The proposal that took ten minutes
“Send me a proposal.”
You have good sites and your rate is fair. You send four photographs and a price on WhatsApp, because that is what you have and the client is waiting. The other man sends a document: a map, each site with its size and lighting, photographs, a rate table with tax broken out, and the dates.
He gets the business. Not because his sites are better — sometimes they are worse. Because his document let the client show it to somebody else.
The proposal is not for the person you send it to
This is the part that catches people out. The person who asks for the proposal is rarely the person who decides. He is going to forward it — to a brand manager, a finance person, sometimes an agency.
Whatever you send has to survive that forward without you attached to it. Four photographs and a number in a chat cannot: the recipient does not know which sites those are, what they cost each, what size they are, or whether tax is included. So the person you sent it to has to do the work of explaining, and the easiest thing he can do instead is forward the other document.
What belongs in it
Not more. Just the things the second reader needs to not have questions.
Every site, identified. Name, location, and enough that somebody can picture it — size, type (hoarding, unipole, gantry), lighting. A photograph per site.
The rate, per site. Not a bundle price. A single figure for eight sites forces the client to either accept all of it or reopen everything. Per-site rates let him cut two and keep six, which is a negotiation you win.
Mounting and printing, separately. He may have his own printed material. If it is baked into one number he cannot tell, and assumes you are expensive.
Tax, stated. Say whether the rate includes GST. Ambiguity here is the single most common reason an out-of-home payment freezes months later — the invoice and the purchase order end up describing different amounts and nobody can prove which was agreed.
The period. Start and end dates per site, not “one month”.
That is it. Every one of those is something you already know. The reason it takes an evening is not that the information is hard — it is that it lives in five places and gets retyped into a sixth.
Why speed decides more than rate
An advertiser asks three or four owners at once. The first complete document sets the frame: it becomes the thing the others get compared against, and its site list becomes the plan the client is now imagining.
Arriving third, two days later, with a better rate is a weaker position than arriving first with a fair one. You are no longer proposing — you are discounting against somebody else’s plan.
This is why “I’ll check the rate and get back to you tomorrow morning” is expensive. By the morning, the client has spoken to somebody else.
Getting it down to ten minutes
Keep the rate card where the site is. The card rate and the last agreed rate belong on the site record. If you have to remember what you quoted a client in March, you will delay to check, and the delay is the cost.
Build from your inventory, not from a blank page. Picking six sites from a list you already maintain, and having size, lighting, photographs and rate come with them, is a different job from composing a document.
Let the totals calculate. Mounting, printing and GST rolled up by hand is where arithmetic errors enter, and an arithmetic error in a proposal is worse than a slow proposal.
Generate the document. The deck the client forwards and the cost sheet your office keeps should come from the same figures, so they cannot disagree. If they are produced separately, one of them will be wrong eventually and you will not know which.
Make the won proposal the campaign. Re-entering an accepted proposal as a booking is a second chance to introduce a discrepancy, and it is the discrepancy that stalls the invoice later.
What this does not fix
It does not make your sites better or your rate more competitive. If you are losing on inventory quality, a faster proposal loses faster.
What it removes is the case where you had the right sites at the right price and lost anyway, because the document arrived late and the client could not forward it to the person who decides.
In Sazinga AdBoard a proposal is assembled by picking sites from your own inventory — rates, sizes, lighting and photographs come with them — mounting, printing and GST carry through to the total, and one click produces a client-ready presentation and a full spreadsheet cost sheet from the same figures. A won proposal converts straight into a booked campaign with nothing re-entered, which is the seam where most outdoor media businesses introduce the discrepancy that stalls the invoice.
Related: what billboard advertising actually costs in India on setting the rates you are about to quote, and why out-of-home payments get stuck on what happens when the proposal and the invoice disagree.