Effective Pricing Live: Perfecting your proposals - Templates, Design Process and Beyond

So the first thing we're going to look at is how to get started with your proposals. The first thing that you need to know about proposals is that you can just like our pricing models, you can have several different proposal templates. You could have a proposal that's for the type of service that you offer. Maybe you have a proposal for cleanup work or monthly recurring revenue. Or if you're a tax preparer, you could have a proposal, a different proposal for tax preparation. It might be that you have. If you have a couple of different niches that you service rather than just one, you may have different proposals for the niche that you serve. It's all extremely up to you of how you want to utilize your proposals and customize them. Design them in the way that will work best for your business. So you'll find the templates that are given to us by Mark in our settings menu, which is of course the gear icon. And then we've spent a lot of time so far today. And I'm just going to turn my.

Camera off while I'm doing this demo.

I don't want it to block any.

Of the screen or have you guys looking at the side of my head while I have it open on another screen. So we spent a lot of time in model management, which is of course where our pricing models are. Like I said, we will pop in there a little bit today. But when I do, I'm going to be flying through it pretty quickly. So if you have missed any of the previous sessions, when I am going through those pages pretty quickly, the clients and quotes section I'm going to jump through pretty quickly. If you've missed any of the previous sessions, do go back and take a look at those. They're available in the Academy if you're Academy member or also on Mark's YouTube page. So where I'm going to go today though, for our proposal templates is right down here.

You'll see we have a few different templates at the bottom. Sorry, I hope you don't hear my dogs barking. I think my microphone blocks out background noise pretty well, but they were just barking a bit.

So.

So you do see we have some templates down here at the bottom which Mark provides. Just like with our pricing models, I do recommend using one of the templates. We do have the Create New button at the top where you can create a template from scratch. I'll just quickly show you.

Test Create New.

This is going to bring you into a proposal template that is completely blank as opposed to using one of the templates that we'll get to in just a minute. So you do have that option. I do, however, recommend and find it a little easier to find one of the templates that works the best for what you're trying to do and then just edit and tweak it from there rather than starting from scratch. I find it a little faster.

So in our last session, we looked at some of the print options that are available, as in a quote. I'm just going to quickly review those with you.

I'm going to go into a quote here.

Foreign.

Okay, so when we get to this page, it could be that a client wants to think about it and they want just a little one page handout that you can give to somebody. And we looked at this print print button and how it prints.

As just a sort of blank page. You can customize this. This one is a little customized already because I've been playing around with it. But you can customize this with one of the templates, which is a payment plan page. And then the other option we had is on the actual payment plan page. There's a print button here as well. So I'm going to go back into proposal management because those are going to be the first couple of templates that we're going to look at. And when you're setting up your templates, these are the first two that I recommend doing. They're literally the quickest and easiest to edit. So it'll get you familiar with using the proposal template software in a way that won't seem too overwhelming at first. And then the third template that you would want to set up would be your actual proposal template. But do go ahead and get your feet wet with these first two.

Before I get started showing you how to edit one of the templates, can you just drop into chat?

If you're currently doing service agreements or contracts or proposals, we have different terminology for it. Are you using Effective pricing for it already or are you doing it in another program or maybe just a Word editing program like Microsoft Word or Google Sheets or something? So sorry, it's not Google Sheets. That's the Excel one. I don't use the Google the Google Suite program. So I'm just familiar with Microsoft Word. Google Docs. Yes. Thank you, Sarah. So, and hi, Sarah. I didn't see you at the beginning when you come in. Lynn is using Effective pricing already. Lindsay is as well. So that is awesome. I love to see people using it. Marty's using ChatGPT. Interesting. And then Neil's using Go Proposal. I've Used that one a long time ago in the past before I started using effective pricing.

Okay, so I'm going to carry on then. So I do have some demos here that I'm. I've been playing around with while I was setting up for today. I'm just going to go ahead and put those all back into draft view and we're going to start from scratch and create new templates together now. So the first template we have is, it's called Draft proposal In the template that Mark gives us, that is actually your packages page. So I'm going to start with that one because when we're doing our quote with a client, that's our fixed price page. We see that one first before we get to the payment plan page. So I'm going to start with that one.

I'm going to rename this as.

Fixed price Packages, Print, and I'll say demo.

With today's date.

Just because we're going to be in and out of some different ones today. So I want to be clear which one I'm in. When I'm showing you something, you then have the option of going ahead and making it live or not. I am going to go ahead and make it live right now, even though we're not done editing it yet, just so I don't have to go back and do that step later. You have the same option like in the pricing models where you can add some tags and then I'll just hit save and continue.

Just like on. I'm just going to bump back a little bit. Just like our pricing models. If you didn't notice, you can quickly toggle back and forth if something is live or not.

On this main screen. So even though I didn't leave it in draft mode right away, I could just easily change it back if I wanted to. Okay, so now we are in one of the templates. I'm going to walk you through the screen, but I just want to show you this is the one that I'm on. So it's the fixed price page or the packages page, whatever you may want to call it. So.

It'S a two step process of how to make things look better. First we need to create our payment plan page and then we need to attach it to our model, our pricing model, so that when we want to hit that print screen button, it shows up in there. So the first thing we're going to start with here then is editing. I'm going to give you a walk through the screen first before we get into editing. There's all kinds of customizations and changes that you can make. We're going to look at some of those later in today's session.

But first I want to show you that just like our pricing models, you can change some branding. You can add some coloring in here by default for the logo. Anywhere you put an image, it is going to pull your logo as an image, which you would have set up in your company settings from the beginning before you did any of your pricing models. So that would be there first foreign.

