Driving Customer Engagement With Modern Proposals

When I think of customer experience, three words come to mind: seamless, personal, memorable.

I recently felt it with Ahrefs (joined a giveaway, claimed a book in a few clicks, instant confirmation), and you've probably experienced it too—when Spotify nailed your year-end playlist, when your coffee shop remembered your order, or when that random online purchase became the smoothest transaction all month.

These moments stick because they feel effortless, as if someone had actually thought about your experience.

But in B2B sales, where does engagement begin? During the demo? After signing? Once onboarding starts?

Wrong. It begins with proposals.

While prospects spend 30 minutes in your demo, they spend hours with your proposal, forwarding it to teammates, modeling scenarios, deciding at 11 PM whether you're worth the risk. It's where interested prospects become invested buyers, or politely disappear.

We'll unpack five customer engagement strategies through the proposal lens. By the end, you'll see proposals as your most powerful tool for building trust and momentum before any contract is signed.

But first, the basics…

What is customer engagement, and why does it matter?

Customer engagement is the connection people feel with your business and the reason they decide to stay. It isn’t one email, one ad, or one sale. It’s the ongoing experience customers have with you and whether those interactions feel simple, valuable, and worth repeating.

That connection is also fragile. A single delightful moment can create goodwill, but if the overall experience is clunky, that delight won’t count for much. For example, if the platform itself felt frustrating, would that moment of delight outweigh the hassle? Probably not.

Gartner’s research makes the same point. What matters most is reducing effort and making it easy for people to get what they need without friction. Their study of 97,000 customers found that 96% of those who had high-effort experiences reported disloyalty, while only 9% of those with low-effort experiences did.

That’s why proposals matter so much. They’re not just a sales document; they’re often the clearest test of engagement. When proposals are confusing or inconsistent, the effort it takes to interpret them erodes trust. When they’re clear, transparent, and easy to interact with, they reinforce the very things that make customers stay.

Beyond the demo: How proposals become your biggest engagement opportunity

Remember that Ahrefs moment I described? A simple interaction that created loyalty. For B2B sales teams, proposals represent the same opportunity—often the deepest, most detailed interaction prospects have with your company before they buy.

Yet most proposals feel like administrative hurdles rather than experience moments. They're formatted like contracts, structured around what sellers want to say, and sent as static PDFs that prospects read in isolation.

It's the equivalent of Ahrefs making me fill out a 12-page form just to claim a book. The companies that get this right see proposals differently: not as sales documents, but as customer experience touchpoints that also close deals. They preview what it's like to work together, reduce buyer anxiety, and set expectations for the partnership ahead.

Here are five customer engagement strategies where proposals help reinforce trust, preview partnership, and set the stage for long-term loyalty.

Strategy #1: Preview the customer experience before the deal is signed

Engagement starts long before onboarding. Prospects want to know not just what you sell, but what it will feel like to work with you.

Some companies, like Superhuman, famously did this through manual onboarding. At its peak, the email platform had only 20 people manually onboarding new users, creating superfans who drove word-of-mouth growth. That "white-glove" treatment worked because it turned a product trial into a relationship.

But most B2B teams can't scale one-to-one onboarding. That's where proposals come in. A well-designed, interactive proposal acts as a preview of your partnership. It shows how you communicate, how clearly you organize information, and how proactive you are about removing friction.

BELAY, a virtual staffing company built on personalized service, faced exactly this challenge. Their old proposal process included copying data between systems, sending plain-text documents, and felt completely at odds with their high-touch brand.

As Nick Vian, their IT Systems Administrator, put it: "We want to be intentional from the first interaction through onboarding." When they switched to interactive proposals, the change was immediate.

Instead of feeling like contracts, proposals can set the tone for collaboration by:

• Laying out next steps with visual timelines using Qwilr's timeline blocks to create project roadmaps that prospects can scan at a glance, showing exactly what happens after they sign
• Adding personal welcome videos directly embedded in the proposal so prospects meet their future partners before signing
• Clarifying responsibilities on both sides using Qwilr's modular content blocks to create clear "You handle this, we handle that" sections that prospects can edit and negotiate in-line
• Making it effortless to act with contracts embedded directly inside the proposal using Qwilr's native e-signature capabilities, so prospects go from "yes" to "active customer" without switching platforms

That mix of clarity, personalization, and speed creates a moment of engagement—before the customer has even become one.

Strategy #2: Align your messaging with how customers make decisions

Alex Dutton from Brisant Secure will never forget this deal. He was on the phone with a prospect, wrapped up the call, and immediately sent over a proposal. Two minutes later, his phone rang. "Wow, that is really impressive – how did you do that?" The prospect became a customer that same day.

What made the difference wasn't magic, but alignment. Brisant had finally structured their proposals around how buyers actually think, not how sellers want to pitch.

Most proposals fail this test completely. They're organized like internal sales decks: company history first, then features, then pricing buried on page 12. But buyers don't make decisions in that order. They want the problem defined clearly, impact quantified, solution recommended, implementation planned, then pricing and proof.

When deals stall—and 86% of B2B purchases stall at least once—it's rarely because the product stopped making sense. It's because the buying journey became too complex for a group of 10-15 stakeholders to navigate. Your proposal either cuts through that complexity or adds to it.

