Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, Adam. How's it going?
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Good, man. How are you?
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Good, man. So great to catch up with you.
For those of you that for those listening that maybe don't know you, why don't you go ahead and just introduce yourself?
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So my name is Adam. The founder and CEO of yeah. Better proposals is an online proposal platform just to make that whole process of sort of sending a proposal, scope of work, contract, whatever you want to call it, whatever you're trying to do. Just basically make that process as easy as possible to get it signed. But in the process make you look as good as possible and make yourself just look elevate your business and make yourself look that much more professional.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: I'm so excited to have you on because I'm a huge fan of Better Proposals, and I just love the software. We use it all the time. So this is exciting for me to get to chat with you about this. How did you get into I want to hear the backstory on how you got into proposals.
I'm guessing it's somewhere along the lines of you were writing proposals yourself and everything out there sucked, and you decided you needed to write some software, but I want to hear how it came about.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because when I was, like, 13, I was really badly behaved in French, and I got dragged out of that class and then taken to some psychiatrist who diagnosed me with Asperger's. That apparently means you can't go and talk to people. Look how that's turned out. But what it did do was it gave me this kind of weird idea that I couldn't sell particularly well. So whenever I was selling and I ran an agency for, I don't know, 8910 years, went from I was about 16, I think. And I think one of the things that I always found was that the in person stuff wasn't really my strong point. So I needed to lead with something that was really good. So I thought, well, okay, if I've got to speak to them at some stage and I've got to do some work and I've got to do all of these inter personal bits, I'm really not very good at what's the one thing I can control? And it always came back to the proposal. So I thought, well, if I just double down on that and just make that as good as I possibly can, that's going to give me the best chance of success. So for, like, 1015 years, all I did was just obsess about how to improve the conversion of proposals, what worked, what didn't, what you should include, what you shouldn't, to the point where I was like, okay, well, I don't actually care about selling large ticket items. I'd rather do lots of little bits because I'm getting the repetitions of the proposal stuff in. So it just became an obsession for years and then, yeah, exactly as you said, got sick and tired of using Microsoft Word and InDesign and all that. Sort of just in fact, actually, it wasn't necessarily the creation that drove it, it was actually just not knowing if somebody was opening it, looking at the price and closing it down. That was the bit that drove me nuts. I was like, put all this effort into this reply at least.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, and I love that too, because I was one of those had my proposal in Word and would tweak the pages and stuff. And then when I switched to better proposals, being able to see when they opened it, how much time they spent on the different sections, have them digitally sign it, have them make the payment. I'm like, this is awesome. And I know even sometimes people would say, like, oh, I don't want them to pay with a credit card or whatever because of the fee or whatever. I'm like, yeah, but if you get them to sign and pay right away and you can start right on the project and you don't have to hound them and stuff, that's worth so much more than a few percentage points off of the project or whatever. Right? So I just love the tool. So what are some of the things I know we just covered them, some of them, but what are some of the things that you feel like makes a good proposal stand out or even with the software that kind of elevates the whole process?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: I think probably the biggest thing people get wrong, it's probably best to start there, is not understanding the first minute that they're going to interact with this thing. So first of all, where are they when they're doing this? So are they sitting at their computer with their nice sort of 15 inch monitor, everything's all nice and lovely, nice and comfortable in their chair? Or are they on a train and reading on their phone because it's the only time they've got any a couple of minutes? So if that's the case, how are you going to appear? How are you going to come across? You're not always having this thing experienced in this optimum environment. Sometimes people are opening it on a phone, they're quickly flicking through it, what does this look like? And what you're really trying to do is you're trying to capture that understanding. Like the message you're trying to get across to them as quick as you possibly can is, have they understood me? Do they understand my problems?
And can they deliver them? And the quicker that you can get that across to them, the more time they'll spend on reading all of the other stuff that you've put in there. So for me, I just think people don't think about that layer. They don't think about that sort of initial, sort of 60 seconds. How does it appear in the email? What happens when they click on the link or open it, whatever it is, how does that experience look for them? And I think most people just get that completely wrong. So we just set out with better proposals to make sure that you quite literally couldn't get it wrong.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Love it. And you probably even have the data, I don't even know if it comes through on the proposal, but you probably have the data on what devices are being used the most and all of that stuff like somewhere back in the analytics which now that you're bringing up the whole point, I'm really just curious about. But that's for another time.