You'll also see we it's kind of split into sections. So we have of course our regular buttons at the top for back Save will allow you to save, save and continue will allow you to save and go to the next screen where you can view a preview. I actually use both of these quite frequently. Whereas in a pricing model I just use save and continue to automatically go to the next screen when I'm editing one of my templates. I do use the save button quite often. I recommend it can be a little intimidating and overwhelming when you first come into editing this screen. Some of the people that are using it already in chat may tell you that they may have felt that way when they first came in here. There's a lot of things that you can do. I recommend just going through it section by section, element by element, page by page, which we're going to talk about how to do that. So as I do each element or each section and I'm happy with how it looks, I hit save before I move on to the next section.

Then we have these boxes down here. You can see in this first section we have two. Those are two columns. Here we have one section. Here we have three columns. Again, we have three columns. Here we have a table which is pulled automatically from the quote. This is one of the great things about using the proposal software in effective pricing is it pulls so much information from your quote already and including a lot of keywords which we're going to talk about.

All right, let me show you the buttons on the left, the menu on the left hand side. Here at the top we have a section for pages. Now this particular print for that fixed price page or packages page is just a one page document that we want to print later. When we are in an actual proposal template where there's multiple pages, you would see different pages. Here you can clone a page, you can view a preview.

You can edit it where you can change the name or you can delete the page, remembering to hit save after you've made any of those changes. And to Add a page. You would just hit the plus page. So I would say page two.

And now what you see happens when you have more than one page. You now get this page two of two message here. And you get these toggle buttons where you can move back and forth.

I'm just going to delete that second page.

Then underneath that we have three menus. Two of them are kind of hidden. You can see there's three different icons over here. This black one is the elements menu, which is what we see here when I scroll down. The second one is a key. It's grayed out. It will only let me use that menu when I am in a text version of the section. So, for example, this one is a text version. If I click over here, you can now see that this key menu is unlocked. And this is my keywords section. You can't use keywords unless you're editing a text section of the software. And then the third icon that's over here is a section settings button. We're going to be going through a lot of these in more detail. I just wanted to initially give you a quick walkthrough of the layout of the screen.

So if you're happy with how this looks at this time, we'll pretend you are. We haven't done any editing yet, but you can hit save and continue. It does take a minute to load, but you can now see that you have a preview screen of how this looks. Now, because your packages are long, or maybe your tooltip information is long, it is running over onto a second page. These are all things that you can play around with. You could take the tooltip section out if you wanted to. That might be. Well, no, it probably wouldn't be enough to shorten it up. You can adjust the font size of your table to make it a little bit smaller. So there's lots of customization that you can do from here. You can download it to a PDF. You can print it if you wanted to. If you're doing some in person meetings and you wanted to print it for somebody. For now, I'm just going to go.

Back to the editor.

The other.

Template that you want to set up. So I said there's two that you want to set up initially. The first one is that fixed price page. The other one is your payment plan page.

So this one I'm just going to.

Say demo, today's date.

And again I'm going to make it live.

So this one I'll just show you on the preview model.

Or the preview screen. This is when we're in a quote and we're on our payment plan page and we want to click the print button on that screen, this is how it would print. So again, if you remember when we looked at those models in previous sessions, if you don't set up this template, you just get a very plain looking screen screen that doesn't have any text in it like this, which you can set up. It doesn't have your logo on.

Does. Sorry, when I pause, guys, I'm drinking some water. It wouldn't have proposal name. Like right now it says demo and date because that's the name of who I'm doing a proposal for. That's my client name.

So.

So if you had your client's name, it would say that in here. So this is all customization that you want to do.

So those are the two templates that you want to start with. They're pretty easy.

To.

Edit, they're one pagers. They're not going to be quite so overwhelming as doing multiple pages. The third template that you set up would be your actual proposal template. I am going to move on to the next section. But I do see that Stephanie just asked a question that came in. And Stephanie, I've actually got this in my notes to mention this later, but you've just made me realize that I should have mentioned this in the beginning. Proposals are very client specific. So when you do a quote. Let me just go into a model quickly.

And I'm going to just quickly put a couple pieces of information actually.

Let me say.

Today.

All right, so let me just quickly.

Put some stuff in here.

Okay.

So I've done a quote for a client.

There's my summary.

When you get to save and complete at the end and you hit complete quote, you get two options, right? You get generate your price success metric or create the proposal. So a proposal is going to be client specific at this point you or even on the previous page, the summary page is when you would end the meeting with your client, end the screen share, let them know that you're going to send the proposal. Technically you could do the proposal right on screen with them. If you're really comfortable with your proposal templates. I typically like to do it afterwards when I'm not in the meeting with them. They don't need to see me doing that part. And I can often get my proposal off to them within a few minutes afterwards. It doesn't take that long. It's just sometimes there may be a sentence that I want to edit for that specific client or something. And I don't want to do that in front of them. So at this point, you could create proposal here, you could generate your price success metric, and then if you don't do it right now, if you don't hit Create proposal right there, maybe you need to go somewhere. You can also get back to that from your client's section. So if I go into the quote that I just did for today's client, I can now complete my success metric. If I hadn't already done it, or in the dropdown, I can go to Proposals. I don't have an existing proposal for the client. If I had, it could be that maybe you do monthly. Maybe you did a cleanup job for this client. Maybe now you're doing monthly recurring revenue and now you're getting ready to do tax returns. So it could be that you have multiple proposals for the same client and they would show up in this list. But in this case, we would click Create New. We would choose which template we wanted to create for the client. So in this case, I've got two of them that I just made live.

