Agent skills for writing client proposals
A proposal skill turns the notes from a discovery call into the document you would have written on Thursday night: scope, deliverables, timeline, exclusions, and price pulled from your own rate card. It does not decide what to charge and it does not know the client. It removes the blank page and the reformatting, which is most of the hours.
What the skill needs before it writes
A proposal skill is only as good as the four things you give it. Assemble these once and every proposal after the first takes minutes.
The call notes, raw.
A transcript, a page of bullets, or the messy notes you took while half-listening. The skill's job is to sort them, not to receive them tidy.
Your rate card.
A short file listing your services and what each one costs, in your own units: per project, per day, per retainer month. The skill reads it and does the arithmetic; it never invents a number.
Two proposals you actually won.
Structure and tone are copied from these. Two is enough. Ten makes the output an average of ten voices, which reads like nobody.
Your standard exclusions.
The list of things you have learned to write down: third-party licenses, content the client supplies, revision limits. This is the section that stops an argument in month three, and it is the one people forget under time pressure.
What it produces
One draft in your format, with the sections in your order, ready for you to cut. Expect to change the framing paragraph and one or two line items. Expect not to touch the structure.
> draft a proposal from Tuesday's call with Calder Group
reading: notes/calder-discovery.md
reading: rate-card.md
matching structure: proposals/won/ridgeway.md# Proposal: Calder Group website rebuild
## What you told us
Three-person marketing team, no developer, launching a second
product line in Q1. The current site cannot take a second line
without a rebuild of the navigation.
## Scope
1. Information architecture for two product lines
2. Design system, 6 page templates
3. Build and migration of 40 existing pages
4. Two rounds of revision per template
## Not included
Copywriting, photography, ongoing hosting, third-party
licenses, content entry beyond the 40 migrated pages.
## Timeline
7 weeks from signed scope. Week 1 IA, weeks 2 to 3 design,
weeks 4 to 6 build, week 7 migration and launch.
## Investment
Priced from the current rate card. See the rate line items
below and confirm before sending.What it does not do
- It does not set your price. It applies the rate card you wrote. If the rate card is wrong, the proposal is wrong faster than before.
- It does not know the relationship. The sentence about why this client, right now, is still yours to write, and it is usually the sentence that wins the job.
- It does not qualify the lead. A skill will happily draft a careful proposal for a client you should decline.
- It does not send anything. Read it before it leaves your outbox, every time, without exception.
The one thing that makes it fire reliably
Agencies ask for proposals in a dozen phrasings: a quote, a scope, an SOW, a pitch, a costing, "write up the Calder thing". If the skill's description names only the word proposal, most of those requests miss it and you go back to the blank page. Put the phrasings you actually use into the description. There is a full guide on writing a description that gets picked.
Works with Claude Code.
The Agency Owner pack
Fourteen skills for the work an agency repeats: briefs, proposals, weekly client reports, invoice follow-up, scope-creep checks. Written for the whole workflow rather than one document, tested every night, with the price and refund terms on the pack page.
See the pack