How to Win an RFP in 2026: Proven Strategies and Expert Tips

So you've just received an RFP. Maybe it's the first time you're doing it. Potentially you're an experienced bid manager, and you wanna understand what is the RFP management process, like process, challenges, and how do you win these highly competitive and challenging bids? In this video I'm gonna show you through the exact RFP management process, challenges, share with you some data in relation to winning bid teams and how they win these complex bids that can really elevate your business. Let's jump into it So why does RFP management matter? An RFP or request for proposal is when a large organization, let's say an enterprise with 10,000 staff, or federal government body wants to procure products or services. Where RFP management matters is we surveyed with between AutoRFP.ai and Stargazy over ninety-seven bid professionals in our twenty

twenty-six proposal win rate report. You can find the link below if you wanna have a look yourself of the proposal win rate report. In this report, we found that fifty-one percent of teams without content automation sit in the low win cohort. So in our RFP management video today, we're gonna go into content automation. We're gonna talk about how ninety-four percent of high win teams use joint collaboration with their subject matter experts, not having the subject matter expert drafting. And where this all matters is the median shortlist rate. So the rate of which your RFP makes it to the next stage and isn't disqualified is sixty-three percent for high win teams versus thirty-eight percent for low win teams. So the teams that have very strong RFP management processes and structure, not only are they winning more, but they're making it through the RFP process to the next step almost double or triple the rate of other teams with content automation, joint collaboration with SMEs, and a lot of other things.

So let's jump into it. But before that, I wanted to leave you with this quote: " Most teams lose RFPs because their system is perfectly designed to produce the results they currently achieve." That was in the Proposal Win Rate report from Christina, the founder of the Stargazy community, a bid manager community, and that really stuck with me, is that if you have a poor system for your RFP management and response, you are setting yourself up to fail, which is why RFP management and systems and processes matter a lot more than heroic efforts one-off bid that you spent, hours and hours fine-tuning. But actual process and repeatable ways to win will get you and your business more revenue than just the one-off effort of trying to win a random bid. And finally, sixty-five percent of the bid teams that win the most

use AI proposal tech, which is what Audirfp.ai is and where I'm from. So what is RFP management? RFP management is how you organize everything that happens between receiving an RFP and submitting your response. Think about it could be everything from when you first discover an RFP on a public tender notice board. Let's say it was for a public tender notice board. Receiving an RFP and submitting your response. It involves people, content, and process. So what is the RFP management process? It starts off with a kickoff meeting. When you see it or you receive that private or public RFP, think about who needs to be involved. Get executive stakeholders on board quickly, especially if it's a very highly competitive and commercial bid. What is the response strategy? How are we going to make our response best fit for the evaluation criteria to win the RFP? Draft and assign. Who is doing what section?

How are we going to complete those sections? And overall, what does a great first draft look like? That is where AI can help the most. Review and submit. Who gets final say on the pricing and commercial? Who gets final say on legal? Who gets final say privacy, security, and compliance measures? Make sure that's clear from the start, and be ready when you have your first draft and everything is ready to be reviewed, that it can be submit cleanly to the right people at the right time. Audit and analyze. Something we don't do often enough in bid management is think about how could we do better with this bid? What feedback can we do, and how can we improve for next time? Which leads into that next one, continuous improvement, and that is the difference between a one-off effort and a systematic approach to RFP management and bid response that will get you to win bid after bid versus just that random one bid that you were lucky to get. An effective kickoff meeting does not just rehash to everyone

exactly what the RFP is saying. It is about establishing clear deadlines, where we talked about who is going to submit each answer each section, who's gonna draft each section, who's going to review each section. That's where you wanna have all those people there to establish clear deadlines for each of those contributors. Then you should already have somewhat of an understanding here, but this is where you can kinda lean on the people in this meeting to develop win themes. A win theme is what is your clear competitive advantage or way that you are going to structure your response with persuasive writing, with clear customer stories, that will get you the win in this RFP. For instance it could be an enterprise that cares a lot about security and privacy, and it could be based in the EU, is looking for a vendor who meets certain requirements. And you could be the only vendor, and you may know that you're the only vendor who meets the high-level requirements in relation to security and privacy, and you believe that's a competitive advantage for your company and for this bid.

Overall make sure that you plan all your supporting documents, so everything that the final submission should include. And you can use like an RFP checklist. We've got a pre-submission checklist in the links below. But you can use a pre-submission checklist to make sure, again, all of that is taken care of when you go to submit. And then assign a single project owner who drives accountability. This would often be a bid manager or at least, or a project manager, someone who is keeping an eye on all the deadlines. Clarification questions is an often overlooked part of the RFP process that can really help you understand that buyer and should be used every time. What you don't wanna be doing is submitting a question for the sake of submitting a question. Don't ask something that is very clear in the RFP. That could reflect negatively. But do think of some useful questions, that you can submit back to the buyer that will, help understand their current solution better and what they're currently doing. Map requirements to identify capabilities.

