5 Ways HubSpot Proposal Integration Improves Sales

The sales proposal is a major inflection point in the sales cycle. Get it right, you’re on your way to closing a deal. Get it wrong, and you’ve frustrated your customer, eroded their trust, and potentially lost the opportunity.

To prevent that from happening, you need three things:

• Speed
• Accuracy
• Transparency

If you’re already a HubSpot CRM user, you’re halfway there. It’s one of the best platforms for managing customer interactions and providing accurate data for forecasting. And if you integrate it with your proposal software, you can build, send, and track the status of sales proposals within the HubSpot UI.

Can HubSpot create sales proposals?

The answer is no. HubSpot has a free quoting tool (HubSpot CPQ), but it doesn’t have a proposal generation tool. But HubSpot proposal integration fixes this — by integrating with your proposal software, you can build, send, and track proposals within the HubSpot interface.

HubSpot integrates with several proposal software platforms, including:

• Better Proposals
• DealHub
• GetAccept
• Qwilr
• PandaDoc
• Portant
• Proposify

If you use one of these, your sales team will no longer have to leave HubSpot to create proposals. With a few clicks, they can generate and send professional-looking proposals without having to switch between different platforms. And every action will automatically be updated in your CRM.

5 ways HubSpot proposal integration improves your sales efforts

Now, let’s take a look at exactly how you can integrate your proposal software with HubSpot to optimize your sales process:

1. Streamlining the quote-to-revenue process

Manually creating proposals in a spreadsheet or switching between multiple systems to get them out creates lots of operational friction. HubSpot’s proposal integration eliminates this by automating the entire quote-to-cash process.

When a deal hits your pipeline, the software pulls product details, pricing, and client data directly from your CRM. It auto-populates that info into the proposal, without your reps having to lift a finger.

As for approvals, custom approval workflows route proposals to stakeholders in seconds, and you can create them in a few minutes on your proposal software’s backend. If your proposal system integrates with Slack (like DealHub or PandaDoc), you can even approve/reject proposals within the channel.

Once everything’s ready to go, you can send it to your buyer and they can e-sign with a few clicks and no delays.

2. Enhancing sales team productivity

Manually drafting quotes, chasing approvals, and nudging clients to sign contracts all takes away from time your reps could be spending on revenue-driving activities like prospecting and getting on sales calls. The typical sales rep only spends 28% of their time actually selling, and excessive admin work is a major reason why.

Compared to manual processes, CPQ enables you to increase your sales proposal volume by 49% per rep, per month. That’s because your software will automatically create proposals based on the customer data in your CRM — name/contact info, business type, customer segment, you name it. You can have it generate from one template over another based on those inputs, too.

In addition, this means you can track the status of each proposal in real time, and you’ll get updates whenever someone views it or completes a task (e.g., an approval or signature). And, if there hasn’t been any activity on a particular proposal for too long, it’ll send you a reminder so your sales team is always on top of it.

3. Improving the customer experience

Today’s buyers care about three things when they’re dealing with vendors and service providers: personalization, efficiency, and transparency. If you’re giving them a hard-to-read quote (and taking days to do it), they’re going to be pretty upset once it ends up in their hands.

35-50% of deals go to the vendor who respons first, and 88% of buyers say they only buy when they see their sales rep as a “trusted advisor.”

• Easy-to-read branded proposals
• Fast proposal generation and response time
• Digital signatures for a simplified buying process
• Adjustable proposal templates for added personalization
• Automated proposal status tracking and notifications/updates
• Customizable options/pricing based on customer data from CRM
• Real-time visibility into customer engagement (with some platforms)

All of these factors contribute to a more frictionless buying experience for your customers. They eliminate the guesswork and get the right info in front of them in a professional and approachable way. And they’re only possible when you integrate HubSpot with your proposal software.

4. Increasing deal velocity and close rates

When it’s easier to buy from you, more customers will. And when you need less time to respond to customers and build proposals for them, your sales team can focus on what they do best: selling. They can work more deals at once.

• Automated reminders speed up decision-making and help reps prevent deals from stalling.
• Insights from proposal tracking in HubSpot CRM shows sellers what needs to happen to move each prospect along in the sales pipeline.
• Streamlined approvals and contract execution save you days’ worth of time on deals that would otherwise fall through the cracks due to managers’ and decision-makers’ busy schedules.

Let’s say a customer recieves the proposal and viewed it three days ago, but hasn’t responded or mentioned anything to your seller. Since the rep knows they saw it a few days ago (and can see that on their card in the sales pipeline), they can reach out.

Without those tracking features (which are only possible with proposal tools), they’d have no idea when the prospect last looked at their proposal or if it’s even been read.

That’s why, in addition to the near-50% increase in proposal capacity, companies using CPQ see, on average, a 28% reduction in sales cycle time and a 105% higher average deal size.

5. Ensuring sales and revenue alignment

When you’re building proposals with a system that isn’t integrated with your CRM, you have dozens of operational and data silos. Your finance and legal teams won’t have visibility into the latest versions of proposals, so they won’t be able to collaborate on deals as easily. Your reps will constantly be chasing them down, and there’ll be no accountability or audit trail.

By converting HubSpot deals into comprehensive projects, teams can synchronize essential project information and import client data, creating a unified record without the need to update multiple systems. When it comes to approvals and contract reviews, this significantly reduces miscommunication and keeps everyone aligned on contract terms and pricing structures.

On the backend, proposal software applies your pre-configured pricing rules across each proposal. Some, like DealHub or Qwilr, even feature dynamic pricing capabilities that factor in discounts, promotions, and pricing tiers.

Once you transact, proposal automation also aligns completed sales with revenue recognition standards like ASC 606 (US companies) and IFRS 15 (international ones). Once you transact, it automatically allocates the transaction price based on product/service delivery.

And with integrated proposal data, sales forecasts become more precise. HubSpot’s forecasting tools allow users to review forecasts by deal stage or category, facilitating better revenue predictions and resource planning.

Explore proposal software that integrates with HubSpot

To achieve the sales efficiency, deal velocity, and customer experience improvements we’re talking about here, you need to choose the right proposal software. Not all are created equal.

For instance:

• Better Proposals’ simple UI and features for milestone signoffs make it great for web, graphic design, and marketing agencies.
• DealHub’s subscription management capabilities make it ideal for proposal-based businesses with recurring payments, like solar or SaaS companies.
• Qwilr’s dynamic proposals and extensible templates make it flexible for industries like real estate, where multimedia content and custom branding are crucial.
• Proposify’s visual project plans make it a solid choice for local professional services businesses that need to incorporate blueprints, plans, and project timelines into their proposals.

To find the platform that’s right for you, you need to carefully evaluate its features, user-friendliness, and scalability for your future needs. Consider your industry and workflows, and how the proposal software will fit into your current processes.

Looking for a proposal software that integrates with HubSpot? Get started with our HubSpot CRM overview page, and check out our CPQ and proposal software reviews.