Proposify logo Proposify logo
  • Product
    • Product OverviewProposify is the all-in-one platform that makes every deal a closed deal.
    • IntegrationsChoose from hundreds of third-party tools to connect with
    • Document AutomationAccelerate your sales cycle by sending professional, on-brand documents.
    • Interactive QuotesCreate interactive and error-free quotes that will quickly seal the deal.
    • Contract ManagementMark up and sign on any type of contracts, quotes, and agreements.
    • E-Signatures & PaymentsGet all your sales documents legally locked down right within Proposify.
  • Solutions
    • Roles
      • Sales
      • Marketing
      • IT/Operations
    • Industries
      • Agencies and Consulting
      • IT and Software
      • Landscaping and Janitorial
      • Construction and Restoration

    Want help from the experts?

    We offer bespoke training and custom template design to get you up and running faster.

    Learn more
  • Templates
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • LEARN
    • Case Studies
    • Self-Guided Tour
    • Webinars
    • Blog
    • Newsletter
    • SUPPORT
    • Help Center
    • Getting Started
    • Product updates
    • API Docs
    • Refer a Friend

    State of Proposals 2025 Report

    We’ve dug deep into our data and extracted the information that sales and marketing leaders can use to make their proposals better and boost their business.

    Read the Report
  • Log in
  • Book a demo
  • Sign Up Free
  • Product
    • Product OverviewProposify is the all-in-one platform that makes every deal a closed deal.
    • IntegrationsChoose from hundreds of third-party tools to connect with
    • Document AutomationAccelerate your sales cycle by sending professional, on-brand documents.
    • Interactive QuotesCreate interactive and error-free quotes that will quickly seal the deal.
    • Contract ManagementMark up and sign on any type of contracts, quotes, and agreements.
    • E-Signatures & PaymentsGet all your sales documents legally locked down right within Proposify.
  • Solutions
    • Roles
      • Sales
      • Marketing
      • IT/Operations
    • Industries
      • Agencies and Consulting
      • IT and Software
      • Landscaping and Janitorial
      • Construction and Restoration
  • Templates
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • LEARN
    • Case Studies
    • Self-Guided Tour
    • Webinars
    • Blog
    • Newsletter
    • SUPPORT
    • Help Center
    • Getting Started
    • Product updates
    • API Docs
    • Refer a Friend
  • Log in
  • Book a demo
  • Sign Up Free
Proposify Blog
    • Sales
    • Proposals
    • Business
    • Tools
    • Product
    • Marketing
  • Proposals
8 min read

How to Create Business Proposals Faster

November 14, 2017
Last updated on October 1, 2024
Jennifer Faulkner Jennifer Faulkner Director of Marketing
  • Share
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Copy
  1. Know what you’re selling before you sell it
  2. Use online proposal software, period.
  3. Practice makes perfect proposals

Proposals that get to clients faster, close faster, so you don’t have any time to waste. You need to get that proposal out before your big deal moves on to your competition. Here's how.

Most people have a love/hate relationship with proposals. On one hand, proposals bring clients, work, and money into your business. Without proposals, you have nothing. Winning proposals is awesome.

However, creating proposals is an entirely different beast. Creating proposals can be extremely time-consuming - writing the proposal, designing the proposal, pricing the proposal, proofing the proposal, and then finally getting the darn thing out the door and into the hands of your sales lead who, hopefully, hasn’t gone cold in the days or weeks it’s taken you to get back to them. Creating proposals is painful.

But here’s the thing: proposals that get to clients faster, close faster, so you don’t have time to waste. You need to get that proposal out before your big deal moves on to your competition.

How can you create proposals faster?

Know what you’re selling before you sell it

Make sure you know exactly what you’re going to propose before you start working on your business proposal. You should already clearly understand what your sales lead needs and what your solution is before you type a single word.

I’ve worked with people who made up their strategy as they wrote the proposal, which is incredibly inefficient. It increases the amount of time you spend writing because you’re busy thinking and strategizing.

Your services should already be set and easily articulated; you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel for every proposal. Whether you sell digital marketing services, architectural design, or solar panels, you know what you offer, and, if you’ve done your homework, you know what your client needs. Put the two together.

This isn’t the time to let the ingredients simmer on the stove - this is time to plate the food and serve it up.

Use online proposal software, period.

OK, obviously I work for Proposify, which is online business proposal software. The BEST online business proposal software in my oh-so unbiased opinion, but definitely not the only one in the market. While it would be fantastic if you checked out Proposify’s free 14-day trial, I’m not here to sell you on our solution specifically.

