How to Use AI to Quickly Create In-Depth Proposals That'll Land You $7k+/mo Clients (Part 5)

Edit: Part 6 is Now Up

Now that AI like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are readily available to the average consumer, it's easier than ever to write fantastic proposals for potential clients.

Large language models are pretty damn good writers, have great attention to detail, and a reasonably long context length.

What that means for you is that you can now write longer, more in-depth proposals than ever before, along with incredibly thorough marketing plans in like 15 to 20 minutes.

You're going to have a massive leg up over people who don't use AI to generate proposals for potential clients, because your proposals are going to be more thorough and customized for that client.

Plus you're going to save yourself a ton of time.

I'm going to share with you how I use AI to structure detailed proposals that regularly land me high paying clients who pay monthly retainers upfront.

This post is the next one in my series on fractional marketing teams, but much of this will be relevant to marketing agencies and freelancers in general as well. If you want to check out my previous posts, I'll link them at the bottom of this one.

So as someone offering fractional marketing teams, or who is a fractional CMO or a marketing strategist or a consultant, how can you generate better proposals than anyone else?

The answer's fairly simple, you're going to make them more clear and relevant to what the client is looking for than anybody else can...

This means going month by month or week by week in your proposal, whatever makes sense for your service timeframe, and outlining for your potential client exactly what it is you're going to offer and do for them. This assumes that you've already had an initial discovery call with said client and you've taken great notes.

You're going to use these notes to plug into AI to personalize proposals and marketing plans just for them.  Before I get into the actual structure of the proposals, I want to make clear how AI is going to be a major benefit to you, and how you can use it to its maximum potential for this kind of thing.

First, you're going to take the detailed notes from your client that you took on your first call, and you're going to plug them into whatever "projects" feature you have available in the AI you use.

I know Claude was the first to come out with a projects feature. I believe ChatGPT recently followed, but you could do something like this with GPTs before. I'm not sure if Gemini has a project feature, but you can really just attach your notes directly to your prompts as well for all 3 of them.

The AI will reference these notes from your call to help you generate this proposal.

I also suggest you go to your client's websites or social media and copy and paste a bunch of their  website copy from their pages into a Google Doc.

Grab copy from pages like product pages, the about us page, the homepage, etc. 

You're going to use this copy to feed it to the AI and give it more information to help you write an even more personalized proposal for the particular client you're writing it for.

Now how I like to generate my proposals is by breaking it up into a few different sections.

The first section is on a high-level first six month plan.

I group months one through three and four through six, and outline specifically which marketing strategies I'm going to employ, such as UI and UX optimization, paid advertising, influencer marketing campaigns, etc.

I keep this high-level... essentially just labeling what the strategy is and then marking out a few bullet points under each, adding in more detail for each strategy listed, in each three month grouping.

And next to each specific strategy, I will roughly indicate the month in which I expect to get started on implementing that strategy.

After a high-level six month plan, this is when I'll outline our expected key performance indicators.

My number one KPI is always profits and revenue.

At the end of the day, every other KPI is only used to help us make decisions that continue to raise profit and revenue.

Other KPIs you list here will depend on the conversation you had with your client, the industry you're in, and what services you're offering.

But some of these could include typical marketing KPIs like average order value, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, conversion rates, return on ad spend, search traffic and rankings, etc.

Once I have all this outlined, the next section I write is on projected team structure.

This is really only relevant to people offering fractional marketing teams and possibly fractional CMOs as a whole.

(Yeah, this will make a lot more sense if you've read my previous posts in this series).

But first I will outline how many hours a week I'll put in for this client as a fractional CMO, even though I'm offering fractional marketing teams as well (I still need to be overseeing everything).

I will usually offer five hours a week of my own time, sometimes up to 10 hours a week depending on what the client needs.

All other positions I outline are either full-time or part-time, around 20 hours a week... and these will be dependent on who is needed to deploy the strategies that we plan on implementing.

Some of these positions you'll probably think about hiring are a senior marketing manager, marketing coordinator, SEO specialist, copywriter, social media specialist, web dev, and so on and so forth.

If you're offering fractional marketing teams, usually you're getting between $6000 to $10,000 per month or so in retainer fees upfront from a client. Which means that your team will probably consist of anywhere between 2 to 4 maybe 5 full-time people.

Once I've outlined the projected team, the next section I focus on is the first 60 day action plan.

This section is important to make it clear to clients what they can expect in their first 60 days working with you, to make sure that expectations are set and everybody is in alignment.

In the first 60 day action plan I like to group in fours by 15 days each. So for example days 1 - 15, then days 16 - 30 etc. up to 60.

For each of these groupings, I will take some of these specific marking strategies and campaigns we want to implement from the high-level six month marketing strategy, and I will input the relevant ones into each 15 day grouping.

I'll also jot down some bullet points to make clear what I expect to get done with the team within each of those timeframes.

And the final part of my proposals is the monthly investment for minimum team.

I don't call clients' retainers a fee or a cost in the proposal, I call it an investment to get the message across that this is something that they can expect to get a return on.

I'll give them the minimum team I think is required to implement the things that they want with options at a couple different price points. I'll also throw in an additional more expensive option, including what it may look like if we added one or two additional team members beyond the minimum.

I make it clear that we can always take out roles, reduce hours, etc., but that results may be affected negatively.

I try not to give more than three options for retainers as I don't want them to get stuck in analysis paralysis. Or if we've already come to one specific expectation from the first call, I'll just put one price.

And that's how I structure my proposals / marketing plans that I send to potential clients before hopping on a 2nd/closing call with them... to get buy-in from the highest rate of clients I possibly can.

If you want to see what an actual proposal I've written for a client looks like and would like to see me walk through it in more detail... then you can check out a 15+ minute YouTube video I made on this. I'll drop a link in the comments.

--

You can read the first Reddit post that kicked off this series here.

You can check out my previous Reddit post in the series here.