November 7, 2026

Proposal writer’s block?

If you sit down to write a proposal and end up staring at a blinking cursor for hours, the problem isn’t that you’re bad at writing proposals.

The problem is you did a bad job in the sales interview.

To write a killer proposal (and fast), you need to know where your client is and where they want to go.

If you don’t know those two things, it’s no surprise you don’t know what to write.

So what do you do instead?

You make a big list of best practices and activities you will undertake on the client’s behalf in an attempt to justify the amount of money you want to charge.

Then you cross your fingers and hope that the client will somehow connect the dots between your list of activities and the outcome they secretly want.

But your client isn’t an expert at whatever you do. If they were, they wouldn’t be talking to you in the first place.

So, almost by definition, there’s little chance they can connect the dots between what you do and what they want.

Sensing subconsciously that the proposal isn’t going to be very persuasive, you decide to present it to them live, hoping that personality, persuasion, and “the personal touch” will convince the client to trust you enough to make a leap of faith over the massive gray area that the proposal fails to bridge.

Here’s the thing...

No amount of live presentation skills can truly make up for questions you failed to ask in the sales interview.

So if you’re having a hard time writing proposals, you probably need to learn how to have better sales interviews.

Once you do, your proposals will almost write themselves.

Yours,

—J

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