How to Ensure Proposal Quality: Key Strategies for Winning Submissions

 

Winning proposals are the result of a structured, deliberate process that prioritizes quality at every stage. A strong proposal not only meets all solicitation requirements, but also highlights your organization’s strengths, reliability, and unique value to the customer. To achieve this, proposal teams must balance compliance with clear, compelling messaging while maintaining consistency in style and presentation. This article explores proven strategies you can use to build quality into your proposals from the first draft to final submission.

Develop a Realistic Schedule with Sufficient Time for Reviews, Editing, and Formatting

One of the best ways you can drive quality into your proposal process is by developing and following a realistic proposal schedule with sufficient time for reviews, editing, and formatting. 

Reviews. For a 30-day or more turnaround, you should aim to schedule at least three proposal reviews, allowing a full day for each. For shorter turnarounds, you may only have time for one or two reviews—but even if you’re in a time crunch, don’t skip this step! Reviews are critical to catch issues with compliance and consistency.

Editing. You should also make sure you schedule in sufficient time for final editing. A rushed edit means that errors will likely be missed. Also, if you have an external editor (someone who hasn’t been involved with the proposal content from the beginning of the process), you’ll likely need time to schedule time to review their edits before finalizing your document. Don’t underestimate the time needed for this step!

Formatting. Additionally, you need to make sure you schedule enough time for the final formatting. Often things get moved around when making final editing changes (spelling acronyms out on the first use, adjusting language for active voice, etc.). So, you need to make sure to schedule time to finalize the document formatting. 

Final Quality Check. Finally, you always want to make time in the schedule to do a final quality check of the final formatted document before submitting. Double check that all major elements are accounted for, fonts are compliant, dates are correct, and sections are within the designated page counts.

Develop and Use a Proposal Style Guide

A proposal style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of a proposal. A style guide establishes style requirements to promote consistency within your proposal. 

What the Style Guide Should Include. Style guides set standards to be used in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, formatting of numbers and dates, table appearance, and other areas. The standards should include conventions from your proposal department’s standard style guide (if it has one), but they should also be tailored to the requirements of each individual customer and solicitation.

How the Style Guide Drives Quality. By establishing these guidelines early on with a style guide, proposal writing starts out consistently. Make sure authors review the style guide before they start writing. This will ensure they are using common conventions from the start. How often do we get to Pink or Red Team, and reviewers provide comments such as, “I can’t tell if this is being led by a Project or Program Manager. It’s totally inconsistent.”

Having writers use a common style guide also makes editing easier in the end because most of the inconsistencies are already addressed. It further streamlines the editing process because the style conventions are already defined for the editors. Additionally, if you have multiple editors, they will all be editing to the same set of standards.

Final Thoughts

Delivering a high-quality proposal requires more than just good writing, it demands careful planning, consistent execution, and disciplined reviews. By building realistic schedules, applying a style guide, and allowing time for final editing and formatting, you ensure that your submission reflects professionalism and attention to detail. Proposals that achieve this level of quality not only increase win rates but also reinforce your organization’s reputation as a trusted, capable partner. In the end, proposal quality is not simply about compliance, it’s about building customer confidence and positioning your team for long-term success.


Written by Ashley (Kayes) Floro, CPP APMP
Senior Consultant and President
Proptimal Solutions, LLC
proptimalsolutions.com
LinkedIn

Comments

  1. Noah Taylor October 14, 2025 at 1:38 AM

    This is a very insightful post! Ensuring proposal quality is crucial for academic success, and your strategies are really helpful. Many students struggle to meet submission standards and could benefit from professional support. For those who find it challenging to manage structure, references, and clarity, university assignment help UK can be a game-changer. Expert guidance ensures proposals are well-researched, formatted correctly, and plagiarism-free, ultimately increasing the chances of approval and better grades.

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