The Proposal That Waited a Week for One Sentence

A sales rep had a proposal ready to go Monday morning — client was ready, timeline was tight, deal was basically done. It sat until the following Monday because company policy required the owner to personally review and tweak the wording on every outbound proposal before it went out, and he'd been at a conference all week.

The client didn't wait around wondering. They just assumed the slow response meant the company wasn't that interested, and quietly kept talking to someone else.

The owner wasn't trying to create a bottleneck. He just built the habit years ago, when there were three proposals a month instead of thirty, and never noticed the habit had outgrown the business.

Is there a step in your sales process that only moves at your speed — and has your speed kept up with how fast the business needs to move now?