You close a new client on the phone, hang up, and remember the proposal still has to be written. The work isn’t hard. Pricing it, describing every service so the number makes sense, and making the document look right takes the kind of focus you’d rather spend on billable work, so it waits.
Corey Walker, President of The Marketing Specialist and co-author of Instagram for Dummies, handed that job to a Claude Project. On this episode, she shows the whole setup: her handwritten call notes, the project instructions that hold her rates, the past proposals Claude uses as a reference, and the branded draft that comes back about two minutes later. She also shows where she still overrides Claude’s price, in both directions.
Once your rates and past work live in one project, a proposal starts from a few lines of notes. And because Claude writes out the full scope, it lists the work you would have forgotten to charge for, so the price you send covers the job you’ll actually do.
The short version
- Corey’s Claude Project keeps her rate card in the project instructions and recent proposals as context, so each new proposal starts from a short prompt with the client’s needs, her hourly rate, and an hour estimate.
- Claude returned a branded proposal in about two minutes, with scope of work, investment, what’s not included, payment terms, and next steps, including sections she never asked for.
- Because the scope comes back so detailed, Claude reminds her of billable work she hadn’t priced, such as setting up a Meta ad account for a client who doesn’t have one.
- Corey treats Claude’s price as a second opinion: she lowers it when she knows a small business’s budget or that she can do the work faster, and takes the hint when Claude shows she’s undercharging.
- She still waits about a day before sending a proposal she could send in minutes, so the client doesn’t think it was too easy.
- The same setup works for campaign briefs: list the sections every brief needs in the instructions and tell Claude to ask you when your prompt leaves one out.
Episode timestamps
00:00 Claude tells her to charge another hour
01:23 Proposals before Claude: a Canva template and a lot of dread
02:41 From one-off chats to a Claude Project
03:54 Why she’s showing screenshots, not live client work
04:24 Where every proposal starts: a spiral notebook or Zoom notes
05:09 Inside her social media proposal project
05:45 The prompt: client background, hourly rate, four hours
06:26 A branded draft in two minutes, then tweak or download
07:12 The sections Claude added without being asked
07:49 It’s not the work, it’s not wanting to do the work
08:06 When Claude says to charge another hour
09:51 Setting up the project: description and instructions
11:00 Uploading past proposals so Claude learns her wording
11:54 The first runs need tweaking: the logo she dropped
12:19 The same setup in ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot
13:23 When Claude’s price is too high for the client
14:08 When Claude shows she’s selling herself short
14:38 Why she still waits a day before she sends it
15:24 What went sideways: the brand bar that sized wrong
16:29 Using the same setup for campaign briefs
17:26 Tell Claude to ask when a section is missing
18:01 Workflow redesign, one process at a time
Before Claude: a Canva template and a lot of dread
Corey has run The Marketing Specialist for twenty years, and her old proposal process will sound familiar to anyone who freelances. She kept a designed template in Canva, copied the last proposal she’d sent, and wrote over it. When she finally sat down to do it, she says, it wasn’t a big deal. The cost was everything around it: thinking through pricing for anything a little different, writing a description for every line item to justify the number, and doing all of that instead of client work. In her words at 02:06: “I try to maximize my time and try to have as many hours as billable as possible.”
At 07:49, she names the real problem: “It’s not even the work itself, it’s thinking about not wanting to do the work that, you know, really takes a long time.”
Her first attempts with Claude were one-off chats. She’d prompt it to develop a proposal, copy the result into her Canva template, and fix it by hand. That saved some time. The bigger change came when she realized proposals were a repeatable process. Every client has different needs, but if Claude knows her hourly rate, what she usually charges for each service, and what her past proposals look like, it can draft and format the whole thing for her.
The setup: one project, instructions and past proposals
Corey walks through the build at 09:51. In Claude, open Projects in the left sidebar, click the plus sign, name the project and describe what it’s for. Her example description is deliberately loose: “This is a proposal for prospective clients. I want to be able to give them a detailed price on all of the services.” She says it doesn’t have to be thought out in detail.
The detail goes in the project instructions. That’s where Corey writes her rate card in plain sentences: what she charges per hour, what she generally charges if a client wants three posts a week, what she charges for a Mailchimp campaign. Claude prices every new proposal from those rules.
The third piece is context. Corey uploads her most recent proposals, the ones that reflect her current rates, so Claude can see her branding and how she words each service. It now knows her colors, her fonts, and the cover page she usually uses.
