Follow one proposal from 'great call' to 'sent' and count the steps that involve actual selling. Someone digs through shared drives for the last proposal that resembled this deal. Copies it. Swaps the client name and hopes they caught every instance. Rewrites the scope section from memory of a call that happened four days ago. Messages a delivery lead to confirm estimates, then waits. Hunts for the current rate card, or asks the founder what this should cost, then formats, proofreads, and routes it for internal review.
Do your own math on it. If a proposal takes six hours of combined effort across the people who touch it, and your firm sends eight a month, price those hours at loaded cost. Then add the part no timesheet captures: the deal that stalled while the draft sat half-finished, and the senior person who spent Tuesday assembling a document instead of running the next call.
Almost none of this work is judgment. It's retrieval, transcription, and arithmetic — finding what you've already written, restating what the prospect already said, and applying prices you've already set. That is exactly the work software should be doing.