Number twenty-five: Use Bid Sketch
Good day, I'm Troy Dean from Video User Manuals and Agency Mavericks. This is the 101 Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees, practical guide for WordPress consultants to start attracting better quality clients, work on better more interesting projects and get paid better fees. Now, let's go elevate.
Number 25, use Bid Sketch. Okay, what's Bid Sketch? Well, Bid Sketch is simple proposal software made for designers. There are two things I love about Bid Sketch. First of all, when I first started my web agency I was using an accounting piece of software called MYOB. The thing that occurred to me was that the invoices that I was sending out looked absolutely terrible. So, I switched to Xero, X-E-R-O, .com which is online accounting software, and I was one of the earliest users of that program. The reason I made the switch is because the invoices that it sent out looked much better than the invoices I was sending out of MYOB.
Why is that important? Well, if you're a designer and you are putting yourself out there as someone who can build beautiful-looking websites and provide gorgeous user interfaces and nice user experiences then you better make sure that your proposals and your invoices look good. Otherwise, it's not quite up to scratch. So, Bid Sketch does two things.
It makes your proposals look beautiful. It allows your customers to approve your proposals online by clicking an approved button. It also allows you to have a conversation with your client. They can leave comments and you can have a conversation about particular aspects of the proposal, but the one thing I really love about Bid Sketch more than anything is that it allows you to save sections of your proposal as templates.
I remember having a conversation with a colleague of mine one day. We were due to meet join Skype and he emailed me and said, hey man, I need to push this meeting back because I need to get a proposal out the door this afternoon. I knew, like me in the old days he was probably going to spend three and a half, four hours writing that proposal and it just doesn't have to be that way.
Using something like Bid Sketch you can get your proposal well written and once you are writing proposals that are converting and that are succeeding then you can save those proposals as templates and you can save individual sections within those proposals as templated sections. So, when you go to write your next proposal you simple load up a template, remove the parts that aren't relevant, add in any parts that are relevant and you can literally get beautiful looking accurate proposals out the door in less than half an hour. It's a great way to use the technology to leverage your time and deliver beautiful looking proposals to clients and I've had so much feedback from clients who love pushing the approved button online knowing that they have just committed to a new website and they're really excited about it.
So, there are other software programs that do similar things to Bid Sketch. I'm just letting you know what works for us. We've been using Bid Sketch for quite some time now. It's gorgeous to use. It's very easy and it allows us to get beautiful looking proposals out the door very quickly. So, number 25 is use Bid Sketch.
In the next video, I'll give you a little tip on what to do with your proposals just before you push the send button. Until then, go elevate. Make sure you subscribe to the 101 Ways Podcast in the iTunes store. Just search for 101 Ways to Elevate or visit us at wp101ways.com and download the free 101 Ways ebook.
