The software—or SaaS (software as a service)—industry provides customers with a unique mix of both products and services.
Many software companies offer implementation services, custom integration projects, employee training, and customer success manager check-ins. Large enterprise and government organizations tend to need many of these services in addition to the software subscription in order to help them get results from the platform.
For those reasons, software proposals are commonplace. Large companies are more likely to purchase software from a proposal than a one-size-fits-all subscription on the company’s website. A software proposal can clarify what an engagement includes while also selling a prospective customer on the fact that they will be fully supported in their quest for ROI.
What’s in this guide:
A software proposal is a document sent to a prospective client to present the value of a software product and clarify supporting services included with the contract, such as training and onboarding. Proposals sent with proposal software can include the terms of service and e-signatures so that—once accepted—the proposal acts as a binding contract between two parties.
The ideal format for a software proposal includes an overview of the client’s goals, the solution, and what sets the company apart.
While one software proposal will showcase only the features and customer support as in the solution section, another might include very detailed project phases for implementation and training.
The main types of software proposals are enterprise software proposals and SaaS proposals.
Keep in mind that a single company can send both types of proposals to cater to their different customer segments. Many successful companies have SaaS and enterprise branches.
Software development proposals are completely different. These software project proposals are for custom web app or mobile app development. The client will pay for the development process. Meanwhile, a software proposal (described in this guide) is designed for selling access to software that already exists and whatever custom services will help a client make the most of it.
A great proposal should be detailed, brief, and results-focused.
Here are a couple of examples you can use as inspiration.
There are several things you can learn from this enterprise software proposal.
For starters, it includes an Overview and Goals page that mentions the client’s business growth, and associated challenges. The page then offers a bulleted list of the solutions needed to address those issues.
This proposal also includes the project scope. The work is broken down into three main categories: enterprise application management, customer relationship management, and business intelligence. On the second page of the Scope of Services section, the proposal lists the software products included and gives an overview of the project timeline.
Overall, the proposal serves as a great example of how to combine software access and hands-on work.
A SaaS proposal is usually a lot simpler, because there’s typically less custom work involved.
This SaaS example offers a few lessons. The Why Us section includes the company’s beliefs, history, value proposition, and commitment to customer support in just a few short paragraphs. Use this as inspiration when crafting your own Why us page.
The What We Offer portion of the proposal does an excellent job of combining software features and business benefits together. Make sure to use this section of the proposal to spell out the results of using your software, not just the functionality.
This SaaS proposal example also includes a bright, on-brand pricing section with different options. Clients can select the best fit for their business, and then sign off on the subscription.
All in all, the proposal does an excellent job of selling the software in the company’s unique brand voice and distilling essential details into a single document.
Before you can write a proposal, you need first to understand the client’s business case for your software.
Asking the right questions is the most important part of any sales process. Client discovery always comes before writing a proposal.
Client discovery can be done in a single software demo or a series of sales calls, demos, and presentations with different stakeholders.
Here are some questions you might ask:
When demoing your software, pay attention to what features and customer stories they respond to the most. This can help you identify the client’s problems and goals.
Before you sit down to write your proposal, it’s important to know what it should include so you can prepare ahead of time and gather everything you need.
The ideal software proposal outline will cover all of these sections (although the names of the sections can change):
To write a detailed proposal, follow these simple steps.
Kick things off with a proposal template to save time.
Using a template not only saves time with writing but with designing as well. You can send the template to your in-house graphic designer and ask them to make it on-brand, or spend an hour or so tweaking it yourself to match your company’s branding.
The next step is to craft messaging that you can reuse for different clients.
You can start with your Why Us section. It should be informed by competitive research. Let’s take PropertyRadar as an example. This real estate intelligence software offers 250+ criteria for building lists of the perfect properties (for direct mail campaigns). Most real estate analysis tools competing with PropertyRadar offer less than 50. So their salesperson might write something like, “PropertyRadar offers 5X the amount of targeting criteria so you can get better ROI on every direct mail campaign.”
All in all, you can plan on creating reusable content for these proposal sections:
Before you can customize your company’s proposal template for a specific client, you need to lean on your client discovery process, your experience, and your intuition to make decisions about what to present.
When choosing the best approach for each client, here are some things to consider:
Before you start customizing your proposal for a client, you might want to check that you’re all on the same page. You could host a final call to propose your software and the pricing options quickly, and see if that fits their needs and expectations. Once you’ve got the green light, go ahead and move onto the next step.
If it’s a large corporation or government agency, you could ask your point of contact what essential information the decision-makers will want to see. Even if there isn’t a request for proposal (RFP) being sent out for software solutions like yours, you could ask to see a previous, unrelated RFP so you know what this entity looks for in the proposal format.
Now it’s time to customize your company’s proposal template for a specific client. Take the proposal template and alter all of these sections to match the client’s company name and their needs.
To make things more human and personal, you might even add photos and contact information of the specific team members who will assist them after they sign (such as onboarding specialists or customer success managers).
Now it’s time to send the proposal. Proposals with e-signatures assigned to both the sender and recipient are 426% more likely to close.
To increase your chances of getting the deal closed by a further 36.8%, be sure to sign the proposal before you send it.
And finally, be prepared to make adjustments. When we researched thousands of SaaS proposals, we found that proposals that close are viewed 2.5 times on average, while unsuccessful proposals are viewed 3 times.
When using Proposify, you can use viewing metrics to your advantage. If you notice that a prospect has viewed a proposal 3 or more times but hasn’t signed it yet, go ahead and ask them if they’d like to change the scope or explore a different solution.
To rock your software proposals, try these smart tips.
Multimedia content can help seal the deal. Including images in a SaaS proposal boosts the closing rate by 23%, while including at least one video will bump up the closing rate by 41%.
For images, you can include team photos, software screenshots, and case study result graphs. For videos, try making a simple, friendly high-level overview of the proposal or uploading an explainer video. With Proposify, you can easily arrange images and videos on any proposal page.
When you offer interactive fee tables—a table where the client can select add-ons and quantities—you can boost closing rates by 173%.
This is a no-brainer. Software pricing should be customizable, especially for larger companies.
Unlike agencies and small firms, software companies typically garner a lot of online reviews. Websites like G2 and Capterra are well-known review sites for vetting business software.
If you’ve got a great star average or any awards from these sites, be sure to include those badges. That can help add quantity to your social proof, whereas the testimonials and case studies are more about quality.
As mentioned above, we recommend starting with a general software template and then customizing it to make a template that is specific to your business and can be used again and again.
You can take this strategy a step further by crafting different templates for different software products, subscriptions, or levels of service. This will drastically improve your speed when sending proposals to clients, as you’ll have to do less customization each time.
To make sure that your proposal writing is on point, we recommend tracking your benchmarks. Inside of Proposify, you can check your analytics for average viewing rates and closing rates. You can then compare individual clients and proposals against these metrics.
You might find that one proposal type closes at a better rate than another. For example, maybe your hands-off software access closes at 3X the rate as your custom implementation offer. This could inform you that your custom service is priced too high, and maybe you need to try writing up a mid-level offer with some barebones hands-on service at a lower rate.
To create and send an excellent software proposal, you need templates, e-signatures, dynamic fee tables, and analytics all in one place.
With Proposify, you get these and more features designed to boost closing rates.
Dayana Mayfield is a B2B SaaS copywriter who believes in the power of content marketing and a good smoothie. She lives in Northern California. Connect with her on LinkedIn here: linkedin.com/in/dayanamayfield/
