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Ask HN: How do you send proposals to your clients?

4 points by OnlyMateo ↗ HN
In our advertising agency we send a lot of proposals to our clients. It's well designed and personal. Usually the proposal consists of two parts: the presentation (with logic of service, about agency, cases and etc slides) and the media plan (with channels, budgets, results and etc).

We send proposals just in email and don't know about what happen with it. Did the client open and read (and which parts) it? Did the client like it? All of this are hidden.

And I don't like the way itself with sending tons of files in emails, downloading them and forwarding them further.

May be your know some the best way to send proposals and communicate with clients? Please write it :)

6 comments

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ano-ther
It sounds like a decent way of doing it.

As a buyer of advertising services, I need your support in helping my stakeholders (approvers, internal customer, procurement, legal etc) understand why we should hire you.

Their workflow is usually based on MS Office + PDFs. I would go nuts if every agency came with their own customer portal that I (and everyone else) needs to logon to.

If you want to know what people value / read in your proposals, I would set up a call or better a in-person meeting with them, even if you lost.

Creative theft is of course always a risk, but I don’t see a technological solution for that.

OnlyMateo
Yeah I really agree about MS Office + PDFs. I just want to find some online service: 1) where I can put the proposal (and where can the client download it from) 2) where the client can view the proposal without downloading (as I think it saves a lot of time) 3) and, may be, where the client can make some comments or leave some questions

I don't care about someone steals the proposal I just want to give my clients and my team the best way to communicate.

HomeDeLaPot
Sounds like there's no need for clients to log in. Maybe all you need is something like Google Drive or DropBox that allows you to create an unguessable sharing link for a folder. (Not sure if either of those do, though. Also not sure how commenting/feedback would work.)
OnlyMateo
Yeah thanks. I think about it and keep searching)
amriksohata
Some of the best proposals are targeted, short presentations (live) that clients can ask customers. Send out a link for a zoom call using paid, targeted advertising to reach people, then get that focused number on a call. Nothing beats people investment imo.
OnlyMateo
Sometimes the client says that at first wants to view our proposal and after that to discuss it with us on the meeting.

And also after our meeting I want to find the best way how I and my team can send all our docs for the client and how the client can view, discuss and etc our docs in the best way (to save its time for downloading and etc)