As a web design or graphic design professional, you’d probably rather be building beautiful websites or designing amazing graphics for your clients than laboring over that tedious sales proposal. Whether you’re a small design boutique or large web design agency, you know that creating a detailed & thoughtful proposal is the last thing on your mind, but someone needs to do it. Since it can take significant effort and time to coordinate with your sales team to come up with the right project pricing and a scope of work, the importance of an organized proposal workflow can easily be forgotten.
In this article we’ll give you some tried-and-true web-design proposal tips, and show you the benefits of using a web-based proposal tool such as Proposable to streamline your process.
Tip #1 Get Organized.
In our experience with creating proposals, we noticed there is often a disconnect between sales and design/development. No disrespect to sales guys (trust me I am one), but sometimes we tend to say YES! to every request without thinking through the design or development ramifications.
Eliminate the unknowns and the potential bottlenecks by organizing all your services, product pricing and descriptions in a central Library (link to How the Library Works video), so when the product scope or pricing evolves, you can quickly adapt without completely losing your cool.
Proposable Templates Library 
Tip #2 Create engaging content:
When crafting your winning web-design proposal, you should always be thinking about your customer and what will engage them. What are they looking for? How can you set yourself apart from the competition? When sending a proposal, you can quickly create many standard sections of a proposal such as About Us, Services you offer, and methodologies you plan to use in order to build their website. As a designer, your main selling tool is your portfolio, so why not really showcase your work within your proposal. Sure, you can show-off your work within a flat word doc or PDF, but why not make it more interactive by doing a web-based sales proposal that includes interactive elements such as a video reel, and image galleries.
In an infographic provided by Neomam.com researchers found that color visuals increased the willingness to read by 80%. That’s a huge improvement by simply associating images with text.
They also found that people following directions that utilize text and illustrations are 323% more successful that people following directions without the images.
Tip #3 Video, Video, Video
Video is powerful. Hit them with it. Your video content should tell a story and be an interesting narrative, not a hard-sell. Your video should clearly tell demonstrate the pain that you solve for for your prospect. We recommend you use a service like
Or, if you are a designer you can the opportunity to build one yourself.
Remember, YouTube alone has over 800 million unique visitors each month and is practically used like a search engine so be sure to upload your videos to Vimeo and YouTube.
Keeping your video under four minutes should be your goal. Keep in mind that your audience is busy and wants to understand quickly what value you are adding to their life.
Tip #4 Tell a Customer Story
A sure-fire way to connect personally with your prospect is to provide a real-life customer experience that demonstrates how your design services solve a real problem for real people. Adding a story or “case study” of your customer’s problem and how you solved it will help them understand your process and connect on a organic level to you and your solution. With Proposable you have the ability to attach case study to each and every proposal or add a video testimonial from one of your happy clients. Here’s recent blog post of a Customer Review by one of our customers WebpageFX that we’ve added to our proposals to show a true success story.
Tip #5: Include a Clear Call-To-Action
Sending your web design proposal to a customer is half the battle, while getting them to actually accept it and move forward is the other looming hurdle. Using a tool like Proposable to get your proposal accepted quickly online is a big advantage as it allows your prospect to quickly accept and digitally sign their name on the proposal, removing any extra friction that would keep them from sealing the deal. Putting a time restriction on the proposal pricing can also be a good weapon in your proposal arsenal to encourage your prospect towards action. “Estimate is only good for 15 days” will add a level of urgency to the proposal and can get them to commit to a purchasing decision.
Remember, you’re the expert in your business and no one knows how to sell it better than you do so keep it short, concise, and engaging – and your clients will love you for it!
Proposable is an online sales proposal tool that helps web design agencies and graphic design professionals create, track and analyze proposals, quotes and estimates. With over 10,000 subscribers in over 50 countries, we’ve strived to become the #1 Online Sales Proposal Software.
