Automate Your Agency

Are you losing deals because your proposals take forever?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Let's be real....drafting proposals is a pain in the butt. 

They may be essential, but they are tedious, time-consuming, and, for many of us, what we wind up working on when we'd prefer to be relaxing. 

To make things even more stressful, the longer a proposal takes to create and send, the less likely the deal is to close.

It's a shame we don't have the technology for these things to write themselves...😏

Newsflash! We do. 😎

This week on Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson share how they turned a traditionally manual task into an efficient, automated workflow that saves time and eliminates stress.

In this episode, they reveal:

🔹 How they built a system using tools like Grain, PandaDoc, and their CRM to automate proposals

🔹 The steps to pull insights from call transcripts and client pain points

🔹 The surprising benefits of removing the manual effort from proposal creation

🔹 And so much more!

Curious to see how it works? Check it out here! You can watch a demo video AND go hands-on to demo it yourself!

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. All right, Micah. So you know, I was just in Philadelphia this week doing a 10 KSB. It's a Goldman Sachs program for business owners. And they're really active with the alumni and they did an in person event all about sales and marketing. And one of the things that was a huge, huge topic at my table was several of the business owners had said how tired they were because they were.

0:00:42 - (Alane): Several of them had stayed up till midnight the night before writing proposals. And when I mentioned, I can relate. Right. It's not the most exciting thing that you do as a business owner. You know, it's a lot of times it's like the last thing, which is why people were waiting until the last minute putting together the proposal. And when I mentioned that we've put together an automation that will auto generate proposals, it was a big topic of discussion after they said how difficult it was where they saw we haven't even.

0:01:18 - (Micah): Really been able to debrief on this very much. But the reason that we put together this whole automated workflow was kind of to solve our own problem. Like, I hate to admit it, Alane, but I hate making proposals.

0:01:36 - (Alane): Like you're alone in that sentiment.

0:01:38 - (Micah): Yeah, like it's, it's one of those things where it's like, I know we need to make them and, and obviously we need to communicate with our prospects and then proposals help us get sales and revenue, which are all the things that we need to do. But I will push off making a proposal for so long.

0:01:57 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:01:57 - (Micah): I tell myself it's going to take so much time. It does. Then I'm, I'm doing it at night after, you know, my son's gone to bed. It is not my favorite. It's not even. It might be that my least favorite thing to do. Which is so sad.

0:02:15 - (Alane): Yeah. Which now is below public speaking because you like going and speaking at different.

0:02:20 - (Micah): Events doing much better.

0:02:21 - (Alane): So you've moved that one up on the list to move proposal generation down. And I also want to say too, it's not like you're creating these from scratch every time we use a proposal software with templates in it. So even our time to create these is reduced. But man, is it just a mind shift to have to go in and create these every time a customer is like, well, can you see me? Send me a Proposal. I'm like, internally I cringe like, no, I don't want to do that. Just buy from me. Like we just talked about it. Just sign the. Sign a piece of paper saying you'll pay me and we're good.

0:02:53 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. You mean we can't take this recorded video with the transcript and put signature lines at the bottom?

0:03:00 - (Alane): Well, funny you say that because how we've now started.

0:03:05 - (Micah): That's pretty much how it works now. Yeah.

0:03:07 - (Alane): How we.

0:03:08 - (Micah): That was our solution.

0:03:09 - (Alane): Yeah. Good. Lead in, Micah, accidentally is we do have these calls where we talk about their pain points and the solutions that we provide. We already have that discussion documented. We use GRAIN as our call recorder and you know, it automatically does a summary. We've got a trans script, pain points and next steps already outlined because of AI analyzing that. And we do use a proposal software. We use PandaDoc.

0:03:35 - (Alane): Well, what if we tied the two together based on the discussion that we had, the services that we said we'd offer and a template in PandaDoc for that solution that we offer?

0:03:47 - (Micah): Yeah. So essentially that's exactly what we built. And we have it so that now in our CRM, as soon as a deal goes to needs proposal, our automation will run. Run automatically. It will pull all the transcripts, all the call notes, all the history out of the CRM, analyzes that and then writes the proposal for us. And so we've fine tuned all of this to say how do we actually write accurate proposals from that data set?

0:04:14 - (Micah): And it works amazingly well. We even got it to the point.

0:04:16 - (Alane): So cool. Micah. I just like whenever you. When we wrapped up the automation for that, I was like, who can I write a proposal for? Who can I write a proposal for? I'm going to record a video of record like it changed the game. Right. Nobody is going, who can I go write a proposal for? No. But that was the feeling that I had after seeing how amazing this automation worked.