Mike points out that none of this is Claude-specific. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot all have a projects or notebooks feature with an instructions field and a place to upload documents, under slightly different names. If your rates change often, he suggests connecting an external source such as a Google Doc or a Notion page so you can update the information in one place.
One note on what you see in the episode: Corey shows edited screenshots of her Claude Project rather than a live session, to keep her clients anonymous.
From a spiral notebook to a branded draft in two minutes
Every proposal starts with notes from the sales call. For Zoom calls, she lets the Zoom note taker handle it. For phone calls, she still uses a spiral notebook and jots down what the client needs.
Her prompt for the example on screen is short. The client already has a CRM and an established Mailchimp account with three emails written. They need the CRM connected to Mailchimp through Zapier and the automation built. Then the instruction: “Based on my hourly rate and my estimated four hours to complete this task, please create a proposal.”
Claude took about two minutes. The proposal appears as a preview on the right side of the Claude window. From there, Corey has two paths. She can keep adjusting in the chat (“can you up the charge on this?”) and then ask for a ready-to-go PDF, or download it as a Word document, make her edits there, and save it as a PDF herself.
What came back went beyond what she typed. Claude wrote the scope of work, the investment, how the integration would work, what’s not included, her payment terms, and the next steps. She never told it what to exclude. It worked that out from the scope.
Let Claude argue with your price
Because Claude writes out the scope in so much detail, it catches the tasks Corey hadn’t thought through. At 08:06 she describes it: “it’ll remind me, like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re gonna have to do that part, and that part’s a real pain, and you should really be charging another hour for that.'” Her example is a Facebook and Instagram ads job where the client doesn’t have an ad account yet, which means setting one up in what she calls “another load of time and horror that is Meta Business Suite.” That’s an hour she would otherwise have done for free.
Claude doesn’t always get the number right. Mike asked about a job Claude priced at $3,500 that Corey would normally quote at $1,500. Her answer at 13:23 is about what Claude can’t know. Many of her clients are small business owners, and she knows $3,500 isn’t in their budget for that project. She also knows she can do the work quickly: “Something that might take someone three hours, I could do in an hour.” So she backs the price off.
Other times the gap runs the other way. “I should be charging more,” she says at 14:08. “Like, why am I selling myself short?” Mike’s takeaway is that Claude needs something to go by. If you’ve been winging your pricing, the project instructions are a good reason to write down the rules you actually follow.
Why she still waits a day to send it
A proposal that takes minutes to produce still doesn’t go out in minutes. At 14:38, Corey explains why: “It’s really just to give the perception that it wasn’t as easy as it was.” If a client gets a proposal 15 minutes after the call, they’ll either assume she isn’t busy or that the work was too easy. So she sends it the next day.
Mike’s point is the other side of that. Before, the reply depended on procrastination or a day of back-to-back meetings. Now a proposal can go out within a day because Claude does the heavy lifting, and the same is true of briefs, reports, or any document you produce on a regular schedule.
What went sideways
The setup took some iteration. Most of it, Corey says, was making sure she gave Claude enough information up front to price correctly. The branding took longer. Claude didn’t handle her logo well and put a question mark where it should have been, so she dropped the logo and had Claude write out the name The Marketing Specialist instead. Her pink and brown brand bar also came out sized wrong, and it took a few rounds of telling Claude “that’s not normal” before it got it right. Since then, she says, it seems to be retaining the corrections.
The same setup works for campaign briefs
Most social media managers don’t write client proposals. Plenty of them write campaign pitches and briefs for a boss or a team. Corey’s advice at 16:29 is to build those the same way: upload your previous briefs, and use the instructions to spell out what never changes. Every brief has a due date. Every brief has the same set of components. Then tell Claude to wait for your prompt for the project-specific details.
She adds one rule worth copying. If your creative brief always has the same ten sections, say so in the instructions, and add: “if I don’t give you that in my prompt, ask me where it is.” Claude then checks your input against the template and asks questions like “Why is there no date range?” before it drafts anything.
Corey is already using Claude for contract language and plans to turn that into a project next. Mike calls this workflow redesign, one process at a time: start with a document you produce often, work out how AI helps, then move to the next one. After proposals and contracts, that might be monthly reports or audits.
