Draft proposals from your own language

Every proposal you send is mostly a proposal you have already sent. The scoping, the pricing shape, the terms, the way you describe how you work: that is settled language, and rewriting it each time is how a two-hour job becomes a half-day one.

The trap is asking a model to write you a proposal. What comes back is a proposal, in the sense that it is a document with the right headings, written by someone who has never met your business.

Put your real templates in Documents

Upload the proposals you have actually sent and won. Not a sanitised template: the real ones, with your pricing language and your caveats in them.

Two or three is enough. What you are giving the employee is not a form to fill in, it is evidence of how you write when it matters.

Say what changes and what never changes

This is the instruction that separates a useful draft from a generic one.

Draft a proposal for Halcyon Health using our existing proposals in
Documents as the reference.

What changes: the client, the scope, and the numbers. I will give you
those.

What does not change: how we describe our process, our payment terms, our
caveats about scope creep, and the way we talk about ourselves. Use our
existing language for those, near enough word for word.

Scope: brand identity and a campaign for their Q1 launch, three months,
starting February.

Where you need a number I have not given you, leave it as [TBC] rather
than inventing one. Do not invent a case study, a client name, or a
statistic.

The last two sentences are the ones that matter. A drafted proposal that quietly invents a plausible number is worse than a blank page, because it reads as finished and the number survives into a document a client signs. A visible [TBC] costs you thirty seconds. An invented figure can cost you the engagement.

Read the parts you did not dictate

You will skim the scope, because you wrote it. Read the terms instead, which is where borrowed language drifts, and read anything numeric.

Then make it a standing job

Once the shape is right, it becomes a request rather than a project: "draft the proposal for the Northwind retainer, three months, same terms as Acme."

If you take proposal requests through a form or an inbox, a scheduled job can watch for them and produce a first draft before you have read the request.

What good looks like

You start from ninety percent of a document written in your own voice, and spend your time on the ten percent that is actually this client's.

The failure to watch for is homogenisation: after a dozen of these, every proposal reads identically, including the parts that should have been argued freshly. If that starts happening, it is a sign the scope section is being borrowed when it should be written.