Practical thinking on RFP response, bid strategy, and where AI actually helps — and where it doesn't. We write for the people who actually own the proposal: pre-sales leads, bid managers, and the founders and account teams who end up drafting responses themselves.
Most of what's written about RFPs focuses on formatting and templates. We focus on the process problems underneath: how firms decide whether to bid at all, why answer libraries drift out of date, what actually breaks when a team scales from five RFPs a quarter to fifty, and where general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT help versus where they quietly become the bottleneck. If you're building or running a proposal function at a B2B services or software company, this is the backlog of things we wish someone had told us first. New posts go up as we learn something worth sharing — check back, or browse the RFP glossary and tool comparisons for reference material alongside the writing.
Disqualification is quiet, common, and almost entirely preventable. Here is how bids die before evaluation, and the compliance matrix that stops it.
Read the article →Reuse is the whole point of a content library. Stale reuse is how firms commit to things they can no longer deliver.
Read the article →Scoring is more mechanical, more rushed and far more literal than most bid teams write for — why coverage beats polish.
Read the article →The chatbot solves the typing. It leaves the actual bottleneck untouched — and where a general-purpose AI stops being the right tool for a repeated team process.
Read the article →What actually happens between an RFP landing in your inbox and a proposal going out, and how much of it your team should not be doing.
Read the article →