When a proposal goes quiet, check one thing before writing it off: did anyone send the second email? The fix is a rule, not a tool: every open proposal has one owner and one dated next step.
The rule
When a proposal goes out, the person who sent it writes down what happens next and when. "Call Maria on Thursday to go through the budget" counts. "Follow up" does not, because nobody can tell later whether it happened.
If a proposal has no next step, it is not open. Close it as lost or give it a date.
Five stages are enough
- Enquiry — someone asked for a price or a call.
- Call booked — there is a date to talk.
- Proposal sent — scope and price are with the client.
- Negotiation — they replied with questions or changes.
- Won / Lost — with a one-line reason for every loss.
You probably do not need more stages yet. Add one only when deals keep getting stuck at a step and you want to see that step on its own.
What to record
For each deal: client, contact person, email, estimated value, owner, stage, next step, next-step date and lost reason. Leave out anything nobody will look at when deciding who to call this week.
The weekly review
Once a week, spend 20 minutes on one list: open deals whose next-step date has passed. For each one, the owner either does the step that day or sets a new date with a note on why. A simple default: a proposal with no reply after three follow-ups over about three weeks goes to Lost with the reason "no response". You can reopen it if the client comes back.
Write down two numbers each month: proposals sent and proposals won. At this size they tell you more than any report.
A follow-up sequence to start with
- Day 0: send the proposal and book a time to go through it together.
- Day 3: a short check-in: "Did the scope match what you had in mind?"
- Day 10: send one useful thing, such as a similar project or an answer to an objection they raised.
- Day 20: ask directly whether to keep the proposal open.
When a spreadsheet stops working
A shared spreadsheet handles this for two or three people. It breaks when several people send proposals, nobody filters the sheet for overdue dates, and the email threads sit in personal inboxes where no one else can see them.
At that point a pipeline CRM earns its cost. Pipedrive is built around this stage-by-stage view. In its pipeline view, each deal card shows whether the next activity is overdue (red), due today (green), scheduled for later (grey) or missing (a yellow warning), and deals that need attention are listed first. That is the weekly review above, done for you. It is the wrong tool if what you need is project delivery, time tracking or invoicing; those belong in a different kind of software.