Going to name it payment plan.

Save and continue.

Just give it a minute to load.

There it goes.

And then complete.

If I was happy with how it.

Looked.

Give it a second there.

So now if I go back into proposals for that quote, you can now see in my proposals list, I have one named payment plan and it's marked as complete. I am going to talk a little bit later in the session about when you're managing different proposals that you have. So I am going to be coming back to this screen later.

Okay. So I don't see any other questions there for now.

So I'm going to carry on.

My effective pricing window.

Okay.

So I'm just going to go back into my templates.

So I mentioned already about, you know, not getting overwhelmed when you are editing a template.

I'm just going to go back into.

One for today's purposes. We're going to be spending a lot of time in the editing portion in the one pagers. Later, I am going to show you some longer ones, but it's just. It'll be faster to go through the one pagers when we're showing you the editing options. I also mentioned about using the save and continue button often as you go through to preview each section as you go. And I wanted to now show you. We'll go into some more editing details. So you'll see a bunch of buttons kind of all over the place.

In this first section we have. I don't Have a highlighter pen. We have this.

First section, which has two columns in it. Okay. The section has three icons on the left hand side. The first one is the dots where we can click and drag sections around. The second one is a delete button if you want to delete the entire section and doing so would delete both columns in this case, I'm not going to do that just now. I will demonstrate that later. And then this slider bar takes us into the section settings. So this is called a section. Okay. And then this is called a section. So they each have their own separate set of buttons. So for example, if I hit the delete button on this one, it will delete just that section. It won't delete the whole thing.

Okay. Now, in each of the columns you also have a set of buttons, similar buttons. This one has one extra. These are for those specific elements. So this will move just that column or column, if you will. This will delete just that column. It won't delete the entire section. This will give you editing options for just this column. So these buttons on the left are going to be global for that entire section. Section. And then when you have individual columns within a section, you will get buttons on the right that are just for that column. So over here, this is a text section. So now we have an edit icon that brings up our keywords menu. As soon as I put my mouse into a section that is a text section and we're going to talk about the different sections in just a moment, this keywords menu will pop up. Which if I come back over to my. I'm clicking my mouse here, you can see I don't get the keywords menu when I'm in a section that does not have text in it.

Okay, so you've seen me doing a little bit of dragging. Let's just walk through what the different elements are.

So here we have section tools. So these are the types of sections that you can add. So the first one, you may have seen me do it already. I'm just clicking and dragging this. This is just a single section. So one box. I'm going to delete that one because I did just put one here already. Here we have a three column section. So that will automatically give me three different columns with three different sets of icons on the right hand side of that column. These icons on the left control the entire section. Same thing if I wanted to add a section with just two columns.

This horizontal rule is what you see right here. If you want to put just a black line in between sections, which is great when you have this sort of header page or your footer page. When you look at. When we get into headers and footers later, you may want to put a horizontal rule at the bottom of your content, but above your footer and then a page break section. And this is one that you'll want to play with a lot. As you're looking at the layout of your information on that preview screen, you may need to, like I said, adjust some fonts and, and put some page breaks in to make things sure that things display play properly.

On the pages. Sorry, I'm really thirsty today. I feel like it's a little dry in my place today or something. So those are the section tools I also wanted to mention. You can have up to four columns if you can. Even though there's not a four column button here. You can start with a three column section and then just click and drag another section in beside that.

Sorry, I'm going to delete this one.

And we're going to look at this a bit later when we're. When we're actually using a four section one. But you can actually have up to four columns in here.

I've got a few in here now that I'm going to just delete.

You may use that more often when you're starting to put images in and you maybe want to have an image with text beside the image. Okay, so looking at our preview screen, which I'm just going to pull up for a moment here.

You'Ll see when it pops up that the first element that we refer to is our header, which is where our logo is. The name of what this is. It's a proposal for. And then this would be the client name and then the date. That's what we call our header section. We're going to talk about doing advanced headers, but that's just basically what's pulling in up here.

Down here. Further for our sections is where I said that we can have a text section. So these are the two different types of content that you can have. You can have text, an image or a table. And tables are in different sections because there are multiple different ones that you can use. I feel like I'm maybe confusing the terminology a little bit because I'm using the word section a lot. It's just by default. That's how my brain works. So let me know at any point if the word section is getting a little overused and. And if it's getting. Getting a little difficult to follow along. So our different Types of content is text, image or tables. Let's say I wanted to see a payment table. I'm just going to go down to the bottom. I need to first add a blank section and then I need to say what I want to put in that section. So maybe I want to put some text. Maybe I want to put an image. So now I have two columns. Maybe I want to put some more text. So now I have three columns and now I want to put another image. So now I. This is where you can see I have four columns and I can click and drag those around. If I wanted to have two different images in the middle and then text on the left and right side, I can easily move those, click and drag those around.

I'm just going to delete that whole.

Section and then if I wanted to add one of the tables again, I just add a section first to say this is where I want something to go. Maybe I want a page break before this section because I'm going to create a new table. So up here we have a table of all the different packages and I'm just going to check.

I want to open.

A handout that you're going to.

Get today or when the session information gets uploaded because it's something that I won't be going through.

In a lot of detail.

