Most proposals are the last proposal with the name changed. Open the one that won, Find and Replace the client, retype the numbers, and somewhere on page two a line still says "your team of twelve" to a company of four. The client notices. They don't say anything about it, they just stop replying, and you put it down to the price.
The call was the good part. For 40 minutes they told you what's wrong, what they've tried, who else they're talking to and what they'd need to see before they signed. Then you drove home, the writing got pushed to Thursday, and by Thursday the notes say "recall appts?? monthly report, budget tight, who signs?" and the rest has gone.
So: same day, from the notes.
What goes in the project
Make a project for proposals, or one per prospect if you'd rather keep them apart. The goal, up to 2,000 characters, is where you say how you quote: what every proposal of yours includes, what you never promise, how long one is allowed to run, who it's addressed to. Drop one good past proposal in the project's files so the team has your format in front of it instead of a guess at it. Use the one that won, even if it isn't the one you're proudest of, and if the one that won was 14 pages, that's the format, 14 pages.
Then the notes. Typed is fine. A transcript from whatever call tool you already use is better. Or call your Chief of Staff and talk the meeting through out loud for 5 minutes while it's fresh; calls need Flux Router or your own voice keys, and a Claude or ChatGPT plan on its own doesn't cover them. The bot doesn't sit in on the call. It works from what you bring back.
Here are my notes from today's call with Harbor Dental. Draft the proposal in our usual format with three options. Don't send it.
Who does what
Three bots. Sales reads the notes and pulls out the buyer's problem, their goals and their objections, in their words rather than yours, which matters more than it sounds when they read it back. Offer shapes the scope and three options with the trade-offs stated, so the client can see what the middle one leaves out. Copy writes it in your voice and your format, from the example you gave it.
What comes back is a full draft: problem, scope, three options, timeline, next step, and a list of open questions where the notes ran out. "Who signs off on their side?" is the usual one. Open questions stay open in the draft. A guessed answer to who signs off is how a proposal ends up addressed to the wrong person, and you'd rather answer it with one email before you send than find out after.
Sean Donahoe, our founder, has four questions he puts to every piece of copy, and a proposal is copy: "Why you? Why me? Why this? Why now? For any business, this is good. From their perspective." That last bit is the part most proposals miss. From the client's side the questions read: why this firm, why should I bother, why this scope, why this month. The call notes already hold the answer to the fourth one, because whatever made them book the call is sitting in there somewhere, usually in the first 10 minutes, before anyone mentioned budget.
What waits for you
Sending it. New bots start on Ask, and a message to someone new stops and asks even on Full access, so the draft sits in the Inbox under Needs you until you've read it. The numbers wait too: House Rules tell every bot never to promise a price or a deal in your name, so the three options come to you with the trade-offs written and the figures as a question for you. Edit it, export it and send it yourself, or have it drafted as an email through Gmail or Outlook (Flux Router credits or your own connected-apps key) and approve that.
Then there's the second proposal. Once the format has come out right twice, /learn how we write proposals writes the steps down as a skill. Teach a skill is on by default; the skill arrives switched off and you read it before you press Enable. We'd wait for the second one before doing this. The first one usually shows you two or three things the goal should have said, like whether you quote in days or in weeks.
We'd also skip all of this for a quote that fits on a postcard. If it's three lines and a number, type the three lines. This is for the proposal that takes an evening, the one that keeps sliding to Thursday.
The proposals use case has the full picture, and meeting prep is the step before, so you walk into the call already knowing who they are. In the library, Win the Client carries a proposal writer called Bid that drafts three scoped options and marks where your material ran out, then takes the client on to a kickoff pack; Pricing Tribunal is the one to ask when they come back wanting the middle option at the bottom price.
Next call you take, type the notes up before you leave the car park and paste them into Murage with the message above. Read the draft that evening. The numbers are the bit to check first.