Three ways to reduce the time it takes to create a business proposal

How do you handle business? Great leadership means that there’s a balance of both reactive pivots and proactive outreach. Having both is necessary to successfully achieve your internal revenue objectives. When you’re pitching business in a highly competitive industry, taking the time to be proactive is critical.

You likely already know this; you’re focused and diligent about outreach, follow-ups, and relationship-driven sales.

Proactively creating business proposals should be another key part of your sales funnel. It’s one of those things that every team knows they should be doing, but mostly lack an efficient process to execute on.  Proposals are an integral part of your business, being one of the final steps in your sales funnel.

This is a critical tool in winning business (and generating new revenue). Yet, creating these documents continue to be inefficient, time-consuming parts of the sales team’s time.

Being able to assemble business proposals faster allows you to save valuable time. Time, arguably, could be better put to use towards more meaningful work. Not only that, but faster proposal creation directly correlates with a higher, faster acceptance rate- meaning you’d win more work. Now, the only question that remains is, “How do you create proposals faster?”

1. Use pre-built templates

Using pre-built business proposal templates can be a great starting point for busy professionals- providing you with a structured format and some copy that you can adapt into your own words.

A quick Google search will provide you with countless different templates to use or gain inspiration from– allowing you to jump start your proposal creation process and save you time.

Starting with a template also helps you save time designing your proposal. Qwilr’s Business Proposal Templates have already been designed for you, so you don’t have to wait for a designer to do it for you. You can easily change the font, brand colors, image and video assets in the editor to suit your brand and personalize your proposals for the prospect; one of the many advantages available to you when using online proposal software.

2. Create Your Own Templates

If you’ve previously written a proposal, you can always reuse it as a template for future proposals, saving you a lot of time. It can become difficult to keep track of the content that has been sent off this way, especially if you’re working in a team and your proposals are spread across multiple devices.

If you’re a Qwilr user, it’s easy to avoid this issue by taking advantage of the ability to create a library of your own templates, where you can store any proposals that you think could be reused in the future as a template. 

Qwilr also allows you to save individual blocks of content within the tool, which is useful for frequently-used content like “Terms and Conditions,” “Pricing,” and “Contact Us” sections of your business proposal. Once they’ve been saved in your content block library, your team can add them to any page instantly.

3. Automation with CRM Integration

You’ve now discovered pre-built templates and started using them for inspiration to create your own. Your proposal creation process is now starting to show some semblance of efficiency. If your team sends out high volumes of proposals, after a while, this can begin to feel sluggish. The personalization efforts take up too much of your time. 

Enter: CRM integration to save the day!

It is likely you already have your client’s details– things like name, company, and address in your CRM. Qwilr users are able to integrate their account with the most popular CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, allowing templates to pull data from your own records and fill the proposal with relevant information; saving your team a massive amount of time.

Bonus: Qwilr’s Document Generator

We recently built a tool that automatically generates a pack of business documents including proposals, case studies, brochures and more. Simply fill out a few details and pick a design and you’ll receive a pack of documents to kick-start your business.

Start Creating Business Proposals Faster

There you have it. 

Three methods of reducing the time it takes to create your business proposals.

Actually, there’s another major tip, but we all are familiar with it. Practice makes perfect.

Get started right away with Qwilr’s business proposal template and start creating more efficiently.