How Fast Should You Send a Proposal After an AV Enquiry?

Speed wins AV work, up to a point. Send a proposal too late and the client has already moved on. Send it too fast and the client suspects you have not thought about it. Here is how to find the right speed for your enquiries, and how to hit it without sacrificing the quality of the document.

The 48-hour rule

For most live events enquiries, the sweet spot for sending a quality proposal is 24 to 48 hours after receiving the brief. That gives the client time to acknowledge they sent it, gives you time to actually think about the brief, and lands the proposal while the project is still front-of-mind.

Sub-24-hour proposals can work for simple dry-hire enquiries where the brief is a single kit list. For anything that involves run-of-show, multiple departments, or non-standard kit, 24 to 48 hours produces better win rates than under 12 hours.

Why faster is not always better

Clients have learned that proposals that come back in two hours are usually templates with a name change. They expect a proposal that came back in two hours to be:

• Generic
• Missing detail from the brief they sent
• Likely to grow on the day

A proposal that arrives the next morning with specific references to the brief reads as deliberate. A proposal that arrives 20 minutes after the brief reads as automated.

When speed actually matters

There are three situations where being fast is the difference between winning and losing:

1. Last-minute enquiries. A client whose original supplier dropped out for an event in two weeks needs a yes from someone within hours. If you can confirm within the same working day, you win on availability alone.
2. Repeat clients. If you have done similar events for this client before, they expect a fast turn because you already know the venue, the spec, and the budget.
3. Tenders with explicit deadlines. If the deadline is in 48 hours, late is the same as not bidding.

For everything else, quality beats speed.

What takes most of the time

When AV companies are asked why proposals take days to send, the answers are usually:

• "I had to ask the warehouse if we had X in stock"
• "I had to wait for the supplier to come back on a sub-hire price"
• "I had to dig out a similar quote from last year to base it on"
• "I had to update the template with the latest case studies"

Notice that none of these is "I was writing the actual proposal." Most of the delay is logistics, not thought.

The companies that consistently respond within 48 hours have removed each of these as a blocker:

• Live stock visibility (or a rental system that shows availability instantly)
• A short list of pre-approved sub-hire suppliers with known pricing
• A library of past proposals organised by sector
• Templates and case studies that update in one place, not in every document

The follow-up after sending

Sending the proposal is half the job. The other half is the follow-up. A working pattern:

• Send the proposal. Confirm receipt with a one-line email.
• Day 3: short message offering a 15-minute call to walk through any questions.
• Day 7: a single check-in asking whether the client has everything they need.
• Day 14: if no response, one final note. Then drop it for a month.

That is enough. More than that reads as pressure and damages the relationship.

How to know if you are responding fast enough

Look at your last 20 proposals. For each one, measure the time from receiving the enquiry to sending the proposal, and the time from sending to first client response. If your average proposal-out time is under 72 hours and you still lose more than half the bids, the problem is not speed. It is the proposal itself.

If your average proposal-out time is over 5 days, speed is part of the problem.

A note on the open

A useful signal: if you can see when the client opens the proposal, you know when to follow up. A client who opened your proposal three times on a Friday afternoon and has not replied by Monday is a client to chase Tuesday morning, not Friday evening.

pro-posal.io shows you exactly when each proposal is opened and how long the client spent on each section. The analytics make follow-up timing obvious. Start your free trial: pro-posal.io.