Estimate with Project Templates

Introduction to Project Templates (0:00)
Greetings everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It with Klient’. This one, I want to talk about project templates and how they can be used to generate better estimates and proposals.

Challenges of Not Using Project Templates (0:15)
First, challenges of not using project templates. If you’re generating proposals from scratch every time, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It is slowing down your proposal generation process, delaying responses to potential clients with longer turnaround times. It also results in content inconsistency. Different team members may have varying writing styles or design preferences, leading to inconsistent proposals, making your business look less professional. Also, there’s a higher risk of errors with proposals showing incorrect information, outdated content, or important sections being left out, reducing the completeness and the effectiveness of your proposals. And finally, it will bring scalability issues in the long run. Without templates, it becomes challenging to manage and increase the volume of proposals efficiently, potentially limiting your ability to scale your operations and handle more opportunities simultaneously.

Best Practices for Using Project Templates (1:20)
So, a few best practices that I want to convey with this recording here is that first, we’ll see how we can start the proposal estimates with project templates, leveraging your business knowledge and making proposal generation quicker. Using the project to define and track the scope of the discussions and what you’ve been discussing with your customer in the discovery session. Estimating your revenue with the placeholders, so that will generate beneficial information for pipelining and forecasting your resource utilization. And ultimately, generating the document right from your proposal record, making sure that you have clarity across the team and the customer.

Creating Proposals with Project Templates (2:03)
So let’s see how we can do that using Klient tools. From your Account page, as soon as you have the opportunity that you want to track with a customer, you should create a new proposal if you’re not using Sales Cloud. The opportunity is where you’re going to interact with your team and track any discussions with the customer. When you’re ready to do a scoping for what needs to be estimated, spin a new project using a project template in the ‘Import project’ section. This will create a reference based on the template for you to modify and tweak if you need to customize it. The project being created, you can easily do any adjustments, either on the timeline on what you expect to do, remove any sections of the project that you might not need, or add any customized tasks to that project. What it should include is hours, an estimate of when this task should be occurring and who would eventually be doing it on top of the scope of that task. So here I’m going to add that new task and assign some hours so that I can adjust my expected revenue. That being done, my expected revenue on my proposal is already updated. Now I can just leverage some information from the project and generate a document, using a document generation tool that you might already have in your system. Here I might include information about my scope, my timeline, and why not leverage the information from the task scope and the description that we’ve put for each of them. That’s it. Then you can send it to DocuSign for an easy completion.

Benefits of Using Project Templates (3:50)
So as you’ve seen, there are several benefits of using project templates earlier in your sales cycle to generate your estimates and your proposals. First off, you’ll have enhanced sales forecasting. It provides a clearer picture of potential future work, helping more accurate workload forecasting and revenue projections. It also offers better visibility into your entire pipeline, both for sales and the delivery team. It also helps for better communication and collaboration. Early project creation greatly improves clarity within the team, ensuring that everyone is aligned with the project goals and timeline. Also, you can focus on customization. With the basic structure and standard content in place, you can focus on customizing each proposal to address the specific needs and preferences of your client. This will increase the relevance and impact of your proposals. It will improve your efficiency and be a time-saver, as the templates streamline the proposal creation process, allowing you for a swift generation of service offers. And finally, you have the famous continuous improvement that should be part of every process of your business. As the team is maintaining the project templates, as part of the project closeouts or lessons learned, each new proposal benefits from your latest successes.

Conclusion and Call to Action (5:16)
So let us know if you have any questions or comments, if you found anything insightful within this recording, it’s always a pleasure to discuss with you. So reach out to [email protected] if you have any further questions. Thanks, have a great day!