Pandadoc for Proposals: An Honest Review
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One question a lot of companies ask is “what tool should I be using for my proposals?”
My answer to this question: it depends on your proposals.
For RFPs, I almost always recommend Microsoft Word because you will have to constantly revise your content, design while writing, incorporate forms, and do many other things that become a nuisance if you use anything else (check out this blog post for more pros and cons). RFPs also often have a unique format for each response, which makes a robust, prefilled template almost useless.
However, not every proposal is an RFP. Many companies send out simple proposals with a quote to customers, and in those situations, many proposal softwares can make your job a lot easier. In these cases, you can often rely on a pre-built template that you customize slightly for each customer. Many tools will also include things like reporting, a variety of templates, and the option to accept payments.
As of this writing (April 2023), we use PandaDoc for most of our proposals here at Utley Strategies because our clients don’t require that we respond to an RFP before working with them. To be clear, our client proposals (as in, the proposals we help customers write) are often in response to RFPs, and in those cases we use Microsoft Word. But for our own sales and business development, most of the time we use PandaDoc.
So if you often send out non-RFP proposals, I’d like to share what I like about PandaDoc for proposals, what I don’t, and how to determine if it’s a good fit for your company.
Let’s take a look!
What I like:
We have been using PandaDoc for over a year now, and overall I have been very happy with the platform. Here are some of my favorite aspects:
Easy to Update Design
PandaDoc has a very robust template library that you can use to create your own template. Once you choose a template that you like, it’s easy to swap in your logo, your brand colors, and incorporate your own visuals to make your proposal your own (and not look like the template). Design is very easy in PandaDoc, and it’s one of the reasons we chose to move to it from our previous system. If you need to make a design change, it’s easy and straightforward. And if you don’t know exactly how to do it, the documentation will help you figure it out (more on that below).
Autofill Fields
I’m a big fan of placeholder fields in proposals to make your content a bit more personalized to the buyer. PandaDoc has many prebuilt autofill fields that you can choose from, or you can make your own. For example, you might write your boilerplate to have “Customer Name” as placeholder text. You can make this a field in PandaDoc that will be autofilled once you input information for your proposal. This makes it really easy to swap in new information and make your proposal a bit more custom without having to worry about accidentally mentioning a different customer or spending too much time replacing similar text.
Contract and Proposal Signed at Once
This is perfect for small businesses. You can include your contract as part of your proposal, reducing the amount of steps to sign a new project. PandaDoc has templates you can choose from or you can create your own (of course, for contracts, make sure your legal team approves). When your proposal is ready, you simply send it over all at once, and your prospect is guided through each step to accept the proposal and sign the contract.
Accept Deposits/Payment Up Front
Another pro for small businesses, PandaDoc can integrate payments with the contract signing and proposal acceptance. We use this for taking deposits for larger projects or for upfront payments for smaller projects. Because it’s all completed at the same time, you don’t have to follow up with the client for the deposit and can instead kick off the project once everything is received.
Content Library
We’re huge fans of content libraries here, and PandaDoc has a content library option for your proposals. You can write your most common sections, add them to the content library, and then insert that piece of content into a specific section of your proposal (and customize from there!). PandaDoc makes it very easy to work with your content library and incorporate it into your proposal.
Templates for Different Services
For companies who have very different offers, PandaDoc is great because you can have multiple templates rather than just one. For example, we have a template for corporate training projects and also a template for custom consulting. These are two very different projects, and the templates reflect that. Because we have different templates for each, we don’t have to cut out unrelated content or search to find specific information for each type of proposal. It’s all built in from the beginning.
Responsive Customer Service
We have had very few issues since switching to PandaDoc, but when something has come up, their customer service has been very responsive and helpful. Most of the time I can find a solution simply from the documentation, but when I need more support, the help team has always been able to provide a quick solution.
What I’d Change:
While I have been very happy with PandaDoc so far, there are a few things I would change if given the chance.
Text Spills Onto Next Page
This probably comes from years of working in Microsoft Word, but I hate how the text spills onto the next page and disrupts the design. For example, if you’re adding your content or an image and it becomes longer than a page, a dashed line will appear to show where the page ends, and anything below that will be moved onto a new page instead of the next page. So for example, if I have one line go past the bottom of the page, we will now have an entire page with one line instead of having it move to the top of the next page (where there is already text).
In general we don’t have too many problems with this, but it does require a bit of maneuvering and designing to make the proposal work. This is the biggest reason why I would not recommend PandaDoc if responding to RFPs. You have too much text and too many pieces to pull together, and it will take too long to design in PandaDoc compared to something like Word.
More Expensive for Custom Brand
PandaDoc is reasonably affordable, but if you want to incorporate your custom brand details, it is more expensive than some of the competitors (i.e. Proposify). If custom branding isn’t a big concern for you, then the simplest version will work. However, if you want custom branding, be prepared to pay a little more.
Basic Dashboard Reporting
There is a built-in dashboard that allows you to see different stages of each proposal, such as Sent, Viewed, Completed, and Paid. While this provides a really clear picture of your sales process, the dashboard and reporting is fairly simple, which doesn’t make it a great replacement for other tools that also have CRM features. I’d ideally like to be able to customize our dashboard a bit more, but since we track a lot of information elsewhere, we haven’t felt the need to invest in the reporting add-on just yet. If reporting in your proposal tool is important for you, then the reporting add-on might be a worthwhile investment.
Is PandaDoc for You?
Now that we’ve talked about some of my pros and cons of PandaDoc, here are the circumstances when I would recommend using it for your proposals.
Not responding to RFPs.
As mentioned above, I do not recommend PandaDoc for RFPs. However, if you are sending out proposals without RFPs, this could be a great fit.
Frequently Send out Proposals.
Because of the licensing and robust functionality of the platform, I would recommend using PandaDoc if you regularly send out proposals. If you send infrequent proposals (less than 10 a year), sticking with something like Microsoft Word (if you already have a license) or a different tool might make more sense.
Want easy-designed templates/proposals.
I ultimately moved to PandaDoc because I liked the templates and how easy it is to create proposals. There are many platforms where your proposal looks more like a quote or a simple, text-based document, and I wanted something more visual. PandaDoc does that while also having some useful features that make creating proposals easier.
There are many options out there for proposals, and it can be hard to decide what’s best for you. We have been very pleased with PandaDoc so far, and if any of the above aspects appeal to you, it might be worth trying it out!