How Boost Your Close Rate with Effective Proposal Management

In sales, every touchpoint with a prospect matters. From the first discovery call to the final proposal, each step should build momentum and reinforce value. Yet, too often, the proposal process becomes the bottleneck that slows deals down or, worse, derails them entirely.

If your team is still treating proposals as an afterthought, you’re leaving money on the table. A well-executed proposal strategy isn’t just about sending a document—it’s about maintaining sales velocity, reducing friction, and ensuring your proposal bolsters the prospect’s intent to buy.

In this post, we’ll break down the key elements of proposal management that can help you accelerate your sales pipeline, leverage proposal automation, and improve close rates.

The first step to improving your close rate is knowing how to calculate it.

How to Calculate Close Rate

Close rates tell you exactly how successful your team is at pursuing leads and closing deals, both individually and as a group.

Yet as valuable a tool as the close rate is for measuring a sales team’s performance and evaluating the effectiveness of efforts made to improve, many businesses don’t know what their close rate is. They lack the means to track it, so they miss out on the insights that following this important metric can bring.

Before you can work to improve your close rate, you need to know how to calculate it. On the surface, it’s a fairly simple equation.

Number of Closed Deals
---------------------------------     X 100  =  Close Rate %
Number of Opportunities 

The key is determining at what point in your sales cycle an opportunity counts as an opportunity. Is it at first engagement? Discovery? Negotiation? Proposal? 

In addition, your close rate will depend on your sales cycle length. As Scott Tower, Director of Sales at Proposify, explains,

If you're closing a lot of deals in 30 days or under, then you could look at the last 30 days and probably get a good sense of close rate. If it's longer than that—say 30 to 60 days—then you probably want to look at the last 90 days.

Choose what works best for your business. Just stay consistent and use the same sales stage as the denominator whenever you calculate your close rate.

So what close rate should you be seeking from that equation? It may depend on your proposal creation method.

What Is a Good Close Rate?

Every year we publish a State of Proposals report, where we scour the data from nearly 1 million proposals sent through Proposify within the last year to uncover the common elements found in winning proposals. 

In the 2025 State of Proposals report, we determined that the industry average close rate for sales is around 20%. But when we studied the results of deals made with our proposal software, we found an average sales close rate of 36%. Some industries achieved even higher close rates.

Why do Proposify customers achieve close rates that are nearly double the industry average?

Because improving proposals increases close rates by closing more deals.

Our research also revealed a lot more fascinating stats and insights, including:

• How deal size affects close rates
• How close rates climb when proposals are sent to multiple recipients
• How long it takes to close a deal after a prospect opens the proposal
• What’s the effect of automated reminders on close rates
• What’s the closing power of including e-signatures in proposals

You don’t need to use Proposify in order to get results (although it helps a lot). The bottom line is, whatever tools you’re using, applying proposal best practices can and will close more deals and improve your close rate, whereas ignoring them means you're unlikely to get the results you want and need.

We've taken this one step further and have created a State of Proposal including the proposal best practices we learned by analyzing nearly 1 million proposals.

The Hidden Cost of Neglecting Your Proposals

While a good proposal can increase the chance of closing a deal, the opposite is also true: a bad proposal can cost you the sale.

If they take too long to produce, or they’re full of mistakes, or they look messy and unprofessional, or you have no idea what happens to them after they’re sent, your proposals are doing you a major disservice and may actually be hurting your business.

The document you send to prospective buyers is the ultimate reflection of who you are, and will sway your prospect’s opinion of you and the goods or services you offer, for better or worse. 

If your proposals don’t reflect your true value, it’s time to seize the opportunity to improve them and watch your close rates climb. And one of the first and best ways to improve your proposals is to accelerate the creation process.

The Proposal Bottleneck: Why Speed Matters More Than You Think

Many sales teams underestimate the impact that delays in the proposal process can have on closing deals. Consider this example: A buyer is eager to purchase a solution and asks for next steps. Instead of receiving a proposal immediately, they're told, “It has to go through accounting.” Days pass. By the time the proposal finally arrives, the buyer has moved on—possibly to a competitor.

This is a textbook case of how proposal inefficiencies cost businesses real revenue. As Kyle Racki, CEO of Proposify, explains:

It's about speed to lead. If you can just get in front of an interested party faster, you will often close more or close faster. It’s really as simple as just getting them the proposal faster.

Scott agrees. "I think a lot of it ties back to risk aversion. People want to take the time with that proposal because they want to get it right." But the underlying reason for this is that they don't have a process set up.

They don't have the standardization in place, they don't have go-to templates, or pre-approved content

Scott says.