Grab the Episode 12 Blueprint
The Proposal Writer Project Kit: the project description, an instructions template for your rate card and payment terms, what to upload as context, and the short per-client prompt Corey uses. Download it here.
CONNECT WITH COREY WALKER
Full transcript
Corey Walker: It’ll remind me, like, ” Oh yeah, you’re gonna have to do that part, and that part’s a real pain, and you should really be charging another hour for that ’cause it’s gonna take another hour,” so it does, it does catch me and help me really capture all of the hours and charge appropriately.
Mike Allton: Welcome back to The Lab. I’m Mike Allton. Claude drafts proposals in minutes, but it can’t read a client. Today, Corey Walker, president of The Marketing Specialist, shows us her Claude proposal workflow. She still sets the final price herself. Hey Corey, welcome to the show!
Corey Walker: How are you?
Mike Allton: I’m doing fantastic. So excited to dive into this with you. You’re someone I’ve been following and reading for years with all your books on social media marketing and Instagram marketing. It’s fantastic. But Corey, you also do client work. So you close a new client, you’re excited, and then it hits you: “Now I’ve got to write the proposal.” You told me that used to eat up about three hours of your life, mostly just dreading it. What did that look like before Claude?
Proposals Before Claude
Corey Walker: Yeah. So, I mean, before, I would hang up the phone and think, “Okay, great. They want a proposal. Ugh, now I have to go create the proposal.” And I would procrastinate a bit, and then I used to have it all set up within Canva, so I had, you know, a nicely designed one. And a lot of the time, I would just take one that I had done previously and just, you know, edit it and write over it.
So when I’d finally knock it out, it wasn’t a big deal. But yeah, I still had to think it through, think through the pricing if it was something a little bit different, think through… You know, I would usually have a description of what each thing was to kind of justify what that price was.
And yeah, all that took more brain power doing something that I could’ve been already doing for another client, so it’s like taking that amount of time that I could be charging someone and not charging someone. So I try to maximize my time and try to have as many hours as billable as possible.
Mike Allton: A lot of people, I think, you know, Corey, like you’re talking about, would just take a proposal template and call it a day. What made you hand this over to Claude instead?
Corey Walker: No…
Mike Allton: Okay then.
Corey Walker: So I had been doing some work within Claude and asking it to do some of this for me, kind of on a more manual basis, putting in a prompt and saying, “Can you develop this for me?” And then maybe still, you know, copying and pasting it over into Canva so it looked like my template, and still having to do some manipulation to it.
But it was saving me some time just with some of the work. So that’s where I kind of started, like, “Okay, what can I do in Claude to get the ball rolling and save me time?” So then after I talked to you, you’re like, “Oh, have you built a project for that?” And I said, “No. What’s that?” I realized, oh, yeah, this is a very easy, repeatable process.
Even though it’s a different client and they might have different needs from me, if I can put in enough information about, you know, my hourly rate and what I usually charge for this and that, and give it some examples of previous proposals, then it can do it all for me and format it, and all that jazz, and it will be painless and easy.
Mike Allton: And what she’s done, I’m just going to preface another thing: she’s not going to show us actual Claude. She’s taken screenshots and edited them a little bit just so she can protect the anonymity of her clients, which I’m sure we can all understand. But this is a process that she’s actually doing in Claude, which would work in Gemini or ChatGPT or even Copilot. All four of these systems have either notebooks or projects, which function largely the same way.
Where Every Proposal Starts
Mike Allton: So Corey, where does it start for you?
Corey Walker: Okay, so this was a phone call. A lot of times, for an incoming new client proposal or call, it will be Zoom. In that case, I’ll let the Zoom note-taker take my notes. But if it’s on the phone, I am still very old-fashioned: I have my spiral notebook, and I just jot down things.
So these are my very scribbled notes of what we talked about, mostly just what they need and what they need a proposal on. Basically, it’s just my quick jotting down of what they need. So that’s what I’m going off of, right?
I’m going to show you how I set up the project at the end, but this is after I’ve already set up Claude to know how to do a proposal for me.
Taking those notes that I wrote, you’ll see I have this social media proposal project all set up. It’s going off of some instructions that I put in here, and then—you don’t see the full context here—down here I had uploaded some previous proposals that I had done, to show both what it should look like from a branding perspective and just to get an idea of the language that I use, the descriptions for different services, pricing, all of that.
