Proposable Blog

Customize Your Proposable Domains

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:47:32 -0400

Team accounts can now customize their domains:
Proposable Team subscribers now have the option of branding their Proposable domains! For example, instead of having “Yourcompany.Proposable.com”, you can now create a domain that’s connected to your website, like “Quotes.Yoursite.com”. This completes the branding experience for your recipients and removes “Proposable.com” from your proposal URL’s.

This new feature can be found in “Settings” under the “My Business” tab and will involve some manual setup. You will be asked to add a new Cname record for the domain that you want to point to your proposable account. Examples of custom domains would be, “sales.yourcompany.com”, or “quotes.yourcompany.com”, etc. This is just one more reason why Proposable is the leading Proposal software solution for businesses everywhere.

Customize Your Proposable Domains

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:45:51 -0400

New Signature Acceptance Feature and More.

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:18:00 -0400

Updated Acceptance Now with Digital Signature:
Recipients can now “sign” their acceptance of your proposals with a real digital signature using their mouse. This feature has been awhile in the making and we are happy to launch it to live to our users. Along with this new signature feature comes an updated acceptance reciept email that shows the client’s signature time, their IP address, and other important info.

Customize Your Proposal Delivery and Acceptance:
Now you can customize the auto-generated messages for both the proposal delivery and proposal acceptance under the new “Proposal” tab in your settings.

Dashboard Redesign & More

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:18:30 -0500

New Dashboard Layout:
The new dashboard layout is more intuitive and allows you more aptions with a single click. You can now use the “actions” dropdown to quickly edit, delete, archive, save as template, and duplicate proposals with one click.

-To view the proposal, simply click on the proposal title.

-To view the analytics, click on the “Viewed” or “Last View” record.

Duplicate Proposals from any other Proposal Now you can duplicate (Clone) any draft or delivered proposal into a new draft proposal by clicking “duplicate” in the actions dropdown menu. This is a quick way to quickly reuse your favorite proposals.

New Placeholder Tags We have added new placeholder tags to make your templates even more dynamic. New tags include, “Sender Email”, “Proposal Delivered Date”, “Proposable Last Modified Date”, and “Current Date”.

New Proposal Archive Folder The Archive folder lets you move old proposals out of your dashboard and into a separate folder. This helps you keep your dashboard organized and less cluttered.

Bugs Fixed -Sections were sometimes getting re-arranged when users previewed their proposals. This bug has now been squashed!
-We removed the automatic underlined page titles from the print layout.

Replacement Tags & New Proposal Status

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:38:00 -0400

Replacement Tags
We have now added support for inserting replacement tags into your proposal templates. These tags are in the form, {{recipient_first_name}}, and allow you to set a “placeholder” tag within proposal sections that will automatically be replaced with your recipient’s information, saving you additional steps that are normally taken to customize recipient info across your proposal sections.

New Proposal Status Selector
We have added a new proposal status category for those proposals that have been “declined” by your recipients. This new “status” selector can be accessed from the top toolbar when you view a proposal. This new “declined” status filter has also been added to the dashboard beneath the “accepted” filter for quick access.

Proposable is proposal software that just keeps getting better!

Start a free trial today

Proposal Software in the Mobile Age

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:53:00 -0400

The dawn of the computer age brought with it new ways to connect with each other like never before. Word processors and spreadsheets made collaborative work faster and easier, and businesses began to thrive using these new digital tools. Then came the growth of the Internet, further connecting individuals and companies by making communication instantaneous and breaking down the boundaries of time and place. When the first generation of cell phones emerged onto the scene, the workplace was redefined as a space existing beyond buildings and offices.

Our lives and media devices have become increasingly mobile. We’re a culture constantly on the move, even when we do business, and there isn’t always time to sit around a computer to get things done. Our phones are evolving, becoming smarter than ever and able to handle virtually any task. It’s disconnecting us from the confines of our desks and cubicles, and it’s a good thing. Here’s the problem: our old models of digital and collaborative work that used to be cutting-edge are no longer adequate to meet the needs of our on-the-go lifestyle.

