How to win proposals: what the winning ones have in common

To win more proposals, send them to clients who already trust you or who you’ve qualified on a call, write about the client’s problem in their own words, keep the proposal short, price the first step so it’s easy to say yes to, and follow up within days. That’s what the winning proposals sent through Nusii have in common. In 2025, past clients accepted 71.8% of proposals against 43.6% for new clients, accepted proposals had a median of 7 sections against 9, and proposals sent a second time were accepted 57.6% of the time against 48.3%.

Those numbers come from the 9,022 proposals our customers first sent in 2025, published in our State of Proposals 2026 report. They show what goes with a yes, and they can’t prove what causes one, so for each finding we say what else could explain it.

This guide covers who to pitch, what to put in, what to leave out, and what to do after you send. For the writing itself, part by part, see our step-by-step guide to writing a proposal.

Proposal win rate benchmarks

Your win rate is the share of the proposals you send that the client accepts. Across all the proposals sent through Nusii in 2025, it was 50.2%, and it has stayed between 48% and 52% every year since 2020. Agencies (marketing, web, advertising, and video) won 47.7%.

Most of the proposals that didn’t win were never turned down. Only 12.2% were declined, and 37.6% never got an answer either way. For most agencies, the biggest gains are in the proposals that go quiet, which is where qualifying and following up come in.

To find your own rate, count the proposals you sent in the last 12 months and how many were accepted. If you send them with Nusii’s proposal software, the Reports page works it out for any period, per client, template, and team member.

Pitch the clients most likely to say yes

The biggest gap in our data comes from who the proposal goes to, before anything you write in it.

Go back to past clients first

Proposals to a client who had already accepted one from the same business were accepted 71.8% of the time, against 43.6% for new clients. The gap held within the same businesses (72.1% against 46.2%) and in 2024.

Part of that is easy to explain. A proposal to a past client is often a renewal or a next phase, the client knows your work, and there’s usually no competitor in the room. For a small agency, that makes the next proposal to a client you already have the easiest one to win.

Before a project ends, put the next step in front of the client: the next phase, a monthly retainer, or the work you noticed they need while doing this one. Our guide to moving clients from projects to retainers covers how to pitch it.

Qualify new leads before you write

With new clients, the decision often starts before the proposal arrives. In a Reddit thread on what makes a winning proposal, one consultant answered: “Most of the time, relationships and price. If the client sponsor wants us to win, we’ll probably win.” Another, writing from the client side: “I usually have a good sense of who I want to award the project to barring any surprises. 80% of the time I go with that team.”

So decide whether a lead is worth a proposal before you write one. Bid teams call this a go/no-go decision. For an agency, a short checklist does the job (adapted from Demi Utley’s vetting checklist for RFP teams):

• Have you spoken to the person who approves the budget, or will they join the next call?
• Did the client give you a budget range, and does it cover what the work costs?
• Have you delivered this service before, for a similar client?
• Do they want to start within the next few months?
• Can you describe the result they’re after, in their words?

If two or more answers are no, book another call or send a short email quote instead of a full proposal. Our guide to running a first call with a potential client has the agenda, and the client interview guide has the questions to ask.

Lead with your specialty

A client hiring an agency for work they can’t do themselves has a hard time telling who’s good. Ilise Benun, writing for our blog in 2015, described hiring a specialist to move her website to a new platform for that reason: they showed they’d solved her exact problem many times before. Her advice to anyone writing proposals: “So if you want your clients to pick you, you need to pick a niche.”

Even if your agency offers several services, each proposal can lead with the work you’ve done most for clients like this one.

Write about the client’s problem, in their words

Clients read a proposal to find out what happens to their business. Curtis McHale gave a good test in an earlier post for us: within a paragraph or two, the client should know you’re on the same page because “they can see their pain in your words.” Open with their situation, the result they want, and why it matters now, using the words they used on the call.

Then tie each part of the proposal back to that result. John Brennan of Shipley Associates, a firm that trains bid teams, puts it this way: “Customers buy benefits, not features. They buy what your product or service will do for them, not its features.” For an agency, that means “a site that books more consultations” comes before “a WordPress build with 12 page templates.”

A few habits help:

• Put a number on the outcome when you can, such as more leads, a lower cost per lead, or a launch date. Nobody pays $20,000 for work they expect to bring back $10,000.
• Repeat back what the client told you, including the goals they mentioned in passing. It’s the clearest sign you listened.
• Cut jargon the client didn’t use. “Omnichannel” and “funnel optimization” make the proposal harder to read and don’t make you look smarter.

