SHOWCASE CASE STUDY
Our largest one-time deal in the company's history happened in 2022. That program was written in Better Proposals. I think that says a lot.
Industry
Solution
Company Size
Sales
Proposals / Contracts
1 - 50 employees
A forward-thinking and innovative sales optimization firm, EDS Strategy LLC’s use of Better Proposals has been a key factor as they’ve grown, secured high ticket deals with large international brands and minimized client churn.
Founded in 2017, EDS Strategy is an end-to-end sales optimization firm specializing in in store product demonstrations, merchandising visits sales, development and sales training programs.
They are leveraging their ‘Educate, Demonstrate, Sell®’ approach and entering the outsourced SDR space as another way to optimize sales for their clients.
As a demo company, EDS Strategy takes a unique approach. It’s a full-stack solution for brands in the CPG space, especially for the natural and organic market.
Like many businesses looking to move to Better Proposals, EDS Strategy was stuck with using old-fashioned, low-fi formats for their proposals and suffering the associated limitations.
“In Word or Apple Pages, it's just hard to format and scalability is limited,” EDS Strategy founder and CEO, Jesse de Agustin.“And a proposal is really vital. It has to look good. It has to be something that someone can look at easily, even on their phone. Ours weren’t doing that.”
Unlike static formats (including PDF), Better Proposals is fully web-based and 100% responsive. This means documents automatically reformat to ‘wow’ customers accessing them on any device, including phones.
In a business landscape where nearly half of all proposals are now opened on mobile first (a 30% increase from 2019, according to our 2021 Proposal Report), it’s crucial businesses provide customers with visually-appealing experiences that illustrate their brand at its best, and makes sign-off easy.
In 2018 PDF proposals were 45% less likely to be signed. In 2021 this had risen to 88%!
Still using a PDF for your sales docs?
Think about switching todayFinding other options clunky and too focused on replicating the deal-killing PDF format of the past, Jesse found Better Proposals’ client-engaging output to be the perfect fit for his forward-thinking approach to sales.
An expert in the field, Jesse explains, “Good sales is about speaking to the needs of the customer. Walking them through a day in the life of using the product or service. Pretending they already do. And Better Proposals allows us to do this clearly and visually.”
Relating this to his experience of Better Proposals own sales approach, Jesse comments: “Your [Better Proposals] demo was excellent. I can't tell you how many software demos are just a feature dump where I'm thinking 'Ok, but what does this mean to me?'. We give a good demo and I've mentioned yours as an example of doing it the right way.”
As well as using the platform to send winning proposals to clients, EDS Strategy also utilises Better Proposals functionality for their HR needs:
“When a new rep comes on board we send them an NDA from Better Proposals,” Jesse explains, illustrating how he uses the flexibility of the platform's in-built Reporting Suite to segment these documents from his outbound sales metrics.
This ease of use has allowed the company to smoothly grow their sales team, and Better Proposals 60+ integrations means that Jesse and his team can also connect systems they already use, such as Teamwork and Stripe to automatically start new projects.
“We have new sales reps and they write their proposals using the system. They write their proposals for demos they do and [the proposals] are coming from their email. It’s personalized. It allows us to send out more proposals.”
In Better Proposals, documents are sent via your company’s standard email domain, whitelisted for better deliverability (99.8%). This keeps things personal and on-brand, while making it easy for customers to respond directly.
“I can also see the proposals [my team] send, which ones are pending and what people are looking at.” Jesse, discussing Better Proposals ‘Approvals’ and ‘Tracking’ features.
Better Proposals uses digital signatures that are 100% legally binding, usable with employee contracts as well as deals with clients.
With different User permissions available in the Better Proposals system, senior Users can review documents before they reach the end client, giving peace of mind and reducing the human-error associated with more traditional documents. Being web-based, documents can also be updated at any time until the point they’re signed – eliminating the back-and-forth delays of the past.
Tracking is real-time, providing sales professionals with insight into when a document is opened, read, which sections are viewed, for how long, when a document is signed and more.
While document-based proposals can be cumbersome to adjust and adapt as the sales process progresses, Better Proposals allows EDS Strategy to tailor and personalize things, even while on the phone to a client.
“I tell clients ‘We're not just sending you a deck, like every other salesperson’,” Jesse explains, noting the difference-maker Better Proposals provides against his competition.
“I’ll ask them, ‘What do you want me to include in the deck? What’s most important in driving your sales in such and such a store?’ and they pause because no-one ever asks that.” Jesse continues. “They’ll tell me ‘Well, we need to sell more of this or we need to do more visits,’ and I'll jump into the system and tailor it just for that.”
With the Better Proposals Content Library feature, you can save an unlimited number of custom materials, design elements and text variations, to easily drop in content as required.
Jesse has used this convenient feature to great effect with different pricing blocks:
“It’s very easy. If you have a pricing block that's for pilot programs, a pricing block for year long programs, for six months, it’s definitely something which can be useful. That allows us to send a proposal, fast.”
This speed and adaptability is critical for conversion as Jesse makes clear, “Most [competitor] reps don’t even write up a proposal. But for us, it's just the natural next step. You need to give them something to sign. If you just say, ‘Let me know or whatever’, the client is left hanging. You need to get that proposal to them within 24 hours, because everything's fresh in their mind about the conversation.”
As EDS Strategy has grown in revenue and prestige, they’ve been able to raise their prices while retaining their clients.
Jesse enthuses, “Our client churn is extremely low. Our first client from five years ago is still a client, and we have others that have been with us for three years, four years. We grow together. Having proposals like this creates that consistency. Using Better Proposals definitely helps reduce client churn. This is so important in the service business.”
I definitely think that Better Proposals allows you to think out of the box and to think of different ways that you can take your company. It's extremely flexible and customizable.
If you write proposals or contracts for clients and you want them to be professional-looking, to be able to send them out faster and customized to each client, to therefore close more deals and help more clients, you should definitely do a free trial with Better Proposals. It's really the best proposal writing software out there.
Jesse de Agustin
CEO
EDS Strategy LLC
Check out EDS Strategy LLC on their website: https://edsstrategy.net/
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