How to Create the Perfect Proposal with Proposal Kit - (2024)

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In this video we'll show you how to create the perfect proposal using Proposal Kit. Now there is no such thing as the perfect one–size–fits–all proposal template for everyone. That is why Proposal Kit uses a building block system of chapter templates, visual design themes, pre–written content and an automation software system called our Proposal Pack Wizard to help you create a custom document that is tailored specific to your situation.

Now that's going to get you a lot closer to creating the perfect proposal for you. In this video we'll illustrate creating an infrastructure project proposal. Now you can create any kind of proposal for any kind of situation using the Proposal Kit.

Now we've already selected the design theme. We're going to use the Infrastructure #3 and we're going to show how to prototype creating a complex proposal by iteratively making changes to the set of chapters, visual design elements and so on until we get our template just the way we want it. So we'll start by creating a Document Project.

I'll just give it a title and since we're using the Expert Edition we're going to turn off the Dynamic Spreadsheet Linking just to speed things up generating the templates. So we'll start with a premade list to get us started quicker. We will just search the hundreds of pre–made layouts and we'll start with this one called Civil Engineering Construction Project Proposal.

Import that list. Now we've loaded 30 chapters out of the thousands that are available for this particular layout and we'll just use this stock layout to see what it looks like. Now we're going to generate this document using all the default settings first.

Now generating a 30 page document will take a couple minutes so we'll speed ahead here in a second. Okay, now the document has been generated and we'll open it up and take a look at it. So you can see in our Table of Contents all the chapters have been added.

Now it looks pretty good but I think we're going to make some changes. We'll make some color changes to the tables, we'll make some font changes, we'll change up some of the chapters, rebuild it and see how we like it after that. We'll start with making some typography changes.

Now Proposal Kit defines a lot of Word Styles and we can individually change the attributes of all of these. But since we're going to make a quick change to a lot of styles at once. Because we just want to change some the font types to start with we'll do the Mass Change.

The way Proposal Kit is designed is everything in headers is going to be using Arial Black and Arial fonts by default and everything in body text will be in Times New Roman. So we'll change all the body text from Times New Roman to Open Sans and it will change all the old headers from Arial Black to Open Sans Extra Bold. Now we're using the design theme Infrastructure #3 that uses graphics as the chapter headers so changing the font types won't change those.

If you're using the brandable pack Proposal Pack for Any Business then this change here will apply to the chapter headers in the document everything in Arial type. Those will be like sub headers within the body of pages so the Wizard will make this change in the document. So we'll change everything in Arial to Open Sans Semi Bold.

We can preview what all these font type changes will look like if we click this button here. We can see what all these different font types will look like in Open Sans font types. Now that we've made our font changes we will go and make some color changes.

Now when we will make some color changes we'll go up in to the Document Styles and we'll edit the Infrastructure #3 we have installed. We'll see the color scheme is set to these grays and blues. I think we just want to change this color too from being such a bright blue.

Now we'll change that to a green. Now we're going to make some changes to the chapters in that template. So last time we added a new project since we're prototyping this complex document and making a lot of changes we want to just keep editing the existing project.

Now you see because we opened that past document in the Edit screen it's now been Locked for Editing. This is just a safety feature to prevent you from deleting all your work by accident if you've actually started editing the final proposal template and doing real work on it. Since we're in the prototyping process we haven't actually made any edits to the proposal so it's safe to unlock this and clicking the Delete Old Files button will delete all of the files we generated the first time.

Now we still have all of our selections of the 30 chapters so we're just going to make some modifications to that chapter list. And you can see what we have selected here. You know, maybe we want to move the order of a template or something like that.

We can move these templates up and down and change the ordering that they'll be in the document. Let's say we want to remove a couple. We can remove the Materials chapter and the Entities Affected chapter.

But what if we want to add some chapters. Well we can use these other tabs here. We can add anything that's unchecked.

There's thousands of templates we can add. So if you want to pick things that are say construction or contracting related. You can see here's the Materials chapter we actually removed.

Well, if we need to talk about say subcontractors and we need to put in chapter about our certifications. Maybe this project requires some demolition. Add that chapter.

So recheck our list of chapters. You can see the ones we added here. Demolition, subcontractors and so on.

Now we'll save the project again and now the Wizard will rebuild the document from scratch applying all these changes to the fonts, colors and the new chapters. And just like before we'll just wait for it to assemble this new document. Okay, now the second iteration of our document has been created.

We'll open this up. You can see the typography has changed to Open Sans. When we changed that blue to the green you can see where it's being applied within the documents.

And all of these shape objects and things can be edited manually after documents are created at any time. You can see the subheaders are in Open Sans Semi Bold. Now these are the chapter headers that are static because they're in graphics.

You can't change these chapter headers that we've created in graphics. There are a couple options, the Wizard using the Pro Kit you can have the Wizard swap in your own logo for these stock logos right here. And that will also cause all the chapter headers that have graphics to be replaced with text.

Then you can use any font type and also completely customize the text. The other option if you want to keep our graphics but make custom chapter headers is we do include the stock graphics and you can make your own chapter headers and then insert them into the document. You can see where our blue that we changed green has been applied in the color scheme.

And some of our new chapters like the subcontracts and so on have been added. So this is the process you go through to iteratively prototype a proposal. We can keep going into the Document Project screen, edit the current project, uncheck the Locked for Editing, delete the files and then any changes we make within the Wizard interface and the Preferences, the Edit Style, the Pick Documents screen and so on will all be applied each time we regenerate the document.

So, that is how you can create the perfect proposal using Proposal Kit to fit your situation. Let us know what you think in the comments below and click subscribe to keep up on the latest proposal writing tips with Proposal Kit.