Our guide to writing a proposal shows how to write each part, from the overview to the next steps. For marketing work, see how to write a marketing proposal.

Show proof from similar clients

A new client is taking a risk on you, and proof lowers it. Pick one or two results from clients in the same industry, or with the same problem, over your biggest logos. A short, real quote from a past client beats a paragraph of claims, and an invented one does harm if the client notices.

Brennan’s rule applies here too: “adjectives do not sell, but the benefits of your solution do sell.” “Award-winning” and “data-driven” are adjectives. A line like “cut a dental group’s cost per booking by 40% in four months” is proof, as long as it’s true. Name the people who’ll do the work, too, since that’s who the client is hiring.

Keep it short

Accepted proposals had a median of 7 sections, and proposals that weren’t accepted 9. 2024 showed the same gap. Shorter proposals tend to be for smaller projects and for clients who agreed on most of it during the call, so length may follow the kind of deal more than it drives it. Still, nothing in the data suggests a longer proposal wins more often.

Consultants have given the same advice for years. The proposal format from Alan Weiss’s Million Dollar Consulting Proposals, which Terry Rice walks through in Entrepreneur, runs to a page and a half. Curtis McHale wrote that a proposal for a well-vetted client “should be 5 pages maximum. Almost all of mine are 2 - 3 pages because I’ve spent lots of time up front talking to the prospect and gaining their trust.”

The usual places to cut are the company history, a list of services the client didn’t ask about, and detailed specifications, which can go in an attachment. Our proposal outline shows which parts to keep.

Price it so the first yes is easy

The bigger the proposal, the lower the odds. Proposals under $1,000 were accepted 70.2% of the time and proposals of $50,000 or more 29.2%, and each band in between won less often than the one below it. 2024 had the same slope.

Bigger projects involve more people and more risk for the client, so the slope is no surprise. It does suggest a move that works well for agencies: if a large project keeps stalling, split it. Propose a paid first phase, such as an audit, a strategy sprint, or a discovery phase, priced well below the full project, with the rest as a follow-up proposal. The client gets a smaller decision, and your next proposal goes to a past client, the group that wins most often.

Set the price on what the work is worth to the client, which our guide to value-based pricing explains, and show the total clearly so nobody has to add up line items.

Pricing options and deal size

Most proposal advice, including ours, says to give the client two or three options. In our data, proposals with options the client could choose were accepted 38.1% of the time, against 57.0% without, and the gap held within the same businesses and in 2024. The likely reason is that agencies add options to bigger, more complex pitches, which win less often anyway.

Options do go with bigger deals. Of the proposals with options that clients accepted online, 24.6% ended with a total above the one first shown, and 1.2% below it. So use optional extras to let the client buy more, such as an extra channel, a care plan, or a longer retainer, and make sure the core option solves the problem you discussed on its own. Don’t add them expecting a higher win rate.

A discount for paying the whole fee upfront, which Nathan Powell suggested on this blog in 2015, is rare in our data: 3.2% of proposals had a discount line of any kind. Those were accepted 54.5% of the time against 50.1%. It’s a small group, so treat that as a hint at most.

Send it fast, then follow up

Terry Rice opens his proposal guide with “Time kills deals.” Clients look quickly: 75.7% of proposals were opened within 24 hours, and half of the opened ones within 48 minutes. Of the accepted proposals, 37.1% were accepted within a day of sending and 63.4% within a week. Send yours within a day or two of the call, while the client still remembers it.

Then follow up. Proposals sent a second time, as a reminder or a revised version, were accepted 57.6% of the time against 48.3% for proposals sent once. Part of that runs the other way, since a proposal under negotiation gets revised and sent again. A follow-up costs one email, though, and the yeses keep coming: 36.6% of them arrived more than a week after sending, and 14.3% more than a month after.

• If it hasn’t been opened after two days, check that it reached the right person. Proposals that were never opened were accepted 8.7% of the time.
• If it was opened and then went quiet, ask one specific question: whether the scope still fits, whether the timing changed, or whether a smaller first step would be easier to approve. Our guide to handling proposal objections has replies for the common ones.

