Write the proposal for the person who was not in the room

The meeting went well. Three of them in the room, all nodding, the technical one asking the questions you want to be asked. You send the proposal that afternoon. Then nine days of nothing, and when the reply finally comes it is two lines long and it is about price. Somewhere in those nine days your proposal was forwarded to someone who was never in the room, and it had to win that person over on its own. It did not.

That is two documents doing two different jobs, and most of us only ever write the first one.

The document you wrote and the document they read

The proposal you wrote is a reminder of a conversation. It assumes the reader was there. It opens with who you are, moves through your approach, lists the scope and lands on a number. Read it with the meeting still fresh and it is perfectly clear.

The forwarded one lands in front of the person whose budget it is. They start somewhere else entirely: what is this, why does it cost that, and what happens if we do nothing. You are not in the room to fill in the gaps, so the reader fills them in, and they tend to choose the cheapest explanation available.

Buyers already assume your story changes depending on where they read it

Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers from August through September 2024. Sixty-nine percent reported inconsistencies between the information on the sales organisation's website and what the sellers had told them. In the same survey, 61 percent said they would prefer an overall rep-free buying experience.

So assume the reader opens your proposal, opens your website in another tab and checks whether the two tell the same story. That is ordinary behaviour now, not suspicion. If your pricing page, your case study and your proposal describe the problem in three different sets of words, you have handed a stranger a reason to discount all three.

So what is the forwarded one missing?

Three things, in my experience, and in this order.

The problem in their own numbers. The first page has to be something the forwarded reader recognises as their own problem, with a figure in it that came out of their mouth rather than your brochure. "Two of your four salespeople hit quota last year" does work that "we help companies improve sales performance" never will.

What doing nothing costs. Your competition is rarely the other vendor. It is the decision to leave things as they are for another two quarters, which is free and always available. If the proposal does not put a number on that option, the reader will assume the number is zero.

A recommendation, not a menu. Good, better and best with a tick box beside each one looks generous. It reads as uncertainty, and it moves the hardest part of the decision from you, who has seen this problem fifty times, to a reader seeing it once.

Your proposal is one of about seven things on the table

Gartner's later survey, 645 B2B buyers from August through September 2025, found that buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase. Sixty-nine percent said they go to a sales rep to validate what AI tools have told them.

Seven sources means your document is read beside six other things, and you wrote almost none of them: a review site, a peer's opinion over coffee, a summary some chatbot assembled out of your own website. The proposal that survives all that is the one that still makes sense with your voice removed, because that is the condition it is read in.

In a small market it travels a shorter distance and matters more

In New Zealand the person it gets forwarded to is usually one step away. Often it is the chair or an investor, sometimes the same person who will end up signing it. You will probably meet them, and probably at a conference inside a year. So write every proposal as though the reader will read it cold and meet you later, because here that is close to guaranteed.

The cheapest fix I know costs one question at the end of the meeting: who else will read this, and what will they want to know? Buyers answer that honestly almost every time, because it helps them too. Then write the document for the person they named, and let the people who were in the room read it over that person's shoulder.

So open the last proposal you sent and read the first page as a stranger would. What would you not understand?

Sources. Website-versus-seller inconsistency and rep-free preference: Gartner, "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience," press release, 25 June 2025, reporting a survey of 632 B2B buyers conducted from August through September 2024, in which 69 percent reported inconsistencies between the information on the sales organisation's website and that provided by sellers, and 61 percent said they would prefer an overall rep-free buying experience. Information sources per purchase: Gartner, "Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights," press release, 20 May 2026, reporting a survey of 645 B2B buyers conducted from August through September 2025, in which buyers reported using an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase and 69 percent said they turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights. Both samples are B2B buyers generally rather than New Zealand buyers, and neither press release publishes a country breakdown, so they describe the direction of the problem rather than its size here. Two figures were considered and cut. Forrester's "The State Of Business Buying, 2026" (press release, 21 January 2026) is widely quoted for the finding that a typical buying decision involves 13 people inside the buying organisation and nine outside it, which would have been the obvious number for this piece, but neither that release nor Forrester's own write-up of its Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025 publishes a sample size or fielding dates, so it is not used. 6sense's "B2B Buyer Experience Report" for 2025 reports buying groups averaging more than ten people and does publish a sample of just under 4,000 respondents with a regional breakdown, but no fielding dates, so it fails the same test. The three missing elements, the question to ask at the end of the meeting, and the observations about how far a proposal travels in New Zealand come from my own work with New Zealand tech founders rather than from published data.

Nick Burns is a fractional CRO for New Zealand B2B tech companies, at home and expanding internationally. He co-founded Emendo and sold it to McKesson, then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500, and has since helped 60+ tech companies grow sales.