You could look at, for instance, there could be Moscow ratings, there could be mandatory nice to have, must-have, and so on. But each of those requirements you can compare to, evaluation criteria, and you can look at where do you stack up. But every single one of those requirements, where do you stack up just at a first glance? Even better is that step is in your AI go, no go or your go, no-go process before you even start to bid on, start contributing resources. You've already seen if you're actually a good fit for this bid before jumping headfirst. Build a response plan with section owners, deadlines, and review cycles. We discussed that just before. And decide your competitive angle before writing a single word Now, drafting response and assigning owners.

So this is where we actually start to write. So each of the reviewers and writers they begin to work. Use real-time collaboration so multiple people can work simultaneously. You never wanna have a bid that only one person can access at a time. That's not very conducive to strong teamwork. Pull from your your content library for common questions instead of writing from scratch. So at the start of the video, I mentioned how a strong content library often underpins a winning bid team, and here is the time that you can use that. So if you have pre-filled answers or approved answers in regulatory environments that you can pull from readily to answer common requirements, then this is where you use that. Make sure, though, you're not just mindlessly copy and pasting. Make sure that where appropriate, you're weaving in that win theme throughout the RFP and bid response. AI tools, and this is where a company like and product like ours, AutoRFP.ai, really shines, is generating that first draft.

AutoRFP will demonstrate a first draft in a matter of seconds from a blank RFP document and it'll leverage your content library for that, really speeding up the RFP response time, increasing participation rate, and giving you more time to write even stronger and better responses. So it goes into kind of like an AI feedback loop to continuously improve your responses. That can be one part tooling, and tooling can be one part of your RFP management process and response process that can really underpin a winning strategy. Some larger bids and structured processing involve a different colored reviews, where it goes through multiple and sequential reviews of different sections for relevant people. One trap around reviewing is making sure that the value of the bid and that win theme isn't lost through people's opinion. If you have ten different people review a section, you're gonna have ten lots

of different feedback and potentially some of them are contradictory or some of them are the same. But you wanna make sure that, of course, you're applying feedback if they're experts in that space. But you as the editor or project owner of that section should ensure that the win theme and what makes that a winning bid isn't lost. That's the review trap And finally, just before you go to that final review, run your pre-submission checklist, spelling, grammar, compliance, consistency and so on. And again, in the description below, we've got our pre-submission checklist that you can download for free, and that can be part of your winning process. Finally, we've now submitted that RFP. So some kinda top-level metrics that you should track is your stages the bid goes through. How many do you not bid for because it wasn't a good fit? That's a good thing to measure. Make sure there's endless opportunities, but you wanna bid what actually makes sense. The ones that you bid for, what were the outcomes of those b-

The ones that you bid for, what are the outcomes for those bids? Was it won? Was it lost? Did you withdraw? Did you stop the bid because of resourcing issues and never submitted it? Next level, once you have that data in terms of the status of your bids , is what were the size of the bids and what was the cost of the bid? That's a really tricky thing to measure. There's some great resources out there around cost of bid, but effectively you wanna make sure that these bids are profitable. So if there's a ten percent chance on a ten million dollar bid, but it costs two hundred grand to bid, that's a really tough one to make. And then also make sure that, you wanna make sure, in a good system or a good AI RFP software like AutoRFP or other software out there in the RFP software market, should automatically be using your responses that you're working on and add them into your library and intelligently store that and categorize that content so it can be used for next time. That's where it's really important to consistently write better and

better, and your content library kind of builds over time, and your systems are set up to produce better results as your company gets, makes bid management and RFP response and the management, RFP management process a competitive advantage of the company And finally, continuous improvement. So it's really not out there to ask for feedback, whether that's a private enterprise bid or if it's government bid. Often this may even be posted publicly. But you wanna make sure you get feedback on the bid, and not just on the bids that you win, but the bids that you lose are sometimes more important. You may unearth that you shouldn't have bid on that in the first place, that it wasn't a good fit from the start. You may realize a flaw in your RFP management process and where something needs to be sharpened up for next time. And continuous improvement in your RFP management process implementing that will just kinda make it better and better every time, and that's what really helps companies go from winning the occasional RFP worth a million dollars

to consistently winning million-dollar RFPs and substantially growing the business's footprint in the enterprise so what are some of the common RFP management challenges? Outdated systems and bottlenecks. Thinking about that process is where is the most amount of friction? That could be following up people to review. So you're always having to message them and be like, "Hey, can you review a section? This was due yesterday." It could be that your content lives in ten different systems. You can never find the right answer. It could be technical docs. It could be SharePoint. It could be Google Drive or whatever. And then and then content library paralysis. So if forty percent of saved references may reference outdated information, no one has the full data to update them. Now, here's some best practices to help you win RFPs consistently and land those million-dollar contracts. Automate the repetitive work. AI has come so far and can help out in particular places of the RFP management process.