Sales is about momentum. When prospects are excited and ready to buy, every extra step or delay increases the risk of them reconsidering—or worse, looking elsewhere. In fact, our State of Proposals report found that winning sales proposals are typically acted upon within just two days. If your team is taking longer, you’re introducing unnecessary risk.

In addition to doing away with proposal bottlenecks, there are a few other ways you can increase your close rate.

Tips to Boost Close Rates

If you've never considered your proposals as tools to improve your close rates, you're missing out on some powerful factors that can help you win more deals.

Pay Attention to Deal Size

We found that one of the biggest factors that affects close rates is the size of the deal. Smaller deals close more.

To increase your close rate, Kyle advises,

Start small. We all want to win the big deal, but sometimes the smarter approach is the long-term approach.

Here's how to capitalize on the higher close rates of smaller deals:

• Know your prospect’s approval threshold and price your deal under it. One of the reasons why smaller deals close more is because bigger deals tend to require levels of approval. Most companies have a threshold where purchases under it don’t require a higher level of management sign-off. Find a way to price yourself under this, and your chance of closing will rise.
• Don’t go for the big win right away. Test the waters with a smaller deal and follow up for the upsell. Hedge your bets by starting with smaller engagements, then scale up the scope and investment after proving success.
• Stand out from the crowd with a slick, persuasive, professional proposal. This is true no matter the deal size.

Once you have your deal in sight, the next step is determining who should receive your proposal.

Send Proposals to Multiple Stakeholders

Our State of Proposals research showed that when proposals are sent to more than one person, the close rates double. This is because if just one person receives the proposal, they may not be sharing it with their colleagues, therefore not getting group buy-in. Luckily, this is easily solved.

Scott says,

Discovery is a process, not an event.

Ask the prospect outright if anyone else needs to receive the proposal.  But even if you miss that step in discovery, Scott says all is not lost.

If you haven't uncovered that someone else needs to be involved, better late than never.

 It might even be that the proposal helps you do that by showing the proposal has been forwarded—if you're using proposal software.

Once you have a list of stakeholders who need to receive the proposal, it's time to get it out the door as quickly as possible, and you can do that with automation.

Automate Proposal Creation

The fastest-growing sales teams aren’t manually creating and sending proposals. Manual proposal creation takes up much too much time. Instead, they’re leveraging proposal automation to generate and send customized, professional-looking proposals within minutes. This ensures that the deal moves forward at the peak of prospect interest.

Automating your proposal process means:

• Using pre-approved proposal templates to eliminate manual work
• Integrating with your CRM to automatically pull in prospect-specific details
• Enabling interactive proposals with pricing tables that allow buyers to customize their package on the spot
• Embedding electronic signatures to remove friction at the final step

Incorporating these elements reduces the back-and-forth and allows reps to focus on selling, not chasing signatures. While automation is an efficient time saver, don't let it distract you from the proposal's true purpose—demonstrating your unique value proposition.

More Than a Price Quote: How Proposals Reinforce Value

One of the biggest mistakes in proposal management is thinking of it as just a formality. A strong sales proposal isn’t just a quote—it’s a reinforcement of everything the prospect has already agreed is valuable.

As Scott explains:

You have to layer the value or tie the value to that price point. Otherwise, people are just going to open the document, see a number, and start looking for something cheaper. The proposal has to continue selling the value proposition when you're not in the room.

The best proposals don’t just present a number—they remind prospects of why they wanted the solution in the first place. They reiterate the pain points discussed in earlier conversations and show exactly how the solution alleviates them. They also contain specific sections, each with an important function for the proposal.

What Winning Proposals Include

According to our State of Proposals report, high-converting proposals contain seven essential elements:

1. Cover Page – A professional introduction to set the stage.
2. Executive Summary – A personalized section that ties the proposal back to the prospect's needs.
3. Scope of Work – A breakdown of how the solution addresses the problem.
4. Deliverables & Timeline – Clear expectations on what’s included and when.
5. About Your Company – An overview of your experience, relevant case studies, and your team's qualifications.
6. Pricing – Not just the cost, but the value justification.
7. Terms & Next Steps – Legal details covering payment schedules, project scope, and other policies, and electronic signature to accelerate closing and create a binding agreement.

This structure helps guide prospects through a natural decision-making process while keeping the focus on value rather than price alone. Following an outline doesn't mean a proposal has to be a boilerplate, though. Some of the sections can be improved by adding interactive elements.

The Interactive Proposal Advantage

In this digital age, static PDF and Word document proposals don’t cut it anymore. Buyers expect interactive proposals that engage them beyond just text on a page.

