Propovoice CRM for Managing Sales and Project Processes

Propovoice is a WordPress plugin for managing business to business processes related to sales, projects, and invoicing. The product name is a combination of “Proposal” and “Invoice”. It is a relatively new solution that launched in October 2022. When it was first released I noticed a lot of positive comments from early adopters, but I didn’t test it myself. Recently the product founder gave me a license so I could try it out and I was curious to take a look. There was no expectation that I would do a review and what follows is my overview and assessment.

About the Free Version

There is a free version of Propovoice available in the WordPress plugin directory. It is regularly updated, has more than 800 active installs, 11 five star reviews, and 4 of 4 support questions have been answered in the last 2 months. The free version has a number of features that might be good for a freelancer or smaller business. These include:

• Lead management for gathering contacts and tracking progress through a sales pipeline.
• A deal management pipeline.
• The ability to create and send estimates and record the response.
• The ability to create and send invoices, take and track payment.
• Add client information.
• Customizable templates for estimates and invoices.
• The ability to add tags, tasks, and notes to make tracking easier.
• At a glance “swim lane” or Kanban-style report views for quickly assessing and navigating pipelines.
• And more.

The free plugin is required for installing the pro version.

About the Pro Version

The pro version of Propovice is available from the company website. The pro version adds a number of additional features some of which are:

• Dashboard View
• Deal Pipeline View
• Direct Send Email Estimate and Invoice
• Estimate Reminder
• Invoice Reminder
• Invoice Recurring
• Duplicate Estimate, Invoice
• Copy To Invoice
• Tax and State Tax
• Payment Gateway
• Task & Activity Module
• Task & Activity Checklist

The website also has a demo so that you can log in and try Propovoice, a roadmap, support ticketing system, and a documentation area. The documentation provides overview articles for most of the features.

The pro version of the plugin is available in annual and lifetime packages for 1, 10, and 50 websites.

There are a good number of integrations for a new product. Integrations appear to be for accepting payment, integrations with popular forms plugins for creating lead forms, for communications platforms, and for automation.

High Level View of Propovoice

There are various platforms and plugins for managing projects and each one takes a different approach. With Propovoice you view sales and projects in terms of pipelines and processes. People building small ecommerce, coaching, and membership sites are familiar with the idea of a sales funnel. At the top you have a wide mouth where leads are collected, then you have information about the benefits of what is being sold, and then hopefully people progress to a sales page. This is generally a B2C model where you are making sales, often without talking to the customer first.

B2B sales typically involve more money, a discussion of project requirements, maybe a demo, then a proposal or estimate, and then a contract. After the contract is signed then the project is started, tasks are completed, milestone payments are received and the project concludes and final payment is made. We often view these kinds of processes through the lens of WordPress freelancers or small agencies. Propovoice can be used in that context, but there are other businesses that can also benefits from pipeline and process management. For example, think of a company that builds backyard pools, an event management company, a company that installs elevators, and so on. Large companies may use a bespoke system or pay large licensing fees, but medium sized businesses are looking for cost effective solutions that they can host and manage themselves. This is where Propovoice can shine.

Pipelines

There are two “pipelines” in Propovoice, a sales pipeline and a project pipeline. They both have Kanban style boards available. Imagine something like this for your sales and project pipelines:

Sales: Leads -> Contacting -> Engaging -> Proposal / Estimate-> Closed (success or not)

Projects: Design -> Implementation -> Testing -> Review -> Payment -> Complete

In Propovoice the Sale and Project pipelines are separate, but the UI and features of each are similar. I’ll look a bit at the sales side, but the project side works the same.

The first step in managing a sales pipeline is to map out the steps in your sales process. Propovoice visualizes this in terms of a Deal Pipeline. Here is the default sample pipeline that is setup by default to get you started.

The starter pipeline lays it out in terms of:

• Opportunity
• Contacting
• Engaging
• Proposing
• Closing Won
• Lost

So you would look at the steps that you or your sales team typically take. That might include a demo, a site review, and so on. Propovoice lets you customize the deal stages by adding your own and reordering them on the deal settings page. Note that similar settings pages are available for many of the areas for customization.

Propovoice calls opportunities in the pipeline “deals.” Here is a screenshot of the Propovoice “Deal” card that you use to track sales in the pipeline. In addition to contact information, description, and notes, there also places for a budget. Note also that you can add tags to the deal cards and use search to filter by tag.

If you don’t see all of the fields you might need, note that Propovoice supports adding custom fields for leads, deals, and projects.