The companies getting this right are doing four things:

• Reordering content around customer logic, starting with the problem they're facing, showing the impact of not solving it, then presenting a recommended approach, implementation plan, pricing, and social proof
• Tailoring content to different decision-makers. Finance leaders want ROI coverage while end-users focus on workflow improvements
• Making everything scannable with clear headings and visuals using Qwilr's modular block structure
• Using analytics to track where prospects actually spend time, then adjusting based on real buyer behavior

"We were just sending an email accompanied by a PDF with an Excel price book. It felt outdated and didn't reflect who we are," Alex explained. The shift to customer-aligned proposals didn't just improve their close rates—it changed how prospects experienced the entire sales process.

When proposals reflect how customers actually decide, you're not just sharing information. You're creating an experience of competence that builds trust before any contract is signed.

Strategy #3: Balance personalization with scalability

Engagement happens when prospects see their own world reflected back to them. A SaaS company pitching to a retailer shouldn't promise vague "efficiency improvements"; instead, they should highlight "managing inventory spikes during holiday seasons" with proof from similar retailers who reduced stockouts by 40%.

That specificity signals understanding and builds trust before any deal is signed.

The challenge is scale, but deep personalization can't mean reinventing the wheel for every prospect. The key is systematizing it: create reusable components, automate the basics, then leave space for contextual tailoring.

STAFFLINK discovered this balance when they stopped sending generic proposals and started reflecting each prospect's specific challenges. Their close rate doubled from 25% to 50%.

"Qwilr has allowed us to show how good we can be, just by enabling us to present our services so professionally," said Matt Anson, their SEO Manager. "Prospective clients believed we could deliver what we were saying."

Modern tools make contextual personalization achievable at scale:

• Auto-fill variables pull company names, contacts, and deal data so reps never send generic proposals
• Content libraries let you drop in relevant proof fast—industry case studies, testimonials, or ROI calculators tailored to the prospect's sector
• Segment-specific templates scale personalization across teams, so enterprise sales proposals feel completely different from SMB approaches

When prospects see their priorities, risks, and context reflected back, engagement naturally follows. They spend more time reviewing proposals, share them internally, and respond faster. More importantly, they enter partnerships already feeling understood—the foundation of long-term customer success.

Strategy #4: Encourage participation, not passive consumption

Most proposals are like museum exhibits—beautiful to look at, but hands off. Prospects read them alone, forward PDFs to teammates, and hope everyone interprets the same information the same way. Then deals stall in "internal discussion" limbo for weeks.

The breakthrough comes when you flip the script entirely. Instead of asking prospects to consume your proposal, invite them to participate in shaping it.

Beyond Times Square learned this lesson while creating luxury travel experiences for high-end clients. Each customer had detailed, unique requirements that couldn't be captured in a static document. Their solution was building proposals where prospects could actively explore options, mix and match components, and model different scenarios in real-time.

But the real magic happened when prospects could interact with those proposals themselves.

The best sales conversations happen when prospects start asking "what if" questions—What if we scaled this to three regions? What if we started with the pilot program? Interactive proposals capture that energy and sustain it even when you're not in the room.

Here's how to build participation into your proposals:

• Offer choice, not just quotes - Interactive pricing tables let buyers toggle between packages, add-ons, and service levels, seeing pricing update instantly without waiting for new quotes
• Invite conversation inside the document - Use comments or embedded chat so decision-makers can align internally without endless email threads
• Enable scenario modeling - Let prospects adjust variables, timelines, or scope to see how changes affect outcomes and pricing

When prospects can participate in shaping the proposal experience, they're not just evaluating your solution—they're co-creating their path to success. And that level of engagement is what transforms interest into commitment.

Strategy #5: Remove friction at critical decision points

When the path from approval to action is seamless, buyers don’t feel like they’re crossing hurdles. They feel like they’re progressing, and that confidence is the ultimate form of engagement.

A prospect loves your proposal, gets internal approval, and is ready to move forward. Then they hit a wall. Sign this PDF, wait for a separate contract, forward the invoice to procurement, and switch to another platform for payment. Each step creates space for doubt to creep in.

LaunchNotes knew this pain intimately. Their original process involved creating documents in Google Sheets, exporting PDFs, uploading to HelloSign, plus separate questionnaires in Notion.

Co-founder Jake Brereton described it perfectly:

Research shows that 88% of B2B buyers want timely, relevant engagement during their evaluation phase. But too many companies sabotage that momentum at the finish line with unnecessary friction.

The breakthrough came when LaunchNotes consolidated everything into a single proposal experience.

The result? They doubled their close rate.

The most engaged prospects become frustrated customers when the buying process feels like an obstacle course. The fix is making proposals the single place where decisions get finalized and action gets taken:

• Embed contracts directly in proposals so agreements don't get lost as separate attachments
• Enable e-signature and approvals in one flow to keep momentum alive without platform switching
• Process payment on the spot without leaving the document
• Update terms in real-time during negotiations without canceling previous versions or resending anything

When the path from approval to action is seamless, buyers don't feel like they're crossing hurdles, they feel like they're progressing. And that sense of forward momentum is what transforms interest into revenue.

The proposal advantage: Where customer engagement actually happens

Customer engagement can mean many things within an organization—marketing teams track email opens, customer success monitors product usage, and support measures satisfaction scores. But when it comes to sales, engagement has one clear definition: the depth of connection and investment prospects feel before they become customers.Here's what most sales teams miss: your proposal is the only sales asset prospects actually use to make decisions. Everything else…the demo, the discovery call, the follow-up emails—those are conversations. But your proposal? That's the document they reference in budget meetings, share with legal, and use to justify the purchase to their boss.

Yet most proposals are static PDFs that kill momentum instead of building it.

If your team is wrestling with how to turn proposals into engagement drivers instead of administrative hurdles, it might be time to see Qwilr in action. Book a demo and see how interactive proposals make customer engagement impossible to ignore.