Introduction
For many sales leaders, a common frustration is seeing their best reps get bogged down in administrative work. Every hour a salesperson spends manually creating a proposal is an hour they are not actively selling. The problem is not that proposals are unimportant, but that a slow, manual process directly impacts your team’s ability to hit quota and drive revenue. The solution is not to work harder, but to build a smarter, more streamlined workflow.
Key Takeaways
- seProposals by salesElement streamlines your workflow by automating manual tasks, cutting proposal creation time from hours to minutes.
- Our platform connects directly to your CRM, pulling in accurate data to eliminate costly errors and ensure every proposal is professional and on-brand.
- By using a repeatable, guided process, you can reduce ramp-up time for new hires and give your entire team more time to focus on selling.
A 3-Step Guide to Streamlining Your Proposal Workflow
Step 1: Define a Repeatable and Standardized Process
The first step in fixing a slow process is to create a clear, repeatable one. A repeatable sales process is a “structured and standardized set of steps and actions” that your team follows for every deal. This means you stop “reinventing the wheel every time” and instead build a consistent workflow that everyone can follow.
For proposals, this could be a simple, three-stage process:
- Configure: The rep selects the right products and services for the customer.
- Generate: The rep uses a pre-approved template to generate the document.
- Approve: The proposal is sent to a manager for a quick review.
This is especially critical as you hire and train new reps. A standardized process with guided selling tools can walk a new hire through the configuration stage, ensuring they select the right products and pricing, and can build a perfect quote from day one.
seProposals by salesElement helps you build and enforce a standardized proposal workflow, with guided selling to ensure reps create accurate, professional quotes every time.
Step 2: Automate the Manual Work with a Central Hub
Once you have a process, the key to making it fast is automation. The most time-consuming parts of writing a proposal are manual data entry and formatting. Modern automation tools solve this by allowing you to “populate data from CRM… into pre-defined templates.”
Your CRM should be the central hub for all customer and pricing data. By using a tool that connects directly to your CRM, you eliminate the risk of your sales reps copying and pasting information, searching for the latest pricing, or struggling with formatting. The document is built for them using accurate, real-time data.
seProposals connects directly to your CRM, automatically pulling all the necessary data into your templates to eliminate manual work and errors.
Step 3: Measure the Time You Save
How do you know if your new process is working? You need to measure it. We suggest creating a metric called Average Proposal Creation Time.
Challenge your team to measure how long it takes to create a proposal from start to finish with the old, manual process. After implementing a new, automated workflow, measure it again. The goal is to see a dramatic reduction in that time. This is a direct indicator of how much time your team has won back to spend on prospecting, demos, and closing deals.
salesElement gives you the analytics you need to track your team’s efficiency and measure the time saved from your new, streamlined process.
Frequently Asked Questions
- My team already uses Word or Google Docs templates. How is an automated system different? That’s a great first step! The key difference is automation. While static templates require reps to manually find and enter information like client names, product details, and pricing, an automated system connects directly to your CRM. It pulls all of that data instantly and accurately into a pre-approved template, cutting creation time from hours to minutes.
- How difficult is it to set up a streamlined proposal workflow? It’s more straightforward than you might think. The main work is on the front end: defining your ideal process and standardizing your content. Modern platforms like seProposals by salesElement are designed to integrate seamlessly with major CRMs, and the salesElement team works with clients to connect the systems and build their templates.
- Will a standardized process limit my reps’ ability to customize proposals for specific clients? Not at all. A good system standardizes the non-negotiable elements—like your branding, legal terms, and pricing structure—to ensure quality. However, it also provides flexibility. Reps can still add personalized executive summaries or choose from a library of pre-approved content blocks to tailor the proposal to the client’s specific needs.
Conclusion
Your team’s struggle with time-consuming proposals is a clear sign that your process, not your people, needs an upgrade. By creating a repeatable workflow, automating the manual tasks, and measuring your success, you can streamline the entire process from start to finish. A platform like seProposals by salesElement provides the tools to build this efficient system, giving your reps the time they need to focus on what truly matters: selling.