Time Kills All Deals: How to Create Better Proposals Faster Using AI Tools You Probably Already Have

Data shows that slow movement in the sales process kills deals – which means saving time in your sales process is an extremely high priority.

Today we are being offered new innovative tools at a rapid rate which means that the burden of choice and then adoption can be overwhelming – so today I’m sharing a way you can accelerate your use of a templated sales proposal and use of your LLM to make proposals even faster without buying more tools.

Let’s focus on why this is worth it.

Winning more business as a result of a more efficient sales process:
Delivers cash on cash returns from sales and marketing faster.
Reduces customer acquisition costs due to less overall time spent on selling.
Yields either higher EBITDA, and/or additional ability to invest in marketing to grow faster.

Getting Started

At this point I assume most founders have an LLM, either ChatGPT or Claude, that they are using.

Our assessments of services firms show that most already have the essential content blocks that go into proposals:

• About us
• Service descriptions
• Example deliverables
• Case studies

If you have both of those, then you already have the tools to assemble proposals quickly.

The goal of leveraging AI is to make proposals highly personalized without costing yourself a huge amount of time.

We recognize that some people happen to be amazing at taking comprehensive notes when listening during a meeting, and then writing them up and summarizing them in a proposal format—the problem is that it takes way too much time.

To save time with AI, start right from your first interaction and carry this approach all the way through the sales process and beyond.

First Building Block—Record All the Meetings in Your Sales Process

At Mindracer we have a simple policy: we record everything. External meetings, internal meetings, in-person meetings.

This means we always have a transcript of the meetings we have that can be used to create proposals.

Based on the assessments we have run on 78 firms aiming to scale their sales, we know that 54% of the firms are using these tools in their sales process and that adoption rate is growing fast—so if that’s you, keep it up.

If that’s not you yet, your competitors likely are—and they’re probably writing better proposals faster than you.

Second—Leverage Your Favorite LLM to Create a Summary of the Sales Discussions

• Pull out all of the transcripts and merge them into one document.
• Move that document into your LLM—we recommend Claude or ChatGPT for this.
• Prompt the LLM to summarize the client needs that were discovered and solutions that were discussed.
• Review the output—you may be amazed at how well the LLM is able to summarize your entire conversation—but make sure to sanity check it based on your memory of the interactions.
• If your proposal template has a word or character limit you can prompt your LLM to provide a summary that fits the space.
• Edit the output until you’re happy with it.

Third—Use the Edited Output as the Basis for Your Proposal

Take the edited summary and paste it into your template.

This way you have highly personalized content for your proposal within a few minutes.

Adding this content to your existing design template gives you the highly personalized outcome your clients desire with a very low amount of effort.

Curate which case studies make sense to the summary and add those in.

Read the draft version for continuity and you are done.

Mindracer has been using this approach for over 2 years and now we are typically able to build a proposal in under 30 minutes.

Fourth – embrace revisions and use the AI again for this.

Data from proposify shows a 37% increase in conversion rate for proposals that have revisions – and this increases to a 50% improvement for proposals with three revisions.

It’s clear that revisions = engagement and investment.

With your new AI process – you can make amendments and revisions in minutes. Again simply record the call where you discussed the required revisions and you can use the same process from above over again.

Summary

Investing in recording your whole sales process creates the opportunity to rapidly summarize all the points that are important to your client and develop a highly personalized proposal in a fraction of the time.

From a sales perspective – time wasted kills deals. Slow responses give the advantage to your competitors. Slow sales process means low momentum. All of these slow your growth.

Once you have mastered this approach and gained your time back, there are of course ways to automate these steps and tools that you can invest in to help you scale it—but you may not need them yet.

About Collective54

Mindracer has been a Collective54 member for almost three years now—it’s been an outstanding community for us. Our long-term plans have evolved, our metrics have improved, and we have made some highly valuable connections, partnerships, and friendships among the team and community members.

Get Started:

• Apply for membership at Collective54
• Subscribe to Collective54 Insights for regular updates and best practices
• Connect and network with the author of this post and managing partner at Mindracer, Dan Morris on LinkedIn

The right strategies and support can transform your business. They can shift it from founder-driven sales to a high-growth company with a much higher value. Mindracer helps services firms win better clients faster within 90 days.