Old-school wisdom meets new-school proposals

I’ll let you in on a secret. The single most useful business book I ever read wasn’t about AI, funnels or KPIs. It was a book written in 1936 by Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

As a young woman trying to break into the corporate world in the early 90s, it was an invaluable teacher on how to listen, how to connect and how rouse enthusiasm in myself and others to get jobs done. Those lessons shaped my career and most of my close friends are those who I met through work. The lessons also influenced how I write proposals to this day.

Fast forward to 2025: our inboxes are full, AI is spitting out reams of text and telling us what to say according to its synthetic wisdom… but people are still people. We want to be heard, we want to feel understood. There’s a fine art to getting along with people and our proposals need to echo our authentic joy and belief that the solution we’re presenting to our client is in their best interest.

Dale Carnegie’s timeless principles and apply them directly to proposal writing and sales success. Think of it as old-school wisdom sharpened into a modern sales tool.