Is Using AI in Proposals Costing You Deals?

Time saved vs Deal closed

There's always been a little battle going on when you pitch your services. "How much do these guys want it?" Reputation, personal presentation all count, but the proposal has always been seen as the measuring stick for how badly you want the deal.

Send it in late, badly designed, written poorly and with mistakes - "Clearly not fussed about working with us if THAT is how they present themselves". 

Send it in within 24h looking shit-hot, written beautifully, flawlessly presented - "These guys are on it and want the job!"

So, in order to look like you wanted the job, you needed to do the following:

• Send it quickly (proposal software helps you do that)

• Beautifully designed (great template design or good proposal software with great design built in)

• Writing it well (good education, good template and customer questions handled this)

• Presentation (again, proposal software presents it as an interactive web link, not a tacky-looking PDF)

So the real variable here is the writing. Speed, design and presentation is handled by your $29/month decision to use decent proposal software.

Along comes ChatGPT.

We've been quite public about our hard stance on not using AI for anything customer facing. Not everyone feels the same though. To some people, the idea of spending less time making a proposal is worth the risk of losing the deal, or perhaps, they don't even realise it will cost them the deal. 

But it is. Big time.

Here's the thing - our ability to detect the absolute dribble that ChatGPT spits out is insane. We can all tell. There are a few telltale signs like the first sentence, the use of certain words that don't really get used by people and the famous double-length hyphen. 

It doesn't matter if you're the Lionel Messi of prompt engineering, you can't get ChatGPT to produce text that doesn't look like it's from ChatGPT. It's almost like it has a writing style. 

The problem is as people get better and better at detecting this rubbish, it's going to have a negative impact on your deals. What does it say to your potential new client if you've used AI to write significant parts of your proposal because you couldn't be assed to write it yourself?

It's not about saving time, it's the perception of effort.

With so many people turning to cheap language models to do their thinking and writing for them, there's going to be a genuine competitive advantage in actually giving a shit about your client and writing in a clear and persuasive way.

Don't use ChatGPT to write bits of your proposals. It's not good for your bank account.