Why: I run a 12 person digital marketing agency and I'm still doing all our proposals myself. I know I should have someone else help with this, but our average project is around $15-30K and when we mess up pricing or promise something we can't deliver, it really hurts. I tried having my senior account manager help last year but she underquoted a project by like $8K and we basically worked for free for 3 months. Now I just do them all myself but I'm getting 4-6 requests per month and each one takes me most of a day. It's not sustainable and I'm probably losing opportunities because I'm so slow to respond. Would love to clone myself with AI to do this task.
Software: Word, Excel, Gmail, Google Drive, and Pipedrive CRM
Process:
Step 1) Get an inquiry email, usually pretty vague about what they actually want
Step 2) Print out their email and any attachments they sent (old habit)
Step 3) Check our CRM to see if we know anything about them.
Step 4) Look through old proposals in Google Drive to find something similar
Step 5) Open our standard proposal template in Word and start customizing it
Step 6) Write the executive summary based on what I think they need
Step 7) Copy sections from old proposals and modify them to fit
Step 8) Build out pricing in Excel, trying to guess how many hours things will take
Step 9) Go back and forth on whether to include optional add-ons.
Step 10) Read through everything to make sure it makes sense
Step 11) Fix formatting issues (tables never look right)
Step 12) Convert to PDF
Step 13) Write cover email and send
Step 14) Add follow-up reminder in CRM