How to Build a Scalable Proposal Process: Lessons From Sales, RevOps, and CS Pros

Two sales reps walk into a bar. One's buried under version 6.3 of a proposal, trying to remember if the latest security compliance paragraph is in the shared drive or Sarah's email from Tuesday. The other is using automated templates, but just watched their "scalable" system populate last quarter's pricing for their biggest deal of the year.

When you peel back the layers, you'll see almost identical challenges. Both are victims of processes that looked brilliant at 20 proposals a month but crumbled at 200. The manual rep can't keep up with updates. The automated rep can't trust their system's outputs. Neither can scale without something breaking.

Accenture research shows that 80% of B2B buyers will switch suppliers within 24 months when services fail to meet expectations. Think about that: months of nurturing, countless calls, strategic alignment meetings—all undone by a proposal that arrives late or riddled with errors.

So how do you scale your proposal process without choosing between overwhelmed teams and unreliable automation? If that's the crossroads you're facing, this article will reveal why traditional approaches break and how to build systems that thrive under pressure, backed by expert advice.

What does it mean to scale your proposal process, and where does it break?

Yes, scalability is essential, but what exactly does scaling a proposal process actually mean? It means creating a system that handles growing volume without sacrificing quality, speed, or accuracy, and one that gets stronger, not weaker, as your deal flow increases.

Put simply, it means your team can produce 10x more proposals without working 10x harder or making 10x more mistakes.

A scalable proposal process has four essential characteristics:

Still, even with the right foundations, things slip. Where most teams start to feel friction is in the handoffs — version sprawl between reps, pricing errors that slip through because the source of truth is buried in a spreadsheet, or there's the compliance bottleneck that the sales team knows well.

The longer your process stalls under pressure, the harder it is to spot where deals are slipping, until it’s too late.

How high-performing teams build a scalable system

The teams that scale well have already seen proposal processes break under pressure — messy versions, pricing errors, stalled approvals, deals going cold. And they’ve rebuilt their systems to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

So, what changed?

To find out, we turned to the people who’ve lived through the chaos—the sales leaders, operators, and enablement pros behind high-performing teams, but also people who help fix these problems every day, guiding teams through implementation, and spotting where process gaps quietly turn into lost revenue.

But before we unpack their insights, here’s a quick snapshot of what a scalable proposal system actually includes.

#1 Start where your data already lives

As a sales leader, it’s easy to assume proposal mistakes happen at the tail end, i.e, during approval, negotiation, and legal. But it usually starts much earlier, with the wrong contact, wrong pricing, and, most times, wrong terms. Not because the rep missed something, but because they had to rebuild the proposal from scratch.

Ask yourself: how often is your team retyping information that already exists in your CRM?

That’s where things begin to slip and stop scaling.

“When proposals operate in a silo,” says Georgia Mobley, Customer Success Manager (Enterprise) at Qwilr, “teams end up re-entering data, copying information from one system to another, and manually tracking deal stages.”

Those manual handoffs open the door to inconsistency and delay. The more proposals your team sends, the harder it gets to keep everything aligned, especially when you’re growing fast, and every rep has a slightly different way of working.

Qwilr customers who use CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho often avoid this entirely. Once connected, deal data such as company name, contacts, product mix, and pricing terms flows directly into the proposal, without reps needing to dig or duplicate.

And when the proposal is accepted, that acceptance is pushed back into the CRM, automatically updating the pipeline without anyone having to follow up.

This is a win-win, and as Roni van Dijk, one of our Customer Success Managers who supports teams rolling out Qwilr at scale, puts it, “one of the biggest time savers across the board. Templates+ CRM integration reduces human touch points and helps manage the sales pipeline seamlessly.”

#2 Use templates that do more than look good

At Qwilr, we LOVE proposal templates. They help teams move fast, stay consistent, and scale without reinventing the wheel every time. But let’s be clear — templates that only look good aren’t enough.

