What you'll get
- 1 copy-ready blocks
- 3 min read
- Paste both documents below this
How to use it
before a proposal goes to a named account, give the assistant the buyer's own words and your draft, and ask what they said that the draft never answers.
The hack: before a proposal goes to a named account, give the assistant the buyer's own words and your draft, and ask what they said that the draft never answers.
What to gather
Two documents, pasted in full. First, what people at the account actually said: lines from call transcripts, sentences from their emails, the phrases in your notes that are quotes rather than paraphrase. Second, the proposal draft as it stands. Rough drafts work; the check reads substance, not polish.
The prompt
Paste both documents below this
The first document is what people at [account] said to us, quoted in their own
words. The second is our proposal draft. List every priority, worry or constraint
they stated that the draft does not clearly answer, quoting their words next to
each gap. Then list every claim in the draft that nothing in the first document
asked for. Do not rewrite the proposal.The last line matters, as ever. You want the two lists, not a new draft. A rewritten proposal would close every gap in vendor language, and vendor language is what this check exists to remove.
The two lists
The first list is your edit plan. Answer each gap in the buyer's own vocabulary: if the operations director said the team cannot carry another system it has to learn, the proposal says what happens to that worry in those terms, not in yours. The second list is your cut list. A claim nobody asked about reads as boilerplate, and every paragraph of boilerplate buys a little less attention for the paragraph that wins the deal.
Three mistakes to avoid
- Letting the assistant rewrite. It will close every gap in polished vendor prose. The point of the gap list is that you close each one in the buyer's words, and only you heard how those words were said.
- Pasting your summary instead of their words. A summary is already your reading of the account, and it has already dropped whatever you missed. Quotes carry the worry in the shape the buyer will recognise.
- Checking only the gaps. The cut list earns the habit. Proposals lose readers through unasked claims long before anyone notices a missing answer.
Make it a habit: run the prompt on anything a buying committee will read: the proposal, the follow-up note, the deck for the second meeting. If the buyer's words are not in your file, that is the real gap, and no prompt fills it.
Why this works on named accounts
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