Host Christina Carter and Tom cover how solution consulting teams should approach RFPs, why ownership of the response matters more than any template, and how AI has changed the job from writing answers to editing them. Tom has managed teams that own RFPs end to end and teams that work alongside proposal specialists, which gives him a clear view of what actually moves win rate.
Key discussion points:
✹ Ownership: the SC who fills out the RFP should lead the deal it becomes, which improves both qualification and answer quality.
✹ Prioritisation: rank RFPs by relationship depth and whether you influenced the requirements before the document dropped.
✹ Proposal team vs tooling: the business case has moved from hiring writers to buying RFP software, with senior judgment applied on top.
✹ KPIs: win rate, split by blind versus influenced, is the only fair measure. You cannot attribute a loss to a single answer.
✹ The scorecard: evaluators skim and score against a checklist, so respond and demo to that list rather than writing to persuade a reader.
About the guest: Tom Josephson is Director of Solution Consulting at Braze, the customer engagement platform. He leads an enterprise solution consulting team and has built and managed RFP response processes both with and without dedicated proposal support.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Connect with Tom Josephson on LinkedIn. Explore the 2026 Proposal and Bid Software Report at stargazy.io, and join the conversation in the Stargazy community.
Episode topic: Running an enterprise solution consulting team that responds to RFPs, with and without a dedicated bid or proposal team. KPIs for SMEs, hiring and managing solution consultants, AI tooling, and when to hire a proposal manager.
Chapter times and per-turn timestamps are approximate.
Christina Carter (00:08): Hey Stargazers, welcome to the Stargazy Brief, where we speak with professionals across the globe about how they win requests for proposals. Today we have a very unique guest. We're speaking to a Director of Solution Consulting at Braze, Tom Josephson, and he is going to give us the inside look at what it means to run an enterprise solution consulting team that has to respond to requests for proposals without a bid or proposal team.
He's also going to give background on when he's worked with and managed proposal and solution consulting teams that worked alongside proposal teams to respond to requests for proposals. He's going to give you an inside look at what KPIs we need to be working with our SMEs on when we're responding to RFPs together, what it looks like to hire and manage these solution consultants so they're really good at responding to RFPs even without a bid team, and of course what it's like to be a solution consulting director who maybe wants to hire a proposal manager but doesn't know how to go about it.
This is one for all of us to listen to, to get a unique perspective. If you often have to work with pre-sales or SMEs to respond to RFPs, or you are an SME leader who is thinking about how to get your people to respond to RFPs in a way that's going to win; let's get into it.
Christina Carter (01:33): Hey Tom, thank you so much for being on the Stargazy Brief. I really appreciate you being here.
Tom Josephson (01:37): Of course. Thanks for having me.
Christina Carter (01:38): For the people who are just getting to know you, you lead a solution consulting team at Braze. When you're coming in, you're thinking a lot about how solution consultants have so many things they have to do in their day.
Tom Josephson (01:53): Yeah.
Christina Carter (01:54): But one of those things is oftentimes responding to RFPs, or helping with the RFPs. What is your modus operandi when you're thinking about how solution consultants respond to RFPs? What's your mindset in general?
Tom Josephson (02:06): This has changed throughout my career, because I've worked with different companies that have different approaches to RFPs, and we have different resources and different teams to support it. I have this joke where we're going to respond to an AI-generated RFP by running it through AI, and then when we give it to these prospects, they're going to have AI summarize it and decide which one is the best.
Obviously that's tongue in cheek. I assume they're actually reading the RFPs, and the RFPs obviously have a human touch to them. But it's changed. I've noticed they've actually gotten longer, and the timelines sometimes have shrunk. That might just be the industry I'm in, but I think there are higher expectations for turning these around quicker. A lot of our prospects have realized we're probably using AI and can turn this around faster, which means our process can be a little bit faster.
Coming back to your original question of how we approach it: fundamentally it has always been, if this is an ICP fit, we need to make sure we're not putting anything in there that is going to eliminate us. We have to ensure that we get to the next step. This is a gate.
Now, I undersold that ICP part — it is critical, and it's different from company to company. What I've found is that in more mature companies, we're okay saying, "Hey, we're not a good fit for this, let's take ourselves out." I personally love that. With newer companies and startups, in my experience it's, "Hey, we've got to keep the lights on, we'll figure out a way."