Here’s how modern, high-converting proposals leverage interactivity:

• Embedded Video Summaries: Proposals that include video are more likely to close, but only 23% of them include it. A short, personalized video at the beginning of a proposal can set the tone and reiterate key points. You could also include explainer videos, product demos, work samples and case studies. Video also helps sell to other decision makers.

• Live Pricing Adjustments: Instead of a firm quote, interactive pricing tables allow prospects to modify quantities, add-ons, or seat counts in real time, helping drive upsells. You can also use a good, better, best pricing model, which can work for any industry, and try to guide them to the middle option. Above all, give the buyer options. Our research showed that interactive pricing increased the close rate by 6%.
• Interactive Forms: We found that interactive forms increase the close rate by 56%. Interactive forms also show buyer intent, so people who are ready to buy will fill out the forms and you can collect more information about the buyer. Just remember not to all the forms mandatory so as not to slow down the deal.
• E-Signatures & Instant Acceptance: Proposals that include an e-signature option are 4X more likely to close—and close 40% faster—than those that don’t. These days, more people are comfortable with digital signing, so if you're not including it, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. In addition, offering a pre-signed agreement increases close rates by 33% because it eliminates an extra approval step.

By making proposals more engaging, your reps can maintain momentum and reduce friction in the buying process. However, even with interactive elements, prospects may still request revisions, but this is nothing to shy away from.

How the Best Sales Teams Handle Revisions

Your sales team may hesitate to revise proposals, fearing it signals uncertainty. However, the State of Proposals data tells a different story:

• Proposals with one revision have a 37% higher close rate
• Proposals with two revisions? 42% higher.
• Three revisions? 50% higher.

Revisions aren’t a sign of weakness—they’re a sign of engagement. When prospects request changes, they’re showing buying intent. Smart sales teams use proposal analytics to track engagement, anticipate objections, and proactively tweak proposals to remove any last-minute barriers.

While there's nothing wrong with a prospect requesting revisions, you don't want it to be because they can't understand the proposal. That's where plain language comes in.

The Role of Proposal Language: Concision and Clarity

Our research shows that proposals that have a huge word count close at a lower rate. Kyle says,

You don't want to send just a quote with the numbers, but you also don't want to send a 100-page document that no one's going to read." So how long should your proposal be? As long as it needs to be.

OK, that's probably not the answer you wanted to hear, but it might be that if you're dealing with an RFP process, your proposal does need to be 100 pages long.
What we found, though, is that the average page count for won vs. lost deals was 11 vs. 13. Any more than 11 pages, and you may start to lose the prospect's attention and interest.

The solution, says Scott, is to make sure the proposal is personalized.

By customizing certain elements of your proposal to the conversations and to the customer, it feels like it's for them, so they want to check it all out.

He continues, "I think the biggest misstep I see with proposals is they're way too much about the seller. That creates indecision." 

Instead, keep contracts concise and reader-focused. The goal is to make things as easy for the buyer as possible. The best proposals:

• Use clear, simple language
• Keep terms & conditions to one page or less, rather than including multiple pages of fine print. You can also summarize terms in the proposal and then link out to your full terms of service on your website.
• Incorporate images to break up blocks of text and make the content more digestible

Your goal is to reduce friction, not create uncertainty. And how will you know how long a prospect is spending on any one section of the proposal? With analytics.

Gain Visibility Into Your Proposals with Analytics

Analytics in proposal management software provides crucial insights into how prospects engage with your proposals. By tracking metrics like viewing time, most-read sections, and customer interactions, you can understand what resonates with potential clients. 

Proposal analytics data helps optimize your proposal strategy—you'll know which content drives engagement and which sections may need improvement. Real-time notifications also alert you when prospects open proposals, enabling timely follow-ups. 

By analyzing win/loss patterns and proposal performance trends, you can identify successful approaches and replicate them across your sales team. This visibility transforms proposal management from a guessing game into a data-driven process that increases close rates.



Everything from creation, to analytics, to follow-up is made much easier through the use of proposal software.

Close Deals Faster with Proposal Software

A well-structured proposal does more than just summarize a deal—it accelerates it. By automating and optimizing your proposal management process, you can:

• Speed up sales cycles by sending proposals quickly, when prospects are most engaged
• Reinforce value through personalized, interactive elements
• Eliminate friction with e-signatures, live pricing, and streamlined legal terms
• Increase close rates with smart revisions and real-time analytics

Proposal management is much easier with proposal software, and Proposify is, we think, one of the best options available. If you want to see how you can use proposal automation to accelerate your sales pipeline and close more deals, book a demo with one of our experts, or start your free trial and experience it for yourself. Gain more control of and visibility into your proposal process today.