0:04:40 - (Micah): Yeah. Because I would easily wordsmith proposals for an hour, be paranoid that I'm going to have to like that I'm missing typos or whatever it is. And like you said, even with the templates, like there's still that, that gear shift in your head of like, okay, I feel like I'm writing from scratch. I have to go back and review. It's been two or three days since we had this meeting. Now I have to go back and watch the meeting, watch the recording, read the notes, read this, catch up, think about what we were talking about in that moment, then write about all of that and put it succinctly enough, then I've got to figure out the timelines. Then I've got to figure out the deliverables, the statement of work. Like, holy crap. So what would take at a minimum hour for me per proposal or anybody else on our team for that matter, runs in less than 60 seconds.

0:05:37 - (Micah): And we've got it to the point Now, Alane, I was kind of tracking like, what are my edits when a proposal is output and I'm about to like two minor edits and the rest is good right out of the gates because we already have the template. It's selecting the right template to use the crux to all of this. And this is probably a best practice for anybody listening to this is document, great call notes, paste your transcripts, use a CRM. Like, use these tools, because that's what makes this work. If you just have spreadsheets and your notes are in your head and all this stuff, then. Yeah, sorry, you're going to be writing proposals. Yeah.

0:06:16 - (Alane): You keep manually writing your proposals, then this is where you and I definitely agree on paying for software. Because paying, I don't know how much we pay $40 a month or something for a CRM user. Minimal, you know, and paying for a software for proposal templates is. Pays us back a thousand percent, you know, not only from an automation standpoint, but from a business operation standpoint. And now you add automation in there.

0:06:47 - (Alane): It is well worth the money that we spend. It pays us back 100%.

0:06:53 - (Micah): Oh, my gosh. And then adding grain into that huge margin.

0:06:56 - (Alane): Grain. CRM and proposal software. So those three, if you have those three, you're paying such little money per month to have these resources that then you could automate proposal generation. And you are just editing. I mean, I just used it the other day and did like two edits. And let's talk about some of the sections that we're automating in here too, Micah. That it's customized. Yeah.

0:07:21 - (Micah): Just to give context. For sure.

0:07:23 - (Alane): Yeah. And one of my favorites and why people ask for proposals is they want to know that you heard their pain points. They don't want a cookie cutter thing, even though it is like, you know, you need to have a viable service that you give, so you need something that is scalable. Okay, well, how does that speak to their pain points? And my favorite section is the challenges and goals section where it takes from the transcript the specific challenges that they have and then puts the solutions and goals that you offer and solving that.

0:07:58 - (Alane): I'm like, oh, my God, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. How can you get more custom for a customer than spelling out the words that they said and how you can solve their problems? That's what should go in a proposal.

0:08:12 - (Micah): Yeah. And I looked at one that you created that you showed me just the other day, Alane, with this system and it had like six different challenges identified. And I know for me to skim through the call notes, write down those six challenges and the solutions, like that's an hour in itself.

0:08:33 - (Alane): Again, it was auto generated. So we have these core pieces, these core sections in the proposal. So like one of our core sections is this challenges and goal solutions section.

0:08:46 - (Micah): Yep. Another one is tailored solutions. So we've trained it and you know, and this applies to any business. Like we can give the system enough information to know what are your offerings, what are your services, what are your products, so it can make good decisions about what should go into that proposal. So tailored services, expected outcomes, executive summary. All of these are full page structured, but we basically said like, here's the voice that we want to use, here's the structure that we want to use, loads it right. And does all the work for us.

0:09:17 - (Alane): Yeah. And even has a loose timeline. So, you know, one of the big questions that a customer is going to ask is, you know, how long is this going to take? Well, based on the call, because that typically happens during calls, is like, hey, you know, is this a month long project? Is this a three month long project? It can pull these things out and put together a loose timeline, which is really helpful. Again, in a proposal, when you're talking about money and cost, how long does do they expect to continue paying for this?

0:09:43 - (Alane): Do you have a minimum number? You know, those kind of things can also be pulled and put in there. And then you have these core sections that aren't going to change. Like maybe your pricing structure is going to be the same for everyone that can be baked into the template so that you're going to have these core sections that don't change, that you want to include and you can still edit them. All of this is editable before you send it out.

0:10:05 - (Micah): Yep, yep. Now, let's say you have a decent sized sales team. This the way that we've set it up. Like Alane, you and I are independently sending out proposals. It's smart enough to know, hey, this is Micah's, this is Alane's again because it's pulling the data from the CRM because we have good practices on that side.

0:10:25 - (Alane): Hold on, Mike. But that way we don't even have to. This is like so cool. It knows because I'm the owner of that contact in the CRM that it even fills in the signature lines at the end. So it has a signature block assigned to me and signature block that is assigned to the person I'm sending it to automatically. Like it just when I, when I saw that piece and this is what we do for a living, like, even when I saw that, I was like, holy shit, this is awesome.