Christina Carter (03:49): Do everything.
Tom Josephson (03:50): If there are things we can't do, we're going to talk to our product team, because this prospect is big enough that we can make it happen. So the approach is different. It's changed, but it also varies very much depending on the type of company you're at.
Christina Carter (04:07): I'm curious. You've managed a variety of teams — ones where solution consultants are the main people responding to these RFPs, where it's landing on their shoulders, and ones where maybe they're just a small part of it and the proposal management team is doing it and they're just checking a few things. When you have to go in and a solution consulting or solution engineering team is the main set of people responding to RFPs, what are your thoughts around that?
Tom Josephson (04:33): I actually really like RFPs for newer SCs who are learning the product. It's a great way to have to figure out these answers. As an SC personally, and I've observed this behaviour in other SCs, I'm not going to learn something until I absolutely have to. If you have to fill out this RFP, it's a great reason to learn it and figure it out. That's usually my first step when an SE has to fill it out.
And then, if we don't have anybody who's newer, it's one of these things where no one likes doing this, so it becomes an equitable distribution of that particular labour.
Fundamentally, my way of approaching them is: if you filled out the RFP and we get down-selected, you lead that deal. There are a couple of reasons for that. If it's not an ICP fit and they're thinking, "I really don't want to lead this deal because it's going to be an awful one to sell, we're not a great fit," that's going to change their approach. But if it's one where it's, "This is a great deal, this is a great customer fit, I'd love to do this," then there's more intrinsic motivation for them to complete it, and it doesn't feel so much like a chore.
Maybe this is me, but I've yet to find an SC who is not like this: RFPs always feel like a chore. It's just the nature of the beast. It feels like you're in college again and you have this essay with a time limit, there's no getting out of it, and you just have to do it.
Christina Carter (06:14): Most solution consultants and solution engineers don't choose that role so they can respond to RFPs. That's understandable — it's not usually in their job description.
Tom Josephson (06:20): No.
Christina Carter (06:23): That comes to the question: if you have a solution consulting team and you're suddenly getting a ton of RFPs, an influx, how do you make the decision that some get a really good focus and others you have to do a bit faster, with a bit less customization?
Tom Josephson (06:43): There's a playbook for that. I've seen this playbook at a lot of places, and it varies. Fundamentally, if I'm trying to prioritize, the first thing I'm asking is: do we have a relationship with this prospect? And second — and these are the ones that get top priority — have we influenced the RFP?
Especially non-government and non-public: someone is almost always influencing the RFP, whether it's the incumbent or somebody who has a better relationship than you. It should be you. Most of the time, most customers don't want to do an RFP — their procurement is asking them to do an RFP. And if you have an established relationship with them, you can shape the RFP. Shaping the RFP makes a big, big difference, because you can essentially shape it to lay traps if you need to. This is a widely known secret, and everybody does this.
So the two things I'm looking for are, number one, do we have a previous existing relationship, and number two, how deep is that relationship and have we had influence on it? That helps me with the prioritization.
Where I'm at now, we have RFP tools that help us write it. Sometimes, if it's low on the totem pole, we push back on the rep and say, "Okay, if you really think we can win this, you do the first pass at it," because we haven't got these two things. That's one approach we've taken.
Christina Carter (08:16): I like that. "Hey, account executive, you go do it." I've done that too, even with a proposal team. Sometimes it's just not worth your time.
Tom Josephson (08:28): And then they'll make a very solid argument as to why it is. It's, "Okay, you put in the work and we'll help you, but we're not very confident on this."
Christina Carter (08:37): It would be so different if you had an endless amount of time and an endless amount of team members, but no one has that. That doesn't exist.
Tom Josephson (08:43): Exactly.
Christina Carter (08:46): You kind of alluded to this already, but a lot of solution consultants think of RFPs as a distraction from the real selling, the real part of the deal. How do you make that RFP contribution something they really want to respond to, rather than seeing it as an admin paperwork step?
Tom Josephson (09:07): That comes down to making sure they have skin in the game. What's really important to me is that I want them evaluating this RFP as they go through it. If they're reading it and they don't feel good about it, I want them to have the space to tell me, because then we can decide, "We don't answer this, we're not a great fit."
