You sent the proposal Tuesday. Here's what you know by Thursday.

The worst two days in consulting are the two after you send a proposal.

You've done the work. The document is good. And now you sit in a silence that could mean they haven't opened it, they're circulating it internally, or they read the price and stopped. Three completely different situations, and the standard response to all three is the same limp email: "Just checking in — did you get a chance to look at this?"

That email exists because you have no information. Here's the version where you do.

Tuesday, 4:10pm — you send it

Instead of attaching the PDF, you upload it and send the link.

Total added effort: dragging the file onto the dashboard instead of into the mail window. If you have an assistant connected, it's less than that — "give me a tracked link for this" and paste what comes back.

One setting worth flipping before you send: turn on the email gate. It doesn't block anyone; it asks for an email address before the document opens. That single step is what turns "someone in Ohio opened it" into "the CFO opened it", and it's what makes everything below work when the document gets forwarded — which, for anything with a price on it, it will be.

Tuesday, 4:41pm — the first open

A notification arrives. They opened it half an hour after you sent it, which already tells you the timing was good.

Thirty seconds of read time. One page.

That's not a read — that's a glance to see what arrived. Nothing to do yet. Resist the urge to email; they know it exists and they're busy.

Wednesday, 9:15am — the real read

Second session, eleven minutes, and this is the one that matters. The page breakdown:

Page		Time
1	Cover	20s
2	Understanding of the problem	3m 40s
3	Approach	2m 10s
4	Pricing	4m 05s
5	Timeline	50s
6	About us	—

Four minutes on one page of numbers is not reading. It's deliberating. Nobody spends four minutes on a price they find obviously fine, and nobody spends four minutes on one they find obviously absurd — they close the tab.

Four minutes is the sound of someone building an internal argument.

Wednesday, 2:30pm — the third viewer

Two more opens, from a different fingerprint. Because the email gate is on, you have a name, and it's someone you've never emailed. Different device, and they went straight to page 4.

Your proposal is in a meeting. The person you've been talking to is not the person who decides.

Thursday — the email you actually send

Compare the two.

Without any of this:

Hi Dana — just checking in on the proposal I sent Tuesday. Let me know if you have any questions!

With it:

Hi Dana — a thought on the pricing section, since it's the part I'd want to interrogate too. If the total is the sticking point, we can split phase two into its own engagement and start on phase one at £X, which gets you the audit results before you commit to the build. Happy to put that on a page for whoever else needs to see it.

The second email isn't cleverer. It's just informed. It addresses the actual objection, on the actual page, and it quietly offers the thing a forwarded-to stakeholder needs — a version they can look at themselves.

What this doesn't do

It doesn't tell you what they thought. Four minutes on pricing is a signal, not a verdict — maybe they were on a call with the tab open. Treat every reading of the data as a hypothesis you test with a question, not a fact you assert.

And don't say the quiet part out loud. "I saw you spent four minutes on the pricing page" is a sentence that ends deals and deserves to. The information is for shaping what you say, never for proving what they did. If it would be strange to admit how you knew, don't act on it that way.

Being upfront costs nothing, either: "it's a tracked link, so I'll know if it's useful to you" reads as competent, not creepy.

The setup, in full

1. Upload the document, get the link.
2. Turn on the email gate so forwards have names.
3. Send the link instead of the attachment.
4. Read time-per-page, not open counts.
5. Write the follow-up that responds to what happened.

That's it. The rest is the same job you were already doing, minus the guessing.

Where to go next

• Did they actually read your proposal? — the four patterns and how to read them
• Password-protect, expire, or revoke a link you've already sent
• Sharing a deck with investors