The conversation covers three structural shifts that are changing what enterprise buyers actually evaluate.
Consistency of fact is replacing consistency of message. Every spoken and written word during a procurement now lives in a searchable record. Email threads, demo recordings, written responses, and meeting transcripts are indexed and retrievable. Buying committees pull on those threads. The vendor's language, commercial terms, and commitments are now compared across phases. Inconsistency reads as broken trust.
The dilution effect is killing win rates. A bid team running 10 proposals to win three will usually be outperformed by the same team running six proposals to win four. The mechanism is the final four hours of editorial polish, commercial review, and message alignment before submission. Win rate compounds in those four hours. Spreading them thinly across too many bids compresses the curve. Most companies do not pair hours-on-bid with win rate, so the effect stays invisible.
Lost bids are 18-month sleeper pipeline. The procurement cycle for most enterprise contracts is around three years. The procurement window for the next decision opens around 18 months from the original loss. Vendors that were second on the original bid are structurally well-placed for the next one. Almost no one is watching the calendar.
Greg also breaks down how procurement teams actually read RFP cross-references like "see 3.1" (badly), why a 40 percent price drop without a commercial breach reads as broken trust rather than generosity, and why the word "just" is the most expensive word in proposal operations.
The episode closes with practical guidance for two audiences. For proposal practitioners: track hours per bid, build a commitment register for every submission, run a 12 and 18-month renewal watch on every loss, and review the top 20 most-used content library responses every quarter. For revenue leaders: treat AI-recovered capacity as a reallocation into qualification, win-loss review, and renewal nurture, not as a headcount saving.
Guests on The Stargazy Brief are senior operators and analysts working in the proposal and bid software market. Episode 18 is essential listening if you are a proposal manager who suspects your team is being structurally underused, a solution consultant pulled into RFP work without proposal training, or a CRO evaluating where to invest as AI changes which parts of the proposal process matter most.
**Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to The Stargazy Brief newsletter for weekly analyst notes on the proposal and bid software market: https://the-stargazy-brief.beehiiv.com/subscribe**
Christina Carter: Hey Stargazers. Today we are speaking to a solution consultant leader, Greg Ellis, who has been a solution consultant for enterprise-size deals at Zendesk. He has also worked for Freshworks, OneTrust, and before that he worked as a proposal manager and a proposal consultant at places like Fujitsu. So he has gone from writing the responses to RFPs to then selling it as a technical sales leader.
We are going to learn from him about what he wishes he would have known as a proposal person about what it is like to be a subject matter expert. And if you are a solution consultant who has to win from RFPs, here is a great view from somebody who has done both roles and won RFPs through both roles. Let's get into it. ================================================================
Christina Carter: Hey Greg, thank you so much for being a part of the Stargazy Brief.
Greg Ellis: No problem. Great to be here.
Christina Carter: Your background is so interesting because you have had a long background in proposal management at a variety of companies, and then you moved into technical sales as a solution consultant. What did you learn about evaluations once you moved to the technical sales side from proposals?
Greg Ellis: It is a great question. I actually did not start my career going into massive bids. I started in logistics, then I got into a role in marketing, and then through that into smaller bids, and worked my way up. But the thing I have found is the consistency of message through the different stages. From pre-sales, proposal, the bid, the documentation, the larger discussion around that, into demonstration, discovery, and then into negotiation. There needs to be a consistency of message. That can change during the process as new players come in and objectives might move.
In certain places I have worked at, it can be a very sequential process. The bid is completed, the bid manager stands down, the solution consultant might come in, you get into the next phase. You have got the common thread of the account executive or account manager running through that, but it can be quite jarring. The thing I have found is to make sure there is a consistency, and then obviously that makes it a lot easier when you are downstream rather than having to fit your message to what was previously told, or come in with something that completely conflicts with the overall value or pitch that you have started the dialogue with.
Christina Carter: Oftentimes proposal managers come in after the AE or sales leadership have been speaking to the customer quite a bit. It can feel really different, even though the same people on the other side are reading that messaging. So what would you suggest to proposal managers who are working with solution consultants or pre-sales — making sure that messaging stays tight all the way through so it does not feel jarring to the customer?
