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If your sales team is still sending SaaS proposals as PDFs, they’re leaving money on the table—and your sales enablement team has very little control over what’s going out the door.
The problem isn’t just that PDFs get lost in inboxes.
It’s that they’re static. They can’t adapt when pricing changes. They can’t tell you which stakeholders actually looked at them. And they do nothing to help a champion convince the rest of their buying committee.
That’s a big problem in 2025.
According to Gartner, 83% of deals involve a buying committee with six to ten decision-makers—each with their own priorities, objections, and questions.
For modern sales and enablement leaders, a SaaS proposal should be a playbook to close deals.
In this article, you’ll learn how to build proposals that:
- Tell a consistent value story, no matter which rep builds them
- Adapt to different personas (CFO, Security, IT, end users) without becoming bloated
- Provide real-time insight into who’s engaging and what’s resonating
- Use AI to create, personalize, and optimize SaaS proposals at scale
By the end, you’ll have a repeatable framework and customizable template for proposals that not only look good, but also drive deals across the finish line faster.
Four jobs for every SaaS sales proposal
A good SaaS proposal doesn’t just summarize what you’re selling. It accelerates the deal by giving potential clients precisely what they need to build buying consensus and close deals faster.
Here’s what modern SaaS proposals are really for:
1. Help your buyer sell internally
Most SaaS deals are champion-led. That means your main contact probably believes in your solution, but they still need to win over Legal, Security, Finance, and their boss’s boss.
A good proposal turns your champion into a seller. It gives them a clean, organized story to tell, backed by pricing, proof, a mutual action plan, and an easy way to loop in other decision-makers.
2. Package your value—so it’s easy to pass around
CFOs don’t want a pitch. They want numbers, risks, and a clear business case.
IT doesn’t want a demo. They want documentation and a fast path through procurement.
Your proposal has to serve all of them—without becoming a 40-slide deck or a PDF with 12 attachments. The modern SaaS proposal is a buyer-friendly hub: organized, lightweight, and skim-able.
3. Prevent deals from stalling out
You’ve had a great call. They love the product. Then…nothing.
Most deals don’t die because of objections. They die because the buyer doesn’t know what to do next, or because someone internally kills the momentum.
A modern SaaS proposal includes a mutual action plan—a shared roadmap with next steps, milestones, and owners. That alone can be the difference between a signed contract and a slow fade.
4. Track interest across the buying committee
The best proposals don’t just sit there—they tell you what’s happening.
Modern proposal tools like Dock show you who viewed your workspace, what sections they clicked, and how much time they spent with each piece of content. That means you know when interest is heating up, who else is in the mix, and when it’s time to follow up.
What to include in a SaaS proposal
The most effective SaaS sales proposals are built right after your discovery call—while the buyer’s priorities are fresh and before momentum fades. The goal is to arm your champion with a single, structured resource that makes it easy for them to sell internally.
To make this easier, we built this Dock SaaS Proposal Template—a single, collaborative workspace that brings together everything your buyer needs to say “yes,” without endless email chains or stale PDFs.
It’s designed so sales enablement teams can control the structure, keep messaging consistent, and still give reps the flexibility to personalize.
These are the key sections to add to your SaaS proposal template:
- Introduction and contact info
- Executive summary or business case
- Mutual action plan
- Product information
- Sales deck
- Pricing proposal
- Case studies
Here’s a walkthrough of what’s inside the template, why it matters, and how to make it your own.
1. Project Overview & Contact Info
Purpose: Set the tone and make it personal.
Start with a short intro that explains the problem you’re solving and who’s involved on both sides.
Include names, titles, photos, and contact details for quick reference. Listing your key team members builds trust and makes it easy for stakeholders to know who to reach out to during the process.
Go beyond text—embed a short intro video or Loom recording to reintroduce your team to new stakeholders.
2. Mutual action plan
Purpose: Create urgency and show your buyer there’s a plan.
Most software-as-a-service business proposals fail because the next steps aren’t clear. A mutual action plan fixes that.
Think of a mutual action plan as a roadmap—a shared checklist that keeps both you and the buying team on track as you move through the sales cycle. The goal is to show your buyer how the process will (ideally) run.
Lay out a shared timeline with milestones and ownership—signed NDA, security review, legal approval, kickoff date, etc. This helps the deal feel real and reduces back-and-forth later.
