September 24, 2026

The Proposal Craft Question That Matters Most: Would This Only Make Sense to Them

Most editing questions about a proposal, is this the right tone, is this section too long, should the case study go earlier, are secondary to one blunt test that catches the most common failure.

The test itself

Read any paragraph in the proposal and ask: could this exact paragraph, unchanged, have been sent to a different company in the same industry without anyone noticing it was recycled? If yes, that paragraph is not doing the job a one-of-one proposal needs it to do, no matter how well written it is on its own terms.

Where this test usually fails first

The opening section and the firm-background section are the most common places a proposal fails this test, because they are the sections drafters are most likely to reuse wholesale from a previous proposal. The technical scope section usually passes, because it has to reflect the actual work, which naturally varies by engagement.

Applying the test without rewriting everything

The fix is not to make every sentence unique for its own sake, some structural and boilerplate language is fine to reuse. It is to make sure the sections that are supposed to demonstrate specific understanding of this prospect actually do, which usually means anchoring the opening and the firm-background framing to something true and specific about the prospect rather than leaving them generic.

Why this checklist item tends to stick when others do not

Checklist items phrased as broad principles, ensure the proposal is client-specific, are easy to check off without real scrutiny. A checklist item phrased as a specific, answerable yes-or-no question, like the one above, is harder to rubber-stamp, because it requires the reviewer to actually reread the two sections in question rather than relying on a general impression that the proposal seemed fine overall.

A short note on applying this same test to a firm's own website and pitch deck

The same could this have been sent to anyone test applies just as well to a firm's general marketing materials, not only to individual proposals. A homepage or capabilities deck that reads as though it could describe any firm in the category is making the same mistake at a larger scale, and is worth the same scrutiny.

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.

Making the test part of the standard review

Add one explicit question to the standard proposal review checklist: could the opening and firm-background sections have been sent to a different prospect without anyone noticing? Making this a required checklist item, rather than something a reviewer only thinks to check occasionally, is what keeps the discipline consistent across every proposal a firm sends, not just the ones a particularly careful reviewer happens to catch.

VIPMarketing Editorial