A beautiful proposal can still fall apart if the wrong clause slips through, which is why you truly need templates with guardrails. They need to lock what shouldn’t change and leave room for what should (think legal terms, billing structures, and company-wide disclaimers). These sections must remain untouchable once approved.

Georgia, who supports some of our most complex accounts for us, echoes the sentiment,

That’s why at Qwilr, templates come powered with interactive features, such as modular content blocks, dynamic pricing, embedded videos, timelines, and sign-off triggers that make decisions easier. Static PDFs can’t do that. And your buyers know it.

As Mael Hartl, Head of Revenue Operations at Shippit, puts it:

This aligns with what we’ve seen across our customer base — especially when teams move beyond “formatting reuse” to truly interactive templates that embed calculators, video walkthroughs, calendars, and eSignatures in one clean flow, they achieve acceptance rates up to 2x higher.

#3 Cut approval time without cutting corners

One of the biggest problems with static proposals is what happens after you hit send, or more accurately, what doesn’t.

Traditional proposals create a black hole at the worst possible moment—right when buyers are making their decision. You can't see if they're stuck on pricing, if legal's raising flags, or if a new stakeholder just entered the picture. By the time you discover there's friction, momentum's already gone.

Smart teams have flipped this entirely. They track buyer behavior in real-time, turning every click and view into intelligence they can act on. They know exactly who's looking, what's catching attention, and when to make their move.

At Qwilr, our analytics dashboard delivers granular visibility that changes how you manage deals. Track opens, see engagement block by block, and identify hidden stakeholders by name and email. Know whether buyers are playing with your interactive pricing or if they've skipped critical sections.

But visibility alone isn't enough—timing is everything. That's why our Slack integration pushes real-time notifications for the moments that matter:

• A buyer stalls mid-signature (time to remove friction)
• Someone adjusts figures in your interactive quote (they're negotiating with themselves)
• A new viewer appears weeks later (your dormant deal just woke up)
• They've shared it internally (expansion opportunity)

These are action triggers, and as Dilshi Gunasekara, Business Operations at Lorikeet, discovered:

#4 If the team doesn’t commit, the process won’t stick

What slows down the scalability of a proposal process isn’t usually the tool — it’s what teams keep holding on to.

That one rep who still copies last quarter’s proposal from their desktop. The legacy template with outdated pricing that somehow keeps resurfacing. The manual workarounds no one documented, but everyone quietly relies on. These habits create friction you can’t see in your sales deck, but you feel it in every delay, revision, and missed step.

That’s why rollout alone isn’t enough. You have to make a clean break. As Georgia says, “Set a clear cutoff date for legacy systems. This prevents fragmented workflows.”

And the fastest way to drive adoption (and improve proposal scalability)? Show, don't tell. Alex Dutton, Sales Director at Brisant Secure, discovered this firsthand:

Here's how to create these moments for your team:

• Run a live demo in your next sales meeting: Build a proposal in real-time while everyone watches. Two minutes from brief to send
• Share win notifications publicly: When someone closes a deal using the new process, screenshot the timeline and share it
• Pair resistant reps with early adopters: Let them watch a colleague send five proposals in the time it used to take for one
• Track and celebrate time saved: "Sarah just saved 90 minutes using templates" beats any policy memo
• Make the old way impossible: Archive legacy templates, revoke access to old folders, force the new path

#5 Know what’s working so you can do it again

You may have the best systems in place to scale proposals, but your efforts are a waste if you can’t document them in a repeatable playbook for your sales team.

Do you actually know what’s working each time? Are you confident about which proposal format wins more often? Which pricing layout leads to faster decisions? Where deals consistently stall?

Chances are, you’re still guessing.

We’ve already talked about how real-time analytics and Slack alerts help teams react faster — but this is where analytics become something else entirely. With Qwilr, you can see exactly how buyers are engaging: what they’re clicking on, where they’re spending time, and what they’re skipping. That insight helps shape your follow-up and tweak your structure for next time.