So how have you seen things change with proposals, with the way that they're used, they're created all of that techniques that have work now that maybe weren't kind of the way that was done before.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: So I can answer the first part of the question which was about mobile. So 58% of proposals that are opened in better proposals are opened on phones the first time. Wow, okay, 58%. Which makes sense. We've all got used to the idea that email is opened and whatever, but then when you're sitting there designing this thing in Microsoft Word, which is quite literally an a four sheet of paper or letter if you're from the States, but if you want to make up your own paper sizes and make things awkward for us developers.
But, yeah, if you're trying to design this thing for a sheet of paper at any size and then somebody's opening it up on a phone isn't going to work, is it? It's designed for a completely different thing. So it doesn't matter how you're designing your proposal, but you've got to at least be understanding that there's a very good to fair chance that someone's going to open this thing on a phone. So if they're pinching and zooming their way through some sort of PDF, it's not great. It's not great.
But yeah, so that's only going up and we've done on our you can find it on our website somewhere in reports. But every year we take some aggregate data and we've just noticed that every single year more and more and more proposals are opened on mobile. First time round.
It's nuts. But in terms of things that have changed, attention is probably the biggest thing.
I mean, you'll know this as a user and as a customer, the amount of time people spend on the proposal just gets less and less and it's just purely down to the fact that we're conditioned now to spend less time paying attention and just skipping through things. This kind of like endless scrolling kind of thumb movement that we just all do for hours and hours and hours a day and we do it with everything. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's Facebook or whether it's your proposal, you're just used to scrolling through stuff. So a little tip would be just imagine that someone's going to do that? What can you do to stop them in their tracks? Think in sub headlines. So when you're writing this stuff out, don't put big walls of text in. Don't use complicated language. Try to get your head around the idea that most people are just flicking through this stuff looking for something to stop at.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah, and I know one of the other thing that you guys talk about, too, is from your report, because I love the data that you put out.
For those of you listening, we'll have to put a link in the show notes. But if you go to betterproposals IO reports, they have all of these amazing findings from so many users using proposals and scopes of works and whatever you want to call it, digital documents that I think is really fascinating. I know one of the things that you guys said in the recent one was that if you sending your proposal within 24 hours of meeting, the client increases conversion rates by 42%, which I know is an increase even from the previous year, which is just amazing. Do you want to add anything to that or talk about that?
[00:09:01] Speaker B: If you think about it, it would just make sense, doesn't it?
Don't want to say there's like, no surprises in there, because there kind of is. But if you think about them for any number of seconds, you're like, yeah, it's pretty much it does make sense. But if you go and meet a client, you have a great time. You're talking about it. They're excited about their new thing. You're going to make them their new website, their new lead system, whatever it is, and then you go and leave it for a week, and then you go, oh, hey, here's this proposal, and you send it over.
What's the chances that their excitement level is going to be at? Like, oh, amazing. Let's sign.
Probably not. It's probably sort of curved off just a little bit. So if you can get it to them quickly, then that excitement level is nice and high.
They can remember the subtleties of the meeting. They remember you. Everything's all fresh and good. And they're much more likely to sign quickly, obviously, depending on who it is and how the deals are structured and stuff. But generally, if it's the type of deal where you're speaking from one business owner to another and you're trying to just sort of sell some agency stuff, generally you want to just get it out there as quick as you possibly can. There's no downside to it at all.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Right. And I think you bring up a good point, too, and that is like, okay, they're spending less and less time on the proposal. You don't want to spend hours putting a proposal together that's only going to be looked at for three minutes.
And I think the way that you guys have done the templates where you can literally just spin up a template. You can pull in reusable sections and stuff and if you need to tailor it a little bit or whatever, but I think I rarely spend more than like 15 minutes on a proposal even for a 1020 $30,000 project because I've already kind of got the nuts and bolts of what the clients are asking for. I'm literally copying and pasting a few different sections into my big template and I might switch one photo or something or whatever, but otherwise it's like it's ready to go. And it's just when I hear people complaining, other agency owners of like, oh, I have to write a proposal, it's going to take me 3 hours in this. I'm like, what are you doing?
It shouldn't take that long, right?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: No, it shouldn't. And if you're selling the same thing over and over again, how many different ways do you need to say the same stuff at the end of the day generally the way you want to do it, right?
How many things do you sell?
If you're an agency?