0:10:58 - (Micah): Yeah. And I mean, now I just feel like we're talking about how cool our own thing is that we built. But we did have it do like the company research ahead of time and that can help work through the sales process. And then on the outside it has a whole proposal template performance dashboard that it goes in. And this is agnostic to CRMs. This is any CRM with an API, any proposal software with an API, we can make this work.

0:11:27 - (Micah): And so like that's kind of the beauty, taking it out of like, just talking about the cool shit that we build. But like, that's the beauty of where we're at in business right now with the, with being able to leverage AI, with being able to leverage automation. Right. Sky's the limit in many cases when it comes to, like, if multiple systems have an API, how do you tie this all together and then how do you eliminate this time consuming work? Even the argument of hiring a VA to do this. The reason you and I write template or write proposals is because this is super hard to train on because it's all of our knowledge, it's the conversations that we've had.

0:12:06 - (Micah): It's just like, you can't just delegate this and be like, hey, make a kick ass proposal for me. No matter the sops, no matter how long that person has to be involved in these deals, in these products and these offerings, making probably 20, 30 proposals before they're catching on how it is. But that's not the case through AI and automation because you can say it once and train it once, and then it, it's a system, it just repeats. And in order for you to improve these types of systems, you're just editing different pieces of the prompts or different pieces of the automation and suddenly it's like this nice iterative approach, like, oh, what if we had it output like this? Or what if we had it formatted like this? Or what if we added this new section?

0:12:53 - (Alane): Yeah. So I got a question for you, Micah, that I honestly don't know the answer to. So I understand it's CRM agnostic, because I can totally understand how APIs work. But what if the customer is using Monday.com as their CRM? Does this still work?

0:13:09 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

0:13:11 - (Alane): That was one of the questions that I got when I was out in Philadelphia and I was talking to someone, they're like, well, we use Monday as a CRM. And I was like, you know what, I think that'll work. But I need to make sure, because it does have an API, we can still pull that data. The core would be that you have the notes in there, right?

0:13:30 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So there's some, there's some basic stuff that you would want to track just to make sure that it's getting the data that it needs to run through the automation, the notes, the transcripts. But that's really easy to add to Monday. When we think about it, it all comes down to a trigger. So in a CRM, right, it would be moving a deal from one stage of the pipeline to another.

0:13:51 - (Micah): You could do that in Monday. You could have it be a status change. There's a number of things that you could set as the trigger. And as long as you have a trigger, then that's going to say, now we got to run this automation, pull all this data out, analyze it, pick the template, write the content, populate the template, spit it out, and then like we have it set up so that we get notified with a task to review the proposal that we need to write.

0:14:18 - (Micah): Or now in this case, edit.

0:14:21 - (Alane): Yeah, review, edit, send. No, that's awesome. Because we have a lot of, and a lot of our customers that use Monday as a CRM. And so that's pretty exciting even for them. If you're using that, then it's totally doable.

0:14:37 - (Micah): Yeah, I think the, the only scenarios where this can get rough are some of the very industry specific CRMs that are designed for a niche, but are not a large enough niche to be able to have the development team to build a nice API around that. So if you're using a CRM that doesn't have an API, this is not something that is possible yet, unfortunately.

0:15:05 - (Alane): Yeah, and if you're wondering, shoot us a note and we can easily look up and see if your CRM has an available API. And an API is just simply ways that two CRMs can talk to each other. We can either pull data or send data and that gives us that window to be able to do that. So shoot us a note if you're not sure. And Micah, we have a demo video of us walking through this that will drop into the show notes so that if you're interested and you want to just see in context what we're talking about, you can watch that.

0:15:35 - (Alane): It's short and you can just see how this works and how much time it can hopefully alleviate from your day to day.

0:15:43 - (Micah): Yeah. And in fact, I think by the time this episode will be published. So if you're hearing this, check the show notes because we'll probably have a link to a live demo where you can actually simulate putting in some call notes or have it auto generate some call notes, run through this whole process and then spit out an example that you can see in real time.

0:16:05 - (Alane): Yeah. Pretty exciting stuff.

0:16:06 - (Micah): Thanks everybody for listening. We're super excited about this topic and just what's possible these days. So we'll probably do a few more episodes on just these very unique use cases. How do we leverage AI? How do we leverage automation? Getting into some of these just wonderful time saving things that we are building and implementing not only for ourselves, but for other people. So reach out with any questions. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

0:16:38 - (Alane): Bye guys. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate youe Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja. Com.

0:16:51 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:16:55 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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