Greg Ellis: You have a qualification phase in an opportunity that comes organically from inbound or outbound. MEDDPICC, BANT, whatever acronym the company is driving itself by. And then within the bid and proposal world, you have bid/no-bid processes with themes and qualification rounds. They do not necessarily match in terms of terminology. Sometimes it feels like it is a closed operation and that you are viewing things through a similar lens but talking about it in different ways. The output of that is being translated from one department to the next as it moves through the process.
I have worked in places where the proposal function is seen as an admin component. The salespeople do their merry dance, then a document comes in and the centrifuge effect kicks in. That is thrown to a proposal team who do the written word component. Then it moves forward, they stand down, and it is back to the dog-and-pony show of the sales process. From a proposal perspective, to inject yourself as a more forthright member of that sales and overarching process is important. It is easier said than done, but the companies that do it well, you are an active participant in the overarching sale rather than just that section of the sale.
The same thing is true with solution consulting. I have worked in and around places where you are a demo donkey. You come in, you do your dance at the particular stage, and then you stand down. Where it is more holistically viewed, that is where you have the ability to inject across the process and be part of that consistency of message. It is really about staking your claim a little bit broader in the activity that is going on customer-side and internal.
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Christina Carter: How would you suggest proposal people work closely with the technical sales team before the RFP? Greg Ellis: From a content library perspective, there is a lot of product marketing, marketing materials, change of message, new product roadmap that occurs on the technical side that is not distilled back into the content library. Sometimes the content library itself sits as an island outside the outward-facing website of the company talking about its own product. There is background work you can be doing with the technical team in terms of aligning both messaging and the functional components of a response within the library around a particular technology.
One thing that gets lost often — we talk about the importance of when a proposal comes in, did you influence it? Is it a blind proposal? Did you have skin in the game? Have you been able to ingratiate yourself with the customer? Let's say you work on a proposal and you do not get down-selected. You know that someone got awarded a contract, and in three years that will renew. So in six, 12, 18 months from that renewal, you should be doing outreach with that customer.
This is one of those points of data that — everyone is a little bit annoyed when a bid does not go the way of the company you are working for, but that reminder, that alert that should be ringing saying here are the things we should now be doing, put them in a nurture state — that does not get enacted often. That is where you can be part of that outreach with the sales team, rather than just bombarding them with emails and cold calls. Planting the seed, inviting them to more events, being a broader part of that. From a technical sales and proposal perspective, you have both the data and the content to create messaging earlier on that can then resonate both in the document and the sales process beyond that.
Christina Carter: That is such a good point because it is so easy to be like, we lost. Maybe we will do internal feedback and update ourselves in that way. But the big thing you can do is start — when do you plan and how do you plan for when that renewal inevitably comes? Because now you have it on paper, you know when that renewal is.
Greg Ellis: Individuals involved in those singular opportunities will move on at that point. They will be reassigned to different territories if they are still within the company. So it has to be a business-owned process that happens always in those situations. There is nothing worse if you pull hundreds of hours into a bid or a proposal and then you get three lines from the procurement manager saying we are sorry, we decided to do nothing or stay with the incumbent. That really is all the information you have about hundreds of hours of work.
One thing I did when I was stationed out in Sweden, I was part of the committee — or individually I would go out and do win-loss reviews, but on opportunities that had been managed in my company but not by me. So it was a third-party voice understanding the process. There is immeasurable, invaluable information. A lot of companies will be amenable to telling you. They cannot give you the specifics, but they will tell you where you did really well, where your strengths were, where things may have fallen through the cracks, or messages got lost, or you just did not have the functional or commercial capability.
But again, that needs to be driven by the business. I have worked at other places where they do win-loss reports but they have got nowhere to file them. They just exist within that opportunity that gets closed within Salesforce. So there is a real opportunity to use the information that you have, the data that you are generating, and improve the operation. You have already done the work. It is just that extra few hours that you need to do at the end, rather than starting from scratch again in 18 months or two years. ================================================================
Christina Carter: When you work with an enterprise customer and they say, hey, we are evaluating platforms — maybe they have not put it out in RFI yet — what is happening in the background?
