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Rafa Naclerio
Rafa Naclerio
Jul 28·Questions

How can I automate our proposal process?

Why: I run a 12 person digital marketing agency and I'm still doing all our proposals myself. I know I should have someone else help with this, but our average project is around $15-30K and when we mess up pricing or promise something we can't deliver, it really hurts. I tried having my senior account manager help last year but she underquoted a project by like $8K and we basically worked for free for 3 months. Now I just do them all myself but I'm getting 4-6 requests per month and each one takes me most of a day. It's not sustainable and I'm probably losing opportunities because I'm so slow to respond. Would love to clone myself with AI to do this task.

Software: Word, Excel, Gmail, Google Drive, and Pipedrive CRM

Process:

Step 1) Get an inquiry email, usually pretty vague about what they actually want

Step 2) Print out their email and any attachments they sent (old habit)

Step 3) Check our CRM to see if we know anything about them.

Step 4) Look through old proposals in Google Drive to find something similar

Step 5) Open our standard proposal template in Word and start customizing it

Step 6) Write the executive summary based on what I think they need

Step 7) Copy sections from old proposals and modify them to fit

Step 8) Build out pricing in Excel, trying to guess how many hours things will take

Step 9) Go back and forth on whether to include optional add-ons.

Step 10) Read through everything to make sure it makes sense

Step 11) Fix formatting issues (tables never look right)

Step 12) Convert to PDF

Step 13) Write cover email and send

Step 14) Add follow-up reminder in CRM
1 likes 3 comments

Comments

Rafa NaclerioRafa Naclerio· Jul 28
Should probably also mention that the hardest part is estimating how long something would take. Usually just intuition from experience, might be tricky to automate that.
Pierre BredellePierre Bredelle· Jul 28
What about a list of past project descriptions and corresponding hours?
Leon PetrouLeon Petrou· Jul 29
Hi Rafa, thanks for the details. I see you booked a call. Look forward to meeting you and helping you with a plan of action to build this proposal bot.

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