Okay, so this is a 34 page handout that you're going to get today. Talks a little bit in the beginning about how to edit your proposals, but then on page four and five it starts getting into details about the sections that I'm showing you now. So if you're looking at what the different tables are, I would recommend using that handout for an explanation. So if you wanted to know the difference of payment schedule, chosen package table all packages, table all enhancements. I mean they are a little self explanatory, but if you wanted to see examples of how they actually look without having to click and drag and then delete them, you could use that handout and get an example. So here we have a table that is all the packages. Let's say they have chosen your silver package and I want to have a table of just their chosen package. I can then click and drag that over into my proposal and you can see now that I have a table that is just the package that they chose, which is a little different than the all packages table.

Page break.

I'm going to be deleting things as I go just so we don't get too convoluted in here.

So the first when you're editing these, then the first thing to remember is to add the section first of whatever type of section it is that you want to do. So you're using the section tool first and then you need to say if it's text, image or a table that you want to add.

When you are adding information.

Let's just say we wanted to add a section with some content that we're manually typing in.

I'm going to.

That was a sip of water.

Again, I don't have my camera on, so you guys can't see what I'm drinking. So I'm going to add a section. Let's say I want to add some text and an image. And like I said in the beginning, when you add an image, it will default to pulling the logo that you have set up in your company settings. But we can of course edit this. If I click on my slider bar, I get a section settings.

Editing screen and this is where I can upload a different image if I want. Something to note is that your file cannot exceed 500 kilobytes and that it has to be one of these three file types. We're going to go into a little bit more detail shortly about managing images, but if I wanted to add a couple of different columns, that's how I could do it. If I wanted to change the size of the image or the width of the image, I can do that here on this slider bar. I can make it larger and smaller. I can align it on the left side of that particular column or I'll make it a bit smaller so you.

Can maybe see it moving around a bit more.

So I can move it to the left, move it to the right. I can vertically change it to the top if I wanted it in the top right corner, and so on. So there's essentially nine different places within this column where you can put your image.

In your proposal settings. We're going to look at some examples later, some actually finished examples, but you can change the size of the paper that you want it to display in, whether you want it in a more horizontal format or landscape format or portrait format, like an A4. You can change what margins you want, your date format, just like you can in all of your pricing models. You can change your date format. I want to get into looking at headers and footers, so I'm going to just quickly check for some questions.

Foreign.

We're going to look at keywords in a little more detail later as well. I know I've touched on those a little bit when I showed you the keywords menu.

The other thing you can do in here is you can add some background color. So you can go in here. You can either choose a color from the color scale, or if you know your actual hex code for the branding colors of your business, you can actually put that in here. So let's just say I want this sort of. That's not the color I wanted pink or red, but I could put that in as a background color.

I could say that I want some margins. And you can see my columns are now indented on both sides. I can put different.

Background colors if.

I want.

For a specific column. So I'm in the slider bar for this column. So that's why it's changing the background color for just that column. This looks horrible. That kind of limey yellow green color on a pink background is lovely. So lots of things that you can play around with in here to customize it however you want. I am now going to delete that whole section.

So there's. There's lots of customization that you can do in there. Let me just go back to editing one of these ones.

Okay. So I see a question has come in from Stephanie. Working with nonprofits, they always have to go to the board or some committee. Is it customary to include all packages on one page and their chosen package on another? Stephanie, that's a very specific question for your business and how you want to deal with your clients. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's customary at all. I'd say that it really depends on what your client wants. So if they want to see all packages available and show that to the board and let the board choose which package they want, or if you're speaking with an actual decision maker and they've chosen a package already and you want to show just the chosen package, I don't have. I haven't ever shown both on. On a table. I do tend to use the chosen one on some of my proposals, like for a cleanup proposal or something. But typically I use the all package one. And I'll. And I'll show you why a little bit later. But basically, I like to use the all package one because it shows them what other options. Maybe they've selected a basic package or a medium package. But showing them the all packages table shows them what's available if they ever want to upgrade. And there's actually, in one of the samples that I'll show you a bit later, there's actually.

Some sample wording that you can use specifically for that. To kind of help them along with.

Upgrading at a later point if you want them to.

Okay, so I'm going to move on to our next session. We're going to talk about.

Managing and customizing your proposal template tips.

And now we're going to look at advanced headers and footers. We touched a little bit about managing some images and price tables. We're going to look at that a little bit more. And then next we're going to get into some keywords.

So let me go back to our software.

Okay, so let's imagine that I want the.

Text.

I'm going to add a section.

Again. I'm just going to do everything down at the bottom.

So I'm going to add a section.

And I want to have some text and I want to have an image beside it at any time. If you drag something into an existing section, it's going to create those automatic columns for you. So if I add another text or add another image. So we looked at that.

So I'm going to delete, use extra 2 I just added.

I'm going to work mostly with just two guys.

But what actually what I wanted to show you though is if you try to add a fifth section, you're going to get this little error message that tells you only four are allowed. So it's never going to let you add more than four. I'm going to work with mostly two today or one. So default is going to be the logo.

That you have set up. Let's say I want to change that. I'm going to go into the slider bar. I'm going to click on upload. You can either drag and drop a file or you can select one. I have one ready to go here.

I'm just going to drag it in.

And save that.

So you'll see that now changes the image that I have in there. What's recommended to do with your images because of that size format that we have, and if you decide that you want to use it as a background image, which we'll look at in just a second, it's really recommended to use a photo editing software program first to edit the photo to the correct size and the correct layout that you want. So I'll show you a little bit of what I mean. Let's say.

Let's say I'm in this section where there's some text, text.

And I want to.

Add a background image right here I have the option to upload a background image. I'm just going to use that same image as an example.

