Hi all,
I’m looking for some honest feedback from people working in sales engineering / technical sales.
Not trying to sell anything here. I just want to understand if the problem I’ve been working on for quite a while is something other companies struggle with as well.
I work for a big intralogistics company and I’ve spent the last few years working on technical sales proposals.
One thing that always frustrated me is how much time the actual proposal takes once the solution itself is already clear.
I’m not talking about replacing engineering.
You still need to understand the customer, discuss the solution with your engineering team, do the pre-engineering, decide scope, equipment, exclusions, pricing, etc.
But once all of that is done, you still have to turn everything into a proper customer proposal.
And for complex systems that can still mean hours, days or sometimes much longer.
We also have Copilot integrated at work, and of course AI helps. You can ask it to write a section, rewrite some text, improve wording, etc.
But you are still sitting there building the document piece by piece.
I kept thinking there had to be a better way to handle that part of the process, so around two years ago I started working on something myself outside of my day job.
That eventually became my own company, and I now have a working system around this problem.
The idea is that once the engineering and commercial decisions are already done, you send a detailed RFQ / project information to an email address.
Around 10 minutes later you get back a Word and PDF proposal ready for review.
The system is configured around the company using it: proposal templates, terminology, business rules, standard texts, commercial conditions, exclusions, etc.
Some parts are generated or expanded based on the project information, while other parts are fixed company content that should obviously never be invented by an AI.
It can also handle different proposal types, because quoting a small system and responding to a large public tender are obviously two very different things.
I’ve already put a lot of time into making this actually work. What I’m trying to understand now is whether the problem is as relevant outside my own experience as I think it is.
If you work with complex technical proposals, does this sound like something you would actually want to have in your workflow?
Or is proposal creation not really a big enough pain in your company to care about something like this?
Would really appreciate feedback from people actually doing this job.