7/ Full breakdown — including the prompt structure I use, and the anonymization step you can't skip — on Substack:
https://t.co/pMmgRZZkvF
If your meetings keep producing "this looks great" → silence: the issue is rarely the strategy. It's the three questions that weren't in the document.
#B2B #JapanMarket
6/ The fix: treat AI as the writing partner that handles exactly the parts humans run out of time for.
3 sources to feed it:
→ Meeting transcripts (the buyer's actual language)
→ Your direction (voice memo right after the meeting)
→ Past results + playbooks (anonymized)
5/ All three need time + data — past results, structured comparison, milestone plan.
Done by hand from scratch → days of work.
Most proposals don't have days. The strategy section gets filled in. The other three don't.
4/ "Who delivers what, by when?"
Project milestones. Team structure. What outputs land in month 1, 3, 6.
If the executive can't visualize the post-contract experience, the uncertainty alone is enough to defer the decision.
3/ "On what axis should we choose you over a competitor?"
Decision-makers assume you're not the only proposal on the table.
If you don't spell out the comparison axis in your proposal itself, internal voices will fill it in for you — usually unfavorably.
2/ "What's the investment, and what's the ROI?"
"It's a good initiative" is the floor — not the answer.
Without quantitative + qualitative payoff, ringi (internal approval circulation) doesn't move forward.
1/ In Japan B2B, a proposal that won the meeting often dies in internal circulation.
The reason isn't the content. It's that the proposal was written for one reader — and graded by a completely different one.
The 3 questions Japanese decision-makers grade on ↓