You can also identify who’s viewing your proposals, even if they never filled out a form. Qwilr captures names, email addresses, and view data from anyone who interacts with your page. That means you can uncover hidden stakeholders, map out the buying group, and start fine-tuning your ICP.

Are you closing more with product-led founders? CFOs? Ops managers in healthcare?

The more you know about who’s reading and what they care about, the easier it gets to improve the next one — from how you structure the offer to how you follow up.

It’s not about chasing perfection. It’s about learning what lands, spotting patterns, and helping your team make better decisions next time.

What sales leaders wish they knew earlier about scaling the proposal process

If you’ve read this far, you already know what it takes to build a scalable proposal process, but to make sure you’re not missing the small things that quietly derail deals, we dug deeper. We asked sales leaders one simple question:

What’s something you wish you knew earlier — or believe has the biggest influence — on proposal success?

Here’s what they said.

1. Skipping agreement upfront creates hidden friction later

If the buyer and seller aren’t aligned on terms before the proposal goes out, it shows up later in approval delays, objections, or sudden silence. Sam Rahmanian, CRO at Eftsure, has some good advice for sales teams here. He says:

In a nutshell, it’s a mindset shift. Instead of proposing to persuade, you’re proposing to formalize, and that only works when both sides are already aligned.

2. Think of personalization beyond {firstName}

When a proposal feels generic, your buyers tune out. The best ones, on the other hand, feel like they were written just for that business (because they were).

As Umberto Anderle, Co-founder at HowdyGo, says: “Personalization, but not the Hi {firstName} kind.” Talking about how personalization has been one of the biggest influences on proposal success at his org, he adds:

3. Strong proposals look different in every industry

Proposals are strategic tools that need to speak to real commercial constraints and evolving buyer expectations. That’s why a scalable proposal process in this space must go beyond surface-level polish.

As Mael Hartl, Head of RevOps at Shippit, puts it, three elements consistently set winning proposals apart in his world:

• A strong business case: “Clear ROI and commercially sharp pricing have become non-negotiable. With retailers under pressure from tightening margins, shifting customer expectations, and overseas competition, every investment must prove its value early.”
• Strategic alignment: “Proposals that go beyond the current pain points and align with a customer’s long-term roadmap land best. We often operate slightly ahead of the market in terms of tech maturity, so taking a consultative approach helps us show the future-fit of our solutions.”
• Customer-centric framing: “We get the best engagement when we position our platform through the lens of specific operational challenges, especially in logistics and fulfilment, rather than leading with product features.”

For RevOps and sales teams selling into complex, layered industries, this kind of nuance isn’t just a “nice to have” but essential if you want your proposal process to scale with consistency and relevance.

4. Fix the post-sale blocker before it shows up

Even with a signed proposal, deals can derail fast if the buyer sees roadblocks ahead — and most times, that has nothing to do with pricing or product fit. Richard Savoie, CEO & Co-founder of Adiona Tech, shares what helped his team dramatically improve close rates:

“We found a lot of customers were overwhelmed by the requirement that they'd have to clean and format their data to start using our product, so we built a feature that does this automatically.

“It's not something we charge for, but we saw a huge improvement in the conversion rate to closed won after introducing it, as it made implementation so much easier,” he adds.

The insight here? Sometimes the most effective sales move isn’t in the proposal — it’s in removing the “but how will we actually start?” anxiety before it creeps in.

Finally, scale starts with systems

Scaling your proposal process doesn’t mean rushing through deals or skipping steps. It means building smarter systems that can flex as your team grows, without sacrificing quality, accuracy, or buyer experience.

The most effective sales teams have proposals that are accurate, brand-aligned, and easy to approve. Their workflows are consistent, not cobbled together, and most importantly, when something works, they can do it again and again.

If you want to see how high-performing teams are streamlining workflows, reducing friction, and scaling proposals without sacrificing quality, book a short demo with Qwilr, where our team will show you exactly how it works in practice — from smarter templates to seamless approvals to insight-rich analytics.