your pricing section
• How to customize your domain name
• When to talk about yourself

When it comes to naming your pricing section, we would suggest staying away from names like price and expenses because it cheapens your proposal and makes it seem like just a regular invoice. 

Try using names like ROI or Investment since they suggest a long-term relationship and create far more positive emotions. 

If you want to fully customize your business proposal, we suggest you create a custom domain, which you can do in your profile settings. Take advantage of this option and send out branded proposals that will help you stand out from all the competition. 

Conclusion

Being a proposal coordinator doesn’t have to be too big of a challenge, especially if you rely on the right tools. With Better Proposals, you can rest assured knowing that we’re with you every step of the way. 

From proposal creation to the follow-up process and building a relationship with your client, we’ll help inform every step with relevant data and insider information. Now that you know the importance of proposal coordinators and how their job could be made easier and quicker, hop on to our sign-up page and start your free 2-week trial. 

FAQs

How should I start my business proposal? 

Start your proposal by talking about the benefits you can bring to your client. We know it’s tempting to talk about you and your company but put yourself in your clients’ shoes. They want to be won over by the introduction and the best way to do so is by showing how working with you can be beneficial for them. 

Once you finish your introduction, you can write about your features and even introduce your team, or share your brand vision. 

What should I write in my proposal email?

Since your proposal is filled with information, there is no need to write a long email. All you have to do is send your link and ask the client to get back to you once they read it or if they have any questions. 

Should I know my client’s budget before I send the proposal?

Yes! You should find out your client’s budget in the discovery meeting. If you’re not sure how to approach the subject, read our tips in this helpful blog. 

When should I send my proposal?

The best time to send your proposal is as soon as possible. Send your proposal while you’re still fresh in your client’s mind. The only exception to this rule is the day of the week. Avoid sending your proposals on a Friday, because it may slow down the agreement process. 

How will my proposal look on a smartphone?

Our proposals are mobile optimized and look amazing both on laptops and phones. 

Do Better Proposals offer a free trial? 

Yes, of course! We offer a free 2-week trial which lets you test out our solution and find out why we love it so much.