What Goes in a Training Proposal That Gets Approved

Most training proposals are too long, too flattering, and organised for the writer rather than the reader. The person deciding usually reads the first page and the price, then skims for risk. Write for that.

What gets read, in order

1. The summary — what you'll do and what it costs.
2. The price and what's included.
3. The timeline.
4. Anything that looks like risk.
5. Everything else, maybe.

The sections worth including

A one-paragraph problem statement

In their words, not yours. If you can restate their problem more clearly than they did, you've demonstrated understanding better than any credentials page. If you can't, you don't understand the brief yet.

Your recommended approach — and why

Not just what you'll build, but why that's the right thing for this content and this audience. This is where you show judgement. It's also where you should say what you'd not do: 'We'd recommend against a full-day workshop for this content — there isn't enough here to justify taking 30 people off the floor for a day.'

Counterintuitively, arguing yourself out of scope builds more confidence than accepting everything. It signals you're advising rather than selling.

Deliverables, named specifically

A table: what they get, who it's for, when. 'A course' is not a deliverable. 'A 30-minute SCORM 1.2 module, a facilitator guide, and a learner reference manual' is.

What you need from them

The most-skipped section and the most valuable. Content in final form, a named decision-maker, access to SMEs, LMS access for testing. Putting this in the proposal makes delays visibly shared rather than your fault.

Timeline with dependencies

Not just dates — dates conditional on their inputs. 'Storyboard delivered 10 days after content sign-off' protects you when content sign-off slips, which it will.

Price, with the boundary stated

What's included, what's not, and what triggers a variation. Ambiguity here is where relationships sour.

How you'll know it worked

Even briefly. Proposing a measure signals you expect to be accountable, which is rarer than it should be and differentiates you immediately.

What to cut

• Your company history. Nobody reads it.
• Generic methodology diagrams. Everyone has ADDIE on a slide.
• Adjectives. 'Engaging, immersive, transformative learning experiences' is noise.
• Anything that could appear in a competitor's proposal unchanged.

On length

Three to five pages for most engagements. Enterprise procurement sometimes demands more; that's a form-filling exercise, not a persuasion exercise, and should be treated differently.

Why the honest version wins

Buyers of training have usually been oversold before. A proposal that names risks, states assumptions plainly, and declines part of the scope reads as competence. One that promises everything reads as someone who hasn't thought it through — and they've met that person already.