Vinyl × Socket: turn client conversations into drafted proposals
Amy Mall
Vinyl and Socket are now integrated, making it easier than ever to build proposals that prospects sign without hesitation, and making sure your existing clients are charged for all the work you do for them and quoted for the new opportunities that come up in conversation.
The integration works by matching your pricing menu in Socket to the meeting transcript in Vinyl, allowing you to swiftly draft proposals with pricing and an introduction, straight from the conversation context.
What the integration does
The two-way connection bridges your meetings in Vinyl and your pricing and proposals in Socket:
Proposal and pricing: Vinyl connects to your Socket pricing menu to pull in your services and build starting prices for you to check, then builds a draft proposal in Socket in under two minutes.
Tailored introduction: Vinyl writes a tailored introduction directly from the pain points and goals raised by the client.
Anything the meeting didn't cover: Vinyl asks for and you can reply in the chat. This could be anything from year end date to pricing instructions. Then, every proposal then stays a draft until you've reviewed and sent it from Socket.
Out-of-scope work and new opportunities: Vinyl can check existing client proposals in Socket against a call transcript, so you can decide what to do about anything not in the proposal.
For me, the key bit is keeping the proposals live with the conversations. You're giving the client exactly what they need, and you're helping them to be successful. That's what we want: successful businesses.
Jonathan Gaunt, Socket
This integration makes it easier for you to put your best foot forward every client interaction. The context you need for a great proposal is in the conversation, your firm’s standard offerings and pricing is in the pricing menu, and you bring the judgement before anything gets sent.
You and your team are typically losing hours every single week to meeting admin. Context gets lost, notes are patchy, follow-ups fall through the cracks, and team members are left in the dark.
This workflow starts to help firms take discovery calls and proposals off the partner's shoulders, and allow other people in the team to be involved in that process.
Jordan Vickery, Vinyl
How it works
The whole workflow takes three steps:
Run the meeting in Vinyl: record and transcribe the call in Vinyl.
Click 'Draft Proposal': Your Socket pricing menu is used to draft the proposal from the call context, with starting prices and a personalised introduction.
Review and send in Socket: Confirm the pricing, make adjustments, and send as you normally would from Socket.
In our demo of the integration, a discovery call with an interiors business came back matched to existing services in the demo account, then, Vinyl asked for the financial year end and company registration number to fill in, flagged that the VAT health check had no price and took a one-line reply as the instruction to fix it.
Once in Socket, the drafts from Vinyl live under the AI generated proposal section, complete with confidence scores so you know what to review first.
The work you're doing for free
When a client asks for a small favour and the team obliges, you now have another way to catch the scope creep and keep proposals up-to-date.
The integration turns the scope checking into a two-minute job. Record a regular client catch-up call in Vinyl, then ask it to pull the client's existing proposals and scope of work from Socket to compare and update.
In my own firm we were leaving about 10% on the table every single month in work we were doing for free. That simple bit of checking back at the proposal, asking is this in scope and re-quoting if not, gave us an awful lot of free revenue that went straight to profit.
Jonathan Gaunt, Socket
The opportunities you don’t want to miss
A routine catch-up with a client might highlight opportunities that you don’t want to let slip by. You can then turn these into a proposal without leaving the Vinyl chat.
To make this even better, Vinyl's Studio can run its Revenue Opportunities analysis across all of your team's meetings and report back in under a minute, giving you a list to cross-reference what's in scope in Socket Insights.
Clients don't know what to ask for. They'll talk about things in the context of their business, the pains and problems they're experiencing, but a lot of the time they just don't know it's a service their accounting firm can offer.
Jordan Vickery, Vinyl
Getting started
The integration is included for every Vinyl plan and for every Socket plan. Switch it on with 3 simple steps:
Go to Integrations in Vinyl and connect your Socket account. It takes less than a minute to sign in and authorise the connection.
Ask your firm's Master Admin enable AI permissions under Settings → AI Permissions in Vinyl.
Open any captured meeting and find the Draft Proposal button in the post-meeting actions.
Not heard of Vinyl yet? Visit usevinyl.com, to find out more and their support article covers the setup in detail.
Watch it in action
We walked through the integration, covering discovery call to sent proposal, and from catch-up call to out-of-scope opportunities. Watch the recording here.
If you're already using Vinyl to run your meetings, connect the integration and try it on your next client call. Let us know how you get on!