April 12, 2024

Where the Hours Go Between First Draft and Final Send

Most proposals are not slow because the writing is hard. They are slow because a draft sits in someone's inbox between each round of comments.

Count the rounds before you fix them

Pick the last five proposals your firm sent and write down how many times each draft changed hands. Include the partner, the subject-matter reviewer, the manager who checks the fee page and whoever formats the final file. Most teams find the number is higher than they assumed, and that no one owns it.

This is a counting exercise, not a study. A rough planning assumption is that each handoff adds at least a day of elapsed time when people are busy, even if the actual reading takes twenty minutes. Your own count will be more useful than any figure from outside.

The wait is bigger than the work

Elapsed time and effort are different things. A reviewer may spend half an hour on a draft and still hold it for three days because client work came first. From the proposal's point of view, all three days are lost.

That is why speeding up the drafting step rarely changes the calendar. If the draft takes an hour instead of a day but still waits in the same queue, the deadline feels the same. The queue is the target.

Comments that contradict each other

Two reviewers reading the same page in parallel will often ask for opposite changes. One wants the scope shorter, the other wants more detail on method. Someone then has to referee, and that referee is usually the person with the least time.

Decide in advance who has final say on each part of a proposal. Scope belongs to the engagement lead. Fees belong to whoever signs the engagement letter. Tone belongs to one named editor. Ambiguity about authority is a quiet source of extra rounds.

Give each reviewer a narrower job

Asking a partner to review a whole proposal invites a rewrite. Asking the same partner to confirm three things, the scope, the fee range and the named team, takes ten minutes and produces a clear yes or a clear correction.

Write the review request as a short list of questions. Attach the full draft for reference, but make it plain what you need back. Reviewers tend to answer the question they are asked.

Fix known answers upstream

A large share of review comments repeat. The same firm description gets softened, the same credential gets reworded, the same sentence about methodology gets clarified. Each time it is fixed in one proposal and left broken in the next.

Keep a short log of recurring comments for a month. Every item that shows up twice belongs in an approved source paragraph, so the correction is made once and inherited by every later draft.

What automation can and cannot do

Software can assemble a first draft from approved material, flag missing sections and route the file to the right reviewer with a due date. That removes some of the waiting, since nobody has to remember to forward the file.

It cannot decide what the client needs or whether the fee is right. Those judgments stay with people. The gain comes from fewer idle days and fewer avoidable comments, not from removing the review.

Start with one change, not five

Once you have counted the rounds and named the waiting points, resist the urge to fix everything together. Choose the single change most likely to remove a day from the typical proposal, such as a fixed weekly review slot or a shorter reviewer question list, and run it for a month.

Then look at the same count again. If the number of handoffs or the elapsed days moved, keep the change and pick the next one. If nothing moved, you have learned something cheaply, and no one has been asked to adopt a large new routine on faith.

VIPMarketing Editorial