January 24, 2025

What a Decision-Maker Is Actually Reading a Proposal For

Most proposals are written to sound impressive to the person writing them. A decision-maker reading the proposal is checking for something narrower and more specific.

What a decision-maker is actually scanning for

Does this firm understand our specific situation, not situations in general? Is the scope of work clear enough that a surprise invoice is unlikely? Is the team named, with real experience relevant to this specific problem, rather than a generic bio page? Those three questions get answered or not within the first few pages, and the rest of the proposal is read through that initial impression.

Why generic praise reads as a red flag, not a compliment

A proposal that opens with broad claims about the firm's excellence, without anchoring to the specific company's actual situation, signals that the same document could have gone to any prospect. That is close to the worst first impression a proposal can make with someone who is deciding whether this firm actually looked at their company.

What actually builds confidence

A specific reference to the prospect's own recent situation, drawn honestly from public information, not overstated, paired with a clear, itemized scope and a named team with directly relevant experience does more to build confidence than any amount of persuasive language about the firm in general.

Where a firm's own past work fits in

The fastest way to make that specific reference credible is to pull from a firm's own prior decks and results rather than writing generic claims from scratch. A proposal built from an actual past engagement, with the client's permission to reference it, reads as evidence rather than assertion.

A short before-and-after worth keeping on file

Keep one real example on hand, an opening paragraph before it was anchored to a specific fact about the prospect, and the same paragraph after, to show new team members concretely what specific means in practice. Abstract guidance about writing for the decision-maker is harder to apply consistently than a single clear example that shows the actual difference in the finished sentence.

A short training exercise built around this test

Give new team members two versions of the same opening paragraph, one generic, one anchored to a specific fact, without telling them which is which, and ask them to identify which would more likely get a response and why. This short exercise, repeated with a few different examples, builds the pattern-recognition faster than a general instruction to be specific, which tends to be too abstract to change actual drafting behavior on its own.

A short note on where this specific research should live afterward

The specific fact that anchored a winning proposal's opening is worth keeping on file against that account for future use, a follow-up proposal, a renewal conversation, rather than treating it as disposable once the current pitch is sent. A firm that keeps this kind of detail organized by account builds a compounding advantage over one that starts from a blank page each time.

A short note on the relationship between proposal quality and win rate over time

A single well-crafted proposal rarely explains a meaningful shift in a firm's overall win rate, since any one outcome is influenced by many factors outside the document itself. The more reliable signal comes from tracking a consistent standard, the swap test, the scope-and-assumptions discipline, applied across dozens of proposals over a year, and watching whether the aggregate win rate moves, rather than judging the standard by any single deal.

This longer view also protects a firm from overreacting to a single loss on an otherwise well-built proposal, since some prospects were never winnable on price or fit regardless of how the document was written, and a good process should be judged on its aggregate results, not on any one outcome it could not have controlled.

A final word on what separates a good proposal process from a good proposal

Any individual proposal can be improved with enough time and attention from a skilled writer. What is harder, and more valuable, is a process that reliably produces a good proposal under normal time pressure, for the tenth prospect of the month as well as the first. The tests and checklists described throughout this piece exist for that reason, to make the tenth proposal as sound as the first one, not to make any single document perfect.

VIPMarketing Editorial