Websites are probably going to be like top of the list, right? And then there's probably going to be some marketing bits and maybe there's some coaching, consulting and stuff. But those three categories are pretty much going to cover more or less everything you're ever going to do. So just get sick templates done for each one. There's tons of like I mean you don't have to use proposals, you can use anything. But there's so many different templates out there that you can use but just spending the time and effort just getting those three things sorted. And then when you speak to a client, what are you changing?
The main thing that you really need to change. And it's the same regardless of what you sell. You sell steel beams for a house if you want to, but it's the same thing every time. The introduction is the most important thing, bar none. Like if you get that bit right, you can almost screw up everything else. It's that important. But it's so important if you can get everything else absolutely spot on. But if you screw that bit up, whole thing's done. Whole thing's done. Because they're just going to take one look at it and go, first thing I've read is about us.
Come on, grow up, grow up. We're past that. We did that one in like 1999. We've moved past it. It's all about them. We all know this stuff. We all do sort of some level of copywriting on some level.
It's about them and their problems. So just write down what they tell you literally, word for word as close as you can and just tell them back, like word for word exactly what they said to you. Explain.
Just want to tell them what their problems are. They're going to tell you if you're good at doing discovery and anybody listening to this will be and then just tell them exactly what they told you and then just tell them how you're going to fix it and sort it out.
That's it. If you just do that one thing, you would probably, I don't know, depending how bad you're starting with, but that probably double most people's conversion rates.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Just that, yeah, that's great. That's great.
Cool. Talk a little bit about automation because I think one of the things that I've discovered more recently, I tend to get the minimum plan possible on whatever SaaS tool I'm using and push it to the ends of the limits and then eventually, okay, now I need some more of those features that are on a higher plan. And so I know after you and I had talked just a few months ago and you were sidebar, though, how many customers did you talk to over like a few week period to get feedback on the tool?
Because you recently did that, right?
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I went a bit mad. So basically I had kind of come to a bit of a conclusion. It's a little bit, maybe a bit of an overshare and a bit of honesty here, but I'd got to a point with the business where we had sort of teams in to do everything very much taking a CEO kind of role, very backseat role. The problem was everyone was looking to me for leadership and direction and the things that I used to do, which was design features, get feedback, speak to customers and do the OD bit of customer support. Even if it wasn't day to day, I would still be semi involved in it. And I'd speak to customers on the phone, I would do bit of sales here and there. I'd do that kind of stuff. And I had my feet on the ground and over time, it's normal, it happens, but you just stop doing some of that stuff. And I had a moment where somebody in my marketing team asked me something and literally I could have flipped a coin. It wouldn't have mattered what I said to them, but they asked me, do you think we should do it this way or do you think we should do it that way?
No idea. Literally had no idea. And I'm a decisive guy, I just make a decision and go with it. I didn't know. And I thought, that's nuts. That's the first time in about 20 years I can remember literally having no idea. I thought, there's only one way to fix this. I need to just go and speak to as many customers as I possibly can. So I went calendarly, opened the thing up from six in the morning, five in the morning until midnight. And I just sent an email to every single customer. I went, when the slots are gone, they're gone. That's it. Fill my calendar up. And I just opened it up for two weeks and just went absolutely bananas. And it was nuts, but it was the best thing we've done in probably five, six years. Incredible.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Wow. And you talked to, what, like 100 of your customers within a two week period or something, right? Yeah, it's crazy. That's awesome, though.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: And I love you.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and at least I know when you and I were talking, there was sort of this like I'd be like, oh, it'd be really nice to be able to do this and be like, oh yeah, we can do that. You're not on the plan. Or there was almost some customer education that happens when you do that, even though that wasn't like the primary goal. You were trying to get feedback and improve the tool and all that. But that had to be a byproduct, right?
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. And it's one of those things. Immediately afterwards, we found quite a few things, actually. There was a few little niggles that people didn't be nice if it did this or nice if it did that, or sometimes it does this. And we're like, you would never have reported that to support, ever, because it's just too small. But you'll tell me now. We're on the phone and now so I've got it out of you. So we had a really nice list of niggles to fix, which is really, really cool. So our product team have gone ahead and done that, which is amazing. The other thing we realized, which we are really good at making software and terrible at telling people about it.
So we've started a well, I've started a monthly email newsletter, basically called Laser Focus. And it's just that it's literally just telling people about anything new we've made and also educating people about anything that's just old stuff, like the amount of people that said, are there any other font options? I'm like, yeah, it's like 10,000 fonts in there. Like there's connected to every font service. They're like, oh, I didn't know.