The skin in the game is really key: if we get down-selected for this RFP, this is your deal to go and win. Generally, the personalities of SCs — people who want to win, people who are driven — yeah, we're salespeople. We are the technical person and we don't position ourselves as a salesperson, but we do get commission, and a lot of our KPIs are our win rates. Those pieces are really critical.
If they have skin in the game, that's usually enough. If you've hired right, most SCs, that's enough for them to drive and do it. But also be honest about it: "I don't want to do this one, because if we do get down-selected, we're probably going to lose," or "If we get down-selected, the work required to win this is not worth the squeeze."
Christina Carter (10:14): Exactly. Afterwards you have to do a demo and whatever the next steps are, and if you're not going to win, it's so much time you have to spend.
Tom Josephson (10:23): That's really critical, what you pointed out. You can't just view the RFP as, "I have to do it, it's like checking my email." If an SC doesn't see the value in it, then as a leader I haven't done my job.
Christina Carter (10:39): So much of it really does depend on the leader of the solution consulting team — how they think about RFPs and how seriously they take them. If the VP, or whoever leads that solution consulting team, doesn't care, then no one cares. I would put money behind those win rates being so much lower than the teams who do take it seriously.
Tom Josephson (10:54): Yeah.
Christina Carter (11:17): You've seen solution consulting teams that do the end-to-end — they don't have support in responding — and you've also seen a hybrid, where you have solution consultants and also a proposal team. Let's say you get into a company and you don't have a proposal team. What would you suggest that structure look like? Would you set this up within the solution consultants, or would you push to hire a proposal person? What's usually your suggestion or best practice?
Tom Josephson (11:36): Honestly, you just have to read the organization. Every organization is going to be different. Some are open to that and some are not. My instinct, if I think they're open to it, is: what is a senior leader going to respond to? Data that supports it.
So I need to start seeing how much time SCs are spending on RFPs, what our win rate is on these RFPs, and how much revenue these RFPs are generating as opposed to other SC activity. That is the baseline before you can ever make the argument. You've got to have the data to back it up.
This has changed quite a bit with AI and AI tooling to help write RFPs. Like all of our jobs, they're changing because of AI, and for RFP writing teams it's changing significantly. It's not that you're going to lose your job; now it's about how you use AI to become faster and better at your job. There's great tooling out there that's very affordable. We use one today, and it makes a huge difference in filling out these RFPs, which is why we were able to shift some of that work onto reps.
So making the argument for RFP writers has actually become a lot more difficult. It has changed to making the argument for tooling that supports writing RFPs.
Christina Carter (13:06): Interesting. I'm really curious to see where the data will show how that's changed win rates in the future, but I think we have to wait probably a year to really know what that looks like.
Christina Carter (13:17): So solution consultants have some AI proposal management software to help them respond to RFPs. How would you set that up for solution consultants? Is it based on their territory, or the AE they're assigned to, and those are the RFPs they respond to? Is that the best way to do it?
Tom Josephson (13:33): That's exactly it. And that helps with the skin in the game — this is your rep, and you're assigned to this rep. They should have a relationship with the rep where they can say, "No, rep, this is trash, we're not a good fit, I don't think we should do this." That relationship is absolutely critical.
Christina Carter (13:53): Obviously AI is changing what they're doing and how they're responding to RFPs. What do you think it's doing really well to help SEs, and what do you think is making it worse or more difficult for them?
Tom Josephson (14:08): What I find really good is: instead of you writing this from scratch — even though you can, and you've done it a number of times — it gives you something already based off all of our other responses and off the documentation. And it finds all of the links for you when you have to link the documentation. It's incredible at that.
Sometimes it's dead wrong, or more often than not it's answered part of, but not all of, the question. But it gets you started. If you think about it, say there's a three-part question, but to AI it's reading it as one, and the whole thing is written this way — even if it's giving you only a third of it, it's cutting back a third of the time you're spending on this. That's actually a very conservative number.
None of them are getting it perfect, but you wouldn't expect it to, for a couple of reasons. The way they're worded, it's difficult for even humans to discern what they're saying. And yes, it has contextualization, but an SC who's been here for ten years is always going to have way more context than what can be gleaned from internal documents and a library of RFPs.
