Transcription
All right, when that big moment comes that your prospect goes to agree to the proposal, here’s what they see. We’ve got a section where you can enter your name, your email address, and then sign in the box. And I’ll accept. What’s up, everybody, it’s Dave here from Profitable Tools, and today I am looking at quota’s, this is a new proposal tool designed to help you make the proposal creation process quick and easy. But how does it hold up?
Well, let’s find out. I’ve got a fresh account set up right here. There are no proposals created, so let’s go ahead and make our own. Now, before doing this, I will point out we need to get a few things in place. First of all, I’m going to go down to settings and then over to proposals. Now, obviously, in under information, I’ll probably want to fill out all of the relevant information about my business.
But under proposals, there is something important you’ll want to do more than likely, which is a turn on proposal signatures. Now, in order to do this, you’re going to have to type in the person’s name who is going to be signing the proposals on behalf of your company, as well as upload a picture of their actual signature. Now, I’ve just grabbed a stock image off of the Internet, so don’t think you’ve actually got my signature here.
And then you check this little box, which enables your customers to actually sign the proposals. That seems a little bit weird to me, but that’s how it works. All right. Now, one other thing I’ve done ahead of time is I’ve added a contact in here. You can manage all of your contacts inside of quarters, and it does work with Xabier so you can integrate with your CRM or something like that. But for now, here we go.
I’ve got one contact set up as kind of a template to get us going to go back to the dashboard and create new proposal. I’m taking to a screen that has several templates all over the place here. In terms of NEACH, we’ve got interior design, dental clinics, event planning, total office renovation, really just anything you can think of? Well, not anything. There’s about 20 different templates. So let’s go ahead and choose one. I’m going to start with this digital marketing consulting, a template.
I need to give it a name. I’m going to call it Make Money Online, and I will assign it to you. A contact. Now, if you had not created a contact, you can do that right from the screen. But I did it a little bit earlier to save time. Let’s go. All right. While the template has loaded and it’s got a video background now, a few things that are unusual about this. First of all, I’ve never sent out a proposal that has a video background.
The second thing that’s a little weird is that the content itself looks like maybe a small child typing on a keyboard. So I would definitely want to swap that out before I sent it to anybody who’s, you know, professional. Now, another thing that jumps out at me right away is the capitalization of this heading. Well, first of all, it’s not the right heading. You’d think that they’d pull in the title of the proposal, which is Make Money Online, but looks like they just have kind of some stock Copy.ai right here, which I can show you how to replace, obviously.
But also the title is not capitalized properly. We’ve only got the first little letter capitalized and everything below it is centered, whereas this is left aligned. So changing that should be easy enough. I can just select the text. The little editor pops open here and then I can centerline it. It’s just a little fit and finish doing that. Kind of jumps out at me as always. Is this how the application is going to be now? You might be noticing all of these little curly brackets with some commands in the inside, things like business, name, contact, business name.
This is actually a really nice thing. These are personalization tags. So what it means is that you can get the perfect looking template and then reuse it on multiple clients based on the information you fill in under your contacts profile. So, for example, if I look at this on the front end, we’re going to see those brackets go away and it’s going to pull in the default business information that I created. So Giannis long care and then client app is my business.
This really does speed up the proposal creation process. I highly recommend utilizing these personalization tags in the creation of your own proposals and all of the other proposals. Software out there already does this right. Back to the Ed, let me show you how you can add your own personalization tags anywhere that you can type. If you double click, you’ll get the ed to show up and then they have what they call placeholders. These are the personalization that I was talking about.
I can click on that once and I get a list of all of the personalization that’s available to me. I can simply click on one of these icons right here and then it will copy to my clipboard. And if I want to use it, I just press command or control V and it’s inserted into my proposal on the front end. It will fill in with the contact information. All right. Let’s see what’s included in their template. I happen to send out quite a few proposals, so I’m pretty familiar with this process.
So we’ve got an introduction now right away. Kind of another fit and finish thing. They’ve spelled introduction wrong. If I were to get a proposal that’s spelled introduction wrong, I would probably just throw away that proposal. So definitely a big red flag right there. You’ll want to go ahead and do some spell checking. Do not rely on their templates. However, let’s look past that and continue on. We have introduction, briefing and goals. What will do is the next section here.