Greg Ellis: I wish I had a crystal ball or access to the security cameras in their offices. In a lot of cases you can see what is happening from an RFP. When you get an RFP and they ask the same question in five different places, one of the ways of doing it is people say, I answered that, please see 3.1, even though you are in question six. But what happens when that RFP goes to the customer is the procurement lead might split up those sections and hand them individually to the different stakeholders and the different groups within the organisation. So they do not have section three. And even if they did, they do not want to look back to it.
That is representative of the organisation trying to get itself in order in terms of the number of stakeholders, the requirements, the capabilities they are looking for from that procurement, and centralise all of that in something that can be processed. Or it is just a mandatory procurement exercise that they have to do every 12 months, and no one wins. But it is part of their due diligence.
Ultimately, it is not just about making the right decision. It is about making a decision that can be retrospectively defended when put under scrutiny. That is not my idea. That is something Rory Sutherland was talking about in one of his books that I recently read. That is the duality of it. It is very difficult from the outside to know exactly how real these things are. They can start very real and then become less real as competing objectives move budget or focus elsewhere in the business.
When you work in bids and proposals and you sit opposite procurement teams, the idea is they are trying to get the best commercial and functional deal for the organisation by writing the best RFP, sending it to the best vendors in the market and giving them the best opportunity to respond. It comes down to: how ahead of the RFP, the proposal, the document, are you? How ingratiated are you with the organisation? How relevant are you to them? How do you build that presence in their procurement ecosystem so they are thinking of you when they are putting those documents together before they create the RFI? This is a company that has to be part of the vendor pool. As you know, it is not always easy from the outside. Even a very well-written proposal with a lot of stakeholder engagement can eventually fizzle out and become just a procurement exercise so they know they are getting a good deal for the incumbent. ================================================================
Christina Carter: Let's say you get an RFP and you kind of have an idea it is not going to go anywhere, especially with you — you are the extra person to make sure the pricing is, whatever it is, you are not a good fit, but it is a strategic decision to respond anyway. You have this idea about the dilution effect when it comes to these. I would love to hear your take on what that is and what it means for pre-sales and sales teams in general.
Greg Ellis: If any of the roles that work in this area — sales, solution consultants, proposal managers — if there were an abundance of them and they were tripping over each other in the office, it would not really be an impact. But I have never met, and I have never worked myself as a proposal manager where I have worked a 40-hour week.
The dilution effect is really understanding what your ICP is, where you are strong, and particularly where you are not, and having the intentional approach to taking on proposals you can win, working in the margins to a degree. You can work on 10 things and win three, or you can work on six things and win four because you are not diluting that team and their focus.
You put a finding out on it as a post on LinkedIn a while back about the final four hours that are spent on a proposal before it leaves the business. The impact that has on win rates is a bit of a hockey stick moment. You are ratifying the commercials, you are looking for small marginal errors, you are tweaking little things that have come together at the last moment from different stakeholders, and making sure that consistency of message is there. It is just four hours, but if you have got other things taking that time away, you are diluting yourself and your team's impact. Things will always fill the time people have available, not necessarily what they are contracted for.
It is very hard in an organisation to decline opportunity. One of the dualities of that is, some places you can decline. You can have a perfectly rigorous process and you decide as an organisation not to bid on something because it is a product that does not map to what you do, or it is a customer outside your criteria. And then a week later, it appears again with a week less time to respond, because it is now deemed strategic. It has got greater weight than it necessarily merits.
That is where the power of tracking and data comes in. When that inevitably does not go anywhere, that has to come back and be held up as — how many hours did we waste on that? What was the impact to the other stuff we could have been doing that we did not win, that should have won, by us focusing our effort with a week less on something that already went through a process and got marked no-bid.
Christina Carter: Anyone who has ever worked on an RFP can probably feel that.
