Run a 5-person agency, services-based, we send roughly 12-18 proposals a month. Each proposal is preceded by an exploratory call, a discovery brief, and a custom deck for the prospect.
For 3 years our proposal workflow was. Discovery call notes in Notion. Manual translation into a deck in Keynote. About 4-6 hours per proposal between writing and slide assembly.
Math: 12-18 proposals a month at 5 hours average = 60-90 hours of proposal production monthly across the team. We are 5 people. That was eating roughly a full week of capacity per month.
Last fall I redesigned the workflow. Posting because the time savings have been substantial and the quality of the proposals has gone up, not down.
The new workflow.
Discovery call gets recorded in Granola. Auto-summary plus the full transcript get pasted into a Notion page tagged for that prospect.
A Claude prompt I've refined over time takes the discovery notes, our proposal template, and a "what we're proposing" outline I write in 15-20 minutes. Output is a structured proposal narrative tagged by section.
The structured narrative goes into Gamma as the source for deck generation. Gamma produces a first draft using a custom theme matched to our brand kit.
I edit the deck for 30-45 minutes, focused on the highest-stakes slides (problem statement, our approach, pricing, next steps) and trusting the rest of the structure.
Final deck is exported to PDF, attached to a Loom walkthrough I record in 8-10 minutes, sent to the prospect with a written proposal email.
Time per proposal in the new workflow: roughly 90 minutes total, including the Loom recording.
Time saved per month: ~12 proposals × ~3 hours saved = ~36 hours. Conservatively 30 hours after accounting for occasional rebuilds when the workflow doesn't fit.
What got better, beyond the time.
The proposals are more consistent. Each one follows the same structure because the template is built into the workflow. The variance that used to come from tired team members rushing the deck is gone.
The proposals incorporate discovery insights more accurately. The Granola transcript means we don't lose what the prospect actually said. The old workflow lost detail because we were taking notes manually.
The Loom walkthrough has measurably improved close rate. Prospects who watch the Loom (we track this) close at about 1.6x the rate of those who only read the proposal. The Loom is partly possible because we have time to make it now.
What didn't work in the new workflow.
The first version had Gamma generating the proposal narrative directly from the Granola transcript. The output was bad. Generic. The transcript-to-deck path needed Claude in between to give the narrative shape.
The custom theme in Gamma took 4 attempts to land. Theme drift across decks was a problem until I locked it down properly.
Some prospects (about 15%) ask for the proposal as a written document, not a deck. The new workflow handles this poorly because the source-of-truth is the deck, not a written document. We rebuild manually for those, which is roughly 2 hours per case. Probably need a parallel workflow for the doc format.
What I'd tell someone trying to build something similar.
The win isn't any one tool. The win is the chained workflow. Granola alone wouldn't save the time. Claude alone wouldn't. Gamma alone wouldn't. The chain together changes the math.
The chain breaks at the weakest link. Spending time refining the Claude prompt was the highest-leverage hour I spent on this. The output of that step determines the quality of everything after.
The economic case is clear at our volume. 30 hours a month at our team's blended cost of about $90/hour is roughly $2,700/month in recovered capacity. The tools cost maybe $80/month combined. The payback is immediate.
For lower-volume operators (3-4 proposals a month), the workflow design overhead probably isn't worth it. At our volume, it was. The threshold matters.