Streamline your public relations sales process with airSlate SignNow's sales proposal automation for Public Relations

How to create outlook signature

[Music] hello and welcome to this episode of speak pr my name is jim james and i'm your host on this podcast which is for business owners who know they've got value locked up in their companies and organizations if they can just find free and easy and effective ways to communicate that this is the podcast which talks about technologies and tools that you can use now today i'm going to talk about the challenge of creating professional and personalized presentations and proposals we're all in the position where we need to communicate through our websites and through our pr but when it comes to the close we need to prepare proposals how can we do that at scale when it's personalized and also at speed so today i'm going to look at some key elements within a great proposal but also some technologies that we can use for helping us to create quick effective and personalized presentations and proposals now first of all the reason that this is so important is that the proposal and the presentation that we make really then delivers on all the marketing promise that we've made so we need to make sure that the proposal that we're issuing isn't aligned with all the public relations or advertising or events or signage that we've done for the company so that's why i'm addressing this in a pr conversation because after all that great work the next set of experiences the next set of relationships that the audience is going to have with our business is going to be the the one where we're making them an offer now actually this applies uh not just to potential customers but also to partners and to potential members of staff so this idea that we would make sure that we're offering a presentation or a proposal to somebody that really reflects the brand qualities that we've got as a company i think is worth addressing now over the last 25 years i've issued literally tens of millions of dollars worth of proposals and not just actually for public relations because in china i imported morgan sports cars and i worked quite hard to make the presentation about building a custom sports car for a chinese client into part of the experience so when we look at what a proposal includes let's just drill down into what i think that can include first of all it needs to be personalized so some idea of a cover letter or a media or some sort of a welcome address and i've recently started using a couple of apps one is called bonduro which allows me to send a video along with the presentation and i've also been using loom which has enabled me to then have the presentation ready but then i record it and i then send the video link along with the file to a client or prospective client so that instead of hoping that they're going to read and understand all the nuances that i have in my presentation they're going to have me explain it and that's important because as we know we can't make a presentation too long because people don't have the time to read it but if it's too short and too brief then we're missing out detail if we're making in person presentation we have all the benefits of charisma character chemistry but if we're sending something to somebody that may be on the other side of the planet often in my case how do i communicate and send the energy that i have for the work i'm about to try and get from them or the product i'm about to sell them but all online so first of all a personalization which can be done with video second is about knowing the customer's motivation so in consumer pr for example people are buying products and services they can feel better it solves a problem for them whether it's a car or a piece of clothing or food or travel it's meeting a personal need now in business to business it's different on many levels they're buying a good or a service or a person in order to accomplish something else and they're spending company money not their own so they'll often have to justify that expenditure so there may be two or three people involved in the process in fact almost always there will be two or three people involved in the process so understanding the different people inside the organization that are going to be involved in the purchasing decision but also understanding what's their motivation for actually buying the good or service that we're selling i think is really important so the third part is about the executive summary so making this now into the body of the proposal so what we do in east west pr is we have a five-stage methodology and we we talk about investigation first so we as part of our presentations we always include a little bit of background both about the company but also about the market that they operate in and one of the things we found works really well is when we include information about their competitors especially if we include information for example news coverage that their competitors have got and that's partly because actually we want to instill a little bit of fear in our client or prospective client that actually we know that they're not alone and we're props we're perhaps quite often i found had as much or more information that they have internally because internally they're focused on their own work and they're not often then searching for their competitors and we can do that so the executive summary can be the research that we found about them but about the market and about maybe a market trend but also about the competitors second element in the presentation can be about the outcomes so in consumer the outcome is happiness for yourself or your children or whoever you're buying that good or service for but in b2b the outcome is for example the the integration within an existing process and i always say really the only two outcomes that companies are looking for is either time or money they're buying something to make them either more money or to you know directly or to save them time or to save them some cost somewhere so outcomes for b2b i always narrow down to either efficiency or profitability and how can i translate my service into doing that in pr we talk about for example bringing leads bringing awareness bringing traffic helping the salesperson to arrive in a meeting and people in the meeting already know about that company the next element is about interactive pricing table so we go quite quickly into what it costs now there's a school of thought negotiation that says name price first and this is because by going in with the price early you're setting expectations and i will say about how much the good or service or the program is going to cost early because frankly i can save a lot of time in the early years of my pr firm i did a long presentation and then we'd all go away and then we'd come back and maybe on the third meeting we'd ask how much money they've got to spend i wasted a lot of time now i quickly get to a ballpark figure with the client and then they either say or you look in the whites of their eyes or you listen to a pause and you can know whether you're on the right lines or the wrong lines and taylor really your your proposal ingly so interactive pricing tables mean that you can have then a set of offers which enable you to move within the range of what the client has got and maybe what you want to sell them we're now just building our proposals really in a menu system we found over the years that as attractive as it is to give a lump sum clients then often are afraid especially more recently afraid of that lump sum so a bit like buying a base level car they may end up with the entry level product that gets them to what they needed but then there are optional extras and my line is always that i want them to be happy and us to be happy it has to be profitable on both sides or the relationship won't work so interactive pricing tables mean that we can modify together what the project's going to cost and it's already then getting teamwork between us and the client which is a big part of course of the proposal is getting them across the line of having trust in us the next can be compelling imagery now data from 3m has shown that people access and process images up to 60 000 times faster than text steve jobs was always the you know the proponent of one large picture and then on the screen and then a narrative and that's great if you're in the room and you've got a theater style presentation but it's not great if you're just showing a picture of an apple on a screen and you need to talk about data processing