Christina Carter (15:15): Yeah.
Tom Josephson (15:16): So you still need that human to come in over the top. But it goes from "I am writing this from scratch" to "I am reviewing this and validating this and making proper changes." You go from writer to editor, and that's a lot easier of a task.
Christina Carter (15:33): Do you see anywhere where it makes it more difficult, or is it only positive across the board for a solution consultant?
Tom Josephson (15:41): The one thing I've seen: a lot of the tools require you to load the documents in. That has actually been a pain for a lot of reps. We ask reps to do it, but sometimes you get them in weird formats — PDFs, Excel documents formatted in ways they should never be formatted, Word documents. That sometimes makes it more difficult.
Reps get kind of annoyed: "It's taken me three hours to load this in." And I say, "Well, how confident do you feel about this RFP still?" And then there are RFPs where you have to answer in a browser, but the RFP tools are getting better at being able to handle that.
Christina Carter (16:29): They are. There are some really good tools out there to answer the portal-based ones. For people who are listening: if you have one that can't do a portal, or can't respond within an Excel or Word or PDF, a lot of those exist now.
Christina Carter (16:34): One of the really difficult things about being a solution consultant, and then leading a solution consultant team, is the KPIs or OKRs around RFPs. I see some people who don't have them in there at all. Maybe they look at win rate, maybe they look at shortlist rate. Walk me through your thoughts. What do you think is best practice here?
Tom Josephson (17:07): I think the better way of measuring RFPs is just what percentage of RFPs we've won. And what we try to figure out is: were they blind, or did we influence it? That's what we care about.
It's hard to make the causative argument that it was poorly written. Which of the 350 questions was the one? Or which of the ten of the 350 questions the SC wrote was why we lost? You can't do that. You may be able to find correlation, maybe, but you're never going to find causation.
As an SC and as a leader, I can pick that apart in my sleep. Did we have a relationship with the prospect? How was procurement? How did we fit in? When did we get in? Were we actually column fodder? There are a million different arguments you can use to destroy the idea that the SC was the reason we lost it.
Christina Carter (18:01): So if a solution consultant doesn't have a say on a go/no-go or a qualification — whatever you call it — with an RFP, especially with those specific red flags, like you don't have a champion, you don't know the executive buyer, you didn't influence it, then there's no way to put that on them, because they couldn't make the right decision in the first place.
Tom Josephson (18:22): Exactly. That's like blaming somebody for a plane crash where autopilot was the one actually flying.
Christina Carter (18:30): I'm still with you, because I say this for proposal managers as well. If they don't get a say in whether you go or no-go, then it's not their fault if they lose.
Tom Josephson (18:44): You can't measure them on that point.
Tom Josephson (18:45): That's interesting. So people usually think you can, or they take the position I take.
Christina Carter (18:55): I take the position you take. A lot of the time, if you're a proposal team responding to RFPs, you have to rely on solution consultants to help you respond in certain ways, or to review a really specific section to make sure it's accurate. And a lot of the time they do not get back to you — they ghost you, or say, "I'll do it tomorrow," and they never do.
That puts the proposal team in a really bad place: am I going to submit something inaccurate, or, especially for public sector, overblown? Are we saying something that's actually going to get us in legal trouble? That's the only time, but once again it's not a win rate, it's more of, "Are you doing your job?"
Tom Josephson (19:28): Exactly. You're right. We often don't even get feedback on why we lost it, or why we weren't down-selected. We try to get the feedback, but a lot of times you don't get it.
Christina Carter (19:41): Do your AEs call and say, "Hey, why did we lose?"
Tom Josephson (19:44): Yeah, they do. We do that for every deal that we lose.
Christina Carter (19:47): It's so hard to get real feedback. Even with public sector, when they send you feedback, it's like, is that the real feedback?
Tom Josephson (19:55): Yeah.
Christina Carter (19:56): A lot of solution consultants have never been trained on RFP best practices. They've never been trained on the procurement side of things when it comes to RFPs. What would you tell them about how it really works on the procurement side — or not even just procurement, but the evaluation side? Once they send a proposal over, what's happening over there, and how can they use that knowledge to better respond to those RFPs?
