How to choose proposal software

Before you open any website, answer five questions on one page:

• How many proposals do you send a month?
• Who builds them: you, a salesperson, or several people?
• Does the buyer need to sign, and who signs?
• How do you show prices: a fixed total, options, or a table with optional extras?
• Which CRM holds the deal?

Your answers decide everything else. A team sending five proposals a month needs something different from one sending fifty.

Most tools cover the same ground. Your list of must-haves should be short:

• A notification when the buyer opens it, and which page they spent time on.
• Reusable templates with blocks you can swap in.
• A pricing table that supports optional items and quantity changes.
• A signature step, built in or through a tool you already use, like DocuSign.
• A two-way link to your CRM.

Everything else is a bonus. Do not pay for a library of design themes if you send plain, short proposals.

Look at PandaDoc, Proposify, Better Proposals, Qwilr and GetAccept. Your CRM may also have a quote feature of its own. HubSpot does in some plans, so check what yours includes before you buy a second tool.

Cut the list to three using your must-haves and the vendor's own integration page for your CRM. Three is enough to compare and few enough to finish.

Take the last proposal you sent. Rebuild it in each of the three, using a free trial. Time yourself. Write down:

• Minutes from blank page to ready to send.
• Whether the pricing table handled your options without tricks.
• Whether the preview looked right on a phone.
• Whether the signature step worked when you sent it to yourself.

Under twenty minutes for a repeat proposal is a good target. If it takes an hour in the trial, it will not get quicker.

"Integrates with" can mean very little. Create a deal in your CRM, send the proposal from the deal and open it as the buyer. Then check three things. Does the deal show that it was viewed? Does the amount in the CRM match the proposal? When you sign it, does the deal stage change?

If any answer is no, find out whether a no-code tool such as Zapier can close the gap before you rule the tool out.

Ask how you get your templates and signed documents out. Ask what happens to the signed files if you cancel. Look at how the plan counts users, since adding a second salesperson may change what you pay. Prices change, so confirm them when you buy and do not rely on an old page.

Choose the tool that passed your test with the least effort, not the one with the longest feature list. Put a date in the diary ninety days out and ask three questions: are proposals going out faster, is anyone using the view notifications, and does the CRM stay up to date?

Then build your templates with Create reusable templates, and measure the result with How to track proposal performance.

• Choosing on a demo given by the vendor rather than on your own proposal.
• Buying an enterprise tool for a team that sends a handful of proposals.
• Ignoring the CRM link until the first week of use.
• Paying for extra users who never log in.
• Switching tools every year, so templates never settle.

A proposal goes out the same day as the call that triggers it. You can see, for any open proposal, whether the buyer has opened it and when. Signed proposals move the deal on without anyone retyping. And nobody on your team has gone back to sending PDFs.