Greg Ellis: It is not exclusive to RFP. It is across sales. The challenge is, it is easier to sit here on a podcast and say, just do not bid on stuff you cannot win. But if it is a constricted pipeline, it is a lot easier to say no to the one thing you have got no chance of winning when you have got 10 other things you could win. It is important that companies do focus on this, because that is where proposal teams have quite high burnout rates. There is quite high churn within certain companies, and culturally it is normal for people to be working extended hours around the clock through weekends and cancelling paid time off. Which is not beneficial for them, certainly, and obviously not for the business either, particularly when you are doing something that does not have a great chance of hitting the bottom line anytime soon. ================================================================
Christina Carter: There are so many other things you can do. If you get an RFP and you are not going to win for whatever reason, especially in the private sector, you do not have to be compliant in your response. There are so many things you can do — call them, call up your current team, ask is this really mandatory, will this really kick us out? You can do practical proposals. What have you seen work?
Greg Ellis: I have worked in a couple of places where, with a few customers who did not have a standard documentation, they did not have a standard response they could send out. So here is a non-compliant but all-encompassing response to something that we can do to give you an idea of who we are. It takes minimal effort to top and tail it, rebrand it, present it, maybe create an executive summary. I have worked in places that would bid on everything, and that was an olive branch. Why don't we try this non-compliant response, if the idea is to be in front of the customer and remind them we are there, so when a more adequate procurement comes around we can be part of that.
The challenge with that, now that I work as a solution consultant — if they bite, you have engaged hours of resources downstream. So there is potential it can also lead to the same amount of work elsewhere, even if it is stopping it on the front door. But to your point, being able to have dialogue with whoever is leading that procurement — I have seen multi-lot bids where we could not do everything, so you bid on the stuff you can do, and it is for the customer to either repackage that or create a hybrid model with a systems integrator that might sit on top of that.
Bid/no-bid — MEDDPICC is a qualification tool. It does not mean that in week four of an engagement, if you do not have a champion, you do not know what the metrics are, you stop the opportunity. The challenge with proposals is you have got a ticking time bomb because there is a delivery date at the end of it. But there are things you can do to get more colour in terms of what the customer is after.
If a company you are working for is solely focused on sending that RFP and proposal out, track every hour you spend on it. Figure out how many resources it actually took, because in hindsight you get to the end and you do not win and it feels like it was only a light touch. Then you analyse and it is several weeks of time. If you have got four people on an hour-long meeting twice a day, that is one working day for a couple of meetings. Then you can present that to the business and say, here is the resource we burnt, and here is where we could have spent that elsewhere potentially. Trying to build that business case around not being an administrative function that just does what it is told, but being part of the more strategic aspects of the sale, can be really important. The data you have to back that up is critical in terms of changing the trajectory of what you are doing. ================================================================
Christina Carter: Because you are in technical sales now, you are seeing more of the before and more of the after. When you are speaking with customers, what else are they scoring, other than the RFP and the demo? What may be not physical, like a quiet thing they are doing?
Greg Ellis: It is like a job interview. You are being tested on your past, your history, your ability to do the job line by line in the job description, but they are also trying to assess your character. How would you work in this organisation? So they set you quirky tasks, things to do — not consciously, but: can we trust you? Can you step up?
At some places I have worked as a proposal person, it was literally the RFP comes in, I submit, and then I stand down. On the larger stuff I worked on, the proposal document part was probably 20% of the process. There were several months after that of meetings, stage-managing engagements, working through contract schedules, negotiation, functional capabilities, set pieces, proof of concept, proof of value. Through those engagements, which are more in line with the solution consultant work I do now, they are testing how trustworthy are you, how trustworthy is the solution, how likely are you to step up and deliver if things go south at some point during implementation, or there is a challenge on the customer side, or they suddenly acquire a company and they need to roll the solution into it.
These are not just functional things — does it do X, Y, and Z, or Z, depending on which side of the Atlantic we are on. But it is really interesting, when you start doing those win-loss reports and you understand why they were doing certain things they were doing, and where they struggled with certain things you may have presented to them in good faith that they could not really call out at the time because it was a level playing field.
One example I have: I did a win-loss review with a company. I had not worked on the proposal. In negotiation, the champion told us we dropped the price significantly from time A. They told us we were too expensive, and when we came back, it was something like 40% or so, which seemed like great benevolence on our part. But then it made her job difficult, because she could not justify where the price cut had come from to her CFO. What we had done as an organisation was we had taken some of the service levels down, we had re-engineered the solution, we had taken some of the bulk out and provided something more fit for purpose for their budget. But that had got lost. So all they saw was a price cut. So one of the things we lost at that point was trust. And that was just a commercial construct.