So it has information about what’s going on. Once I have my notes, I’ll put them in here. This project was a new proposal for a company that already has a CRM and an established MailChimp with three emails already created. They need help connecting the CRM through Zapier to MailChimp and doing the automation.
So I was giving it that background information and then, based on my hourly rate and my estimated four hours to complete this task, asking it to please create a proposal. With that, it took about two minutes, and then it came out with this, okay?
I can preview it on the right-hand side within Claude and look at it. If there are things that I want it to tweak directly in Claude, I can say, “Oh, actually, can you up the charge on this?” or this or that. If I want to do all of that in Claude and then say, “Okay, output this as a ready-to-go PDF,” it will do that for me. Or if I feel like there’s enough that I just want to manually edit, I will download it in Word, do the updates, and then save it as a PDF.
It already knows my colors, the fonts that I wanted to use, and the typical cover page that I use. Then it wrote all the stuff based on… you saw what I put in there; it was very brief. It came up with the scope of work, the investment, how it’s going to integrate, and what’s not included—even though I didn’t tell it what’s not included, it just listed all of that. Then it also threw in what my payment terms were and the next steps.
I think that’s pretty cool, and that saves me so much, not only work time, but also mental overwhelm.
Catching the Hours You Forgot to Bill
Corey Walker: I would say. And it’s funny—a lot of times with me, and probably with a lot of freelancers and entrepreneurs, it’s not even the work itself, but thinking about not wanting to do the work that really takes a long time.
This saves me a ton of time. It’s very accurate. It’s probably more thorough than what I would have created. The other thing that’s cool is sometimes, because it’s so thorough in the scope, it’ll remind me, like, “Oh yeah, you’re going to have to do that part, and that part’s a real pain, and you should really be charging another hour for that because it’s going to take another hour,” that I hadn’t really noodled through.
So that’s another thing: often I will end up changing it because I realize, say it’s like Facebook and Instagram ads, “Oh yeah, I got to set up their ad account because they don’t have an ad account,” and that’s another load of time and horror that is Meta Business Suite. So it does catch me and help me really capture all of the hours and charge appropriately.
Mike Allton: I also think it helps a lot of people reply back to the prospect in a far more timely manner than when we normally procrastinate. Or worse—maybe not worse, but in a different scenario—if you’re not even procrastinating, but maybe you’ve got back-to-back-to-back meetings in a day. You wouldn’t normally be able to get back to somebody until late tonight, maybe tomorrow or a day later.
Now, if AI is doing most of the heavy lifting, you can get these proposals out in a timely fashion. And again, maybe it’s not proposals; maybe it’s briefs, maybe it’s comprehensive reports. Whatever it is that you need to do on a regular basis, the AI can help you do that at a much faster rate.
But obviously Claude needs to know what you charge, right? And what the client actually wants. So show us how you tell it that. Are you typing in that fresh every time, or do you have that set up somewhere where Claude already…
Setting Up the Proposal Project
Mike Allton: …knows?
Corey Walker: When you go into Claude—and I’m assuming other AI platforms are going to be similar—on the left-hand side, there is an area and a link for “Projects,” and then there’s a little plus sign. Once you click that, you are creating a new project.
You can name your project whatever you want, and then describe the goal of what you’re trying to achieve. You might say, “This is a proposal for prospective clients. I want to be able to give them a detailed price on all of the services, and I will give you a description of that.”
This can be pretty vague; it doesn’t have to be super thought out. Then you hit “Create Project,” and this is where I give it a lot more detail. This is where I would say, “I charge X per hour for this. If they want three posts a week, I generally charge this. If they want a MailChimp campaign, I charge this.” So it has a good set of what my service fees are already in here.
Once I have those instructions set, it goes off of that. There’s another area called “Context,” and this is where you can add extra reference materials. For this project, I would put in a bunch of older, recent proposals that reflect my current rates and everything so that it can see the branding. It can see how I word things, and it references that.
That is really all I’m sharing with it. Then, of course, when I put in the message for the specific client that I showed you in the beginning, that’s all it’s going off of. It’s pretty darn good at figuring it out, and if it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can tell it, “No, I really think it should be this,” and it will fix it.
The first couple of times you use it, you are going to have to do a little tweaking. For instance, it doesn’t like my logo for some reason, so I just ditched the logo and have it write out “The Marketing Specialist.” There are little things that you are going to have to deal with in the beginning, but usually once you get it to the place you want it to be, it’s good.
