With digitized offer management, you can optimize your offer processes. Our Offers module facilitates this process through uniform offer templates, effective administration and flexible positions. Find out more now!
Writing a proposal- useful or not?
A detailed range writing requires time and therefore financial resources. It is therefore important to carefully consider for whom and to what extent an individual offer makes sense. While a short, informal e-mail or an oral offer over the phone is often sufficient for smaller orders from trustworthy regular customers, larger and more financially significant orders require a more comprehensive approach — with these advantages:
🛡️ Protection for both parties: A written offer serves as security and provides clarity for both sides.
🤝 Avoiding misunderstandings: The more precisely the content of the offer is formulated, the lower the risk of misunderstandings.
✅ Avoiding relationship damage: A customer relationship should not fail due to unclearly formulated or inaccurate offers.
🏗️ Industry dependency: In some industries, such as handicraft, are lump sum offers more common than in others, such as freelancers attorneys, which bill at hourly rates.
A carefully drafted offer letter therefore not only provides legal security, but also contributes significantly to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Setting up a proposal
Unlike invoices, which must contain various mandatory information, the rules for writing offers are less strict. However, your offer should contain the following content so that it is legally compliant:
Optimize offers professionally
A professional offer letter can consist of several parts: the cover letter, the actual offer with all mandatory information and your terms and conditions. However, a good offer goes beyond this mandatory information. With an individually designed offer text, you stand out from your competitors and convince the recipient.
Write your offer text clearly and comprehensibly and let the recipient know that they are making the right decision with your offer. Always be open to questions and requests. Even if creating an offer may seem complex at first, it gets easier with practice. Use suitable software such as ZEP to write proposals and to create invoices in a GDPR-compliant and efficient way and send them directly from the system.
Write proposals with ZEP
Effective offer management is essential for your company, especially as the number of offers increases. The challenge is to maintain an overview and make all documents quickly accessible. Here is our module offers for ZEP Professional into the game. In addition to creating offers and templates, it offers comprehensive functions for managing your offers.
Which functions are particularly beneficial and how does the module support your preparation of proposals?
Basis for future projects
An efficient quotation process is crucial for the success of future projects. Our module enables you to design offers consistently and thus ensure a consistent presentation to your customers, which strengthens your brand image. By using templates and text modules, the offer process is significantly accelerated, as standardized content can be adapted and reused. This saves time and effort.
With ZEP, you can individually design offer positions to meet the requirements of your customers. In addition, the four-eyes principle promotes error prevention and ensures professional offerings. After review, you can send your offers directly via email and add additional attachments. When an order is placed, the offers can be seamlessly converted into projects or processes, which ensures a smooth handover for project implementation.
Order and consistency
Managing offers can often be a major challenge — true to the motto: You can no longer see the forest for the trees. But: With the additional Offers module, ZEP offers you helpful offer management functions that ensure order and clarity. In this way, all of your offers are stored in a central database, which means document management and makes it much easier to search for information. For quick search results, you can also add categories and keywords to your listings.
And how do you now find out which employee is responsible for which offer? Our software provides you with an overview of all offers that must be processed by every employee. This makes it easier for those responsible to assign tasks and track the progress of the offer.
Flexibility and individuality
With the various types of offer items in ZEP, you can respond flexibly to different customer requirements. Expense items allow work services to be billed by hour or day, while flat rates ensure clear pricing structures. Standardised products or services can be easily integrated as item positions. The module also offers the option of individually showing or hiding the calculation for each offer item in order to offer your customers maximum transparency.
{{blog-cta}}
7 easy steps to an offer: step-by-step guide
The preparation of a convincing offer is crucial for the success of your projects, especially in project-oriented industries. A well-structured offering can make the difference between a business opportunity won or lost. How exactly do you go about this?
1. Gain interest from customers
In order to attract potential customers, it is crucial to communicate clear benefits and benefits of your service or product right from the start. A concise introduction that addresses the customer's specific issues or challenges can help connect.
2. Gather all necessary information
Before you start writing the offer, make sure you've gathered all relevant information. This includes details of customer requirements, project goals, time frame, budget and any special features that must be considered.
3. Use offer templates!
Creating standardized offers for specific types of projects can be a time-consuming task. With the offer templates in ZEP, this process is significantly simplified and accelerated. For example, you can create offer templates that can also include attachments such as terms and conditions. Existing offers can be saved as templates to reuse later.
Do you have project inquiries that are very similar? Then the proposals module gives you the ability to use automated text modules to speed up the preparation of offers, but still ensure consistency.
4. Send offer to customers
As soon as the offer is ready, send it to the customer in a timely manner. Make sure the offer is clear and understandable and includes all relevant details. A professional cover letter can help highlight the most important points and underline your willingness to work together.
5. Proactively inquire after a reasonable waiting period
After you've sent the offer, wait a reasonable amount of time and then proactively check with the customer. This shows your commitment and interest in a potential collaboration. When doing so, be polite and respect the customer's time.
6. Create a sales contract or obtain feedback in case of cancellations
If the offer is accepted, draw up a clear sales contract that includes all agreements and conditions. In the event of a cancellation, it's helpful to get constructive feedback to improve your future offerings and understand potential concerns.
7. Professional invoicing
After successful completion of the project, you will hire a professional invoice, which transparently lists all agreed services and costs. This contributes to the clear and efficient processing of the transaction and strengthens the customer's confidence in your professionalism.
Conclusion
Effective offer management is critical to the success of any company. Professional offer management with ZEP enables you to strengthen your brand, speed up processes and increase customer satisfaction.