The mobile revolution is upon us, and your business tools should reflect these changes. If you’re still using proposal software that doesn’t fit into your mobile lifestyle, you may find yourself falling behind. Proposable’s mobile features allow you to stay connected even when you’re not at your desk by sending real time updates to your phone showing you who is interacting with your proposals. Now with Proposable, your proposal software isn’t restricted to your desktop. This instant feedback translates to shorter sales cycles and more effective, informed sales communication.

The mobile revolution is accelerating business at a rapid rate. Don’t let your current proposal system leave you in the dust. Connect and collaborate with online proposal software from Proposable, and be prepared to meet the demands of a business culture on the move.

New Proposal Design Features

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:05:00 -0400

New Proposal Section Tab Re-Design:
Our proposal section tabs have gotten a facelift. Based on user feedback, we have created a better user experience for the section tab navigation and are confident that this new design will encourage more clicks and ultimately lead to better analytics for our subscribers.

New Background Design Options:
We have created some great new background designs for you to choose from. Give your proposal a polished look with our new woodgrain, or candy cane backgrounds. Our background design options can be found within the design tab in proposal “edit” or “preview” mode. Our design team is hard at work creating more great background designs to add to our selection, so keep your eyes peeled!

New Advanced Design Settings:
For all you CSS wizards out there, we now have a great feature designed specifically for you. Our “Advanced Settings” button within the design tab opens up the entire proposal layout to your endless customization. Your proposal layout and design is now only limited to your creativity.

30,000 Proposals Created! And Other News.

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:41:47 -0400

Proposable users have created over 30,000 proposals using our online proposal software since our launch in March 2010! This is a huge milestone and we are excited to be on the forefront of this online proposal revolution. Here’s to our fantastic subscribers and all your valuable feedback!

New Help Video Area:
We have now added our growing list of help videos to our site through an easy to navigate help window.

Bolder Acceptance Button:
Our acceptance button is now bolder and greener, making it even easier for your clients to accept that beautifully crafted proposal.

Highrise Integration Update:
The Proposable/Highrise integration now automatically updates the status of Highrise Deals to “won” as recipents click and accept a delivered proposal.

Analytic Page Updates:
Our new private URL copy feature gives you a dead-simple way to copy your private proposal URL’s. Also, the proposal title at the top of the analytics page is now a clickable link back to the proposal preview.

New Line Items and Library Redesign

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:09:16 -0400

New Line Items Feature
We are excited to announce a new feature called “line items”. Line items are a new part of the library that allows you to save and re-use individual products and services and any other “chunks” of content you would like to quickly insert into proposal sections. This allows for more flexibility and efficiency when creating custom proposals fast. Watch our overview video here.

New Library Re-Design
The Proposable library has been re-designed to make it even easier to organize, edit, and share your templates, sections, and line items.

Proposable is now live in the SalesForce AppExchange
Proposable is now officially a part of the Salesforce.com family of apps and can be found in the “Sales Intelligence” and “Quoting and orders” categories. Check out the listing here.

Proposal Management Software to the Rescue

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:45:25 -0400

Proposal management can be a daunting task for any business that sends out multiple proposals each month. When you have multiple people involved in the process, storage and transparency can turn into a huge nightmare for everyone involved. Where do the proposals get stored? Who’s computer has the most current proposal templates? And how can proposal performance be analyzed to increase sales?

A proposal management software solution can save your company time, empower new sales intelligence, and increase sales. First, proposal software allows proposals to be created out of a central library of pre-developed templates, improving creation-to-delivery time. Once delivered, proposals are then organized in a central file system that allows for easy access and review at any time. Sales team members and managers will both benefit from this proposal management tool. The sales team becomes empowered to create and deliver custom proposals in record time and instantly access any past proposals for review. Also, managers will have complete transparency into all proposals being created and delivered across their salesforce, allowing for better sales intelligence and decision making.

Proposable.com offers a powerful web-based proposal management tool that empowers sales teams of all sizes and in all industries.

Try Proposable.com for free and experience the benefits of a powerful proposal management software solution.

The Proposal Software Revolution Has Arrived.

