How I Use Claude to Create Proposals

A proposal used to be most of my afternoon.

Not the thinking - the thinking happened on the call. The afternoon went on writing it up, remembering how I'd structured the last one, hunting for the wording I'd used for something similar six months ago, and then fiddling with the formatting until it looked like it came from a business rather than a person with a laptop.

Now it takes about twenty minutes and three prompts, and I'm mostly reading rather than writing.

This assumes your template already exists.

Everything below drops your words into a proposal template that's already designed. If you haven't built one yet, do that first - it's a single afternoon and it never needs doing again: How I Built My Brand Profile with Claude Design.

Why I do this in Claude Code

I'll be honest: I only do proposals in Claude Code. You can absolutely do it in a Claude Project, and if that's where you're set up, it'll work. But there's a specific reason I don't.

A proposal needs two things at once. It needs that client - their discovery call, your meeting notes, everything they've told you. And it needs your past proposals - how you structure them, how you write, what you always include.

In a client Project, you've only got the first one. And you don't want to fix that by dropping other clients' proposals into that client's folder, because that's their information sitting somewhere it shouldn't be.

Claude Code doesn't have that problem. I point it at my whole vault, and then tell it which folders to read - the client's folder and my proposals folder and my templates folder, at the same time. Three sources, one chat, nothing crossing over that shouldn't.

The output is better too. Code writes the file, renders it, looks at the result and fixes what's wrong - so the finished PDF actually looks how I want rather than how it turned out.

Step 1 - Get it up to speed

New Claude Code chat, pointed at my vault. This first prompt doesn't write anything - it just reads.

I've pointed you at my vault.

Review it & get up to date on who I am, what I do & who I serve.

Then review my proposals folder - those are copies of proposals I've sent
before. I want you to see how I write & how I structure them.

Then review the proposal template in my templates folder.

When you've done all three, come back & tell me in a few lines what you've
understood about how I put a proposal together.

Don't write anything yet.

That last check is worth the thirty seconds it takes. What comes back tells you whether it's actually understood your approach or is about to write a generic proposal with your logo on it. If the summary sounds like anyone's proposal process, correct it now - it's much cheaper than correcting the finished thing.

Step 2 - Map the proposal

Now the client, and the part only you can supply.

Now review the client folder for [CLIENT].

Read the meeting notes - & specifically the notes from the call on [DATE]. That's
the one where we talked about the products & services we want to put into their
business.

Take that, plus the brain dump below, & map out a proposal aligned with my
template.

Here's my brain dump: [everything you're thinking. What you'd build, in what
order, what's involved, what you'd charge, what you'd leave out, anything you're
unsure about. It does not need to be tidy or in order - talk it out]

Give it to me as an md document so I can read it properly & tweak it before we
make it look nice.

The brain dump is the whole job. The meeting notes tell Claude what the client said. The brain dump tells it what you concluded - and that's the actual value in a proposal. It's the difference between a document that summarises the call and one that tells them what to do about it.

Talk it out rather than writing it neatly. Dictate it if that's easier. Messy is fine - untidy thinking still contains the thinking.

And keep it as an .md first. Do not let it jump straight to the PDF. You want to read the words on a plain page and change them freely, without any of the "well it looks nice now" reluctance that kicks in once something is formatted.

Read it, tweak it, argue with it, until the text is genuinely right.

Step 3 - Make it look like it came from a business

Now, and only now, the template.

The text is right now. Apply it to my proposal template & create the PDF.

Please make sure:
- each main heading starts on a new page
- the spacing & borders on every page are correct & consistent
- nothing splits awkwardly across a page break

Save both the md & the finished PDF into the client's folder.

Then tell me what to check before I send it.

Those three formatting lines are the most useful thing in this entire post.

PDFs are where this falls over. Claude will produce something that reads perfectly and then breaks a heading across two pages, or puts a section title alone at the bottom of a page with the content overleaf, or quietly changes the margin on page four. It's not a big failure - it's the kind of small wrongness that makes a document look amateur without anyone being able to say why.

So you name it up front. Headings start a new page. Spacing and borders consistent. Nothing split across a break. It gets it right far more often when it knows those are the rules.

And because it's saving into the client's folder itself, the proposal is filed before I've thought about filing it. The .md stays there too, which means next time this client needs something, the reasoning behind what I proposed is right there.

The whole loop, short version

1. Point Claude Code at your vault. Have it read you, your past proposals, and your template.
2. Point it at the client's folder and the specific call, then brain dump what you're actually thinking.
3. Read the .md and get the words right.
4. Apply the template, with the three formatting rules.
5. Read the PDF. Send it.

Twenty minutes, most of it reading.

What actually changed

The interesting thing isn't the time saved, though that's real.

It's that my proposals got more consistent than I could make them by hand. When I wrote each one from scratch, the good ones were the ones I wrote on a good day. Now every one carries the same structure, the same intro letter, the same way of framing what I think they should do - because it's reading the ones I got right and following those.

The template holds the standard so I don't have to remember it on a Friday afternoon.

Start with the last one you sent

Don't wait for a new client. Take the last proposal you sent, strip the client details out of it, and put it in a proposals folder in your vault. That's your first reference document, and the whole thing works better from there.

If your vault isn't set up yet, that's the foundation: start here. And if you haven't got a template yet: build it first.

And if what you actually want is to stop pricing by the hour altogether so your proposals are selling outcomes rather than time, that's the thing I teach.

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