Are proposals going out on time?
A prospect is ready to buy. Your team promises a proposal by Friday. It goes out the following Wednesday. By then, the prospect has two other quotes. Here's how to see if this is happening in your business.
The short answer
Are proposals going out on time?Measure the time between when a deal enters the “proposal” stage in your CRM and when the proposal document is actually sent. If the average exceeds 3 business days, you are losing deals to delay, not to price or competition.
Slow proposals kill more deals than bad pricing
A prospect who asked for a quote is giving you their attention. That attention has a shelf life. Every day you delay the proposal, the prospect's urgency fades, competitors respond, and the likelihood of closing drops.
In most service businesses, proposal turnaround is the biggest controllable factor in close rate. You cannot control the prospect's budget or timeline. But you can control how fast you get a proposal in front of them. And yet most businesses have no idea what their actual proposal turnaround time is.
Your team says “we get proposals out quickly.” But “quickly” is subjective. Is it 1 day? 3 days? 7 days? Without measuring it, you are relying on everyone's optimistic self-assessment instead of the data.
How to measure proposal turnaround in your CRM
- 1Pull deals that moved to the proposal stage this month
In HubSpot, go to Dealsand filter by deals that entered the “Proposal Sent” stage this month. Add the Stage change datecolumn. In Salesforce, run a report on Opportunities where Stage changed to “Proposal” this month.
- 2Find when the deal first entered the pipeline
Check the deal's creation date or the date it entered the “Qualified” stage. This is when the prospect was ready for a proposal.
- 3Calculate the gap for each deal
Subtract the qualification date from the proposal date. This gives you the turnaround in business days. Average across all deals to get your typical proposal speed.
- 4Correlate speed with close rate
Group deals by turnaround time: under 2 days, 2-5 days, 5+ days. Check the close rate for each group. You will almost certainly see that faster proposals close at a higher rate.
Total time: about 30 minutes. All data comes from your CRM deal pipeline. The accuracy depends on your team logging stage changes correctly.
Track proposal speed monthly and set a target
Set a clear target for proposal turnaround (e.g., under 2 business days). Measure it monthly. Share the results with the team. When there is a measurable target and visible accountability, turnaround times shrink.
Or track proposal speed automatically in your monthly report
Bottomline connects to your CRM and calculates proposal turnaround for every deal. It shows the average, the trend, and the correlation between speed and close rate so you can see the direct impact of delays.
The data makes it impossible to ignore: faster proposals close more deals. Your team sees the correlation directly, which drives behavior change better than any policy memo.