Proposal Options

Discover how you can empower your clients with greater choice!

Pat Kuo avatar
Written by Pat Kuo
Updated over a week ago

What are Proposal Options?

With proposal options, you can streamline your sales process by allowing clients to choose from A, B, or C options directly within your proposals.

Clients can pick the option that best suits their needs, enter their payment information, and sign, all in the one place.

Let’s run through some common and practical use cases that you can apply to your proposals.


Interactive demonstration

demo gif

Pricing options

Presenting different pricing options to your client is a fantastic way to build immediate upsells, or alternatively - provide various options to first capture your client, build the relationship, and then look to upsell in the future.

A great way to structure your options is to build standardised “packages” that contain different levels of service. This helps tap into a client’s loss aversion tendencies and subtly push them to make a choice.

Here are a few examples:

  • Basic, Plus, Deluxe packages

  • Bronze, Silver, Gold packages

We recommend you build template proposals containing your various packages, so that you can duplicate the template and use it as a starting point when creating a new proposal with options. Then, you can customise it even further depending on the specific client’s needs.

When you build a New Proposal with pricing options, we strongly suggest you clearly define your services in your service library.


Payment cadences

Providing different payment options to your client is also a great way to influence a purchase decision.

Your clients’ preferences and situations will be varied, and they may want the option to pay in different cadences for cashflow reasons, so it makes sense to provide options like:

  • Weekly payments

  • Monthly payments

  • Annual payments

You can also decide whether to include a discount if you prefer your clients to pay a certain way. The most common offering is a discount on a longer cadence (e.g. X% on Annual payments) as you will receive bulk of the cash in one payment.

When providing different payment options to your clients, we suggest including a paragraph around out of scope services in your terms and conditions to ensure that you are covered in case of scope creep.


Pricing models

If you are not charging fixed fees and/or are moving from an hourly based billing model, you can experiment with creating options that will provide greater transparency to your clients.

Through our extensive research, we’ve discovered that clients prefer the transparency of their billing and care mostly about the result rather than the number of hours it took to complete their services.

This can also be an opportunity to encourage your clients to move to a fixed fee engagement, which can be incredibly beneficial to your business.

  • Hourly model (uncertain pricing, loose deliverables, less protection from scope creep)

  • Fixed model (transparent pricing, structured services and deliverables, protection from scope creep for both parties)


How to use proposal options?

When you are creating a New Proposal, proposal options can be found in the Services step. Open Show proposal options → click + Add Option to open a new option. If you would like to duplicate an existing option, click the three dots beside the first option → Duplicate option.

Once you have added at least 1 option, there are a few actions you can perform:

  • Click and hold the Option to reposition the selected option

  • Click the three dots → toggle on 'Mark as recommended option' to add a recommended banner on the option in the client's proposal view

  • Click the three dots to edit the option name and description. Please note: There is a 40-character limit on the name and a 120-character limit for the description.


Building a proposal with options

When you wish to build a proposal with different options, we strongly suggest the following workflow:

  1. First, build the desired or ideal option that you would like your clients to accept. (Remember to toggle on 'Mark as recommended' to highlight this as the recommended option!)

  2. Duplicate this option (click the three dots → Duplicate option) and edit the services within the option depending on the type of variation you’d like to present to your client (see use cases section)

  3. Repeat Step 2 and create another option if needed (max 3 options on one proposal)

Please note: Only the Service Name will be pulled into the options tiles; the Service Description will not be displayed in the option tile.


Presentation of proposal options

When you are finished completing your proposal with different options, you can examine how this will look like from a client’s perspective in the Presentation step.

Notice the live preview on the right-hand side, which will now display the options step in the mobile experience (due to page size limitations). If you’d like to preview the desktop or browser experience, click the Preview button - this will open a new tab that generates a preview from your client’s perspective.

Your businesses logo will be displayed in the top left-hand corner, and the options page pulls the primary colour that you have selected in Branding Settings in your Ignition account for a perfectly aligned branding experience.

If you wish to change something or realise that you have made a mistake, you can jump back into the New Proposal Editor and click into the Services step to make further changes.

Billing Rule Displays

If you have added more than one billing rule that is billed the same way, Ignition may potentially split this up in the presentation.

Services that are billed One Time will be grouped together, regardless of the date.

Services that have a Recurring cadence will not be grouped together unless they are under one single billing rule.

Once you are happy with how the options look visually, you can proceed to send this proposal to your client with full confidence around your pricing and presentation.


FAQ

  • Am I able to create two levels of options - e.g. Client selects a package option first, then payment options second in the same proposal?

    This will not be available upon release, but is on our plan for development in the future. Please stay tuned!

  • Why can’t I accept on behalf of a client for a proposal that has options?

    If you create a proposal with options for a client, your client would have to read all the options in order to make a selection & digitally sign for it. Accepting on behalf of the client would defeat the purpose of creating this type of proposal since you can simply create a standard proposal and then accept it for them.

    In the extremely rare case that you need to accept the proposal on behalf of your client, you can simply duplicate the proposal, remove the irrelevant options and accept it on behalf of a client.

  • What happens with proposals options after I subscribe to the Starter plan?

    You will no longer be able to add options in newly created proposals.

    You will no longer be able to duplicate proposals already created with options.

    For draft proposals with options, you will still see and be able to interact with the options you created, but you can no longer send the proposal without first deleting the options.

    Sent proposals with options will remain unchanged, but if you then revoke and edit them on Starter, you will no longer be able to send the proposal without first deleting the options.

  • Once the proposal is accepted, does the PDF version of the proposal specify the option that my client selected?

    Once your proposal is accepted, the specific option name will appear under the Agreement Summary section in the generated PDF.


Did this answer your question?