A Proposal tool for big kids

I love this thing and use it all the time. Before I got this program I was shuffling through Word docs on my computer and constantly rewriting brand new proposals for each prospect. Proposify helped me streamline my process for kicking out really great looking proposals. The absolute best part of the whole tool is how it allows each party to e-sign the contract right inside the program. Really handy and beats the pants off asking someone to print, sign, scan, and send back. It's the real deal and honestly I couldn't go back to send someone a pdf from my word doc or whatever. This is way better. http://www.signal-interactive.com

Pros

I save all my different versions of proposals and can mix and match different sections as needed for each client. Helps to have a library of sections, different contracts, etc. The delivery, editing, and signing is all in one place. It sends us both a PDF version with signatures to file after closing. Uses great code snippets to automatically fill in the client name, the cost, etc to make each one somewhat custom. I get notified in my email when my prospect views the proposal (which is exciting). It looks a lot more professional when they get the nice designed email with a button to click and the proposal deck is laid out with a nav bar. Takes you from minor leagues (with silly word docs or PDF attachments) to big leagues, especially as a digital agency.

Cons

It's definitely not a design tool so I have a hard time getting the layout and design of the proposal to look the way I want. It's fairly limited in what it can do in that respect so we build pieces (images) offline and then paste the image into the proposal sometimes. Otherwise, for what it is, it's pretty good at helping me put together a good looking proposal. It's just not an Adobe product or anything. The way content pieces in the library are saved and edited is somewhat confusing and I've struggled to replace everything after deleting templates and then losing content pieces.

Entreflow Consulting Group's use of Proposify

For any of you who have suffered through the time suck fun of writing proposals on a regular basis, Proposify is going to be an awesome app for you or your clients.

Pros

our favourite feature; huge time savings. If anybody's ever done proposals on Word or Excel; its head wreck. Proposify is great because there's beautiful templates there ready to go, it saves you a ton of time and they are visually appealing. We get lots of feedback from our clients when we send them out proposals that our proposals look amazing. The other top features are that there's a super easy editor to use, great content library, theres the signature function in there to get your signature to get to a proposal signed off on. There's great, sneaky metrics that we absolutely love. You get notifications on your phone via the app when somebody opens the proposal, and when they've signed off on it. But, also, you can go into the app and see how much time people are actually spending looking at your proposal, which I think is kind of sneaky but it surprises me how little time people actually spend reading your proposal. Spoiler alert: people don't read their contracts.

Cons

the startup integration is cool but we'd like to see a little bit more love in that space. So once the Stripe payment is taken could the clients get a receipt? That might be helpful, we have to go and actually manually create that in Quickbooks, so it's a little bit of love required on that, I think it was more of an after fact for them and they've just left it to Stripe to kind of manage it.

Great looking proposals & sales tracking, but some glitches.

I've used this both in an agency setting and as an individual consultant to craft and send proposals. I truly do believe that a great proposal (both visually and written) helps to win business. Proposals can be one of the most critical sales documents in your process.

Pros

The software helps you to create great-looking proposals and keep things in your sales funnel organized. It is also nice that you can track when someone has opened your email/proposal and how long they have viewed different sections, which greatly helps during sales follow-ups.

Cons

Glitches. I've used this software for a couple years and I do find that it does glitch out quite frequently. The text formatting changes when you writing text and then it goes to the next page. The worst experience was when I lost hours worth of work for a big proposal (and it didn't autosave), making for a sleepless night.

Excellent software for streamlining the proposal process

Overall it has helped us as a small business and taken some load off of our marketing expert by streamlining the process of presenting proposals.

Pros

After getting everything set up in the software, we have a significantly quicker turn around in terms of firing out proposals.

Cons

It is relatively time-consuming to get everything set up for the first time because there are some kind of glitchy elements that can be slightly frustrating to get everything how you want it. Fortunately, there is plenty of support online to find answers.

Great in concept, but buggy

We switched to Proposify from Bidsketch to solve a bunch of problems. Proposify is great on the surface and as an idea, but there are many things we don't like. Nonetheless, we're stuck with it for now. Pros: Proposify streamlines our proposal writing process, clean UI, pricing tables that do math. Staff is helpful and responsive. I love that we can spin up proposals very quickly with templates. It would be basically perfect if it weren't for the cons. Cons: This software is still full of bugs. There have been several instances where data has been lost, or unexpected behavior happens. It's extremely frustrating and time consuming when these bugs happen. I've probably submitted 20 bugs over the past month. Examples include formatting buttons that don't work, pages breaking and crashing etc. There are many features that leave us scratching our heads and asking either "why isn't this a feature" or "why IS this a feature? Examples: -You can add sales tax to pricing tables, but sales tax doesn't reflect in the totals. -Pricing tables are very difficult to customize -Pricing tables that are longer than one page cannot flow into a second page. If you do want them to flow into a second page, you have to create a special type of page from the start that can ONLY have the pricing table on it. -When you go through revision history, you see data from OTHER proposals that share the same type of section. -You can't format text in snippets. To see what it looks like you have to drag the snippet into one of your sections or templates. -The navigation is super clunky and not natural. I find myself clicking around a lot looking for things. ... and many more Bottom line: I want to have faith in this but I'm close to start looking at other options. We've had more than one catastrophic failure that has cost us tremendously and I'm at the point where I don't feel that I can rely on Proposify as a tool because I never can be 100% certain that it's going to work properly. Proposify should really take some time and listen to their users, and try writing some proposals themselves and experience the process. If they were willing I'd personally love to hop on the phone and talk through some suggestions for improvement, and I'm sure other users would feel the same way. I feel kind of bad for how much I've had to bother their support staff with bugs and issues. If Proposify improves, I'll come back and update my rating.