Now I’m noticing maybe just some design things in that these sections are awful big to me. I would definitely want to tighten those up. Well, look at how to do that in a second. Yeah. Nice little table in here. Implementation schedule, another capitalization thing on the heading. I’m going to point out this website quickly. This is called Capitalize My title. It’s totally free. And, you know, sometimes when you’re writing a headline for something, you’re unsure of which words should be capitalized and which words should not, well, this will do it for you.
It’s just a quick and dirty simple tool here. So if I were to copy digital marketing consult. And pasted into this tool over here, it will automatically capitalize the right words, I simply click the little button and then I can go back into my documents and replace it. So definitely check that out. It’s a quick little WP Rocket. Now, I just got to replace that S.. There we go. That already looks much better. All right.
Your investment, another little video animation type of thing going on here on the background, really huge section. I’m not a big fan of how this looks. Just wastes a lot of space. Got a pricing table down here. You can see that this looks a little bit different than the standard table, which you see above. And that’s because it actually is a different section. If you go to any of the sections, you’ll see this red plus button where you can insert a new section here.
I can see that you have the option to create what I’d call like a standard section, which has just text images or videos. And then you can also do this pricing table section, which is a little bit different because this is where you actually list out your services any time you’re working on a section and you think you’ve really nailed it and you want to save it, to use again in other proposals, simply click on this pencil over here on the left hand side, save that section, and then when you create a new section, it will show up here under safe sections.
All right. Let’s continue browsing through the template here. Got the pricing section that looks fairly good. Our team, once again, they didn’t capitalize team. I also find it a little odd that this is left aligned, whereas everybody in the team is centralized. Let’s get everybody together here so much better. Right. I feel like I’m spell checking them, but here we have chief strategy, officer of our strategy and officer our lowercase. But yet the marketing manager, as well as the project manager both have capitalizations in their titles.
So just more red flags at the Copy.ai here at least, is not to be trusted. We’ve got some terms and conditions as we go down and a thank you with the business name. All right. So these are all good sections. This is everything at a bare minimum that I would include and a proposal. But is the good time to mention if you’re wondering about what you should include in your proposals, I highly recommend checking out the agency OVERDRIVE Training from Issac Rudansky.
I’ll show you the sales page for right here. They do have a deal running right now. It’s 70 percent off for the lifetime of your subscription. It’s a monthly recurring fee, but it’s the best proposal training that I could possibly recommend as it gives, I think about a 40 minute lecture on how he creates proposals when he sends them out and he even gives you an actual template of the proposals that he’s sending to his clients and how he deals with some very, very large clients, people like EMC, Nike, Forbes, you know, like really, really big companies.
So back to our originally scheduled programing. Let’s go ahead and look a little bit closer at the editor here. So I’m going to go down to this section right here. You can see it functions very much like a word processor. You can edit right in line. I can add a line break here. Maybe I want to insert an image. I can do that by clicking on the image button does have an integration with Unflashy. You can just grab an image and drop it right in or you can upload your own as well.
All right. I’ve added this image to my proposal. I can resize it now. It will automatically center align all images. There’s not any way to align images. I hope they add that feature soon. You can add a link to your image, but I’d caution against that. Once your client gets to reading your proposal, you don’t want them easily distracted and sent off to another page. If I wanted to replace this background image, I could definitely do so.
I’m going to click on the upper left hand corner here and go down to background here. I have the choice between just a solid color and image and it’s going to open up on Splash again or the video right here. You can see they’re just linking up to Amazon as three. So I’m going to go ahead and delete this first so I don’t have anything in the background. And then let’s add a new background here. It will choose an image.
And how about this car over here? Let’s add that in. Now, I would like a couple of features here on the background image selection. One, I would like the ability to add an overlay, which I don’t see any way to do that right now. So what I mean by that is be nice. If I could darken this background, maybe put it like a slightly black hue over it, that’s a little bit transparent so that it’s easier to read the text.
You can see that the white is kind of blending in with the white car here. The other option I would like to have is the ability to move around inside of the image. If I wanted to maybe zoom in on a particular part of the image or just crop it inside of the app, there’s really no built in tools to do that. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I wanted to make this section a little bit smaller. In fact, I do.
