What is Proposal Management Software and How Does it Help Sales?

How to empower sales with proposal management software 

Creating business proposals that contain valuable and personalized content requires people to collaborate and exchange ideas. Successful collaboration—interfacing productively with colleagues and customers—requires a cooperative spirit and mutual respect to achieve goals in an efficient and timely manner.  

Online workplace collaboration tools provide a secure, modern, and cost-effective way to make teamwork easier. Sending business proposals that contain irrelevant, incorrect, or outdated information is a waste of the recipients’ time. And taking too long to personalize the content you send is a waste of your own time. 

What is proposal management software?  

In simple terms, proposal management software is a technology-based program that allows for real-time creating, organizing, and archiving business proposal contracts. This software allows companies to keep contracts current, collaborate in real time, track progress, and identify potential roadblocks that could prevent proposal finalization. 

Why businesses benefit from this software 

Without proposal management software in place, your employees could spend hours preparing for a single proposal. From gathering assets to waiting on information and compiling everything together, the process is time-consuming for each individual proposal. And, once the proposal is finished, the hours start over again for the next proposal.  

By implementing a proposal automation system like Conga Composer, the proposal process can be streamlined and more efficient. Your sales force can create templated proposals, share documents across many platforms, and collaborate with employees and clients anywhere in the world. This shortens the time it takes to create and deliver customized proposals and helps your business be more efficient.  

What should a proposal include? 

A successful proposal should include a clear project overview, scope, objectives, terms and conditions, appendices, methodology, timeline including key milestones, and cost estimate that breaks down the costs associated with the project, including labor, materials, software, travel, and any other relevant expenses. It must outline the value proposition, address client needs, and demonstrate the solution's benefits. It’s also important to highlight team expertise, quality assurance, and post-delivery support.  

A comprehensive proposal that covers these key components will help ensure that the proposal effectively communicates your solution, addresses the client's needs, and increases the likelihood of a successful partnership. 

What are the key features of the best proposal management software?  

Your proposal management software should take care of all of this and more. It should offer a range of powerful features designed to streamline the proposal creation process, enhance collaboration, and improve overall efficiency. Key features include: 

Conga will enable you to create, share, track, sign, and store your sales documents—all from a single platform. 

With Conga Composer + Conga Sign, you can empower sales reps to create personalized documents using pre-built templates, content from marketing/legal, and data from key systems of record (CRM, CPQ, etc.). Better yet, you can take advantage of the best of what the web offers by including images, videos, GIFs, dynamic forms, and more. Add custom timelines, determine the scope, and make client-specific recommendations in one convenient place.  

Distribution 

Share your interactive, online sales proposal with a professionally branded and personalized email. When your prospective client opens the proposal, you receive instant notification via text message so you can follow up at the appropriate time. The instant notification also prevents email delays and back-and-forth communication that can delay a final proposal.  

Automation 

Save hours spent on menial tasks, manual data entry, and starting each proposal from scratch by using Conga. Automate many of the business processes associated with managing online sales proposals such as sending an email, creating a task, updating fields in your CRM, or subscribing to key deal alerts. You can also house your signed proposals and agreements in Conga’s secure, central repository. 

Collaboration 

Working with document platforms like Microsoft Word or Google Docs limits your collaborative ability, especially if prospective clients don’t have access to your program. By choosing Conga for your sales proposal software, employees and clients can all easily access documents from anywhere, make changes in real time, and keep proposals moving forward with minimal delay.  

Integration 

Conga Composer works with all other Conga products, allowing for seamless integration of proposals across all platforms. You can easily get up-to-date pricing information from one system, view client information from another system, and track the entire proposal from start to finish with a proposal management system.  

Protection 

Conga stores all your documents and proposals in a secure cloud location. This means that all with approved access can work, no matter where they are, and you can trust that your information is secure and protected.  

See Conga Composer in action 

Discover how Conga helps other businesses streamline their proposal automation systems and make the entire process more efficient.  

With Conga, the sales process automation has never been simpler. Conga allows you to easily create, share, sign, store, and track sales proposals on any device. To learn more about how you can deliver professional, branded, interactive sales proposals that will help you stand out from the competition and close deals faster, get a demo of our proposal and signature automation solutions today.