Killing the Frankenstein sales proposal
A sales team answering a major RFP needed a proposal that looked like it came from a mature organization. I designed the document, then rebuilt it as a Word template with a built-in asset library so the team could produce on-brand proposals without me.
The problem
Brand consistency across the sales process is routinely overlooked. Salespeople are on the move and build documents on the fly. They hit the deadline, but what they hand over looks like Frankenstein's monster — four fonts, three logo versions, and a screenshot from 2016.
Cohesion in presentation plays a substantial part in how a buyer reads your professionalism. Just as surely as you would pick the best label on the shelf, your prospect leans toward the product that is packaged well. My sales team was preparing to answer an RFP from a major organization and came to me for help — they wanted a polished look and a review against the new brand taxonomy.
Approach
The design had to do two jobs at once: align to the brand direction I had established, and function as a template the sales team could actually adapt without design help.
I designed the document in Adobe XD first, establishing rules for type, spacing, and title graphics. Then I rebuilt it in Microsoft Word — where the team actually works — and created an asset library of character styles, spacing, palette, and graphics inside the document itself, accessible to whoever was writing. I used the template to produce the first real proposal so the kinks were worked out before anyone else touched it, then delivered both the finished proposal and the template with a short training session for its users.
Results
Another piece of the buyer journey brought into line with every other touchpoint. Letting the sales team use a template rather than queue up a design request nearly eliminated rogue, mismatched proposals — which is the only version of a brand system that survives contact with a sales team.