It’s a set of instructions, and the output is only as good as they are. A great prompt won’t save bad inputs or a skipped review. A thin one guarantees a thin draft. Here’s the structure that fixes it.
You bring the strategy, the customer knowledge, the competitive context. The model brings speed and pattern-matching across long documents. A proposal pulls together capture intel, past performance, compliance, the technical approach, and pricing, written under a clock and judged by people you can’t talk to. No model has that context on its own. You do. Treat it like the fastest intern you’ve ever hired: brief it well, read every line, never let it sign the cover letter.
Every effective prompt has five parts, and they’re diagnostic. When a draft comes back generic, hallucinated, the wrong length, or the wrong voice, one of them was thin. Role: the perspective, tone, and assumptions. Context: everything relevant — the RFP text, the criteria, a tone sample. Task: what exactly you want, and how long. Format: your structure, which the model can’t guess. Constraints: the guardrails, like active voice, no invented facts, and flagging uncertainty with [VERIFY].
A proposal is too complex for one prompt. The model does its best work the way a good writer does, after you’ve walked it through the RFP, the capture, and the tone you want. Do it across a few messages. Set the stage (“don’t draft yet, just confirm you understand each piece”). Feed the requirements, pasting the full RFP section with no paraphrasing. Provide your strategy. Then ask for the draft.
The context window is a workbench, not a dumping ground. Lay things out in order and the model can reason over how they relate. It also makes follow-ups cheap: “revise paragraph 2 to address sub-req (c)” costs ten seconds, not another full brief.
For batch work and the templates you reuse weekly, a single-shot prompt is the fallback: same five parts, filled in. Load a proposal preset and edit it, or fill the parts yourself. {CAPS_IN_BRACES}are yours to replace. This assembles the instruction; it doesn’t run anything. Then run the output through PARC before it touches the draft.
Fill a field or load a preset — your prompt assembles here.Take your worst recent prompt and rebuild it with all five parts. The thin one is almost always context (paste the full RFP, not your summary) or format (tell it your structure).
Good prompting is a skill. If you’d rather not build it, we run the bid end to end: humans first, the tooling under our hand.
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