In a sales driven organization the sales team would be feeding prospects into the pipeline. The pipeline serves two purposes:

1. First, management should be able to look and instantly see what’s in the pipeline. Does the company have quarterly and yearly sales goals? If so, a good view of the pipeline is crucial.
2. Second, team members can see what needs to be done and find their tasks. Management can get a sense of progress by regularly checking the pipeline.

In this screenshot I’ve added a few deals to the board:

In addition to the card in the lane view, there is also a list view. In the list view you can sort by column.

The second step is to add content to the form. You add your company info, who the estimate is for, and the work items. You an add lines for currency, tax, and discount.

After you enter the data then you can review and send it.

Front-end View

In addition to viewing the screens from the admin, there is also the option to view all of the screens on the frontend. This is a nice option as it looks cleaner and keeps users focused and out of the WordPress admin. This is the frontend dashboard. Note the left side menu where you can perform all the same tasks.

Team Members

On the WordPress site where Propovoice is installed the plugin adds several user roles. You assign these roles on the WordPress profile page for each user.

Here are the roles and what they can do, from the Propovoice documentation:

Propovoice Staff: The role will let the user look after all the basic activities regarding CRM and invoicing. A Propovoice staff will be able to access basic Propovoice functionalities from their user dashboard and they can create a report based on the regular CRM activities on the go.

Propovoice Manager: This role will allow your users to act like an administrator. That means the user can have access to all the features without any barriers. The users will have all privileges to control everything from the settings to third-party app integrations from a single dashboard.

Propovoice CRM Manager: A CRM manager can have access to all the customers’ data. The CRM manager will be able to manage the front-end, user dashboard, leads, deals, tasks, estimates, and everything that relates to customer management from the core.

Propovoice Project Manager: The project manager role enables the user to handle clients, tasks, and project-based activities of the plugin. Project managers can make the workflow a lot easier for the CRM managers and staff.

Propovoice Billing Manager: The following role will give your user the ability to manage invoices, tasks, estimates, and contacts, along with the user dashboard. The billing manager will take care of all the necessary billing information.

For example, here is a view as the Propovoice Staff role:

And when in a non-admin role and you view the tasks page you only see your tasks.

Discussion

So by this point you’ve gotten an understanding that the Propovoice workflow is based on the two pipelines where you manage “deals” and “projects”, add tasks, and can manage leads, contacts, and clients. The pipelines, status options, and tags are flexible as you can create your own, and you can add custom fields as well, so that you can match the needs of your business.

Strengths

• The strength of Propovoice looks to be the pipeline / process model. There is some overhead in adding the data and maintaining the pipelines, which makes me think that Propovoice might work best for medium sized businesses where you have team members working on the sales process and others working on the implementation side.
• You are able to customize the pipeline categories and tags as well as add custom fields.
• The estimate and invoice builders were fairly flexible and produced nice looking results.
• The front-end version will be nice for businesses that want to keep users out of the admin.
• There are a fair number of integrations, including integrations with automation platforms and plugins.

Neutral

In the web design business, for instance, there are entire systems built around getting the needed assets and content. While Propovoice has the ability to attach files, this is pretty generic. The possible downside is that you might also need another tool. However, the types of requirements are often business specific and by not niching down to just one area, Propovoice can be used for various types of businesses. There is a priority roadmap item for adding a client portal, which will help strengthen this area.

Missing?

When adding tasks they seem to automatically be assigned to the user who created them. I didn’t see how as Propovoice Manager to assign tasks to users or see which tasks were assigned to different users. Perhaps I missed this? Also, as noted above, when using the task view (not the pipeline view) you don’t see the parent entity associated with the task. I see on the roadmap that some team features, so hopefully this is coming soon.

Propovoice has the front-end view, but I didn’t see any way to lockdown the site to restrict users to that interface. I imagine you would need to use another plugin to do that.

Conclusion

I’ve seen businesses where management tracks sales and projects closely and the pipeline model can be a powerful tool. A really powerful tool, but for that to work management needs to check it often and make it clear to the team that they need to work the pipelines.

Propovoice is a new tool, but already has a good core set of features. There has obviously been thought given to making the tool flexible so users can customize it for their needs. However, because it is a new tool there are some things that are missing. The roadmap looks promising for filling in the gaps.

Propovoice is not an end user tool, like a page builder, instead it is a tool for businesses. It won’t make sense for blogs and many other typical types of WordPress sites. A business that has a strong sales and operational focus could benefit from using it.