Whether it be automating the repetitive work of a first draft and finding the relevant information out of your content library, AI is incredibly strong in that. AutoRFP.ai customers consistently get eighty percent plus AI first draft rate off their existing content, and you wanna make sure that standardized templates. Centralize everything, so it's easy to find the right and source the right information. Cross-functional collaboration, multiple people can edit at once. Reviewers it's easy for someone to review. It's an easy-to-use system. You don't want some clunky software that they have to log in, and an SME can never use it, and therefore, they hate having to help you on an RFP. And track performance metrics automatically. Every time you are moving through your CRM or your relevant software, these opportunities that the bid software is also updating, or at least your bid process data is there. Automating routing questions to the right SMEs, so you don't have to think about who should this go to. Real-time progress tracking so nothing falls through the cracks, and automatic importing of different documents to get a really high level of AI first

draft, and trust scores telling you which answers need human review. So the AI is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That's kinda what AI RFP management looks like is the AI is taking care of that manual work, and the human is coming in to ensure that the win themes are strong, that the pricing is competitive, and that evaluation criteria are met, and they're going to win that bid. All right. What I wanted to leave you with today was a live demo of just the project management capabilities with an AutoRFP.ai and how that can help your RFP management process. So looking in here, we have an RFP project. You can see here that already forty-five of my responses have been submitted and reviewed, nine have been, nine have been submitted but not reviewed, and there's still fourteen left drafted. So I can quickly click into my Drafted, see what ones are left left need to be edited, and then I can look after those as needed. So I can click into my fourteen draft and see, okay, we're still waiting for someone here to to submit those, and I can go in, submit, and make changes. So it's a very easy kinda multiplayer capability, seeing where everything's at.

Can go to my Project Overview and see that the project is due in five days. This is everyone who worked on that project, when it's due. My first draft was highly AI automated, ninety-seven point one percent draft. And overall we have sixty-two percent exceed compliance, thirty-five percent fully compliant, and I can quickly see what response is partially compliant and understand why that's partially compliant and kinda review that. By just having one look and a couple of clicks, I can see, against the evaluation criteria, what responses need to be improved or where we're potentially weak on this competitive bid before having to really do a lot of work. I can see project attachments and everything else going into this bid. And so that's what a project overview dashboard for a competitive bid looks like. If you wanted to have a look at AutoRFP and give it a try, you can go to our website autorfp.ai. Here, you can have a look and learn more about our product and everything else that kind of goes into it and what kind of automation rates our customers are achieving with autorfp.ai. And you can also book a demo to spend time with our team, and in this demo, they'll

provide a really guided walkthrough of the platform, help understand your business, and see really if it's a good fit or not. Thanks. I'm Rob from autorfp.ai. Hopefully, that was helpful in relation to your RFP management process. See ya.

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.

Hey, have you ever wanted to use Gemini for your AI go no go analysis? We're going to jump into it today using Gemini to do our tender analysis to understand if we want to bid on this tender or not. I'm going to be using Gemini Flash 2.5 Pro which currently available on the paid Gemini plan. Uh, and we're going to be looking at a tender actually from the Australian government. Uh, so this one specifically is the ATO, the Australian Tax Office. And interestingly enough, this tender is for a coding assistant. So like an AI coding software SAS application. I use an AI coding SAS application that I love to use every day and that's cursor. So we're going to look at cursor who have an enterprise plan. So making a pitch for the likes of the ATO's and we're going to look at this publicly available atto tender and

whether cursor should bid on it. So we're going to be using our AI go no go analysis tool with Gemini. So let's jump into it and and wait until the end because the results of the AI go nogo analysis may actually surprise you. So, first of all, um I've got this prompt, and I'm going to leave a Google doc uh or page where you can download this uh prompt and then customize it for your business down in the description below. Uh but of course, um you know, I you can customize to your heart's content. When we're prompting, it's really important to a make it contextual to our business, which is where we have the inputs here. So, I'm going to enter the cursor URL. Uh we have our persona. So effectively that's telling the Gemini flash 2.5 what you know what kind of uh person is going to be what skill set should it have what context should it have when it answers this question in this case it's an expert RFP manager uh then we have

