Proposals & Due Dates

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After this lesson you'll never be surprised by a proposal deadline, and you'll know how to signal when a deal's pricing is done.

Proposal deadlines are the hardest constraint on this desk. A stage can slip a week and recover; a bid submitted a day late is simply gone, along with everything the team spent pricing it. The system is built so that no deadline lives in anyone's memory — every one lives on the record, and the views sort by it. Your job is to feed the system two things honestly: the due date when a deal comes in, and the pricing complete signal when the numbers are done. Everything else follows.

Where deadlines live

Every opportunity has a proposal due date, and the working views sort by it — so deadlines are in front of you instead of relying on memory.

1. Open the view dropdown at the top of the Opportunities list.
2. Pick Proposal Pipeline — it's sorted by what's due.
3. Make that your landing spot each morning.

Proposal stage and priority

Alongside the due date, two fields tell the team what kind of deadline they are looking at:

• Proposal Stage — what the work actually is: RFP (inbound bid, scoping), Sales Lead (proactive outreach), BAFO (best and final offer requested), LOI (letter of intent received), or Existing Client Budget (renewal or expansion already budgeted).
• Priority — how it ranks this week: Priority 1 — RFP for the top of the stack, Best And Final when a BAFO is in flight, and Pricing Complete once the numbers are done.

A BAFO due Tuesday and a budget renewal due Tuesday are not the same Tuesday. Keeping these fields honest is what lets the proposal team triage the queue without calling every deal owner.

Marking pricing complete

When a deal's pricing is finished, the Pricing Complete field on the opportunity flips to done. That's the signal the proposal team watches — it moves the deal into the "ready" views so everyone knows it's cleared to go.

Here is the part worth knowing: most of the time, you do not set it by hand. When the Proposal Engine generates a one-pager for a deal, the deal is marked Pricing Complete automatically, stamped with the date. That is Universal CRM Push keeping the CRM in sync with the actual pricing work. Set it manually only when pricing was finished outside the normal generation flow — and never set it early to make a queue look healthier than it is.

The home base for proposal work

The Estimation & Proposals view mirrors the whole workflow — what's being scoped, what's priced, what's ready — with the columns the proposal team triages by: proposal stage, priority, due date, and pricing status. It's the daily base for the proposal side, and it's how the estimations team decides what to work next. (More on the flow itself in Estimation & Proposals.)

What good looks like

The bar before you move on: every deal you own that has proposal work in flight shows a due date, an honest proposal stage, and a pricing status that matches reality. Anyone — the proposal team, leadership, a teammate covering for you — can open the queue and know exactly where your deals stand without messaging you. That is what "the system carries the reminders" actually means: you did the ten seconds of data entry, and nobody ever has to chase you.

Now you try →

Open Proposal Pipeline, find the next proposal due, and on one deal that's ready, confirm pricing complete reflects reality.

👉 Open the CRM

Related lessons:

• Estimation & Proposals — the pricing flow these signals feed.
• Your Pipeline — the wider queue the due dates sort.
• Managing Your Deals — the status fields that travel with the deadline.