Creating proactive proposals with Proposal Builder

Overview

This article applies to the classic version of Proposal Builder.

Proposal Builder provides a way for Sales and Marketing teams to get ahead of opportunities by providing personalized and professional selling/informational documents before they are requested. There are three main building blocks to Proposal Builder - catalogs, section templates and response templates.

You can also use this version of Proposal Builder within Salesforce. See Working with Proposal Builder in Salesforce for more information.

You want to use pre-built content commonly included in multiple proposals, create an unsolicited document for selling to customers, or generate a Statement of Work (SOW) based on a set of requirements.

Select the applicable tab for your edition of Responsive.

• Creating a Proposal Builder project type

  To get started, a new project type must be created. To create a new project type:

  1. Go to Organization Settings > Response Projects > Type, then click Create New.
  2. Fill out the project type details.
     
     • For the Type, enter something like Proposal Builder.
     • For the Status, select the Active radio button.
     • Under Project Format, select the Proposal Builder radio button.
     • Choose a background and foreground color.
  3. Click Create.

  Creating and managing catalog structures

  Catalog structures are templates that can be used to define and organize various products and services. See Creating and managing catalog structures for more information.

  Creating and managing catalogs

  Catalogs serve as a listing of all the various products, offerings, services of a particular company or product line. See Creating and Managing Catalogs for more information.

  Creating and managing section templates

  Section templates serve as pre-written sections needed for various proposals. They may vary in inclusion and order based on the specific requirements of each proposal (such as introductions, add-ons, or professional services, for example).

  See Working with sections templates in projects or Working with section templates in the Content Library for more information.

  Using catalog merge tags within section templates

  Section templates can be organized like other pieces of content by using metadata such as tags. Doing this helps keep your section templates organized, especially when you have similar section names with different content.

  • Catalog merge tags are automatically replaced with the content of the catalogs that are chosen during proposal creation in Salesforce.
  • Use the catalog merge tag in the section description as below:
    • [catalog#<catalog_tag_name>] or
    • [catalog#<catalog_tag_name>#noname] (to exclude header name)

  See the Updating section templates section of Working with section templates in the Content Library for more information on how to add tags.

  Creating response templates

  Response templates are used to configure the final format of the finished proposal. See Working with Response Templates for more information.

  Creating proposal groups

  To simplify the Salesforce proposal creation process, you can group catalogs, section templates, and response templates together to create Proposal groups.

  1. Go to Organization Settings > Proposal Builder > Proposal Groups and click Create New.
     
  2. Do the following on the Create Proposal Group pop-up:
     
     • Enter a name for the proposal group.
     • Select a primary Business Unit (BU) if applicable.
     • Expand the Catalogs, Section templates and Response templates sections and select the ones you want to include.
       Note: You must select at least one catalog, one section template and one response template.
       
  3. Click Create.

  Generating proposals

  1. Select Projects from the App Launcher menu and click New Project, then select Create a New Project.
     
  2. Select the project type created earlier from the Project Type drop-down list.
     
  3. Do one of the following:
     • If you've create proposal templates, select the group created earlier from the Proposal Template section. This can be used to automatically include catalogs, section templates, and response templates that are part of the group.
     • If you haven't created proposal templates, under each corresponding section, select catalog(s), section template(s), and response template(s) to include.
       Note: Sections can be rearranged under the Table of Contents section.
  4. Click Generate Proposal. A preview screen appears.
  5. Review the proposal, then click Generate.

  Downloading the final proposal

  To download the final proposal, click Menu and select Export Responses.

  

  See Exporting Active Projects for more information.

• Essentials features are subscription-based and may not be available for all users. Contact your account manager, or accountmanagers@responsive.io, for more details.