Dock’s action plans are interactive, so your buyer can check off tasks, leave comments, and keep things moving.
Tip: Add your buyer as a collaborator to the plan so they can take ownership of next steps—it's a subtle but powerful way to drive momentum.
3. Executive summary or business case
Purpose: Present a clear, skim-able business case for late-arriving stakeholders.
Next, include an executive summary and/or business case based on what you learned about client needs during discovery.
Summarize the key pain points, your recommended solution, and expected ROI in one concise, skim-able page.
This section should be written for the economic buyer and other decision-makers, who need a concise summary of how your product can solve their company’s biggest pain points.
4. Product information
Purpose: Show stakeholders exactly how your solution solves their problem—without overwhelming them.
By this stage, you’ve already covered the big-picture value. Now it’s time to share targeted, relevant product details.
Embed short demo videos, feature one-pagers, or even call recordings so your champion can easily show others how the solution works. This is especially helpful for decision-makers who didn’t join the demo, but still influence the deal.
With Dock, you can build your product information section directly into your master SaaS proposal template. That way, every rep starts with the same approved messaging and assets about product functionality.
If product positioning changes, just update the section once, and it automatically refreshes across every proposal that uses it—no chasing down outdated decks or PDFs.
5. Sales deck
Purpose: Keep your core pitch front and center for every stakeholder.
Once you’ve presented your sales deck live—whether in a discovery or demo call—embed it directly into your proposal workspace. This gives your champion an easy way to re-share the presentation internally without hunting through old email threads or Slack messages.
Including the deck alongside your other proposal materials ensures that late-stage stakeholders can quickly get up to speed on your value story. By keeping a single, approved version in your Dock content library, any updates you make to the deck are automatically reflected in every proposal that uses it—so reps never send outdated slides.
6. Pricing proposal
Purpose: Give decision-makers a clear, accurate view of the investment and options.
For most buying committees—especially the economic buyer—this is the section they flip to first. Present your pricing proposal in a clear, high-level breakdown that’s easy to scan.
Favor simplicity here. Don’t show your whole pricing table—prospects can find that on your website.
Instead, share the recommended pricing plan, payment structure, or package. If you want to list multiple options, list them side by side with a short summary of what’s included in each—including your recommendations for the customer.
7. Social proof
Purpose: Build credibility and reduce perceived risk.
Your proposal should not only explain your value—it should prove it. Include case studies, testimonials, awards, or references that show how you’ve solved similar problems for companies like your prospect.
For maximum impact, choose examples that match their industry, size, or use case so the connection is immediate and believable.
With Dock, you can store all your social proof assets—videos, PDFs, one-pagers—in a central library. Enablement teams can tag and organize them so reps can quickly drop the most relevant examples into a proposal. This ensures every deal gets the right proof points without wasting time searching through folders or Slack threads.
8. Other considerations
What else should your SaaS sales proposal include? In some cases, you might want to add:
- Current product usage
- Competitor comparisons
- Security info
- Proof of concept info
- Onboarding plan
- Personalized video
- Call recordings
Let’s take a look.
Current product usage
If you have a product-led growth (PLG) SaaS product, use Dock to show current product usage as part of your proposal.
For example, you can add a table with current users, what they’re already spending, and where they could unlock more features or gain spending efficiencies—to show there’s already momentum for your product within their organization.
Competitor comparisons
Competitor comparisons don’t necessarily belong in every software solution proposal. But if a buyer asks to see a breakdown, you need to be ready to provide one.
When appropriate, a competitor comparison can help with buyer enablement by proving your value, helping a prospect continue to move forward in the buying journey.
Security info
Get ahead of security assessments by adding security info into your software sales proposal. Prospects need peace of mind that you’ll be able to pass vendor risk assessments. Get ahead of time-sucking security reviews by adding a section with security information into your proposal.
In this section, you can upload any relevant legal documents, like your privacy policy, GDPR and CCPA compliance statement, and SOC 2 Report. If relevant, add a few lines of copy overviewing your security policy or answering FAQs. And consider also directing buyers to your IT or security team, where they can get more information.
Proof of concept info
Conclude your services proposal by offering a free pilot period. A sales proof of concept (POC) serves as a free or paid software trial where you help new clients with implementation and support, giving them the opportunity to take the reins and see what they think of your SaaS solution.
POCs are good fits for startups, PLG companies, or a SaaS solution that’s especially technical.