For a day-by-day plan, see the follow-up section of our writing guide. Nusii emails you when a client opens a proposal and can remind you to follow up after the number of days you choose. Our guide to proposal tracking covers what else to watch.

Extras that don’t go with more yeses

Images, video, and expiry dates are common advice for winning proposals, and our own blog has recommended some of them. In our data, each went with fewer yeses. Proposals with images were accepted 44.8% of the time against 58.6% without, proposals with a video 38.6% against 52.2%, and proposals with an expiry date 44.8% against 52.8%. Sending to more than one person went the same way (44.4% against 51.1%). Within the same businesses most of the gaps shrank but didn’t go away, and 2024 looked the same.

These are correlations, and they don’t show that a photo or a video loses work. Agencies tend to add images and video to bigger pitches for new clients, which win less often anyway. A proposal sent to several people usually means a group decision, and those take longer. An expiry date may get added more often to proposals the sender already expects to drag. The data can’t prove they hurt, but it shows no sign that they help, in 2025 or in 2024.

So if you’re short on time, spend it on the client’s problem, the price, and the follow-up before the design. An expiry date still has a use, since it protects your prices and your schedule if the client signs months later. Set it for that reason, and don’t count on it to hurry a decision. Send the proposal to the person who decides, and bring the others in on a call.

Track your win rate and learn from losses

In one of our first blog posts, in 2013, Nusii co-founder Nathan Powell suggested asking the client why you didn’t get it the next time you lose a contract. A two-line email is enough, and whatever the client tells you is more useful than guessing.

Once a quarter, look at:

• your win rate by service, and for new clients against past ones
• the median time to a yes, so you know when a quiet proposal is late
• the proposals that got no answer, and whether you followed up on each one
• the reasons clients gave when they said no

Twenty proposals a quarter is enough to spot a service that rarely wins or a price point where clients go quiet.

Answering an RFP, tender, or grant

Some advice on winning proposals is written for formal bids: requests for proposals (RFPs) from large companies, government tenders, and grant applications. They work differently from a proposal you send after a sales call. A panel scores every bid against published criteria, and a bid that misses a required section can be thrown out before anyone reads it.

Win rates are lower too. Loopio’s 2026 RFP Response Trends Report, based on more than 1,500 teams, puts the average RFP win rate at 39%, and 81% of the top-performing teams in it follow a formal go/no-go process.

Qualifying matters even more here. In the same Reddit thread, one consultant’s whole answer to what wins an RFP was “You helped write the RFP.” If you hadn’t spoken to the buyer before it was published, think hard about whether to bid. If you do bid, answer every requirement in the order they ask, use their headings, and back each claim with proof. For grants, follow the funder’s guidelines to the letter. The rest of this guide is about proposals to clients you’ve already talked to, which is what most small agencies send.

Examples of proposals that won

These are made-up examples, built on the patterns above.

A next-phase proposal to a past client

A four-person SEO agency finishes a technical audit for an online furniture store. On the last call, the owner mentions that their category pages still don’t rank. Two days later the agency sends a two-page proposal for a six-month content retainer. It opens with the owner’s own words about category pages and the audit’s three biggest findings. No competitor sees it, the client already knows the team, and it’s signed within the week.

A big project split into a first phase

A web studio quotes $45,000 for an ecommerce rebuild. The client likes it, then goes quiet for a month. The studio sends a revised proposal for a $6,000 discovery phase: a sitemap, a prototype of the checkout, and a fixed quote for the build at the end. The smaller decision gets a yes, and the build proposal goes to a client who has already said yes once.

A follow-up after the client went quiet

A PPC agency sends a proposal for Google and Meta ads to a dental group. The practice manager opens it twice on the first day, then nothing. After four days, the agency emails one question: is the budget still right, or would starting with Google only be easier to approve? The manager replies that the partners balked at the total. The agency sends a revised version with Google only and Meta as an option, and the partners sign it.

Templates and tools

Our free proposal templates include digital marketing, SEO, and marketing proposals that are already short and start with the client. Before you send one, run through our proposal checklist.

Nusii is proposal software for small agencies. You build proposals from your own reusable sections, the client reads and signs online, and you get an email when they open it, so you know when to follow up. See how it works for marketing agencies, or try Nusii free for 14 days.

Frequently asked questions about winning proposals

This guide replaces an earlier version by Pierre Larose, and builds on older posts for our blog by Nathan Powell, Curtis McHale, and Ilise Benun.