Every sales team has heard the line. "They only read the pricing page." It's a comfortable thing to believe, because it means the rest of the proposal doesn't matter much. The data says it does. If you want sales proposal tips that hold up, start with what buyers do once the proposal is open.
Buyers read more than you think
Proposify, which sells proposal software, studied 742,137 proposals sent through its platform in 2025. Buyers viewed 93 percent of the proposals they went on to sign and 80 percent of the ones they turned down. They checked pricing first, then kept going.
Our read is simple. Pricing gets the first look, and everything around it decides how that price feels. A buyer who reads your approach, your timeline and your team before deciding is weighing whether the number is worth it. That reading time is your chance to make the case. Spending it on boilerplate is the most common mistake we see in proposals.
One caveat is worth keeping in mind. Proposify's numbers come from teams that already use proposal software, and the company has a clear interest in proposals looking important. We still think the pattern is right, because it matches how people buy anything expensive. They look at the price, wince or nod, and then go looking for reasons.
Winners hold attention longer
In the same report, winning proposals were viewed an average of 12 times, against 8 for losing ones. Buyers spent 25.3 minutes on winners and 15.8 minutes on losers.
Read those numbers as a signal of use. The buyer comes back, shows it to a colleague, reads it again before a meeting. In our experience, a proposal that gets reopened is one that's doing work inside the buyer's company. It gets passed around, quoted in a meeting and pulled up when someone asks about the timeline.
So the question to ask about every section is whether someone would come back to it. A clear timeline gets reopened. A page of company history doesn't.
We should be honest about cause and effect here. More views might mean the proposal was better, or it might mean the deal was already warm. The data can't separate the two. What it does show is that winning proposals hold attention longer, and that part is in your control.
Shorter tends to win
Winning proposals in Proposify's data averaged 11 pages. Losing ones averaged 13. Two pages isn't a dramatic gap, but it points the right way. Nobody wins because they wrote more.
Our read is that extra length usually comes from worry. A team afraid of leaving something out adds another case study, another capabilities page, another paragraph of terms. Each addition feels safe on its own. Together they bury the parts the buyer came for. Cutting is harder than adding, and it's almost always the better move.
A good test is to read your proposal as the buyer's CFO would. Anything that person would skip is a candidate to cut or move to an appendix.
Pictures carry a lot of weight
Proposify found that 83 percent of winning proposals included images, with an average of 12 each. In an 11-page proposal, that's roughly one image per page.
We'd push this further. The best images in a proposal do explaining work. A timeline drawn as a timeline. A rollout shown region by region. A floor plan with the phases colored in. A team photo is fine, but a diagram that makes the plan obvious does more. A buyer should be able to flip through the images alone and understand roughly what you're proposing.
Video helps when someone presses play
Only 20 percent of the proposals in Proposify's data included video. The ones where the video got watched were 3.3x more likely to close.
That number is easy to overread. A buyer who presses play is already interested, so some of that lift comes from the buyer's interest before the video ever starts. Our read is that a short video still earns its spot when it does something text can't. It can walk through a product, introduce the people who'll do the work or show a site. Keep it short and put it near the top, where it'll get seen.
Write for the second reader
If we could give only one of these sales proposal tips, it would be this one. When more than one stakeholder viewed a proposal, Proposify saw the close rate rise 20 percent.
Big deals have more than one reader. The person you pitched forwards the proposal to finance, legal, operations and maybe procurement. Most of those people never heard you talk. They missed the context from the call and the concern you already answered. All they have is the document.
So write for them. Give the CFO a clear read on cost. Give operations the timeline and what it asks of their team. Give legal the terms in plain language. In our experience, a proposal that works for the person who wasn't in the room is the one that keeps moving. We go further on this in You're Not the Only One Bidding on This Deal.
Make every section earn its spot
Pull all of this together and you get a short list. Lead with what the buyer checks first, then make the rest worth reading. Cut anything a skeptical reader would skip. Use images that explain. Add video only where it does a job. Write each section so someone who missed the meeting can follow it.
You can do all of it without a bigger budget, as long as your team treats the proposal as the thing that sells for you when you're not there. For a look at how the sections fit together on a big deal, see The Anatomy of a Proposal That Wins a Seven-Figure Deal.
If you've got a big one on the calendar and want it built to hold attention from the first page to the signature, we'd love to help. Start a proposal and tell us what you're bidding on.
