The most important thing a proposal needs to sell

When your salespeople submit a proposal, it should always represent the natural culmination of a series of value creating conversations with their potential customer.
The contents should not come as a surprise. The recommendations should reflect an already established set of agreements with the key stakeholders. So why are so many sales proposals so ineffective?
One of the obvious reasons is that they were submitted as a blind response to an unexpected RFP and did not actually reflect any meaningful dialogue with the prospect (I’ve explained why this is so unproductive here).
But a less obvious but unfortunately all-too-common explanation is that the proposal has failed to sell the thing that is almost always most important to the ultimate decision-makers…
What’s the problem?
The missing element is, of course, why the customer needs to solve the problem in the first place. That problem could be an issue or issues that