I’ve done quite a few proposals over the years. Some of them were for big sites, some were for small sites. Sometimes we’d win these proposals, and sometimes we wouldn’t.

One of the things I noticed is that longer proposals really didn’t do anything for us. Some of the proposals I created were quite long and drawn out, listing all sorts of information, reasons why the client should hire us, samples of our work, information about our team, and so on. Often at the end of presenting these proposals, I’d hear “Ok, thanks for that, we’ll have to think about it.” Of course this usually meant, “We don’t want to hire you, but we’d rather not say it to your face.” Hmm, nice.

Over the past few years, my proposals have been getting much shorter. Now they’ve gotten to the point of just a simple email, with a few sentences about how we’d do the project, along with pricing information. And you know what, we win more projects now than ever before. I’ve come to the conclusion that long proposals won’t win you any more contracts. I’d say 99% of the time, when a client contacts you, they already know whether they want to hire you or not. Usually they only want to know two things:

1) Can you make this project happen like I want?

2) What will it cost me?

If you can answer those, you’ll be well on your way to much simpler, more cost effective proposals.