However, I am here to sell on the fact that if you want to create proposals faster, you must use some type of online proposal software.

Online proposal software is designed to streamline your whole proposal process. From writing to design to sending and tracking, online proposal software unites all your separate tools and steps under one efficient roof. No more juggling Word docs, Google docs, InDesign files, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides.

Here are a few ways that online proposal software can help you create proposals faster:

Business proposal templates

Most proposal software products offer templates as part of your subscription. Proposal templates are professionally written and designed to help kickstart your proposal process.

Often, writing a proposal can be the most time-consuming part of the whole process, and writer’s block can plague even the most seasoned writer. With a template, the provided sample text can unlock your ideas and provide a guideline for what you might want to express in your proposal.

Don’t worry that you might submit the same proposal as your competition - most proposal templates are customizable so you can tailor them to your specific service, brand, and client project. The template just gives you a running start.

The same for proposal design. The great thing about templates is that they’ve already been designed so you don’t have to wait around for your designer to be free, or hire a freelance designer who could take even more time to do the job (not to mention money). Online proposal software makes it easy to swap images, change fonts, and add colour, without needing a professional graphic designer. You can do it!

Templates often cover a variety of services and industries so before choosing online proposal software, have a look at their selection. But if they allow customization, you can choose any template you want and fine tune it to quickly create your winning proposal.

Content library

During my agency days of writing business proposals, the most frustrating and time-consuming part of the whole process was pulling together the content.

Maybe we wrote a great description of our branding services for our last proposal - or was it the one before that? But now no one knows where it is. Is it on my computer? Is it on someone else’s computer? Is this even the final version that was used in the proposal? And how about the description of our digital marketing services? I think that was in a proposal from a few months ago. Can’t find it? Guess you’ll have to start from scratch.

Good online proposal software offers some type of content library where you can store all of your different proposal sections in one place so anyone on your team can access them at any time.

No more hunting for the team bios, the ‘About Us’ description, case studies, or fee tables. Much of what you’re selling to potential clients is repeated from proposal to proposal so why recreate it every time? Yes, you’ll need to customize some things to fit the particular needs of a client, but that takes far less time than going back to the drawing board to rewrite every proposal section every time you have a new proposal to create.

To maximize the time-saving benefits of a content library, you’ll need to do some work upfront to create the sections and input them into the library, so they’re easy to find. But, once they’re in there, you can drag and drop each section into your proposal where you need them, significantly reducing the time it takes to write a proposal.

Online proposal views

Can we all agree that snail mail is great for birthday cards, but it’s not so great for closing deals quickly?

If you’re printing proposals, assembling them, and then dropping them into the mail, you’re adding days - or maybe even weeks if something goes awry with your printer or the postal service - before your clients receive anything. And every day they don’t have a proposal from you is one more day they could receive a proposal from your competition.

Even emailing a PDF can be troublesome as large attachments get caught in spam, so the client doesn’t even see your proposal, or something goes wrong with the file and they can’t open it.

With online proposal software, you email your client a customized link to view their proposal online on any device, at any time. It arrives quickly, with no issues, and looks professional. There’s no faster way to get your proposal in front of your client.

Online signatures and payments

You want to get a proposal to your client quickly, but it doesn’t end there. What you really want is to close this deal quickly and to do that you need to make it easy for your client to say ‘YES’ right away.

Adding online signature buttons to your proposal will help get 60% faster approval, according to our analysis of more than 20,000 proposals. Good online proposal software products have an online signature tool that lets clients sign your proposal right in the browser and makes the contract legally binding.

Better yet is the ability to add an online payment request to your proposal, so you get paid as soon as your client signs off.

Proposal Metrics

While online proposal software helps you create and deliver proposals faster, some products like, ahem, Proposify, go a step further by providing metrics to keep you informed of everything that’s happening with your proposals.

Proposal metrics let you see when your client opened the proposal, which sections they spent the most time viewing and how long they looked at it, along with close rates broken down across teams and individuals so you can track success.

All of this information gives you insight into what’s working and what isn’t so you can improve your approach for your next proposal, making it easier and faster to create a winning proposal.

"Every moment you waste getting a proposal to your client is an opportunity for your competition to get ahead of you"

Practice makes perfect proposals

Overall, if you want to improve the time it takes to create a proposal, you need a system and you need to stick to it. That includes online proposal software, but even the best tools are worthless if you don’t use them consistently or correctly.

Be as prepared as possible before you start so you can snap all the pieces together instead of wasting time creating the pieces as you go. Look for as many ways to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies as possible.

