InDesign: The Recipe for Disaster That’s Costing You Deals

Let me ask you a question: how many deals have you lost because you were too slow to act? If you’re using InDesign to create business proposals, I bet it’s more than you realize.

While you're busy tinkering with layouts, picking fonts, and aligning elements just right, your competitors are already halfway to closing the deal. You're left scratching your head, wondering why your design masterpiece isn't getting you results.

Here's why: clients don't care about perfect. They care about fast, clear, and easy.

InDesign isn't helping you win deals

Don't get me wrong. InDesign is a great tool - for designers. It's perfect for creating brochures, posters, magazines. But you're not creating any of those.

You're creating a business proposal. A document designed to say, “Here’s how I’ll solve your problem. Here’s how much it’ll cost. Let’s get started.”

Proposals aren’t about showing off your design skills. They’re about speed, persuasion, and getting in front of the client with a clear, compelling offer before your competitors do.

InDesign isn’t built for that. It’s slow, manual, and downright unforgiving when you’re under pressure. And the more time you spend fiddling with it, the more opportunities you’re leaving on the table for someone else to snatch up.

The time trap

In sales, time is everything. Clients are busy, impatient, and surrounded by options. If you’re not the first to deliver a polished, personalized proposal, you might as well not bother.

InDesign eats time for breakfast. Need to update your pricing? That's 30 minutes gone manually redoing the table. Want to customize the proposal for a specific client? Better block off your afternoon. Need to make changes across multiple proposals? That’s an entire day of tweaking text boxes, realigning pages, and re-exporting files.

While you’re stuck in InDesign, your competitor is already following up on their proposal. How? They're using a tool made for the job.

Proposal software takes those hours of work and turns them into minutes. Updating pricing across multiple proposals? One change to your database, and it’s done. Customizing a proposal for a new client? Just add merge tags, and their data auto-populates. Need to reuse a section? Simply pull it in from the Content Library in two clicks, no copying or pasting required.

Going in blind

Here’s one of the biggest problems with InDesign: once you hit send, you’re flying blind. You have no idea if the client opened your proposal, how long they spent reading it, or whether they’re even considering your offer. It's like throwing a beautifully designed paper airplane into the wind and hoping it lands where you want it.

With modern proposal software, you're never left wondering. It tracks every interaction, letting you know exactly when the client received, opened, read, downloaded, or forwarded the proposal. You also see how much time they've spent on each section and which order they read them in. Thanks to this insight, you can follow up with confidence, address any concerns, and move the deal forward.

All that work, and for what?

Creating a business proposal in InDesign is a painfully manual process. Even if you have a template, you're in for hours of text tweaking, layout adjusting, pricing table cell redoing, and ensuring everything still aligns perfectly.

Adding or removing sections means reorganizing the entire layout. You have to adjust margins, fix content flow issues, and tweak images - all by hand.

The end result of the hours of work you've put in? A lifeless, static PDF that does nothing to engage the client.

Meanwhile, your competitors are using proposal software to deliver dynamic proposals that clients can interact with. They're creating business documents that come with great customer experiences.

Instead of just images, they also use video. Their pricing tables are interactive, giving clients options to check off and making it easy to upsell. Their proposals are web-based and look great on any screen. They're easy to accept and come with built-in eSignatures.

Guess who the clients are choosing?

Want collaboration? Good luck.

Once your business grows, proposals stop being a one-person job. If you're still using InDesign at that point, get ready for trouble.

Need input from your team? They'll need their own expensive licenses and hours of training just to help you out. And even then, you can't work on the same proposal at the same time.

The closest to real-time collaboration you'll get with InDesign is emailing files back and forth. Or, you can divvy up sections, then combine them into one final PDF.

On top of the slow, manual process of updating InDesign files, now you've also got version control nightmares. As your team grows and the number of proposals you need to produce increases, InDesign becomes a limitation, not an asset.

On the other hand, proposal software lets your team work on the same document at the same time, from anywhere. You don't have to worry about version control, formatting inconsistencies, or wait around for someone to do their part. Everyone contributes quickly, makes updates in real time, and your deals are easy to keep on track.

The real cost of InDesign

You might think, “But InDesign saves me money. Why pay for software when I already have a tool that works?”

The reality is, InDesign is costing you much more than you realize. You're sacrificing speed, efficiency, and putting your business at a disadvantage.

Every minute you waste on perfecting your design is a minute your competitor spends building relationships with clients. They're tracking client engagement and following up at the right time, leading to faster wins and more revenue.

Proposal software is an investment that pays for itself. It saves time, reduces mistakes, and helps you deliver faster, smarter, and more personalized proposals. In the end, the money you think you're saving is nothing compared to the deals you're losing.

Stop fiddling, start winning

The choice is simple. You can keep fiddling with InDesign and keep losing deals to people who know better. Or, you can stop chasing perfection and start closing deals.

The next time you open InDesign to start a proposal, ask yourself: "Am I designing to impress myself, or am I selling to the client?" Then close it right back up and start using the right tool for the job.