Animated: Send a Project Proposal

If you send and maintain project proposals, you may get new business. Not only does a nice proposal impress customers, it gives you an opportunity to follow up and win the deal. Think of it as another reason to call. So if you need proposals in your project tracking app, here's the place to get them. Project proposals are just one of the little goodies you get at no extra cost along with the time tracking system.

Collect Projects Into Portfolios

"We create proposals, save as PDF, and email them"

The video below invites you to consider a sweet app where you send proposals and quotations, win gigs, track client hours, send invoices, and win more clients. That's a nice cycle we all want to have. And it's a necessary one, if we want to keep the consulting engine running. Keep those proposals going out.

Watch this, then scroll down for some new ideas.

What's in a project proposal?

Your proposal or quotation should contain enough information to cover all the details without overloading the reader. The fields shown below are the basics. Think of this as a summary of the work you plan to do, and a summary of what you have already discussed verbally. It should look concise and professional. Readers should be able to read everything in sixty seconds. Most of the information was probably communicated in the sales process before sending the proposal, so this may just serve as a single-sheet overview and reminder. Best case scenario: the client looks at this proposal and wants the work badly.

Begin by filling out a proposal form that contains all the raw materials used in the actual proposal document. An example of that form is shown below.





                                  

Project proposal document

Once the proposal form has been filled out, an actual document is created. This is the basic format, but you can create your own formats using MS Word. The template is a simple RTF document that is edited by most word processors. You can create your own templates, or edit the stock templates. That includes adding your own logo, corporate fonts and colors. Save your changes, and you can use the proposal templates again and again.




                                        

Project revenue chart

Each project has a win/loss choice, and a likeliness of winning. Those settings, along with the project dates and cost are the raw materials for the chart below. When you send your quotation, enter a percentage that represents your best guess at whether the proposal will be accepted and you'll win the deal. That percentage is multiplied by the total project cost and used in this report.

Let's say you have four possible deals you could win. Each one is worth $100K. That's a total of $400K. But you set the percentage of likeliness to be 50% for each because you're not sure if they will close or not. It's a coin flip. So you're saying that chances are, you'll get half the deals. That means the total expected revenue is $200K.

If all the deals are within the same month, you'd see a $200K bar in the chart.

But chances are, those projects are spread out over several months. That means you'll see several bars representing multiple months. In other words, you may expect to see revenues over a long period of time. Pile enough deals on, and you have some good business. That's why a lot of proposals need to go out. Now start tracking time to the projects you win. Yep! There's a timesheet and time tracking tool built in. And wait until you see them!




                             




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