I think this is too large for an introduction section to a proposal. I can turn off auto size, which automatically shrinks it down a little bit. But they’ve also stuffed in a bunch of paragraph breaks here, which I can remove by hitting the delete key. Now, if I wanted to move this car up just a little bit to maybe get the bottom of it inside of the proposal, well, there’s really no way for me to do that.
Let’s take a look at the operating table right here. Editing. This is a little bit different. It’s not in line when I click on it. It’s going to open up a pricing table editor and here I can go ahead and enter in my services. Now, if you find yourself entering in the same items over and over again, you can save one of the items as a rate to your template library and then easily add them. The next time you create a new template for each item that you add, you’ll add a description, the quantity, the price, a discount if you want to, and whether the item is optional or not.
One of the more interesting. Features of quarters is this column right here that I skipped over called margin, so when you’re setting up your rates, you can also enter in your costs. Now, what this allows you to do when you’re creating a proposal is that very quickly see what your margins are. Now, obviously, this is hidden from your clients. They won’t see your margins, but it tells you if you have a little bit of room to be able to offer a discount to your clients, of course, you could do that in the form of a percentage off or just adjusting the price however you see fit.
I’ll show you more on rates and costs in just a second. When you feel like your proposal is complete, you can preview it on a front end to make sure everything is displaying properly. Then go over to this next icon where you get your sharing link. Now, this will be customizable. You can add your own name record in the settings. I’m not going to go through that here, but it’s very simple to set up and you can even download it as a PDF.
For now, let’s go ahead and look at it in the preview mode. All right. I can see my proposal. My prospect’s name is at the top. They can also download the proposal as a PDF. You’d be surprised how many people do that to share with their boss or whoever else is involved in the business. And of course, they can, except up here with the big green button. We can scroll through and see how everything renders it’s pretty identical to what we saw inside of the ED, although it would be interesting to know how things look in mobile responsive.
So let’s go ahead and inspect this. So here’s what the proposal looks like on iPhone ten, at least as emulated on Chrome, you see that the headings are ridiculously large and even more difficult to read than they were on desktop. These bands that were quite big on desktop are downright ridiculous in this mobile emulation. The rest of the text sizes fairly appropriately. But I do notice that as I scroll up, this header section here really jumps out and takes up a lot of the page, hopefully on an actual phone.
This would be off to the side and it wouldn’t take up quite so much as you scroll down. It does hide mostly, but it doesn’t ever quite go away. Things like the your investment section that had that animated coin moving around look plain Juphy. It looks like you’ve completely screwed up. All right, when that big moment comes that your prospect goes to agree to the proposal. Here’s what they see. We’ve got a section where you can enter your name, your email address, and then sign in the box.
And I’ll it excepts, all right, at this point, emails are fired off, your client will receive an email with a download link for the PDF so that they can hang on to it. You’ll also get an email notification to let you know your proposal has been accepted. So before we wrap up this video on quota’s, let’s go ahead and look at a few more features inside of the library. This is where we have rates and costs that I was telling you about in a pricing table.
So what you want to do is go in here and the rates add in all of these services that you typically provide and what sort of markup you have on them. You can also add new costs right here. You don’t necessarily need to go into the dedicated cost screen to do this, but you’ll be able to add in the cost and then quickly manipulate those when you’re creating your proposals to make sure that you’re offering something that’s both profitable for your business and a good offer for your prospects.
So that’s going to do it for quota’s. I think it’s a fairly interesting app. It does have a little ways to go in terms of getting the esthetics to be of a professional level, at least out of the gates in terms of those templates. So I’d love to see them step it up a few notches there. I think all of the features that they’ve got integrated are actually fairly compelling. It does almost everything I’d like to see out of a proposal, and I wish it had some kind of email tracking so that when you sent out the proposal, you could know when your client opens it, receives it and actually views the proposal.
I think that’s a nice thing to have so that you can maybe, you know, jump in and call them up and ask if they want to talk about it. At that point, it’s really, you know, when people are excited about things, it’s good to capitalize on it. So I would love to see a few more enhancements come to quota’s. But as it is, it’s a fairly nice entry into the proposal marketplace. If you want to check out photos for yourself, you can click the link down below.
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I will again include the link in the description for that. It’s going to do it for this video. Thanks for watching. I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below and I will see you in the next review.