So this is a good idea if you wanted to have like a. A nice big image on your cover page with your proposals, information and text over top. But you can see the text is a little bit hard to read because the type of image that I'm using. So it's really recommended to do some editing in a photo editing software first to edit the image to where you want it to be. So in this case I may want to edit the image to move the we offer solutions part down a little bit.

So that the text is not sitting right on top of that.

I'm just going to.

Remove that image.

We have a remove button here.

A lot of times as I'm doing something today, guys, I'm going to undo it right afterwards.

You'll notice when it's an image, we don't have the pencil icon in our settings over here anymore to edit it.

What you need to do instead is click on the slider bars and that opens your editing menu over here. And again most of the same editing features that we have on the other pages. You can add some background color, you can change your margins within the. So that would be for the whole section. So that would be for both columns. Then we have the individual column settings where I can add background color, I can change my image, remove my image, change the size of my image and.

Align it which we looked at.

When you are using an image, don't pick you. One of the other things that you need to consider is the dimensions or size of the image. Don't pick an image that is really big that when you resize it and make it smaller that it's going to be difficult to see what it is. So you want to think about where you're planning to use the image in your proposal. Is it going to be a small image such as this or is it going to be a much larger image? Like for example, I would not want my logo to be a large image. So you need to do a lot of sort of pre planning about how you want to use the images that you're wanting to use and then do the editing in the photo editing software first. You can do some editing in here, but the more that you can do in photo editing software first will just make it that much easier for you.

When you're in here.

Okay.

To.

So I mentioned about the tables that this information is just like automagically. I like that word automagically pulling the information from the quote for our client. And this is why it's client specific. We can't just use. We can use the same template for our proposals, but we need to create a separate proposal for every client, the same way we create a separate quote for every client. So it's not like, for example, if you're doing your proposals currently in a Word document, you would go in and edit some certain things, you would change the names, you would change some pricing, you might change some words. It's the same concept. It's very client specific. But the thing about doing it in the software is it pulls so much information from the quote with us. All we really need to do is tell it what template we want to use and that's it. We may want to do a couple of little tweaks. There might be, and this is, like I said, why I don't do this part in front of the client when I'm in the meeting with them. It could be there was something mentioned in the meeting that I want to go in and change some of the text. Maybe I want to add a section.

And put some text in here. And in this text I may want to say thank you very much. This proposal.

Verifies the information as.

I.

Can'T type when other people are watching me, as discussed in our meeting. Hope you have a great time in Jamaica.

Talk with you soon.

Not that I would put that in a proposal because this is your agreement, this is what they're going to sign. Right. But that's just an example of how there may be something specific that you want to change and that will change it for just this proposal for this client. It's not going to change it for your entire template.

Okay.

All right.

Delete that section.

Have some water.

You're also going to notice over here under the table. So we looked at a few of these already. You also have.

Options.

Let me add a section.

And again, this is all in that 34 page handout that you're going to get where you can choose if you want it to show a table of all the enhancements or upsells that you offer and whether they selected any or not.

You can choose if you want it to show any selected enhancements. Now, when I went through the quote, they didn't have any selected.

And same with rewards. Now be careful how you use this one. And also I'll mention at this point, be careful how you name your templates. And I'm going to demonstrate this a little bit more when we go back into a quick quote. I just don't want to jump back and forth too much right now. Be careful how you name your templates. So for example, you may have.

A payment plan template or a proposal template that includes behavior rewards, in which case they, you did offer them some behavior rewards. And then you may want to have a separate proposal template that does not include this behavior rewards page. And the reason for that would be when you are printing this for a client, if they did not select any behavior rewards, if they just agreed to your price right away and you did not need to offer them any behavior rewards, you don't want to give them a proposal that shows behavior rewards. And then all of a sudden they see in this proposal, hey, what are those behavior rewards? We didn't talk about those. Do I get a discount if I do any of these things? They've already agreed to the price. You did not offer them any behavior rewards. So if I have a proposal named Proposal.

With BR or Proposal no br to me, I know very quickly what that name means. But when I'm doing my proposal for a client and hitting that print button on the fixed page screen or the payment plan screen, they're not going to know what BR means. Just like when we're going through the quote and there's the BR button, they're not going to know what that means. But that would be a good example of why you would want to have a couple of different proposals potentially for the same service that you're offering.

I'm just going to delete that again.

So those are the enhancement tables and the rewards tables again. That 34 page handout will break down the description of each one. They're pretty self explanatory, but you're welcome to come in and play around with this as well. As I mentioned earlier, remember to make use of this page break section. If you are in one of the longer proposals which we're going to go into in just a moment where there's multiple pages, then you'll want to make sure that you're making use of that page break section as you're looking down. So the final part we're going to look at for this part of today's session is the headers and footers and doing some advanced style headers and footers. So to do this we're going to go into our settings menu which is this little gear icon on the left hand side. And you'll see down at the bottom we have header and footer settings. I'm going to start with the footer. Here's the horizontal rule which I mentioned earlier. Whatever content you have in your proposal, if you click this checkbox, it will Automatically put a horizontal rule line above your footer on every page.

Then you have a free text field that you could type in. Maybe you want the name of your company, or maybe you want your website.

And you can select whether you want it to be on the left, center or right side of your footer. You then have the option to show page numbers. So if it is a multiple.

Page proposal, then you can put page numbers on it and again choose whether it's left, center or right. And then we're going to look at keywords later. But you can put keywords in here.

