One of the best things about Better Proposals is its extensive template and product library features. But users often don't know how to find them or use them! Here's how.
Better Proposals is an intuitive, easy-to-use proposal system that takes the admin out of the proposal process. You can send beautifully designed, error-free documents that inspire immediate trust with your clients. Better Proposals integrates with your CRM, automates tasks, tracks your deals, and ensures you always follow up at the right time.
Better Proposals is the proposals system we use at the Werx Brands ... but the most magical part of the Better Proposals system is not always obvious to new users. So we created this video to show you how to create and use templated proposals, template pages, template blocks, and the product library in Better Proposals.
Here's a quick video to walk you through it:
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Transcript
[00:00:12.480]
If you’re looking for a better way to produce proposals, a way that makes your proposal creation faster, more consistent, prettier, and less error prone. Better Proposals is a great way to go. We love Better Proposals at the Werx Brands, and that's what we use. I'm not going to show you in this video how to use Better Proposals. That's actually pretty easy to do. You go into your proposal screen, you click New Document, and you do some basic set ups, and you can see (I've got a little free trial running here to show you how the free trial environment looks), they'll give you instructions along the way. You can decide which type of document you're creating because in Better Proposals, you can do proposals, of course, but you can also do quotes and brochures and SOWs. You can get contracts signed, so you can use it for all kinds of different documents. And you click Next, and it guides you through the creation process. So you're not going to need an instruction video from us to show you how to use it. But what does confuse a lot of people is how to get at the real power of this system, and that's the templates.
[00:01:22.520]
There are two areas that I'd like to show you very quickly. One is the template area where you can create templated content to use throughout your proposals, and the other is the products area. So to get to your templates, you're going to go right here where it says templates, and then you can see all the templates. You can have cover templates and a content library. And then there's a template marketplace where you can get all kinds of premade templates that you can adjust to your uses. Here's the content library. So as you see, when we go to this templates page, it defaults to this tab, the content library. I encourage you to use folders for sorting your template just by turning on this Sort My Content blocks. The folders will help you organize all the different types of elements you use, and it makes it easier to find them, update them when content changes, just manage your template environment. In Better Proposals, you can have three types of templates. There are entire document templates where the whole proposal is templated. You can have template pages where you could add and subtract individual pages from proposals when you prepare them.
[00:02:36.550]
And then there are template blocks, and those are blocks of content that you can put on a page. And that's the piece that it tends to take people a while to find. So that's what I want to show you. Let's go to Templates, and let's go to the marketplace and just grab a template from the Better Proposals marketplace. So we're going to get this. Yes, we want to add this to our list of templates. And now we can use the template. If I click this Use this Template button, it's actually going to launch it as a new document as if I were going to customize it for an actual proposal. I don't want to do that right now. I want to go in and edit the template. You could also duplicate a template once you've created it and adjust it for a variation of that template. But for right now, let's just go in and edit the template. Inside the template, these are pages. That's your navigation on the left. These elements on each page are blocks. So we let our happy customers do the selling as a block, this section is a block, this photograph is a block.
[00:03:42.590]
So these are all blocks. And then, of course, the entire brochure from beginning to end. And there's a cover all the way to a signature page, and that's a templated proposal. So when you hover over any block, you're going to see a place to save the block. So when you create blocks that you want to use over and over again, you can save those blocks to your template folders. There's a settings button where we can change the color and the layout elements. And we could also move this block down the page if we wanted to. So now it's in the second position. Move it back up. Those are some of the things that you can do when you hover on a block. If you highlight copy, then you get another editing block. If you want to save this block, say we just love this stripey block, you would click Save and you would give it a name. We're going to call it the stripy busy block, and we're going to save it to the content library. And now when we go back to the content library, you'll see that there's a stripey busy block in there.
[00:04:47.690]
If we wanted to insert that block elsewhere, let's go to this page and say we just really are dying to have that block right here, we would click here and we would go all the way over here to the content library and there's our stripy busy block. You can also search. So once you have a lot of content blocks, it's nice to be able to search quickly for the block. We're going to add the block and there it is. So the block those are templated blocks. We could also say you did a lot of work adjusting a page, and now that's a page you know you may want to use in different proposals over time. You can template the page by going to Settings and then go into this section of the settings and say, Save this section to the content library. And now we're going to name this page. Of course, you're going to name it something meaningful that you will remember. And we hit Save. And now you can add that page to any template by clicking Plus and then saying you want to do it from the library. And there's our template page A, and you could search here as well.
[00:06:00.380]
We hit Add Page. And now, as you can see, we have this new page displayed that we just added, and you can change the order of the pages by dragging and dropping them. So that's how we use templates as entire template documents or template pages or template blocks in Better Proposals. The other thing I wanted to show you very quickly is that you can also create your product library in Better Proposals, and it makes it easier for adding them to the price tables. So we've noticed that a lot of people when they start using Better Proposals, they get to the pricing page and they just manually add all their products. But you can set the products up in a very templated way as well. The problem is that Better Proposals navigation does not make this easy to find. To get to your product settings, you have to go into settings, then you have to go into admin, and from there you get to products and services. Now inside products and services, you can click create new product and you can name the product, give it a code, describe it, talk about how you charge for it, what its price is.
[00:07:11.120]
And on your proposals, you can make things optional or choices. Options and choices are also something that confuse people in Better Proposals. Basically, a choice is if you sell three packages of something. So there's the package A, package B, and Package C, and they have to choose one of them. You could show all three of them on the proposal, and they have to make a choice. Optional products are more like upsells and add ons. These are things they can add to the proposal if they wish. So anyway, this is where you go in and set up your products so that they can be easily added to the pricing tables when you're managing individual proposals. So that is how you use templates and set up products in Better Proposals. We hope you found this helpful because, as we said, we've noticed a lot of people have struggled with this aspect of Better Proposals, and this is where all the magic is. So we hope you enjoy your better proposal system and that you start putting out more beautiful, more timely, and just more in general proposals so you can build your business.