our context and objective so what are we asking the prompt effectively to do what are the instructions and then what should the output be so from this case I want a comprehensive document detailing against my red flags or amber flags or green flags around whether cursor should bid on this tender or not. So, I'm going to just, you know, copy and paste that prompt, chuck it in here. Then, uh, really cool thing is I'm actually going to turn on deep research. So, deep research is a tool readily available in a lot of your uh common LLMs whether that's uh Gemini as I'm showing here, Chat GPT or Claude. Gemini's deep research can be used not only to search the web but also search your documents. So, with Gemini, you can upload up to 10 documents. And for this, I'm actually going to be using my own go nogo

template. The go no-go template. Again, I'll chuck a link in the description below where you can download that from our website at autoirfp.ai/d downloads, but effectively this will have information. And this is my go no-go framework. What I'd recommend is downloading the template, changing the go no-go framework uh to make it more relevant for your business as needed. But it's a good starting point. Uh for for instance, this really focuses on RFP origins and relationship. uh it looks at resource requirements from our team and then effectively it gives you a scoring matrix and depending on that scoring matrix matrix should tell me whether we should proceed or not uh as well and it has all the different information you can like play around with your hearts content it's just an Excel spreadsheet um but really useful for your go no-go decision framework all righty so jumping back uh I've turned my deep research on and now I'll upload my documents from drive. And so

here are my tender documents. Uh just clicking shift, I'm just going to select all the relevant ones. I can only upload maximum of 10 documents. So I'm actually going to upload the original tender documents, not the indenments. We'll up upload those later. So I'm going to insert those documents. And there's one other document I want to add from my drive. And that actually is that go no-go decision template. So now I have my go no-go decision template. I've got my atto documents uh for the tender and I've got my prompt of what I want Gemini Flash 2.5 Pro to do for my AI go no-go analysis strap in it's pretty cool what you're actually going to see here as well all my tender documents and it's deep researchers on but before I submit this I want to make sure here in the prompt that you can download below is I'm going to update this information so uh tender documents uh see attached As you can see, I've attached them. And in terms of the company URL, well, here

I just want to make sure I I'm just going to enter cursor here. This is a AI coding assistant tender for the Australian tax office. And you know, in this example, we're being cursor. I do not work at cursor. I work at autofp.ai. But for my example, I click submit. And then what I really like about Gemini is it's going to provide a research plan for my AI go no-go analysis. So with that plan, it'll provide a lot of details in terms of the steps it's going to take to try to answer my prompt. And then I can actually edit that plan if I'd like to. And here we have our plan from Gemini. So clicking through I can go through I can read this information. First it's going to browse the cursor docs and all the information regarding cursor. It's going to go and analyze all the tender documents and then it'll make its way through and start to answer my go no-go questions. So, what I recommend here again is a edit the analysis template, the go no-go decision

template. Make that really relevant for your company and when you decide to bid or not to bid for tenders uh and RFPs. And then second is uh in this prompt, make sure you update what questions you're asking. if there's any specific questions like red flags you want for cursor. It might be well cursor doesn't do uh on premise hosting. So want to make sure that's flagged and then uh there's the information and then I can click start research and Gemini flash is going to start doing our AI go no-go analysis. All righty. I've given it some time. time it probably took oh jeez uh maybe about 10 minutes all up which is what you expect for the deep research uh especially for something that goes through you know 10 different tenor documents probably hundreds of pages and uh uses the organizational context that we provide it in the website of cursor to then run a go nogo analysis against that go no-go decision template. So jumping into it, uh before I show kind

of the output, what you have here for deep research is you can look at the thoughts. And so this kind of explains or at least in some cases LMS do hallucinate their thoughts, but in this case we can hopefully trust it and see that what it kind of looked to and what it did uh in completing that analysis. So it looked at the different websites. It then uh looked at the research uploaded folder files and then use that against the decision template to then try to provide an overall go no go as well. Here are the sources it used. Again, it can refer to those Google Drive documents I provided which is really powerful for that Gemini has such a good integration. Obviously, probably no surprise with Google Drive. And then scrolling up here is our analysis. So Gemini has provided an AI go nogo analysis based off the ATO tender documents for an AI coding assistant which we've mocked up as cursor.com to