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:14:00 -0500

Is your company empowered by the latest proposal software tools? Or are you still stuck in the dark ages of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets. The proposal software revolution is here, and your company could be benefiting from a time saving, easy-to-use proposal creation and management solution. This new proposal software will help you transform your static, attached-to-email proposals into dynamic, media rich web-based proposals that your clients will love. Your clients will be blown away by this new breed of sales proposal, and your offering will automatically stand out far above the crowd. Not only will you create a better proposal experience for your clients, but this software will also empower you to analyze which recipients have viewed and spent time interacting with your proposal, giving your sales team yet another powerful edge over your competition.

Proposable.com is at the forefront of the proposal software revolution. Learn more about our innovative proposal software solution

Empower your Business with Sales Proposal Analytics

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:07:00 -0500

What happens to your sales proposals once you deliver them to a prospect? Do they get lost in the black hole of the Interwebs? If you have a web presence, you have access to pages of fancy analytics showing you who’s coming to your website, what browsers they use, and how long they spent on each page, etc, but how much do you know about who’s looking at your sales proposals? How about applying some common web analytics to your sales proposal deliveries… Wouldn’t it be great to know immediately that a prospect has viewed your proposal, and wouldn’t it be nice to see how long they spent looking at each section? Enter Proposable, the tool that removes the mystery and shows you precisely how your recipients are interacting with your sales proposals.

Many businesses have already benefited from the sales proposal analytics revolution and many are using Proposable.com to gain valuable never-before-seen sales intelligence. This new sales proposal intelligence empowers businesses to focus their attention on the “most valuable” prospects and not waste time on the ones that just aren’t that engaged. In addition, real-time notifications allow businesses to connect with their prospects at the exact moment of interest.

Why Sales Proposal Templates are Important

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:54:00 -0500

A great sales proposal should begin with a well crafted proposal template. Proposal templates can save you time and offer a strong foundation for building winning sales proposals.

Focus on honing your sales templates to truly communicate the pain-solving quality of your product or service. If your proposal template can successfully convinced your customer that they will experience less pain if they purchase your product, then half the battle is won. A well developed sales proposal template should be seen as a foundational element in your sales workflow.

Some examples for effective proposal template content include:

Client testimonials
Case studies
Awards your product/service has won
Pricing comparisons with your competitors
Clear call to action

One reason why Proposal templates are important is that they save time. If you invest in crafting a template that you are proud of, then moving from that template to a custom sales proposal then becomes a few simple steps.

Use feedback as a guide to continually help you hone your proposal templates to speak more clearly to relevant pain points and help to more effectively engage potential customers.

With Proposable, you can create and save powerful proposal templates that incorporate video and other rich media and can make your sales proposal templates really stand out above the crowd.

SalesForce.com Integration

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:46:06 -0500

Now send Proposals to your Salesforce Contacts:

You can now quickly search your Salesforce.com opportunities from within Proposable and send to the related contacts. As proposals get delivered to these Salesforce contacts, the deliveries, views, comments, and acceptance all get get passed back and recorded in salesforce as “events”. You now can see a real-time record of all proposal activity within your salesforce account! Watch the Salesforce overview video here.

International Characters are Now Supported:

Proposable now supports International characters within proposal sections. This will help empower users to build and deliver proposals to non-english speaking recipients.

Affiliate Program & Some New Proposal Tricks

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:01:00 -0400

Promote Proposable and get Paid!
The Proposable Affiliate Program has just launched and we wanted you to be the first to know about it. We are paying affiliates 100% of the first month’s subscription for referrals that turn into paying subscribers. In addition, we are paying a small lead generation fee for those referrals that simply sign up for the free trial.

Learn more about our affiliate program

Combine Paypal and Google Forms with your Proposals
Our subscribers have been finding creative ways to use Proposable and we wanted to share a couple fantastic tips & tricks.

Integrate Google Forms into your Proposals to capture info from your clients using questionaires, reservations and request forms. See the Google Forms integration here
Integrate Paypal Payments into your proposal and enable your clients to pay you immediately from within a page of your proposal. See the Paypal Integration here

Send us Your Best Proposal
We want you to send us your best proposal and enter to win some free ole fashioned recognition. We will vote internally and showcase the top 3 proposals. The winning companies will be featured on our homepage, along with their winning proposals. Enter and inspire other users with your creativity.

