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marketing-agency · New business · AugmentBuy it

AI proposal & pitch drafting

01 — The scenario

A marketing-agency business where this lands in Sales.

The friction
proposalswin-ratenew-businesspitching

02 — What is actually going wrong

Proposals are written by the most senior person available, at night, from whichever old deck was closest to the brief. The good case studies live in someone's head. Turnaround is slow enough that you sometimes lose on responsiveness alone.

How it works

The brief goes in; the system retrieves the relevant past work, case studies and pricing structures from your own archive and assembles a first draft in your house format. The strategist spends their time on the argument rather than on assembly and formatting.

What good looks like

First drafts exist within hours of a brief landing. Every proposal cites the strongest relevant case study rather than the most recently remembered one, and win rate moves because you are turning up faster with a tighter argument.

03 — The problem, in money

$77,760$42,356,250/ yr at stake
Modeled
  • Proposals per month18 proposals150 proposalsPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point
  • Lift in win rate0.08 ratio0.5 ratioPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point
  • Average contract value12,000 USD125,500 USDPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point

04 — The options

Buy$200–$600 / moOff-the-shelf tooling, live sooner.
Bin$0Do nothing — and accept the leak.

05 — The call

Buy it

Buy it. An off-the-shelf tool wins this one — it gets you live faster, and the math does not justify building from scratch.

06 — How this goes wrong

  • Sending a draft that reads like a draft. Assembly speed only converts if someone still owns the narrative — the fastest generic proposal loses to a slower specific one.
  • Hallucinated results in case studies. Every number in a proposal must trace to a real engagement; this is the failure mode that ends client relationships.
  • Feeding it your losing proposals as well as your winners without labelling which is which.
  • Assuming a win-rate lift you have not measured. This one input drives the whole model — hold it at zero until you have data.

07 — How you would actually do it

  1. 01Gather your last thirty proposals and mark won, lost and why.
  2. 02Extract the reusable assets: case studies with verified numbers, team bios, pricing structures.
  3. 03Build retrieval over that archive, not over the open internet.
  4. 04Draft into your real template so output needs no reformatting.
  5. 05Mandate a strategist rewrite of the approach section before anything is sent.
  6. 06Track win rate by cohort for two quarters before believing the lift.

08 — Tools worth looking at

Claude Projects / Gemini GemsA grounded project over your own proposal archive is often enough.
PandaDoc / QwilrProposal software with content libraries and AI drafting.
Notion AIAdequate if the archive already lives in Notion.

Named for orientation, not endorsement. No affiliate arrangements, and nothing here has been paid for.

09 — Run it on your numbers

Start from industry averages, then drag the inputs to match your business. The number moves live.Drag each input to your number — the starting points are neutral midpoints, not industry data. The number moves live.

Worth to your business
$77,760per year
Modeled — industry averages
Revenue$207,360Modeled
Cost savings$0Modeled
Hours / week0Modeled
Industry averages
18 proposals
Industry avg: 18 proposalsPlaceholder — not a validated benchmark
0.08 ratio
Industry avg: 0.08 ratioPlaceholder — not a validated benchmark
12,000 USD
Industry avg: 12,000 USDPlaceholder — not a validated benchmark

10 — The evidence · what others report

No hard numbers reported.

Reported numbers are third-party claims, source-attributed — not verified by me, and never blended into the model above.

11 — Questions owners ask

Every figure is Modeled — computed from industry-average benchmarks against the scenario’s formula. Move the sliders to your own inputs and the numbers recalculate live. Nothing here is a promise; it is a starting estimate you can pressure-test.
The library is organized by department, outcome, effort and readiness so you can find what fits. Add scenarios to your plan, tune the inputs, and see the combined picture on your plan dashboard.
Want this to be a Projected number? That's what the Audit produces — my forecast on your real data, with my name on it.
Build means a custom system is the right move; Buy means an off-the-shelf tool wins; Bin means the math does not justify doing it at all. Binned scenarios can be favorited for reference but never enter a plan.

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