Tom Josephson (20:23): Honestly, a lot of the time you don't know, and every single one of them is different. The way I approach it — and it's interesting you bring this up, because this extends to the demo — is that they're using this as a report card. Don't give them a reason to fail you, unless you think there's a legitimate reason to fail us. And if there is a legitimate reason, that means we shouldn't be filling this out.
The second line: don't lie or overblow anything. You'd be surprised how often you have to say that. Don't overpromise. If there's a question where it's a no, but you want to say yes, and you want to drive — "We should do this" — that's a conversation with product. There's a lot of value in that. If it's, "This is going to probably disqualify us because we can't do it, but I think we should be able to do it," that's critical information for our product team, and that's something I want them to be aware of. This is more for smaller organizations; I wouldn't say this for a larger organization, especially where I'm at now.
This extends to the demo. A lot of the time when you get down-selected, they'll say, "We mentioned all of these use cases in the RFP, demo these use cases," which is a horrible way to demo. "Be sure you can do this feature, this feature, and this feature" — it's the antithesis of everything we teach SCs about how to demo.
So what I tell them is: they're going to give you a use case they want you to demo. You want to tell a story. Tell your story, but before you tell it, flash up the use case and all the features they want to see. "Hey, we're going to jump into the platform in a moment. Here are all the things you're going to see." Then you go into your story, you go into the platform, and when you come out you say, "We talked about Chris, and she did this and this, and this is her experience — and these are all the features that you saw through the course of this."
I tell them to do this because I know how RFPs are used to make evaluations: they're probably sitting there with a scorecard, making checks to ensure you have certain features. Give them the ability, give them the check mark. In fact, I tell them to do check marks. When you come back, show the boxes of all the things you're going to see, and sometimes do one or two at a time and come back: "Alright, we just saw that." Do a little build that shows a check mark checking off that feature. You'd be surprised — they're all doing it with their scorecards.
That's the same approach with the RFP. The RFP is your scorecard. That is the scorecard. So you have the scorecard in front of you — make sure you're getting all the check marks.
Christina Carter (23:24): I think that's even more important with AI now. To me, words are subjective. Whatever you write, no matter what, we want to make it objective, but it is subjective. If AI goes through and doesn't see that you're saying, "Yes, we do this exact feature, and here's the exact proof we've done it before," then a person can be fooled and it feels good, but an AI is going to say, "No, you didn't do this thing."
Tom Josephson (23:48): I would argue you can fool AI, but —
Christina Carter (23:53): Well, you can fool AI, but it is looking for really specific things in proposals, I think, if it's reviewing it. I don't know if you agree.
Tom Josephson (24:02): I do. I definitely think it's looking for it. And that's interesting, because when you're writing an RFP and you're using AI, you're using a tool that's specifically for RFPs. If they are using AI, they're probably using a general LLM — dropping it into Claude, or into ChatGPT. That's not going to be specifically dedicated to RFPs in the same way that the technology we're using to write it is. So we kind of have an advantage there.
Christina Carter (24:39): Tom, let's say people want to learn more from you. Where can they find you? Where can they connect with you?
Tom Josephson (24:47): Best way is LinkedIn. I'm not on the other socials — maybe that's a testament to my age and generation — but LinkedIn is where I'm at.
Christina Carter (24:58): Are you guys hiring this year? Should the solution consultants listening apply?
Tom Josephson (25:04): I believe so, don't hold me to that. What I tell people is: if I'm not hiring now, I almost certainly will be later. I'm always looking to connect with SCs, whether they're in the market now or later. So reach out, even if I don't have anything right now. It changes, and we hire quick when we do — or we try to.
Christina Carter (25:28): Very cool. Go follow Tom, go connect with Tom. Thank you so much for being on the Stargazy Brief.
Tom Josephson (25:35): Thank you for having me.
Christina Carter (25:37): Thank you so much for listening to Tom and learning so much from him. I know that I did. It's so good for us to get a different perspective, whether you agree with what he says or not. These are the types of conversations we need to be listening in on.
If you think this would be useful to a proposal professional or a solution consultant leader, please go share this podcast with them. That is how we grow this super small channel that we have. The more we're able to learn from each other, and from people we don't often get to hear from — really successful professionals — is one of the best things we can do.
Don't forget to like and subscribe, and let's go. I will see you next week.