Did you click on the font thing? But it's our fault. That's our issue.
So that was really nice.
It was good to do that. But the lesson really is talk to your customers. There's the amount of things that you learn when you're in kind of a somewhat informal setting and someone's just telling you stuff.
It's absolutely eye opening. Really good.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: That's cool. I love that. I love that you did that. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about automation. Because I feel like one of the things that I realized is the proposals get signed, they come back to me signed. But if I'm on holiday or something, I really don't want to have to stop and tell the team, like, hey, we've got a new project to get going, or whatever, right? And so after talking with you, I was like, okay, we need to get on the plan with the automation. We need to connect in. So now the proposal gets saved and put in dropbox and the process gets kicked off and the Slack team gets notified in Slack and all these different things. And so I can just be out and it's going to get moved along. Right, but talk a little bit about just all the possibilities and just kind of the power of that.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So seeing as you guys have been so good to us over the years, I might as well give you guys a bit of an exclusive. So we've been working on a feature called Journeys for a little while. Effectively, you can think of it as a client onboarding feature, basically. So it allows you to basically build a form into better proposals, but on the back end of it. So once somebody's signed the proposal, you can then collect data, collect information, do the payment, which is something that we've always had in there, allow people to book a call, put all sorts of messaging in there, and you can rearrange this and do it however you want to do it. But where some of the automation comes in is it's such a simple little thing, but you can just CC in where that form goes. So if you've got your onboarding split into a couple of different areas, so maybe you've got some billing and an account information, then you've got kind of maybe some more product specific stuff or project specific stuff you can have that go to a different person or the same people, whatever, but just things like that. Just start to connect the whole thing together, but then also just distribute the right information to the right people. And I mean, it's fairly standard stuff these days, but sometimes it just takes a little while to think. Cool, but how does this work for us? How does it work for our customers? How are they going to use it? That type of stuff. But that's a feature that's going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: No pressure. Product team.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exciting. That's exciting. I love that. And I think that would even cut down on some of our onboarding communication that we have is if we could just turn around right after the proposal sign and get some of those things that we typically always need, then that's just kind of even quicker to start, which I just love that.
Cool. If we could I wanted to veer off topic slightly just because I think there's a unique aspect to you running your business, and that is like, you with your life partner kind of running the business together, which my wife and I work in the business together, too. And there's some nuances with working with your loved one and kind of all that goes with that. And so talk a little bit about that if you could.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So Sabrina is my co founder. We start the business together.
Yeah, we've been together for, I don't know, fuck, 1516 years.
Edit that bit out, but, yeah, no, we've been together sort of 1516 years and basically just roped her into helping me with random agency stuff. And then I don't know why the girl did this, but she started sort of teaching herself to code.
She'd sort of test I'd write out test plans for developers. Then I'm like, can you test it? Like, here was the plan. Does it do these things? If you click this button, does it do that? And then in the end, she was like, oh, it was just like a piece of text. So I just opened up the code editor and just started editing it. And before you know it, she's coding. So the first ever versions of better proposals, sabrina actually built by herself, which was nuts. I designed it.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: And then she coded it.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: That's cool.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Got a few people to sort of help with some of the more tricky parts, but, yeah, there's some couple of tiny little bits in there that are actually probably still fairly original.
There's just, like, minus Sabrina's stuff, which is quite cool. But, yeah, it's a totally different type of running a business. It's completely different. It's not the same.
You wake up and you're working towards something. And I think what's quite nice is that your goals in life usually are connected to the business anyway. So, like, oh, I want to live in this nice house, I want to have this nice boat, I want to do these types of holidays, whatever it is for you. But you're doing the business things so that you can do those things. And all of that stuff becomes so much easier when the person you're trying to do it with wants the same shit as you. It just makes complete sense. So in some sense, it's really, really good. Obviously, there's challenges, and that is normal, of course, but you're not dealing with somebody that's just like a business partner because they're a business partner or they had a complementary set of skills. You're dealing with your life partner, and it's a completely different way of sorting it out. And you're better at it because you do it all the time. You argue about the dishwasher and stuff, so you're better at sorting out problems.
So I think it's good. I mean, if you've got a stable relationship, that's obviously important, and you've got to have your sort of legal stuff handled, because obviously you are dealing with a bit of a tricky situation if it all goes wrong.