You I recommend having your font the same as whatever the font is in your actual proposal. But if you do want to have it in a different font, you can do that here as well. You can change the size, maybe you want your footer to be slightly smaller and you can change the color. So for now I'm going to leave it like that.

And we will go take a look at how that appears on our preview.

So you can see I now have a footer at the bottom of every page that has my website over on the left and a page number on the right. And here's the horizontal rule that is above that. You can see I didn't change the font, so it's coming up in a different font than what the actual text in my proposal is. So if I was looking at this, that's something that I would want to fix.

The headers section.

Is pretty much the same. The horizontal rule will put a horizontal rule at the top of your page as opposed to under your header. If you want one under your header, you need to input a horizontal rule here. So I'll show you in the preview in just a minute what this one looks like. Like again, free text. I'm just going to type in test.

We'll put page numbers at the top so you can see what they look like. Let's just choose some weird font so you can see what that looks like. We'll just make a couple changes this time.

Give it a minute to populate.

Okay, so here is my basic header. So here's my page number. There's the different color font and the free text wording that I put in. However, that is a pretty basic type of header that you can do in the software. What's recommended is to actually do an advanced header similar to what you see. I'm just going to go back.

And.

Take this one out.

So what's actually recommended is to have a nice one like what Mark has provided in the template here with Your logo and some keywords. And we're going to go into keywords in one more detail in our next section, so I won't focus on those too much. Right now what I do want to focus on is how to create a more advanced style header. So to do that, what you'd want to do is create a new page, call it Header.

And then in here, starting with this blank page, we're going to add our sections.

So we're going to say we want an image.

And then some text.

The text over on the other side.

Maybe I want to make my logo a little bit smaller.

Oops, sorry.

And maybe I want to put it on the. I want it aligned on the left side of the page, rather out in the middle. Over here we have our text button. So I'm going to say proposal.

Four.

And now our keywords menu is populated because this is a text box. So I'm going to say there is. Again, guys, in the handout there is a big explanation of what all of these keywords are. We're going to be looking at some of the main ones, but then we're also going to be focusing on how to create your own custom ones. But you can see there's quite a list here and there's dropdowns in each one. I'm not going to spend a lot of time today going through each of these. You will need to use the handout for that. But I'm going to put proposal for client name keyword in here. And then maybe I want the date and I'll say proposal date. And talking about keywords, I very, very strongly suggest using the actual, like clicking on the keyword main rather than manually typing it in. You can type it in if you wanted to. You can do the bracket signs and just type it in. But it is such an increased risk for error if you forget to put the space or if you've created a custom one that maybe you've done it a little bit differently format or something.

So I highly recommend clicking on the keyword rather than manually typing it in. So now let's say I want to.

Preview this.

So you now see I have my logo on the left hand side. Proposal for.

And my client in this case is named Demo. I should have used a company, a person's name, it would have been a little easier. And then the date of the proposal. So now what you can do.

If you want to.

We were looking at page one if.

You want to have that header at the top of every page.

So here's the one that I just created. If you want to have that header at the top of every page, then you can clone this.

And now you don't need to recreate that at the top of every page and make sure that your logo is in exactly the same position and exactly the same size and exactly the same font and wording and everything. Over here, you could even actually have two different headers. You could have a header.

That you want to call page one.

And then another header.

All other pages.

Because it could be that you want this information to be a little bit smaller at the top of the page of your other pages. You still want it there, but maybe you just don't want it as big as you want it on your other pages. So in your template, you can set up these other pages and that's how you would set up a more advanced header. And then you can just clone it. When you clone it, then you start adding your sections with your information, your images, your tables that you want to add. But your advanced header option will be at the top of each page automatically.

So I'm just going to.

Actually. Let me check for questions before I delete these.

One other thing that I wanted to show you. Let's say I wanted to, right, Align this. Just like other text editing software, if I highlight that.

Oops, sorry.

Is not showing up for me.

Normally when I would highlight this.

It brings up a little.

Screen.

Oh, I know, sorry.

It's because I'm in edit mode over here.

So when I highlight.

Let me save this.

I'm not sure why it's not popping.

Up for me, guys.

Normally when I highlight this, I would get a little menu that pops up just like what you would see at the top of an editing software where you would have align buttons and font size buttons, font color buttons, so on and so forth. So I'm going to come back to that in a little bit. I noticed, FYI, the pages aren't being.

Saved is why it's still saying to save the pages.

Yeah, but I was clicking on save what. What I was about to say is when I was playing around with this a lot in the last few days, there was a bit of a lag when I was clicking things and a couple of times I had to go back out and back in. So.

There we go.

So now if I click and save that, you'll see I'm getting the menu. Sorry about that, guys. I. I don't know why that. I guess when you start doing a lot of changes when I'm playing around with it as much As I am, I have to hit refresh. I noticed when I was doing this a couple days ago I would have to hit refresh or I might have to click the back button and then go back into it. So if you're doing a lot of tweaks and edits and you find that's what's happening, that's one way to troubleshoot. But if I wanted to write align this, I can change the alignment, so on and so forth. Okay.

So I'm going to check for questions and then we're going to move on to looking at keywords.

Okay. Working with nonprofits, we answered that one.

Michael says, can you make the first column of a four column section larger than the other three? Okay, so let's move another section in here.

What you would need to do for that, Michael, if I'm understanding your correct, your question correctly, is if you wanted to have, say, column one wider than column two.

If I'm understanding that correctly, I would recommend having.

Maybe a image in there that is bigger than the other sections or columns that you want to do, and then maybe having one section that's blank.