Mike Allton: If you’re not a Claude user—whether you’re in ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini—they all have a notebook or project feature; they just call them different things. They all have an instructions field and a field where you can upload documents.
For instance, if you’re in Copilot right now, you’d look in the upper right-hand corner where there are three dots, and that’s where you would find instructions and be able to paste that in. Just look around, give yourself some patience, and you will find that feature inside projects or notebooks.
The other thing you can do, depending on your model, is connect an external source of information like Google Docs or Notion. If this is the kind of information that changes on a regular basis, you can store it somewhere external where it’s easier for you to control and edit, and easier for the AI to reference.
When Claude’s Price Is Wrong
Mike Allton: But you mentioned something interesting when we chatted earlier. You said Claude priced a job at $3,500 that you would normally quote at $1,500. Now, maybe Claude is right, and you should be charging more, but you know that client. You need to consider what you know that Claude does not.
Corey Walker: Sometimes I feel like Claude (and this is what I was talking about tweaking in the beginning). Sometimes I work with small business owners, and I just know $3,500 is not in their budget for this project. I also know that I can do it very quickly because I know what I am doing. It is something that might take someone three hours, but I could do it in an hour. Sometimes I have to go back in and say that is higher than I think this person would go, so I have to back it off a little. On the other hand, sometimes I do look at it and think I should be charging more.
Mike Allton: Claude needs something to go by, and if we are just winging it all the time, we are going to have to be a little introspective for a moment and come up with some rules of our own that we should probably abide by most of the time.
Why She Waits a Day
Mike Allton: But here is the part I love. The proposal you said just takes you minutes now, but you still wait a full day before you send it. Why is that?
Corey Walker: It is really just to give the perception that it was not as easy as it was. It is one of those sales things. If I talk to you and fifteen minutes later you get a proposal, either you are not busy doing anything else, or that was just way too easy. So it is just kind of like I am a busy person doing lots of things. I cannot always be available right away. That is my philosophy on that.
Mike Allton: But let us be honest, it is not all smooth. What went sideways for you along the way as you were building this up? A draft maybe that Claude got really wrong, or something you tried and dropped?
Corey Walker: Most of it was just tweaking it to make sure I was giving it enough information from the start to price it correctly. One thing it did when it was first doing the branding, for some reason, it was not sizing correctly. I have a bar of pink and brown, and it was just sized weird. So I had to work with it and say that is not normal, going through a few iterations of that. But it fixed it fairly quickly and learned, so now it does not give me a question mark where my logo is supposed to be because I just replaced it with text, and now it sizes it correctly and is retaining its information.
Using the Setup for Campaign Briefs
Mike Allton: That is awesome. A lot of the folks watching maybe do not do client proposals, but they might be writing campaign pitches or briefs for their boss or their team all the time. How do you think they could take what we have talked about, what you have shown them today, and use it for those kinds of activities?
Corey Walker: If you have a brief, one thing that you could be doing is putting all of your previous briefs in there. In the instructions part, you can give it specifics, like this is always going to be this way. It is always going to have a due date and these components to it. Then you could say something like wait for my instructions in the prompt to give you exact information on the project. It can handle the branding, the font, and format it for you.
I have been using Claude to do my contracts and to come up with the language, but I do not have it set up as a project yet. That is going to be my next thing to do. It is really anything where you have a document with a similar setup. Maybe your creative brief always has these ten things in it. No matter what the client is, it is always going to have those ten items. You can tell it that and say that we are always going to have these ten things, and if I do not give you that in my prompt, ask me where it is. It can check back with you, asking why there is no date range when the campaign is running. Definitely, you could do that for a campaign brief.
Mike Allton: I could not agree more. What you are really illustrating for everybody is workflow redesign one step at a time, one process at a time. You start with something you are doing today that you have to do often, repeatedly, and regularly. You work with the AI, figure out how it can help you, and then take what you learn there and move to the next step. You went from proposals to contracts, and then you might work on deliverables that you regularly give clients, like monthly reports and audits. Corey, this has been fantastic. I loved what you showed us today. Thank you. Where can people reach out to learn more?
Corey Walker: They can go to my website at themarketingspecialist.com, or they can email me directly at corey@themarketingspecialist.com. I get back to people right away, and I am happy to answer questions.
Mike Allton: Thank you, Corey. We will have all of her links down in the show notes below. That is a wrap for today’s lab session.