You take that information back, and you acknowledge that during these kinds of negotiations, even though with the greatest will in the world you are trying to be benevolent, you are trying to give them what they want — if they do not see where that saving is coming from, with this commercial breach, like at time A you had this, at time B it is now priced at this, and these are the things that are in and out, it is very difficult for them to trust what you are doing. They lost the thread of how you did it.
During that process, the relationship the customer has with the account executive, the calibre of the team you bring forward, the number of team members sometimes — but not overkill — bringing the right people to the right sessions, your ability to turn around responses to relatively simple or complex questions quickly, the speed and how nimble you are during that process, they all play in alongside all of the functional stuff. And sometimes a customer, when they really look at their requirements, some of them are not as valid as they thought they were when they built them. How do you then negotiate them into a more positive position from a solution perspective that probably meets their requirements better than the one they sat in a room nine months earlier and threw up on a whiteboard, which then made it into a document? ================================================================
Christina Carter: Would you say it helps to build trust if, after the RFP, the proposal person — whoever the main proposal person who worked on the bid — joined in on the demo or the conversation that happens after the RFP with the technical salesperson?
Greg Ellis: The challenge is, going back to the previous — if proposal managers had infinite time. But from a diligence perspective, any sort of handover from one stage to the other — if you want to look at it as moving through the process — any way of tapering the involvement from both sides on that is going to be beneficial. Whether that be from contract signature into go-live and implementation. So yes, it helps.
We talked earlier about that consistency of message. Sometimes the proposal manager and team will have built that response in relative isolation, using standard content, boilerplate, et cetera. Then suddenly it can be jarring. Even in the dry runs you do, you can call it out: we know we have all seen the proposal, but there is a lot of other stuff going on. There is a whole section in section five about this particular topic that we should major on because it is part of their heavily-weighted scoring criteria. That kind of stuff can get lost as well in the internal planning. So it is definitely beneficial. It is time, and how — the one thing, if there was a way of automating that, or having that more formal handover document from time A to time B — and obviously with tools like AI, you can take a proposal response, throw some prompt in saying I need a document to hand over that encompasses what we presented, there are ways of doing it on a lighter note. But it is not a substitute for having someone who has been heavily involved in that.
Christina Carter: I think it was Ben Hills, CEO of Iris, one of the proposal tech tools, he mentioned something like it makes sense to take AI and then summarise anything you say about your implementation or whatever needs to be handed off anyway to an implementation team, that it can do that, so you can easily send that to them. Oftentimes there is not a really formal handoff from the proposal team to that implementation team. I find that really valuable. But if it were to do that, then that would in theory free up time for the proposal person to then go sit on those demos and create a little bit of diligence and trust.
Greg Ellis: It is an interesting time, though. Back in the old days when I started this, the written word was sacrosanct. You had written it down, they had it, they could put it into a PDF, control-F and find — you told us on page 36 that this is a functional capability. But the stuff that was spoken just got lost to the ether. They could record calls, they could go back if they wanted to, like Gary Neville on Monday Night Football, and find the section where you said this to us and gave us this impression. Now, every single word written or spoken from beginning to end is encapsulated and is searchable within seconds. So there really is a need not only for that consistency of message, but consistency of fact as it moves through the process.
In our role now as a consultant solution engineer, you are part of that — effectively part of the contract — what was said during the sale, in a way that can now be held up. It is a good thing because it provides rigour to the buying committee. But it also means you have to be a lot more clear about messaging and clear about factual content. The more current people are in the process, the less likely there is to be that kind of he-said-she-said, and things moving from one process to the other getting lost in handover. ================================================================
Christina Carter: As a solution consultant, what do you wish you had known as a proposal professional that you now know as a solution consultant, that would have made you a better proposal professional?