You can also play around with your font sizes. There is, there is. You can't just actually like click and drag a column to make it wider. You can click and drag it to move it around, but you can't like click and drag like you would when you're adding columns in a Word document where you can make the column width wider for one column and the other ones just automatically get smaller. We don't have that functionality in here. But this is where again, you can do some stuff with externally and then import it as an image.

And then Stephanie says, what photo editing app do you use, Stephanie? I'm going to actually leave that to anyone else that is maybe using a specific one. I kind of just use whatever I find on Google at the time I set up my proposals and I'm going to talk about this in a minute. My, my main proposal was actually set up for me by Emily. I just didn't take the time to do it.

And so you can use Canva. I. I'm going to come back to your question because we're going to talk about that a bit more. All right, let's move in to looking at keywords.

All.

Right.

Going to go back into the software.

Throughout the first five sessions of the course, I've often referred to keywords. How important.

How are we doing for time?

15 minutes up. Okay. I've often referred to keywords, how important they are, how powerful they can be how they can integrate with your proposals. So just very quickly to make sure everyone understands what I mean. When I call something a keyword, it's essentially a placeholder in your proposal that pulls the corresponding information from your quote into that place. So, for example, we looked already at client name, proposal name or proposal date.

And we looked at how there's a long list of ones that are available in the software already. There's a lot of keywords in here.

I want to talk about. Spend some time about how to create custom ones. This is where it starts to get really powerful in here. There is also a 17 page help sheet that you're going to get.

I'll just quickly show you that as well.

That is going to talk about the keywords.

Jump down to page four.

So here is where it will tell you. These are all the ones that are given to us by Mark already. So it will tell you the name of the keyword, the layout that it is, and then what the result will be in your proposal. So you can see there's quite a few in here. Proposals are basically broken or not proposals keywords are basically broken down into sections. We have system keywords which are all these ones in this first list. Then we have package keywords which are things related to the package.

We have final payment keywords which are anything related to the keywords. And I skipped over one. There's one for client as well. Keywords that are specific to the client.

So you'll get a copy of this handout with today's material.

The custom keywords that you create can be related to three things. So the ones that are provided to us are broken down into four sections. The custom ones that we can create are further broken down into three sections. So there's ones that are client specific. Maybe it's their date of birth or their spouse's name or a goal that they might have, which is something that I ask very early in my pricing process. In my fact find meeting, I ask them about their goals and then there could be company specific keywords which are things related to your company, not theirs. So for example, I typed in my website address into a free text field there. If you wanted to have your website address as part of your proposal template, you can set up a key word.

For that and it would automatically put.

That in.

Client keywords. So let's look at where to do this. They can be related.

They'Ll vary from client to client. So it could be like maybe their pet's name. Right. It could just be something that you really want to personalize and make yourself stand out from other people that may be preparing quotes for them. The quote specific keywords will also vary from client to client. Some examples could be maybe you want to put in a year end date or a month end date or a contract renewal date if you want to let them know when their next proposal renewal date would be. This is all really customized to what you would like to do. So I'm going to show you how to create these. We're going to go back into our settings menu.

And you'll see there's a section over here for keyword manager.

There's a few in here already that I've set up. If you're new to doing this, it's going to be blank and you would click on add keyword. If you have some already, you'll see they appear in this list. You'll have the name that you assign it and the type that it is. So those are the three types that I told you we can have Company, Client and Quote.

If you're adding a new one, you need to give it a name.

So let's say spouse name.

And I'm going to say this one is specific to the client and I will save that one.

Let's just add another one. Floor. What do I have here for.

Company?

I have company website. Let's say I wanted to put my company phone number.

And then I'll put that there.

Okay, so now we've got a few that we can play with. So that's the first thing that you need to do when you create custom keywords is to go into that settings menu and then your keyword manager and then add the keyword that you need to do. Give it a name and select whether it's client, quote or company related. Now the second step that you need to do to actually use the keyword in your proposal is you have to tell the software where you want it to pull the information from in order to fill that space in the placeholder. Remember I said a keyword is just a placeholder, right? So you need to tell the software for this placeholder, where am I going to go to get the information for that? For any company style of keywords, you would change those in your profile. So back to the Gear icon. We're going to go into my profile and you'll see this section down here on the left that says keywords. There's the one that I had created already yesterday that says company website. Here's the one that I just created today that says Company phone number.

So whatever information you want to appear when you use that keyword, company phone number, you will type in whatever information you want to appear in your proposal and then click save. So for the keywords that are company related, that's where you're going to find it. For any.

Client keywords, you're going to find those in your clients and quotes section. So I'll go in here.

Remember, these are client specific ones. Now they're going to vary from client to client. So I'm going to go into my demo client and I'm going to click on view and edit for that client. And you'll see at the top here I have this little tab called keywords. So here's the one that I put in a couple days ago. Here's the one that I just put in today. So let's say spouse's name is.

Say list.

No?

Okay, so first name is one. The default one that comes with the system is their full name. If you want to use just their first name, you need to set up a custom keyword for that. If I wanted to put in their spouse's name or their pet's name or their goal or you know, their favorite vacation spot or something, I can do that. You want to make this similar to the tone of how you would talk to somebody. I see we have about six minutes left, so I want to show you where to find the other one and then we're going to look at a full proposal that is the multi template or multi page one. Finally, the other type of keyword that I mentioned that we have is the quote type. You can use these when you're preparing a quote for a client. If I go to use a model to create a quote quote for a.

Client.

