I used to be good at proposals. That was the problem.
Writing a real one takes most of a week. You read everything the company has published. You sit with the people who do the actual work. You find the thing nobody has said out loud yet, and you write the plan that follows from it. That plan is the work. It is the most valuable thing I produce in any given month. And the convention in this industry is that I hand it to someone who has not yet decided to buy anything, for free, and then ask to be paid for the part that comes after.
I stopped doing that. Not out of principle. Out of arithmetic.
The thesis
A proposal was never a document. It was a costly signal. Thirty three hours of senior attention that could not be faked was the proof that you had understood the problem, and the buyer read the effort, not the pages. Generative AI made that effort cheap to counterfeit. A signal that is cheap to counterfeit carries no information. So the proposal still exists, it still gets written, and it no longer tells the buyer anything.
The arithmetic that made me stop
Loopio published its sixth annual RFP Response Trends and Benchmarks Report on 11 March 2026, from 1,533 response management professionals across more than seventeen industries. Read the numbers next to each other rather than one at a time.
The average organisation submitted 166 RFPs last year, up from 153. The average response took 33 hours, down from 35. Nearly 80% of teams used generative AI during 2025, ten percentage points more than the year before, and 62% used it to write specific answers.
So: 153 responses at 35 hours is 5,355 hours. 166 responses at 33 hours is 5,478 hours. The technology cut the unit cost of a proposal by 5.7% and the volume went up 8.5%. The total time these teams spent writing proposals did not fall. It rose by 123 hours.
That is Jevons paradox running inside a sales organisation. Make a thing cheaper to produce and you produce more of it, and the saving never reaches the P&L.
Now put the win rate on top. Loopio’s benchmark average across 2019 to 2026 is 45%. The current figure is 39%. Adoption of the tool that was supposed to help crossed 80% in the same window that the hit rate fell six points below its own seven year average.
Take the 61% that lose. That is 3,341 hours a year, in one company, producing documents nobody bought. At a 1,950 hour working year it is 1.7 full time people whose entire job is losing. Half of these teams already name bandwidth as their number one problem, which is the correct diagnosis of the wrong system.
What replaces it
The rule is one line. If the problem is already agreed in writing, I will quote a fixed scope for the first block of work. If it is not agreed, the diagnosis is the engagement, it is priced, it runs two weeks, and it ends with a document the buyer owns whether or not they ever hire me again. If they will not pay for the diagnosis, I decline the delivery, because a buyer who will not fund two weeks of thinking will not fund six months of change.
This is not a pricing trick. It changes who is holding the risk. A proposal asks a room to commit to a large decision on the strength of a document written by the person being paid. A paid diagnostic asks one person to commit to a small, bounded, reversible decision, and it produces the evidence the room needs to make the big one.
Why the room is the real constraint
Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna analysed 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for The JOLT Effect, using machine learning to isolate roughly 8,300 factors behind wins and losses. Between 40% and 60% of lost deals end in no decision. The driver is not preference for the status quo. It is fear of failure: the buyer wants the thing and cannot carry the personal risk of being the one who chose wrong.
A proposal does nothing about that. It is an argument for a decision, delivered to someone who is afraid of the decision. More pages make it worse.
Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers in August and September 2024 and found 74% of buying teams showing unhealthy conflict during the decision. Delainey Kirkwood put the group at five to sixteen people across as many as four functions. Groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high quality deal. Content aimed at one individual reduced consensus by 59%.
That last figure is the one that ended proposals for me. The document is written to a champion. The decision is made by a committee that is already fighting. A paid diagnostic is the only format I have found where the committee is in the room while the conclusion is being formed, so the output arrives with their fingerprints on it instead of mine.
Where this breaks
Government and regulated procurement runs on unpaid written responses and no amount of principle changes that. If your revenue depends on tenders, you write tenders, and the only available move is to qualify harder before you start.
Loopio’s sample is people whose job title is response management, so it over represents companies where the RFP is the sales motion. The 33 hours may be elapsed time rather than person hours, and with nine contributors on an average response the real number could be far worse than the one I used. I have taken the conservative reading.
The win rate fall from 45% to 39% is not proof that AI caused it. More responses to lower quality opportunities would produce the same line.
And the honest limit: charging for the diagnosis requires enough demand to say no. I could not have done this at thirty. If you need the next engagement to make payroll, you will write the proposal, and you should. The method is downstream of the pipeline, not a substitute for it.
What I would do on Monday
Add up last year’s losing proposals. Count the hours, name the people, and put the number in front of whoever signs their invoices.
Write the two week diagnostic as a real product. Fixed fee, fixed dates, named output, and a sentence saying the client owns it outright.
Change the first question on the call from what do you need to who has to agree, and what are they arguing about. Then price the argument.
Stop sending anything longer than two pages to a buyer who has not paid you. If they need thirty pages to decide, the problem was never described properly.
Keep one exception list. Tenders, framework agreements, and the two or three relationships worth the free work. Everything else follows the rule.
The close
I still do that week of work. I still read everything, sit with the people who do the job, and find the thing nobody has said out loud. That part was always the value and it still is.
The only thing that changed is that it now has a price, a start date, and an invoice.
I spend most of my week being paid to find out what is actually wrong before anyone commits to fixing it. If you are about to ask three firms for a free plan, book a call instead.