This guided trial should include a pre-defined scope, goals or success criteria, and timeline—all good information to add to the final section of your SaaS proposal. And ultimately, of course, your goal by committing to this process is to close the deal and ensure the purchase goes through.
Onboarding plan
Outline a basic onboarding plan to demonstrate how easy it will be to pass the prospect-turned-customer over to customer success. Briefly introduce your CS folks and preview how onboarding works.
Personalized video
Personalized video goes a long way in deepening customer relationships. A short, sixty- to ninety-second video doesn’t take long to record (or to watch). But when included in the introduction or the product section of your proposal, it can help improve trust and switch up your messaging to be more accurate and personable.
Call recordings
Consider embedding the recording of your discovery call(s) into your SaaS proposal. This can be a reminder to the prospect of their vision, goals, and what they’re looking for to solve their current problem.
SaaS sales proposal best practices
Once you’ve built your proposal, a few best practices can make the difference between “great presentation” and “signed deal.”
1. Start from a template
Your sales enablement team should own a standardized SaaS proposal template. That way, reps never start from scratch, and your messaging stays consistent.
Build in variables—like {{account.name}} or {{primary_contact.title}}—so details auto-populate when a rep creates a new workspace. This ensures every proposal feels personal without sacrificing control or adding unnecessary work.
You can ever trigger these workspaces to create automatically as part of your rep’s existing client workflows. For example, you can automate workspaces to create when deals hit a certain stage in your CRM.
2. Ditch the PDF
PDFs get lost in inboxes, are impossible to update, and give you no insight into buyer engagement. Instead, use Dock’s digital sales rooms—private, trackable microsites that organize all your deal content in one place. Send a single link, and your champion can easily share it with their buying committee.
3. Track engagement signals
With Dock’s proposal software, you can see exactly who viewed your proposal, what sections they engaged with, and how often they came back. These insights tell you when interest is spiking, which personas are involved, and when to follow up—helping you forecast more accurately and adjust your approach mid-deal.
4. Turn the proposal into an order form
When the buyer is ready to move forward, eliminate friction by converting your proposal directly into a sign-able order form. Define terms, upload legal docs, and send for e-signature—all in the same workspace.
This streamlines all the manual work required for reps and automatically stores the completed agreement in your CRM.
5. Make the CS handoff seamless
A good proposal doesn’t disappear after the deal is signed—it becomes the foundation for onboarding.
With Dock, the same workspace transforms into a customer onboarding portal, so your buyer doesn’t have to learn a new process or dig for information.
Embed welcome materials, timelines, and training resources, and track engagement through the first stages of their customer journey.
Best SaaS proposal tools
If you’re looking to modernize your proposal process, here are some of the top SaaS proposal tools to consider:
- Dock: Purpose-built for modern sales and enablement teams, Dock combines proposal creation, content management, mutual action plans, live pricing, and e-signature in a single collaborative workspace. Ideal for replacing static PDFs with interactive, trackable deal rooms.
- PandaDoc: A document automation tool that’s strong for creating, sending, and tracking e-signatures. Good for straightforward proposals and contracts, though less flexible for multi-asset deal rooms.
- Qwilr: Known for creating visually polished, web-based proposals with interactive content. Best suited for marketing-friendly proposals but offers less structure for complex SaaS sales cycles.
- Proposify: Offers customizable templates, analytics, and e-signature capabilities. Strong for managing a library of proposals, though it can feel more marketing-heavy than sales-enablement-focused.
- Better Proposals: A simpler, affordable option for SMB teams that want quick-to-build, branded proposals with basic analytics.
Pro tip: When choosing a SaaS proposal tool, focus on more than just good design—prioritize control, consistency, and buyer engagement. Look for a solution that lets you templatize content, adapt for different personas, track engagement in real time, and integrate directly with your CRM.
Write better SaaS proposals with Dock
A strong SaaS sales proposal isn’t just about design—it’s about making it easy for a buyer to say “yes.”
Dock gives sales enablement leaders the tools to templatize proposals, keep messaging consistent, and give every rep a starting point that’s already 90% complete.
From there, reps can personalize the details, embed the right content, and send a single, trackable link to their buyer. Engagement data keeps you informed, and when the deal’s ready to close, your proposal becomes the order form—then the onboarding workspace—so the customer experience is seamless from first pitch to go-live.
Get started with Dock's SaaS sales proposal template or sign up for a free trial today.
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