Greg Ellis: Learn a bit more product. Obviously now, being in the product a lot, you see what customers are getting at with their line of questioning, and you understand the competitor landscape — what is and is not happening elsewhere and the challenges they have. Not to the point of learning the product like a solution consultant, but understanding a little bit more about the nuance of the product makes bringing the value out a little easier. Just getting hands-on in the product a bit, and even down to agent-shadowing or whatever that particular tool does, trying to find someone who knows it like a solution consultant to walk you through the basics. It really informs a lot of the messaging you can bring out about the product, particularly understanding the competitive landscape and why customers are coming to you with these challenges consistently. That can sometimes get lost.
Christina Carter: If you have time, go to those demos with the customer. That is great advice. ================================================================
Christina Carter: Now let's switch places. You are a solution consultant. Most of your coworkers who do what you do have probably not been proposal managers and probably have not had any formal RFP training, even though they probably have to respond to RFPs at least sometimes. What do you wish your colleagues knew about responding to and winning RFPs?
Greg Ellis: That it is hard. It is hard, it is long hours, it can be quite dry, and there is a lot going on. You can look at that role in a number of ways, in the same way you could look at solution consultant. We talked earlier about it being viewed as an admin function. They just do the document bit, and you just do — in a lot of companies — a little bit of discovery, or you just do a demo, and then you are the technical expert.
One thing I have found useful as a solution consultant that is not regularly trained in, or part of the hiring criteria, is the immense amount of project management you do in proposal and bid work. A lot of companies miss that from a solution consultant perspective, and it is a huge part of what you do. Suddenly you are thrown in front of a customer and they ask for an extended proof of concept, or a trial, or a workshop, and you just do it.
There are a lot of skills within the proposal team. It is not a particularly difficult jump to move from proposal to solution consultant. Once you have been in an organisation, you start learning the product, the pitch, the drivers, the competitive landscape. But that core project management component that was drummed into me as a junior bid manager back in England years ago — I rely on that heavily now. That is something we can learn from within the organisations we work in. There are a lot of assets within the bid and proposal team that might solely exist within that team that can be very useful for people like myself working in different parts of the organisation. This is why we are talking earlier about having that cross-pollination, that consistency of message and qualification at multiple stages following a similar path and a similar vernacular in terms of how it is enunciated within the company, so you are talking on the same wavelength.
A lot of companies are getting there in terms of bridging the gap between the two. But I do find that it is the separation sometimes that kills these incredibly powerful organisations within companies that are not necessarily communicating at the top level with each other consistently. ================================================================
Christina Carter: How can pre-sales, solution consultants, solution engineering teams work better with proposal teams? How can we be better teammates to each other?
Greg Ellis: I have used a lot of proposal software, and sometimes you have to farm out 10 questions to a solution engineer. I have been the solution engineer that had 10 questions farmed to me. From a software perspective, it is not always that straightforward when you are coming in as an occasional user, of what you have to do and what assets you have at your disposal.
I have also received things like, here are 10 questions I need to complete. First question — "4.1.1 Discuss." And it is in some questionnaire related to security, but I cannot see the preceding question, any of the other questions around it, the length of the responses. So we talked about olive-branching — this was a finding in one of the reports — about the ability to provide what they call in University Challenge a starter for 10 to get the SME going, rather than saying answer this question, answer this question. Here is some starting information. This is something I have done for years — I would construct the paragraph or paragraphs needed, just put gaps in, and then put at the bottom, "and why this is important." So I can try to pump them not only for the functional, but also try to build some value-leading, because they are trying to write a sales response but they are set in a functional world sometimes. Trying to understand why you need to respond in a particular way, rather than just "yes, it does."
There is a lot that can be said about trying to understand the constraints each of the roles are under, and what you can do to bridge that gap to get you moving, get you started, get you towards what the output should be, rather than a blank page or 10 random requests for things that, again, are not going to add value to the response without the proposal person having to overlay on top — if they have time, back to that like four extra hours at the end of the bid. To at least put some value messaging on a functional statement that says "yes, we can do this." And what? But so what? Everyone can. So why do you do it better? Why should we go with you?