But, yeah, if it works and you can do it, it's incredible. But Sabrina's, what's the word? Like, consistency is just the thing that makes it work. And that mixed with my manic. Let's go do, like, 100 customer interviews in 14 days and basically stay up for two weeks straight. But then she'll do that, too. She was on the phone as well, like, helping me out when I didn't know where the buttons were in the product.
I can't speak highly enough of doing it if it makes sense for you and you've got doubts about it.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Don't yeah, well, and talk about like I said, my wife and I are in the similar situation, running our agency, and there's the pros, like all the things that you just said, and then there's challenges, right? Like, my wife and I, we work out three times a week together. We go on a run and all this. My wife doesn't necessarily she loves all the work that we're doing and everything, but she doesn't want to talk about the business, like 24/7, right? If we're on a run, she wants to talk about stuff that's not work related. And so we have to have that boundary, right, where it's like there are certain times where we're in work mode, and there are certain times where we're like the husband and wife mode or the parent mode or whatever. And we don't need to always mix constantly what hat we're wearing.
So there's boundaries there, right? Talk about some of the challenges or maybe boundaries or just things that you found that make it work better or kind of keep it in check.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Don't have any.
Yeah, we just don't I think one thing that we both are definitely really good at is riding a wave.
If there's a wave of enthusiasm, you just go you just do it.
But then we do other projects as well. So, like, we bought a house, like six years ago, 90% of it. We've renovated ourselves.
Really good. Fun to do it, love it. And that is our break. It's that it's still working together. It's just with wood and screws instead of code and business decisions. So that's kind of like our mental break.
We both work out together three times a week as well. We have a trainer that comes to the house because otherwise there's absolutely no way I'm doing yeah. Like, you know, we both have our separate you know, I go and play football, like once a week, twice a week, and that gives me a little bit of time to myself, gives Brino a little bit of time to herself, and that's kind of like her downtime and know, vice versa. So that kind of helps.
But yeah, I mean, we have other things that we do together that aren't work related, but they're still working together on something.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: You know what I mean? It's different. I've always really enjoyed the idea of getting off the computer, getting off the phone, and going, like, smash something up, make something, do something.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: So I don't know, I find that that really helps us, to be honest.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's good for everyone to hear because I think one of the things that I hear agency owners struggle with is, like, the work life balance, right? Because it's easy, especially if you're working at home or your office is nearby or whatever. It's easy to just grind away and try to make the business work and do all the things and spin all the plates and put out all the fires and it can just be hard to step away or take a vacation or whatever. And I think then hearing like, oh, working with your spouse, I would just be working 24/7. But it's like, yes, you work hard and you're working toward the same goal, but you've got to have those other things that you're doing that aren't work related right. Or you're going to burn out or it's just not going to be sustainable. Right. And I think that's good for everyone to hear.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: But it's interesting though, this is just a me thing. I don't know if it's just connected to being spacky or asperger's or whatever, but I find that if the more stuff I have to do, the less stressed I get. I find that some people take things off their plate when they get stressed. I think I've got to add more. I don't know whether it's because it forces the issue and forces your brain to go right. You definitely don't need to do that. And by having a nice level amount of things to do, a safe amount of things to do, that kind of keeps you comfortable and then by adding too much, that's when you go. Right now I've got to make some hard decisions. So I don't know, for me, I find that the more busy I am, the more effective I am. The output is just simply better.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah, for me too, I got to be running at 110% because if I'm running at 90%, it really feels like I'm at about 40%. Right.
For whatever it is, it forces you to use your time more effectively to make the prioritize the decisions, to hand off more stuff to the team. Like you're just kind of running at a higher level. So I totally get that. Well, thank you for letting me take that little side there with that because I just feel like that's something unique and I know a lot of people are kind of in similar type situations with that. So just wanted to kind of touch there anything else that you would just as we kind of wrap up here and people listening to this are running agencies where they're like the only person or they've got a whole team or all kinds of different types of agencies and stuff, but any kind of takeaways or final points or just things that might help the audience in terms of closing the sale or kind of working through this and having their terms written down and all that kind of stuff.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, having your terms, god, just get them done. You can literally get them online if you really want. Just go to betterproposals.com IO, whatever. Just go to the templates thing. Go find one that makes sense. Just copy and paste it. Just steal it, I don't care. At the very least, do that. But, yeah, get that stuff sorted. That's just basics. It's business basics. Like, you've got to have that sort of stuff sorted. It gives you peace of mind. It gives the client the feeling that they've signed something. And sometimes just that alone can get them to behave when they might not have done. So just stuff like that is good.