Send us your best proposal to proposals @ proposable.com

Multiple Recipient Support & More.

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:49:00 -0400

Now send to Multiple Recipients:
Now you can deliver a proposal to multiple recipients at a time. Simply click the “add recipient” link within a proposal and add multiple recipients. Also, you can specify which of those recipients you would like to be able to accept.
Check out the walk-through video.

Customize the subject line & add bcc’s to your proposals:
Delivery email subject lines can now be customized right along with the delivery message. You can also send a “receipt” of any proposal delivery using the new “bcc feature”. Email addresses that are added to the bcc field will receive a copy of the delivery message, a non-analytic-recording link to the proposal, and a list of all the recipients.

Better Proposal Analytics:
We have just made your proposal analytics smarter by using mouse tracking within each delivered proposal. This way, we cut out any “dead” time where your recipient might have left your proposal open within their browser.

Easier Recipient Feedback:
Instead of requiring each recipient to fill out their name and email every time they want to comment, we auto-fill it for them, so all they need to do is simpy add their comment and hit submit. Commenting on delivered proposals is quicker than ever!

New Awards and New Features

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:49:00 -0400

Proposable was voted the Best web tool by SalesPop! Up against the likes of Yousendit.com and Evernote.com, Proposable came out on top of the pack as the best new web application for salespeople! Read the article here. We are thrilled and want to thank our subscribers and all of you who voted.

Search Proposals from your Dashboard: Quickly locate specific proposals within your account from your dashboard.

Organize your Attachments: Quickly rearrange and delete all your previously uploaded attachments.

Proposable Update 7/20/10

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:55:00 -0400

Acceptance Feature

Now, you can give your recipients a simple way to accept your proposals with the new Acceptance feature. We have given you the option to include the “accept” functionality on every proposal you deliver. Your recipient only needs to hit the accept button and sign his or her name to finalize. We have added email and sms notification options for this feature as well, and they can be edited within your settings tab.

Overwriting Fixed: We fixed a pesky bug that was allowing older versions of a proposal to overwrite a newer version if a proposal was open in two places at once. We solved this by only allowing one instance of each proposal to be open at any given time. The site will recognize which of the multiple copies is the newer version and lock out the older version.

Re-sizing Sidebar Content: When users had too many sections, the sidebar content sometimes ran off the page. We have now dialed-in this sidebar to automatically adjust the rest of the proposal content to accomodate whatever you decide to throw at it.

We changed the “last comment” column in the dashboard to display “last view time” instead.

Design Feature and Highrise Integration

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:43:00 -0400

Design Feature:
The new Proposable design feature lets you really jazz up your online sales proposals with custom backgrounds and coloring options. We are really excited about the possibilities here! You can either choose to use and edit one of our pre-made backgrounds to fit your logo and brand or you can upload your own custom background. We have also included the option to remove the border around your logo, for a more seamless online sales proposal. The design tab can be found at the top of the page when you are in proposal edit mode.

Highrise Integration:
We are proud to announce that Proposable is now integrated with Highrise - http://highrisehq.com/ , an elegant CRM application from 37Signals. Highrise users can now seamlessly import their Highrise contacts into sales proposals and when a proposal gets delivered, a “deal” for that contact is automatically pushed back into Highrise. The new “Integration” tab can be found within your Proposable settings.

Branding, Branding, Branding

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:58:00 -0400

Branding. We all do it, some more effectively than others. Take Coca Cola as an example. Coca Cola is arguably the most recognized brand in the world. From their iconic bottle shape to their cheery red color scheme, the Coke brand is masterfully maintained and distributed across all marketing mediums and across all continents. It is important to re-create your brand’s image across all your touch-points; your website, blog, twitter, letterhead, and lets not forget your sales proposals. This means maintaining colors, logos, and other various design elements that represent your brand. We have heard that our users want more creative brand control over their proposals and we have happily set out to create a slick new feature-set to accommodate. Stayed tuned for our soon-to-be-launched proposal design feature…