How to Reduce Proposal Creation Time Without Losing Quality

In the sales landscape, speed is currency. But speed without quality? That’s like serving gourmet steak on a paper plate. Sales teams need to move fast and deliver something polished, or risk losing deals to competitors who do both.

Every extra hour spent formatting, tweaking, or digging through old docs is like ironing your clothes in the departure lounge: inefficient, stressful, and usually too late. Not to mention, a tad embarrassing. Surely? If your proposal process still involves bloated Word docs, PDF exports, frantic email threads, or last-minute copy-paste gymnastics, you're wasting precious time.

At Qwilr, we believe saving time shouldn’t mean cutting corners; it should mean cutting out the chaos. Just as chefs use mise en place, your sales team deserves tools that do the prep work automatically.

Let’s explore how.

First things first: Where does the proposal process hit the snooze button? Insights on friction points

We checked in with some industry leaders to get the inside scoop on where deals typically stall and how they tackle it:

• Sam Rahmanian, CRO at Eftsure, calls out the chaos when deals start flying around without a clear, mutually agreed-upon action plan. “Without that roadmap, things get messy fast,” he says.
• Richard Savoie, CEO and co-founder of Adiona Tech, highlights the notorious hurdle of procurement and contract negotiations, especially when your customers have bigger legal teams than you do. “It’s a back-and-forth dance with legal folks before anyone signs off,” he explains.
• Umberto Anderle, Cofounder of HowdyGo, agrees: “Once legal and security teams join the party, the deal can get bogged down in revisions and approvals.”
• Mael Hartl, Head of RevOps at Shippit, digs deeper, revealing that friction varies wildly by customer segment:
  • Mid-sized retailers often freeze up during pricing talks, even with strong ROI, because the upfront investment needs to be crystal clear.
  • Global companies bring their own headache: international procurement meets local teams, and the mismatch can slow everything down.
  • Internally, shifting priorities and changing stakeholders are deal killers, requiring constant momentum maintenance.
• Dara Fitzpatrick, Sales Director at Forefront Events, keeps it simple: quality control is another big culprit in slowing the process.

It’s all a tangled web of unclear plans, tough negotiations, internal shifts, and the need for early clarity. Understanding these pinch points helps you untangle the process, streamline collaboration, and keep deals moving forward, without the dreaded stalls.

Build on a solid template

Most companies approach templates as one-size-fits-all. That’s where things fall apart. You end up with a rigid document that requires just as much manual editing as starting from scratch.

Qwilr flips the script. Our templates are built for real-world flexibility and designed to scale across teams, industries, and brand guidelines. Think of them as living documents: fully customizable, modular, and beautiful by default.

Instead of reinventing the wheel each time a new proposal is needed, Qwilr lets you start with a solid, visually impressive foundation that’s already 80% complete. All you have to do is swap in the details.

Here’s how templates speed things up:

• Modular layout: Rearranging or deleting sections is as simple as drag-and-drop.
• Brand-safe design: Once your brand settings are locked in, every proposal stays on-brand.
• Cross-team usage: Marketing, sales, and customer success can each maintain their own versions of templates without stepping on each other’s toes.

No more scavenger hunts through old folders to find the “most recent” version of a proposal. Just open Qwilr, pick your template, personalize, and send.

Automations: Personalization without the time sink

Personalizing every proposal is essential. But if your team is manually typing in tailored details every time, that’s hours wasted and mistakes waiting to happen.

Qwilr integrates with your CRM to provide smart proposal automations that take care of the repetitive work so your team can focus on what matters, mixing storytelling with salesmanship, shaken, not stirred.

From dynamic variables to CRM integrations, Qwilr makes personalization practically effortless.

Here’s how Qwilr automates your workflow:

• Smart variables: Automatically pull in prospect names, company info, and deal details with merge tags.
• CRM integration: Connect with Salesforce or HubSpot to generate proposals from deal records in just a few clicks.
• Auto-populated pricing tables: Sync real-time pricing or packages based on deal size or plan selection.

Imagine this: A rep closes a discovery call, clicks a couple of buttons in their CRM, and a proposal is generated in minutes with all the prospect’s information already in place.

Time saved: hours per proposal. Accuracy gained: priceless.

Saved blocks: Goodbye copy-paste. Hello scale.

Sales teams love to recycle winning content. The problem is, they’re often stuck copying and pasting from old proposals, and praying the formatting doesn’t break or outdated info doesn’t slip through.

Qwilr solves this with saved blocks.

Instead of digging through old documents, you can save your best-performing content (like customer testimonials, pricing tables, onboarding timelines, or product one-pagers) as reusable blocks. These blocks are updated once and instantly available to the entire team.

What you can save as blocks:

• Case studies for different verticals
• Pricing options for different regions
• Legal disclaimers
• ROI calculators
• Feature breakdowns by product tier

Saved blocks aren’t just a time-saver; they’re a consistency guarantee. Whether a new SDR is creating their first proposal or a seasoned AE is rushing to hit quarter-end targets, everyone is working from the same, high-quality building blocks.

And when your product updates or your pricing shifts, you don’t have to manually track down every proposal template. Just update the block once. Then it's correct everywhere it’s used.

Collaboration: When speed is a team sport

There’s no “I” in team. This isn’t a cliche, it’s a truth. Proposal creation rarely happens in isolation. Sales needs marketing-approved content. Legal needs to review the terms. Leadership might want final approval before it goes out. In legacy tools, this kind of teamwork turns into a mess of email chains and version control nightmares.

With Qwilr’s collaboration tools, you can work in parallel by duplicating and editing proposals, sharing pages for feedback, and editing pages in real time.

And that’s usually all you need.

In many organizations, over-collaboration is what slows things down. Qwilr encourages a smarter approach: templatize (great word!) everything that doesn’t require review, and free up reviewers’ time for only the critical changes. 

What slows teams down (and how Qwilr fixes it)

To really understand how Qwilr reduces proposal creation time, let’s break down where other tools fall short:

Speed without sloppiness. That’s the Qwilr difference.

The payoff: Faster sales cycles, happier teams, more wins

When you remove friction from the proposal process, good things happen:

• Shorter sales cycles: Get proposals in front of buyers faster, and get signed faster, too.
• Higher-quality proposals: Polish doesn’t get sacrificed for speed.
• Improved team productivity: Reps spend less time creating proposals and more time selling.
• Stronger brand consistency: Every document is a reflection of your company’s professionalism.

And with features like QwilrPay, you can take it even further, enabling buyers to sign and pay directly from the proposal page. There’s more about this on our Introducing QwilrPay page, but a quick pow wow for now: it streamlines the close, skips the invoice limbo, and gets cash in the bank quickly.

Brains over burnout

In the end, reducing proposal creation time isn’t just about speed. It’s about reducing manual effort, avoiding bottlenecks, and giving your team the tools they need to work efficiently at scale.

With Qwilr’s flexible templates, powerful automation, reusable content blocks, and collaborative infrastructure, you’re building a smarter, faster, more modern sales workflow.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to modernize your proposal process.

It’s whether you can afford not to. Sign up for a 14 day trial once you come to the realization. We’re here for you.