I think getting a scope of work for a complicated project where there's a lot of bits and bobs involved, I think that's well worth doing. And if you want to split that up and do sort of like a proposal or a fee agreement separately to that, that's okay.
Personally, I just try and just get the whole lot lumped into one. I know some people try and split contracts off here, do fees over here.
Why complicate it? Just get it.
I don't know. Here's our rule of thumb. If it's under 20 grand, just lump it all into one document. There's no reason to split it up. If you've got to deal with a separate legal department, fine. You just have to bite the bullet. But keep things simple.
Remember that your client is opening something on a phone, probably, so if it looks rubbish, they're going to think that you're a rubbish company, probably, because that's just how we judge things.
People do judge things by like people do judge a book by its cover. It is true.
Spend the time asking your client what they're trying to achieve and what the problems are that they're facing. If you know those two things, you could almost do anything with that information. Like, if you know exactly what problems they're facing, and you just keep asking them why to the point where it almost feels uncomfortable. If you start to think, like, just keep digging.
How does that affect that? How does that affect that? And what do you think is going to happen if that keeps happening? Just keep digging and make it conversational. That's the playful bit. But if you get those two things, those two bits of information, everything else is easy. It's when you don't do that and then you sit down four days later and you go, right, I've got to go and do that proposal for Dave. And you realize you haven't got a bloody clue what Dave's problems are. You've got no idea what Dave wants. And now you've completely forgotten everything you spoke about in the meeting. And you're going to do this how?
Never going to get it with AI.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: There's so much you can do now, right? I mean, you can record your call with the client using Otter AI or pick any tool, right? And then you can transcribe it. You can put it in chat. GBT. What were the problems that the client had?
We're living in an age when this has never been easier between AI and tools like better proposals, where the templates. I mean, there's just so much that you can do in such a little time. It's amazing. Right?
[00:32:06] Speaker B: I definitely think using AI tools to do what you previously use an assistant for I think is absolutely genius. But I'm glad you brought Chihat GPT up because I've got a bit of an issue with it.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Oh, yes, please, go for it.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: I'll tell you this quickly before we wrap up.
The only reason I'm mentioning it is because I wrote an article this morning about our commitment to be a human only company. And we've basically made a commitment to not use chat, GPT or any kind of AI tools to write content with our marketing and especially not with our customer support team. So we support 11,000 customers in 150 countries 24 hours a day.
We reply in less than like, 90 seconds, everyone's trained on everything and we do it with three people. You do not need AI, you do not need bots. You just don't train people properly, make sure that people know the product or whatever they're selling. You don't need that stuff. But to me, I can't think of anything worse than having a bot or some language pattern program try to do customer support when you're trying to help someone out. So I don't care if it costs me more money, I don't care if it's less profitable, I don't even care if it pushes us out of business one day. As far as I'm concerned, that's a commitment, that one, and I'll take it with me. I don't care.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Love it. Love it. Final question here, and I'm making this loaded on purpose. Loaded on purpose. But are proposals dead? Are proposals, like, going by the wayside?
[00:33:50] Speaker B: No, because you've always got to get something signed somehow, otherwise well, that is dumb. If you're going to try and sell things and not get anyone to sign anything, that's crazy. And you don't need me to tell you that what you call it is up to you. But at some point in time, you're going to have to get them to agree to a fee, agree to some terms and some sort of specification or what you're going to do at some point in time. Doesn't matter what you call it, how you dress it up, how you present it. At some point in time, you're going to have to take that, shove it in a document and get someone to sign it.
You could do it with a tool like ours. You can patch it together and do it with Word if you want. You can use any number of different things, but we've made it nice and easy to do that and pretty it.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Love it. Adam, thank you so much. This has been so great. I could chat with you all day and we could talk about features and all the different things, but thank you for what you've done to make it easier for agency owners like me to do our job and to get the signature. I think my account passed the 1 million mark in better proposals. In terms of, like that's just the work that we've done through the proposals. I think we're, like, right around the 1 million mark, which is pretty awesome.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Congratulations.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: Thank you for all that you've done.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Yeah, love that, man. Brilliant.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Cool. Well, yeah, good talking with you, and I hope to chat with you again soon.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: You would do, man. Thank.
