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.

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.

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.

Where this leaves a firm

None of this is complicated in principle, which is exactly why it gets skipped under deadline pressure. The question worth returning to before treating writing a proposal that is genuinely specific to one prospect as settled is what a careful reader would actually notice if the firm got it right. On the point raised above under “the test itself,” the answer is usually specific rather than clever: ask whether any given paragraph could pass unnoticed if sent to a different prospect. Firms that build this expectation into how they train new associates find it easier to sustain once experienced staff move on, because the standard lives in a documented habit rather than in one person's memory. The gap between a firm that talks about writing a proposal that is genuinely specific to one prospect and a firm that actually practices it shows up over several quarters, not in any single engagement, and it tends to show up most clearly in the small, unglamorous checks that a client never sees directly but benefits from anyway.

It also helps to name, plainly, who is responsible for keeping this working once the novelty of a new tool wears off. Someone should own the point raised under “where this test usually fails first,” check it periodically rather than assume it stays true on its own, and be the person a colleague asks when a new situation does not fit the pattern described here. Put simply: anchor the opening and firm-background framing to something true and specific about the actual prospect. That kind of ownership, named and specific, is a small addition to a firm's process, and it is usually the difference between a good idea that is followed for a month and a standard that actually holds up over a year of real client work.

None of this needs to be elaborate to be effective. A short, dated note in a shared file, reviewed at the next quarterly check-in, is usually enough to keep the responsibility from quietly disappearing when the person who first cared about it moves on to something else.

VIPMarketing Editorial