The team at Beagle is reimagining creative proposals

Pitch presentations tend to take centre stage for young creative companies hoping to win work, but as the first thing a client will see, proposals are just as important. This is a fact Aaron Bateman and his team at Beagle are well aware of. “From talking to lots of different creative companies – digital agencies, design studios etc. – we learned that they way they do proposals is pretty broken,” he explains.

“We see a distinction between the classic pitch – a prepared presentation that you and your team have sweated over for months delivered to a room full of hard-to-impress clients – and proposals. The latter are sent as an attachment or in a link and the client reads them at their leisure. In that sense, there’s nothing like the same pressure on your presentation skills.”

But proposals are still a vital part of the creative process. “They’re a pitch in written form, and they can be definitive. Your proposal is what sets you apart, and makes your agency unique in the clients’ eyes. It’s what convinces them to hopefully say yes.”

With this in mind, the Beagle team set about interviewing more than 30 leading agencies in London and Copenhagen to see how it could help to streamline the process. “We saw a lot of proposals that were unnecessarily long,” Aaron continues, “and many that lacked any visual stimulus to keep the reader interested. I’m not sure there’s a magic formula but succinctness, professional branding and a clear call to action are the bare minimum.”

This is where its software, borne out of months of research and ongoing feature development, comes in. “You could call it a proposal tool, or a proposal builder, but there’s nothing to say it couldn’t also be a useful tool for other documents such as briefs, project plans or technical scopes,” Aaron says. “Technically, it’s a browser-based tool that serves as a repository for all your proposals. It lets companies and freelancers create more compelling proposals faster, so that you spend more time on actual creative work.” Furthermore, Beagle is designed to learn what you need from it – it breaks up imported proposals into handy re-usable sections, making it easier and faster to repurpose that content in future proposals.

It also takes care of the formatting for you, reinforcing brand image while also saving time, and “enabling those without design resources to output beautiful-looking proposals.” That said, it can’t do everything. “It obviously helps if you have some solid ideas, too!” Aaron explains. But, fingers crossed, that’s a given.

To find out more about what Beagle does, visit the website.