across the in the information architecture so compelling imagery you can start to use infographics and canva.com has some templates for infographics which for example which are really useful but what i also like to do is to put inside pictures from the client's website for example or coverage because i found that the clients really like to see themselves most of all the next part is about making an action plan so element number five is make an action plan so that what you're showing the client is what they're going to get over time what we do in our proposals is that we put a a a chart showing which work by which timeline we expect to get done and i think that's important because all the people i've dealt with are trying to integrate what we're offering them within another plan it's never standalone so next what we like to include is social proof evidence that we've done this before so having case studies at the tail end of a presentation this is of course taken from your public relations content and this is then the intersection between sales and pr what we'll include for example is media coverage that validates the performance of this product or service what we also do is give people a link to view them online especially important now that we're not necessarily with them in the room we used to in the old days give people a printed out handbook of case studies and media clippings to show that we've got people media coverage so if you're creating an offer for somebody how can you demonstrate that you've already succeeded for someone like them with another client because it removes the element of risk and what we're trying to do in presentations is to remove risk and the reason why this is related to public relations is because if the pr has done its job properly they'll have already heard and understood and read about the product or the service now the next thing is about creating a couple of sort of calls to action now i always like to include a time frame or a validity for which the quote is available i give people seven days i say this quote is available for seven days at this price because then it creates two things one it creates a sense of urgency on their part but also if they have a an event or or a particular need and they don't give me enough time to deliver on all the goods and services i've proposed i'm just creating a problem for myself so i give i give a duration this is valid for this much time and the final thing that i including now that we're sending proposals to people not with them specifically is i give them phone numbers and emails of people to call we're using the zoho booking system so i'm including a link saying if you're not happy with anything or you have a question here is a place to book time with me to review it at your convenience so these are some of the elements that i would include and am including in my proposals now what about the the software because as you know i like to think about how i can automate this because i've mentioned we're trying to create proposals that are personalized but at scale and with speed those three dimensions and building templates each time off of word or at a power powerpoint or out of excel is really cumbersome but also because most of us now are working remotely we're unable to just cross over and have people look at things so you know part of my team are in china some are in singapore some in america so i really need to have a shared platform i've been using the the zoho platform for my crm and we've just been wrestling with getting the zoho quotes module into place i say wrestling because zoho is an extremely powerful and extremely cost effective platform especially with zoho one at just forty dollars a month with over 50 apps it's amazing so i've opted to use that because it enables me to have a sign a signature element in that as well also within the zoho framework but in terms of displaying of graphics and embedding video the zoho quote isn't there for that really it seems to have come much more from the sort of manufacturing and production side of things so the the fields that we're able to enter really talk about products for example and they talk about units and boxes and so on so i'm having to customize that but also i'm not really able to embed some of the graphics and so on that i'd like to unless i just upload a separate document so it's great for the quote in the sense of actually delivering a piece of information and the pricing and the terms but it's not so great for making it all look beautiful so there are a couple of other tools out there that i just like to share one is called proposify now proposify is not free and in fact in my looking none of these proposal apps are free unlike a lot of the social media tools that you can get for free proposals are not so proposify integrates with salesforce hubspot stripe quickbooks xero and and as well zoho so it's a really well connected really well integrated app for making dedicated proposals and what i like about it is that you don't have to use a zapier integration so it i don't need to engage another piece of middleware between for example zoho and proposify now it's an online so it's a sas service that you can use and it allows you to create branded and marketing approved templates that we can use ourselves directly and again and again and of course this is the beauty of this is that you can create standard templates that you would a word document but in the cloud and with graphics embedded they also then have the ability to add in video for example which is nice and also to translate the interface into 15 different languages now obviously you write the content yourself in different languages but that's great if you've got an international team selling it to different countries and it also then allows the preparation for example of a proposal by a marketing team but the sending of that proposal by the sales rep you can change the date the currency the location and the owner and it also has an embedded live chat function so you could actually take the client through that proposal you know using something like zoom and have this live chat on the document which is really nice and then it has an analytics function so you can see who's viewing the document for how long and you can also then take it from proposal to quote to contract they they have the ability to take the key data and move it across the workflow which is really nice using that within zoho is something that i haven't tried but it's something i'm considering now it's it has a plan called the tall plan at 19 a month per user so that could that could add up because that's three users maximum per account so you could be looking at the best part of sixty dollars a month but of course if you're making proposals you know every day it could easily pay for itself but you can only have five active proposals now i don't know many companies that only have five proposals out there to be honest uh although i guess if that is five per user then maybe that's 15 per month it's a bit unclear they have a grand plan which is unlimited proposals for 49 per month per user which is built quarterly some alternatives one is called i quote express which is 39 a month there's another one called panda dock which is also just 19 a month per user and there's one called uh proposal which is from brazil which is also 19 a month 19 seems to be the magic number when it comes to getting a proposal made so proposal preparation and distribution then followed up with the with the quote to the contract to the invoice the reason i'm mentioning this is because it's automated now it's centralized online but it's enabling us to create proposals which are personalized and at scale and a big part of public relations now is about creating personalized communications we talk about this in our speak pr program about personalization engagement amplification and knowing so it only makes sense that once someone's seen the social media read the mainstream media gone online that when they receive a proposal it's branded the same it has case studies that have come from the public relations to give reassurance and that it's got all the key messaging that you have in your public relations across the proposal so thank you so much for listening to this episode of speak pr i hope you found this useful my name is jim james if you like this please do come to eastwestbr.com you can find also me on linkedin at jim james so until we meet again i wish you the best of health a profitable business and that you keep on creating proposals which are personalized and profitable