5 Ways to Speed Up Your OOH Proposal Process

In the competitive world of advertising agencies, speed is a weapon. The "Speed to Lead" concept applies perfectly to OOH: the first agency to get a high-quality, visual, and accurate proposal to the client often controls the negotiation.

If you are taking 2-3 days to turn around a quote, you are leaving money on the table. Your competitor, who sent a digital link in 30 minutes, is already scheduling the follow-up call while you are still formatting PowerPoint slides.

Here are five actionable strategies to accelerate your workflow and turn your proposal process from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

1. Centralize Your Inventory (Stop the Vendor Chase)

The biggest time-suck in proposal creation is the "availability dance." You get a brief. You email 5 different media owners. You wait. You follow up. You get a PDF from one, an Excel sheet from another, and a WeTransfer link from a third. Then you spend hours normalizing this data.

The Fix: Maintain a centralized, real-time database of your core inventory. Even if you don't own the assets, use a system like AdGrid to store "virtual" inventory for your frequent vendors. Having specs, photos, and historical pricing pre-loaded means you can build 80% of the proposal before you even send that first availability check email.

2. Automate Photo Sheets

For decades, the "intern's job" at an agency was dragging and dropping JPEGs into PowerPoint slides to make photo sheets. It is low-value, high-effort work. It is also prone to errors—pasting the wrong photo next to the wrong map location is a classic mistake.

The Fix: Use tools that auto-generate photo sheets. In AdGrid, when you select 20 locations for a campaign, the system automatically pulls the primary "approach" photo for each one and generates a branded, formatted PDF or digital view. What took 4 hours now takes 4 seconds.

3. Use Interactive Maps Instead of Static PDFs

Static PDF maps are "dead" documents.

• Clients can't zoom in.
• They can't see what's around the board.
• They can't toggle between "Day" and "Night" views easily.

Sending a static map usually leads to a follow-up email from the client: "Can you confirm if this is near the Starbucks?"

The Fix: Send clients a link to an interactive map (like AdGrid's client portal). Let them explore the inventory dynamically. They can click a pin, see the street view, check the specs, and even "approve" or "reject" locations directly on the map. This eliminates the back-and-forth Q&A emails.

4. Pre-set Pricing Rules and Margins

Do your sales reps have to open a calculator for every single line item? "Okay, net cost is $1,500, we need a 15% margin, so that's... wait, did we agree on 20% for this client?"

Manual math slows you down and leads to inconsistent pricing.

The Fix: configure your pricing logic in your system. Set base rates for inventory. Set standard agency markups by client or by asset type. When a rep adds a billboard to a proposal, the "Client Price" should calculate automatically. This gives your team confidence to hit "Send" without needing a manager to double-check the math every time.

5. Kill the "Please Sign" Email Chain

The old way:

1. Export Proposal to PDF.
2. Email to Client.
3. Client prints it, signs it, scans it.
4. Client emails it back.

The new way: Digital acceptance.

The Fix: Use a system that allows for one-click digital approvals. AdGrid proposals include a "Book Campaign" or "Approve Selection" button. This reduces friction. The easier you make it for a client to say "Yes," the faster you close the deal.

Conclusion

Speed isn't just about working faster; it's about removing friction. By systematizing inventory, automating low-value tasks like formatting, and digitizing the approval process, you can reduce your proposal turnaround time by 90%.

AdGrid combines all these steps into one platform. What usually takes a team of three people two days can be done by one person in 20 minutes. That efficiency compounds over a year into massive growth.