Pro tip: Hire a graphic designer.
Your proposal has to look nice; first impressions make a huge impact. I have had clients tell me that the look of my proposal was the thing that put me over the edge in comparison to other proponents; mine looked professional and gave them confidence that my work would be professional too.
Apple has only three pillars to their marketing strategy; one of them they call “impute.” That is to say, if it looks elegant and beautiful, the client will believe the product is elegant and beautiful.
You may not have the budget to hire a graphic designer to lay out all your proposals and make them beautiful. That’s ok. But do consider hiring a designer to create a proposal template for you. If you work in Word, ask them to crate it in that software and lay it all out with style sheets so that you can tag each paragraph for instant formatting. They should be able to create a template that you can just drop text and images into.
Are you really stretched for budget? If you’re good with layout software, search online for nice looking reports and proposals, and spend some time reverse-engineering their fonts, their margins, their overall page layouts.
Pro tip: Get your proposal in early. Not too early, but early.
Back in the day, when I was a project coordinator who received, read, and rated proposals, I used to really love getting the first ones in. I was always worried that nobody was going to bid on my project; I was always worried that the bids might be of poor quality or be overpriced. So imagine my joy at receiving the first ones. (Now, my contracting department always withheld the financial bid until they were all in—but they were happy to let me start rating the technical bids.)
I used to spend more time on the bids that came in early than the ones that came in as a giant document dump on the closing day. And, I’m not gonna lie, I was often already attached to one or two of the bids before the last bids came in.
Get your bid in early. Not too early—you need to wait until the question period is over because sometimes there will be amendments to the RFP that result from the question period. But once that is done, get your bid in there. It may very well work to your advantage.