The 20-hour proposal
How many hours a week do your best sales engineers spend moving data instead of engineering?
In my 20 years in technician-heavy service industries, I’ve seen incredible engineers bogged down by the same invisible ceiling. In the Corporate AV world, I see it replicated as the Proposal Bottleneck.
Recent industry data confirms that a standard design-build proposal typically consumes between 2 and 20 hours of a team's week. But it’s not the engineering itself that’s taking the time, rather it’s the manual friction.
The Proposal Bottleneck results from several causes:
- A fragmented mix of Excel, Word, email, and vendor portals. Without a unified database, they are re-researching equipment specs and pricing for every single bid.
- 40% to 75% of proposal time spent simply copying data from one tool to another.
- Sourcing real-time pricing from 5 to 20 different vendors and checking availability/lead times remains a manual, labor-intensive grind.
- Even "standard" huddle rooms often require custom modeling or diagrams from scratch because of a lack of centralized project libraries.
When sales engineers are forced into a "swivel-chair" workflow, manually re-typing information between systems, you are losing time and the capacity to bid on higher-value projects.
The good news is that these aren't just “the cost of doing business.” They are automation-ready problems.
I’m currently focusing TimeBack Workflows on addressing this directly. I’m not here to sell you another design tool, as you likely already pay for D-Tools or Jetbuilt. I’m here to build the "digital nervous system" that connects them and the other tools you use.
I am looking for a few partners to participate in an Automation Audit. My goal is to investigate your specific workflows and find exactly where your data "dies" during fragmented handoffs.
If you’re interested in addressing this, feel free to DM me and we’ll talk.
Join the discussion at LinkedIn.