So I'm just going to jump into model management.

I'm going to say use this for a quote. I now if I've set this up in my keyword manager already, I now have a keyword section. If you've used your pricing models in the past, you would have remembered that we only have this top section number one, normally when we're preparing a quote. But because I've set up a quote specific keyword, I now have a section two that shows up and I can say their year end date is December 31st.

Okay.

And then save and continue.

Whoops.

The same way you would if you were preparing a quote. I just want to show you that that's where the keyword would show up for a quote specific. So I'm just going to do another Check for questions and then we're going to look at a multi page proposal and talk about some best practices for managing your proposals.

So Kate has said can the company type be changed to firm or more company not in.

I think I understand what you're asking. If I'm in the keyword manager, you're asking can this type be changed? And if that's your question, no. These are.

Software specific names. However, when. Sorry, I should have stayed in there. When you are naming it, you can name it whatever you want. So if you want to name it firm website or company website or whatever, or my company website, you can change the name to whatever you want it to be. But when you're selecting the type of where it's going to pull the information from, that part cannot be changed. That is software language. So I hope that answers your question, Kate. All right.

Let's move on to.

The.

Full page proposal and then we're going to review some best practices. So I'm going to go back into my proposal templates.

The full page proposal, like a long proposal template that Mark gives us is this one called Rocket theme. So if I click on use template for that, I'm not going to spend the time right now to rename it because I'm conscious that we only have three minutes left. You'll see that there. You know what guys, sorry, I'm probably going to go just a few minutes over again because I have some things I want to show you. So you'll see we now have quite a bit more information in here. I'm going to jump to a preview. I've shown you all the editing functions.

So what I want to show you in a multi page one is here's his custom header. So he's got company name, several lines of the address that you can put several lines of contact information. He's got a large image here as a background image that has some keyword text over top of it. So he has proposal four typed in. But then this demo 2024, that's, that's my customer's name today. That is a keyword section that he has.

Here is the footer that he has set up.

Here's a different header now, right? So we have a header here that's got all of the company contact information. Now here's a different header that's only got the logo and the proposal. So that's where I was saying you can create different header pages. So if you see all the other pages in this proposal don't have the same header as what's on the first page.

So you can see here there's several spots where it's pulling from keywords. So this is the package price, this is the package name that they chose. He's got some appendix pages in here. I'm going to scroll through this a little bit quickly because I am going to go back to the editor mode and show you. So he's got a page called Appendix 1 and he's got a table in there.

This is where you would want to play around with this a little bit. Maybe make the font size of that table a little bit smaller. Maybe make the font size of the text in this text section smaller so that it looks a little prettier and the table doesn't get separated. You can't put a page break in the middle of a table. So you want to get your table to fit on one page. So you'll need to play around with some editing about that.

Okay, so what you will see here is one of the keywords, right? Here's another keyword.

If I because it's a multi page document, I now have my options here where I can select two different pages and here's my different header information that was on all the other pages like we saw.

And so here is our edit section. So he has one called Cover page one called Text one. Here's his appendixes. You could rename those as Pricing table or Enhancements table or behavior rewards table. You can, because right now when it just says appendix, appendix, appendix, you may not know what those are. So feel free to rename these. Whatever's going to make it easier for you.

I'm going to be jumping back to the slide. I'm going to come out of the product, turn my camera back on and I'm going to invite everybody. If you have any last minute questions, do start dropping those into chat. If you need me to pop back over into the software, I will. I just want to give you a couple closing messages.

Again, best practices. Remember to use the automatic keywords rather than manually typing them in. Remember that proposals are client specific. So some editing that you may need to do is not going to apply to your entire template. Remember to practice what applies to the template that you have versus what applies to a specific quote that you're doing for a client. And consider using Canva to create some background images with that. I want to jump back to my slides for a minute and tell you about Canva.

Okay, so as a closing option, if you find this is what I did initially. Emily and.

Another member of Mark's team offer Tasha offer a custom proposal design where it is a paid for service where you can contact them. Gabby will drop the link into the chat box for you. It's also there on the handouts for you. It is a paid service but they will design a custom proposal for you. You can give them an example of what you're using already that has your wording and your content in it. If you have any specific images that you want used, they can do that for you and use those images or they can use some stock photos that they have and they can give you that custom proposal. So that is a service that's available. With today's session handouts, you are going to get some examples of ones that they have done before. They aren't ones that you can use on your own, but you can get some examples and see what they do. And then also we are coming to the end of our courses for this year for the effective pricing. We have one more session next month. Next month we're going to be talking about integrations, the payment plans and software tools and next month we will be back to our regular time again. But as we come to the end of the sessions, if anybody has been having trouble keeping up with the sessions or maybe you're stuck somewhere. I'm also available for effective pricing coaching and you can email me directly if you're interested in that and we can talk about my fees for that as well. I do ask that you put effective pricing coaching or just EP coaching or something in the subject line of your email.

Okay, so I am going to stop sharing.

I don't see that any other questions came in.

I'm going to take another last check.

Okay, so a few minutes over guys. I think about five minutes. So I want to thank everybody for coming today. I hope this will help you with your proposals. Again, just like when you first start your pricing models, it will take some time to get your proposals set up the way that you like, but it's an investment that will save you so much time in the future. Honestly, it really does. And it, it gives you a really nice. You'll see in the examples that come with today's handouts. It gives you a really beautiful professional looking proposal that I guarantee people who aren't using Mark's programs will have nothing as nice by comparison. So thanks everybody for coming today and good luck with your proposals.