How EQL doubled their proposal conversion rate with Qwilr

Key results

• Proposal conversion rate doubled from ~30% to 60%, alongside other business improvements
• Cut proposal creation time from 2–3 hours to 30 minutes
• Expanded Qwilr from new-business proposals into customer success account reviews
• Gained full visibility into buyer engagement and previously hidden stakeholders

EQL Consulting (EQL) is an outsourced SDR consultancy based in the UK, bringing a new standard of capability to outsourced prospecting with a team of industry-specialised SDRs who can speak credibly to complex, high-value propositions across logistics, enterprise software, robotics, and industrial automation.

The Challenge

EQL Consulting plays at the premium end of a noisy market. Their clients sell complex, high-consideration products with sales cycles that run anywhere from six months to two years. EQL wins clients by matching the quality of their selling to the quality of work they promise to deliver.

The problem: their proposals weren't keeping up with the service behind them. The team was building proposals in Microsoft Word and sending them as PDFs. Functional, but unremarkable.

"I was just using the classic Microsoft tech stack and PDFs to build proposals. They were wordy, boring, bland, and they could have been done by anybody", Eddy Rowley, CRO, EQL

The commercial cost was real. Eddy was seeing deals lost on price despite winning on capability, and had no way to understand what happened after a proposal went out.

"We never normally lose based on capability. But if you're selling a premium service, you want a premium proposal that goes out to your prospects. Everything about you needs to have that look and feel."

Visibility was the other gap. Once a PDF left the building, the trail went cold. Read receipts felt invasive and rarely worked, and the team had no insight into whether prospects had even opened the proposal, let alone which sections were holding their attention.

"Lack of visibility was a big problem for us", said Eddy

The Solution

Having discovered Qwilr, Eddy and the EQL team rebuilt their proposal process around a new interactive format.

A premium proposal to match a premium service

The first and most visible change was the proposal experience itself. EQL's template now opens with a video from Eddy walking prospects through how the business onboards new clients, uses accordions so buyers can drill into detail without being buried in it, and embeds case studies in a clear and professional way.

The difference has been noticed by the people it matters most to: prospective clients.

"I had feedback from a sales director at a prospect recently: 'Many thanks to the uber-professional proposal. Hopefully it doesn't have an expiration date, as I'll share with the CEO in the coming weeks.' It's only a little thing, but it shows how our proposals are helping us stand out", noted Eddy.

Visibility that replaces the dead-end PDF

With Qwilr's analytics, EQL now knows exactly what happens after a proposal is sent. They can see who opened it, how long they spent, and which sections they kept coming back to. The team is particularly interested in stakeholders they didn't expect to see.

"When seeing who has viewed your proposal, you often find people you've never heard of looking at it. That's a huge buying signal! It tells you there's another person in the buying map you need to influence".

Speed through reusable templates

Because roughly half of a typical proposal is boilerplate, service overview, case studies, agreement terms, EQL now keeps that core in a ready-to-go template and tailors only the sections that matter for each deal: exec summary, project overview, commercials.

"A proposal would have previously taken me two or three hours to write. Now it takes me half an hour. I'm sending better proposals, and it's taking me less time."

The team has also built in an ROI calculator, multiple pricing structures, an accordion-based onboarding walkthrough, and a set of saved terms for different client types. All this is reusable across deals.

From new-business tool to account-management platform

The use case has expanded well beyond new-business proposals. EQL's customer success manager, now runs account reviews in Qwilr, complete with embedded feedback selection boxes, satisfaction tracking, and a consistent visual standard across all of EQL's active accounts.

"From an account management perspective, it looks really professional. It was an additional use case we weren't necessarily planning on initially. Now we use it post-sale with every client."

The Results

The most visible outcome is speed. The time it takes Eddy to put a new-business proposal together has dropped from two or three hours to thirty minutes, a change that compounds fast.

The commercial impact has been even more striking. Since implementing Qwilr, EQL's proposal conversion rate has roughly doubled, from around 30% to 60% so far in 2026. While other changes to the business have helped boost this close rate, Eddy believes that the shift in proposal quality, visibility, and responsiveness is part of the story.

"I talk about Qwilr all the time. I'm a big advocate for the product within my network”

Why Qwilr

Part of what's kept EQL engaged, beyond the product, is the experience of working with the Qwilr team.

"Nothing's ever too much of a bother for their customer success team. I feel like they want to help me, which matters because we're not Salesforce or Coca-Cola, we're a relatively small business. The fact that you feel taken care of by someone who clearly knows what they're doing is a big deal."

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