Christina Carter: It is the demo, but in word form. Any good solution consultant is not going to be like, here is this really bland, terrible explanation of our product. You are going to tailor it to your customer and differentiate yourself. ================================================================
Christina Carter: How do you think enterprise evaluation is going to change with both demos and proposals over the next couple of years?
Greg Ellis: If you take proposals — and obviously you have got to mention AI — you could potentially get to a world where a procurement department in a company asks your proposal system for responses and they get them within 30 seconds. You are doing live scrutinisation of products and assessments. So you could do these rapid RFIs, if not RFPs, where the questions are formulated, the responses are more matched to them, and then you have that 20% overlay as a proposal person in the middle that does the broader messaging and the sales messaging.
From a solution consulting perspective, just in the work I have been doing the last few years, a lot of the pre-work has become a lot easier with AI, and deeper. I can understand the competitive landscape, I can understand the relationship of an existing customer more deeply with us as a company by going through, rather than pouring through the records manually. That can inform what you are doing in demonstration or discovery a lot more, and it can be a lot more tailored.
One of the challenges — if you are able to implement a solution that makes your proposal team 20% more productive, what do you do with the 20% of time you have generated? In the old school you could just fill that with more stuff you should not be working on. You are going further down the no-bid pile. That is where the sophistication of AI comes in — your ability to do the bid/no-bid process in a more automated way. The stuff outside the documentation phase.
Everything is quite rightly focused on the documentation phase. And there is all this stuff that happens around it — the win-loss review, the filtering-in of message and data, the competitive landscape at that time when you lost or won that deal. That is where we can become a lot more sophisticated. I do not think we become less relevant with AI, but certain points of the process will become a lot more critical, and the human focus at those points are going to become a lot more important than they per se are now in terms of across the whole.
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Greg Ellis: One of the things I have also been thinking about — when you are in the office working on a proposal or working around the clock, and the seed that put you there is someone saying, just do this. Just send out the proposal we did for a previous company and just change the branding. A lot of the time, when someone says "just" or words to that effect, it really is — it should just be that easy. It should just be a case of click the magic button and the proposal will be written. Just reuse the environment you built for another customer. But when you unpack it, it is a ton of work. It is the reason you have not seen your family for two weekends.
If you have the ability to create space through something like AI in proposal writing, to give you some back space, and you have five employees and you are 20% more productive, and you do not get rid of one of them to make the team 20% lower in headcount — you can do a lot with looking at where things should be easier than they are and focus your effort. Again, this is — I worked in a company that was driven by Six Sigma, and the ability to look back and find things that were inefficient and focus efforts on them so you were not repeating them again and again. So yes, unpack "just" when it is thrown at you as a glib, passing statement. That should hopefully give you a little bit of time, if not at that point, in future, to make sure things are done so that it does not keep recurring at the same level of effort time and time again.
Christina Carter: Or you could just say to the VP of sales, just create a really good relationship with their VP. Just do it.
Greg Ellis: A lot of the time it is in good faith. You know, things should just take that long. But a lot of the time the capacity you need to make them that formulaic is not there. So that is why I think having a checklist of, these are the things we would do if we had more time, then suddenly if you find yourself with that more time, you have a head start on what to work through. But then you are into the mechanics of organisations and politics and the need for sponsors and budgets and capacity and space. How many companies in proposal have a quarter or half an FTE that just does library management, and that individual has never done library management because half of their time that is carved out for it is doing proposal work, because they cannot decouple from the things that are more important at that point in time? ================================================================
Christina Carter: This has been wonderful, Greg. Where can people find you and get in touch with you if they want to?
Greg Ellis: On LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn, obviously, like one of these things. I am not a vicarious LinkedIn content poster, but I should probably improve that, because I think this kind of stuff is quite interesting.
Christina Carter: Greg, it was lovely to have you on. This was incredibly interesting. Thank you so much.
Greg Ellis: Thanks for having me on.
Christina Carter: Thanks so much for listening. If you loved what Greg Ellis had to say, go check him out on LinkedIn. If this episode was helpful, please give it a like. And if you know a proposal manager or solution consultant who has to win opportunities via RFP, send this over to them and help them out a little bit. We'll see you next week. ================================================================ END OF EPISODE 18 — THE STARGAZY BRIEF