Process

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Explained

If you want to know which contracts are in effect (and what stage they’re at), then you need to manage contracts throughout their lifecycle.

Unfortunately, we’re often too busy to manage contracts effectively. Managers and business owners simply save the PDF contract in their downloads folder, and forget all about it. But this paves the way for legal and financial risks.

Sellers need to improve their proposal and contract operations, while buyers need to rework how they track contract fulfillment, compliance, and renewals to be sure they’re maximizing every contract.

In this guide, we dive into the key stages of contract lifecycle management and showcase smart tools to help you manage your contracts proactively.

How to Write a Proposal for a Project (With Examples)

An excellent project proposal should address the client’s main concerns and goals, sell your unique approach, and clarify the project process.

If the project is crystal clear to both you and your client, you can reduce confusion, scope creep, and complaints.

In this guide to writing proposals for projects, we dive into what this type of proposal must include and how to write one. Plus, we showcase excellent examples to copy and data-driven best practices to follow.

What’s in this guide:

• What is a project proposal?

• What to include in a project proposal

• How to write a project proposal

• Examples of project proposals

• Tips for writing a project proposal

Looking for proposal templates, automated follow-ups, and closing insights? Get a custom Proposify demo.

4 Tips That Will Make Any Proposal More Likely to Close

You’ve based your recommendations on your client discovery process. You’ve added all the essential sections to your proposal. You’re ready to hit send on the proposal and hope it will close.

But what if there were just a few simple tweaks you could do to make sure to increase the chances that it will close?

We researched over 1 million proposals that were sent with our software last year to discover what great closers do before and after they hit send.

Below, we’ve pulled out some of the best tips from this research to help you in the final stretch.

Get all of our research. We’ve included dozens of simple, data-driven proposal tips in The 2022 State of Proposals.

7 Essential Tips for Expert Proposal Follow-ups

Follow-ups are a normal part of sending proposals. But wouldn’t it be better if clients just said “yes” straight away?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Proposals with reminders are more likely to close.

We analyzed over 1 million proposals sent with our software to get to the bottom of whether or not follow-ups really work, how to send effective follow-ups in less than a minute, and what you can do to close deals quicker with no follow-ups required.

Get all of our data-driven proposal tips in The State of Proposals 2022.

How to Create a Business Proposal That Closes Deals

When it comes to business proposals, there’s always room for improvement.

Small tweaks can make a big difference towards whether or not a client says “yes”—and how quickly they sign off.

Last year, over 1 million proposals were sent with our software, and we analyzed them to uncover trends. We dove into the details of what successful proposals have in common, as well as best practices that our users rely on.

We found out that winning proposals are interactive and feature multimedia content. In this post, we cover smart tips for creating proposals, based on our research.

For all of our the best proposal strategies, download The State of Proposals 2022.

Winning Proposal Structure Tips (What The Research Says)

We have the data on what actually improves the chances of a business proposal being accepted.

1,026,891 business proposals were sent with our proposal software in 2021, and our data team analyzed them to find out what successful proposals have in common.

We discovered both the proposal structure and the design elements that winning proposals share—including a way to boost your closing rate by an impressive 72%.

So keep reading for our data-driven tips on creating better proposal content.

To get all of our data-driven proposal strategies, make sure you download The 2022 State of Proposals.

How to Create a Simple Sales Contract

Looking to draw up a simple sales contract?

We’ve put together a guide for creating easy, efficient sales contracts that close. This guide is based on our own experience with creating and reviewing thousands of simple sales contracts, as well as feedback from our customers who have used our contract templates.

In it, we’ll explore the benefits and challenges of using a contract, review different kinds of contracts, and give you an outline to follow—just to make your life easier.

The Vendor Contract Essentials

Your vendors are important. They often provide important basics of business operations: office supplies, for example, as well as equipment repair and maintenance, internet and phone services, and the raw materials for your products.

But as you grow, it can be difficult to keep track of all your vendors and ensure that everyone is on the same page. This can lead to disputes over prices, payments, and more—and it can cost both parties time and money (and added stress, who needs that?).

In this article we'll learn what a vendor contract is, why they're important and how to create smart vendor contracts that protect your business. Most importantly, we'll discuss how Proposify helps you build vendor contracts that are easy to work with, adapt them over time, and strengthen the partnership between you and the vendors you do business with.

Your Guide To Contract Renewal Workflows

The rate of contract renewals is dropping—fast. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of finance and accounting outsourcing contracts will not be renewed. Why? “Outdated pricing models that do not drive digitization and process improvement,” Gartner Inc reports. Take into consideration that the finance and accounting industry are leaders of the world’s economy (financing alone accounts for 25% of the global economy), and it’s safe to say the trends we see here will likely carry into the rest of the business sector.

What this means is that contract renewal is going to take new creativity, effort, and investment.

If you're one of the millions of businesses who rely on the use of contracts, this is the final of three articles that will help you get ahead of the game when it comes to contract workflows. Check out the first two articles of this series, here:

• Your Guide to Contract Negotiation Workflows

• Your Guide To Contract Approval Workflows

Your Guide To Contract Negotiation Workflows

A contract negotiation workflow is the step-by-step process of moving a legal contract through a business' negotiation process. Each step has specific requirements that must be met before the document moves on to the next step. Here's how to do it right.