The more proposals you create, the easier and faster it will get over time. But be sure to learn from each proposal - if it won, why did it win so you can repeat the same formula. If your proposal didn’t win, find out why so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

And one last piece of proposal advice: don’t procrastinate. Remember, every moment you waste getting a proposal to your client is an opportunity for your competition to get ahead of you.

Jennifer Faulkner
Jennifer Faulkner

Director of Communications @proposify. Channeling Maria Von Trapp, Queen Elizabeth II, and my taxi-driving, yard-sale-obsessed grandmother. Professional word nerd and unapologetic disciple of the Oxford comma. Connect on LinkedIn

Subscribe via Email

Related Posts

4 Tips That Will Make Any Proposal More Likely to Close
Tools 4 min read July 12, 2022
4 Tips That Will Make Any Proposal More Likely to Close You’ve based your recommendations on your client discovery process. You’ve added all the essential sections to your proposal. You’re ready to hit …
Read Post
How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle with Proposal Software
Proposals 7 min read August 21, 2024
How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle with Proposal Software If you've noticed your team's sales cycles are longer than you'd like, it may be time to evaluate how they're creating proposals and leveraging …
Read Post
Proposify logo
  • Platform
    • Proposal Automation
    • Quoting
    • Contract Management
    • E-Signatures & Forms
    • Integrations
    • API
    • Security
    • Our Professional Services
  • Solutions
    • Sales
    • Marketing
    • IT/Operations
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Templates
    • Webinars
    • Books & Guides
    • Knowledge Base
    • AI Proposal Generator
  • Company
    • About
    • Diversity
    • Careers
    • Customers
©2025 Proposify Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Status
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Instagram

Basic

Start free trial

Team

Start free trial

Business

Book a demo

Brand customization

Unlimited templates

All accounts allow unlimited templates.

Content library

Create and share templates, sections, and images that can be pulled into documents.

Embed images & videos

Images can be uploaded directly, videos can be embedded from external sources like YouTube, Vidyard, and Wistia

Custom domain

You can map your domain so prospects visit something like proposals.yourdomain.com and don't see "proposify" in the URL

Content authoring

Basic Team Business
Online signatures

All plans allow you to get documents legally e-signed

Interactive quoting

Allow prospects to alter the quantity or optional add-ons

Client input forms

Capture information from prospects by adding form inputs to your documents.

Document Sends

You can create unlimited documents but some plans limit how many you can send per month.

info

5 sends / mo

Unlimited

Unlimited

Collaborator seats

Collaborators are users who only have access to specific proposals, and can edit or approve, but not create or send.

info

1 collab seat included

3 collab seats included

5 collab seats included

Visibility

Basic Team Business
Notifications & metrics

Get notified by email and see when prospects are viewing your document.

PDF export

Generate a PDF from any document that matches the digital version.

Reports

Get a full exportable table of all your documents with filtering.

Integrations & API

Basic Team Business
Payments

Connect your Stripe account and get paid in full or partially when your proposal gets signed.

Integrations

Integrate with popular CRMs, invoicing, and project management tools.

Automations

Set up automations using pre-built connectors or customize using the workflow builder

Single sign-on (SSO)

Our SSO works with identity providers like Salesforce, Okta, and Azure

Salesforce integration

Use our managed package and optionally SSO so reps work right within Salesforce

$9/user/mo

Aspire integration

Import contacts and field data from Aspire into documents in Proposify

$9/user/mo

Process & control

Basic Team Business
Custom fields & variables

Create your own fields you can use internally that get replaced in custom variables within a document.

Auto reminders

You can automatically remind prospects who haven't yet opened your document in daily intervals.

Roles & permissions

Lock down what users can and can't do by role. Pages and individual page elements can be locked.

Approval workflows

Create conditions that if met will trigger an approval from a manager (by deal size and discount size).

Workspaces

Great for multi-unit businesses like franchises. Enables businesses to have completely separate instances that admins can manage.

API Access

Integrate with external systems, or enhance customization, our API provides the tools you need to succeed.

Customer Success

Basic Team Business
Email & chat support

Our team is here to provide their fabulous support Monday - Thursday 8 AM - 8 PM EST and on Fridays 8 AM - 4 PM EST.

Phone & Zoom support

Sometimes the written word isn't enough and our team will hop on a call to show you how to accomplish something in Proposify.

Success manager

Your own dedicated CSM who will onboard you and meet with you periodically to ensure you're getting maximum value from Proposify.

Premium integration support

Our team of experts can perform advanced troubleshooting and even set up zaps and automations to get the job done.

Custom template design

Our in-house designers will design an on-brand, professional proposal template to your satisfaction.

info
Learn more Learn more Learn more

Subscribe via email