Professional Appealing Proposals with Bidsketch
When I visit clients I start by getting an understanding of how things work inside the organization.
A few minutes into the conversation, I start identifying areas of improvement. From duplicating efforts, to lack of formal processes, or identifying a time consuming manual process which can be automated, I start to formulate some ideas on how they can be efficient.
I Love Business Process Improvements
I use a few apps to create my own business processes Podio as my main workflow app to run my business, Things to keep my to do’s on hand, Freshbooks to take care of my invoicing, TextExpander to save time typing, Coda to build websites and apps, and Kaleidoscope to help me analyze different versions of files in a small fraction of time.
Where Most of Us spend our time
Analyzing how I spend my time when it comes to business, I realize that writing proposals takes a big chunk of my time and I am never satisfied completely with the end result.
I never get a proposal out as quickly as I want. I also needed something that would keep an appealing layout but could also be customizable to our specific needs.
I finally stumbled upon Bidsketch, a software that had a small learning curve. As it mentions in the first page, you can create professional client proposals in minutes. I signed up and I was comfortable enough to give Bidsketch my credit card info to start off with the free trial because I had read great things from other bloggers online.
Quality Starter Content
You don’t have to worry about not having any content for a proposal. Bidsketch has some templates created for :
- General Services, Quick Estimate or Proposal
- Social Media Estimate or Proposal
- Marketing Estimate or Proposal
- Web Design Estimate or Proposal
- Consulting Estimate or Proposal
- SEO Estimate or Proposal
- Web Development Estimate or Proposal
You can also create your own customized templates and grab snippets of text from the others. Its easy to use and can help you tweak what you need. I invested less time by just tweaking the proposal to fit what that specific client needed but most of the text I used was from the great content Bidsketch had already provided.
The quality of the wording Bidsketch is so good I left it in my proposal with some small edits.
You’re Not Alone Building Your Proposals
From the Help videos that are included in the main dashboard and throughout the application, I was able to understand the benefits of using Bidsketch.
The educational opportunities from the applications team and founder go beyond the software. Once you subscribe, Ruben the Founder, sends some very well thought out emails where he is helping you understand proposal creation and giving you tips on how to get better. Ruben and his team cover a gap I see with other applications. If you don’t explain and give pointers on the process the application is supporting, people might blame their process inefficiencies on the tool.
Bidsketch takes care of helping you understand what you need in order to win more proposals.
Where I see the Value.
It creates proposals where the information can be easily browsed through and read.
- You can suggest additional services your client might need without making it part of the proposal. Allowing your client to add additional services in the proposal as a option.
- It created a workflow which can help me keep track of opportunities.
- I can also create a proposal that is legally binding once they accept it. It integrates with Freshbooks which helps me create an invoice from the proposal and that saves me precious time.
I have to say that I was able to create a proposal in less time. The benefit is that if I have a similar proposal to send, I already have a template and might just have to add some text where it might take me 1/10th of the time. I liked the fact that you could see when your prospect/client saw your proposal and they can sign it online. The design of the proposals are appealing enough where they look professional and I feel comfortable sending it.
So far my first proposal created got me excited and I have done a better job of tracking the progress with this awesome new app.