reply and say should we bid on this where AI go nogo is powerful is it does help with that cursory first look whether this is worth it to look what information should I understand before diving to it further um as well certification gaps um you know goes through all the different information there and effectively it's going through that spreadsheet the decision template that we have for our go no-go analysis you can see here strategic alignment competitive landscape commercial viability legal and security and it's now providing that information there as well so it's it's kind of looked over those different clauses uh I mean here if that's true the the clause grants the AT the right to terminate the contract at any time for any reason for its own convenience that's a pretty you usually don't want that in your legal contracts with the three year plus one plus1 contracts. That's pretty rude. Uh but yeah, anyway, you can have a look at that and uh obviously make up your own mind as well for uh the different information. Uh then you have kind of the different scoring of waiting and that's the powerful thing about a go no-go decision

template is to um use it as a I guess take the emotion out of RFP response. You might have an enterprise AE salesperson run up to you and say I have to bid on this RFP. we have to do it. Uh and if you kind of boil it down to just numbers and what the scoring is, then you can make a more informed decision hopefully without the emotion of that uh as well. Uh and then so it kind of does that scoring for me that I provide in the spreadsheet. And then that's why it's a no-go is because the weighted score was 44.3%. Uh and so told me to go not go for it. I can actually then expand on this. And in the drive there's actually three indentments. And so uh I'll say uh please find attached I'm typing here. Please find attach uh some addendments for the tender and use that to update the

the analysis. So and that's a great thing. You have this chat. You might have Q&A later. You might have addenments. might have uh mistakes in the original tender that are provided to you and with that chat history you can then come back to it and provide additional documents to then do the further analysis with the context of your original. Now with uh LLMs you will uh hit like a token limit for that. For instance I I believe Gemini's token limit is around 1 million uh for Gemini 2.5 Flash Pro. Uh so it's a very fast model but effectively it's going to start start forgetting the original context that you provided. Uh and so you need to be cautious of that. It's good for initial we think of this AI go no go analysis initial cursory first look. It's it's not going to be our full in-depth look. Effectively it's it's saving me time of places I need to look at uh and so on before we kind of get into it. So I it's not going to replace the human to do the go no-go. This is going to help uh help the human do the

go no-go as well. Hope that this video was really useful for you on how to do an AI go nogo analysis with Gemini Flash 2.5 Pro. Uh you can use this for all your tendering needs. Uh make sure to still have the human in the loop. AI can hallucinate. And then final just that last privacy and security uh comment on making sure that the training is turned off. This is a that you're using a paid subscription. Do not upload private RFPs into an LLM because that maybe then you send into uh training data uh without you make sure that the training is turned off. You're paying for your subscription uh as well. Uh, and then yeah, this one, my example is a public tender, uh, but you can, of course, uh, use it as well. So, I'm Rob from Auto RFP. Uh, we're actually an AI RFP software. We actually have a go no-go analysis feature really similar to

what I showed you before, but a lot less of the leg work uh in our software that also uses Gemini Flash 2.5, which is why I had a lot of confidence that could kind of handle the large documents that you would often find in tenders. So yeah, if you're interested, find us at auto rfp.ai. You can pick a book a demo and learn more about us as well. I thanks.

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.

Hey everyone. >> Hey y'all. Thanks for joining. >> Well, we uh while we wait for people, um you can put in the uh obligatory where am I from in the chat, but also I am curious cuz Spotify Wrapped just came out yesterday, what your top album or top song is. So, if you put that in there, too, extra extra points. >> We're going to start. I think we'll play maybe like 60 seconds or so past the start time, and then the rest can you can catch up on the recording. >> Hi, Northern Ireland representing. It's good to see you, Michael.

>> Cool, cool, cool. Good to kick off with you all. >> I'm good. >> Let's start. Let's jump straight in. Thanks, everyone, for coming to the Proposal Win Rate Report 2026 uh with Stargazy. I'm Jasper Coope, co-founder and CEO of AutoRFP. Um yeah, really excited for what we're going to jump in here today, and we have a Q&A as well at the end. So, if you want to jump in with any questions, you can do that through the Zoom webinar there, and we'll have some time after to catch up and go through it. Over to you, Crystal. >> Yeah, I am Crystal Carter. I am the founder of Stargazy, um which is we we focus on data for proposal people, best practices, and we have a nice little community of proposal professionals. So, yeah, it'd be good to see you all over there if you're not there already. But, this data is the stuff we we are most excited for. Um So, methodology. Jasper, are you ready for me to jump into methodology? Okay. So, methodology, I know this is

like the most boring part of the report, but I want you all to know that uh this is going to be really useful for everybody who is on this call. Uh because everyone we surveyed um they're from public sector, they're from private sector, they're from people who do a mix of both private and public sector, they're across multiple geographies, multiple industries, multiple size of bid teams. Uh we had 97 bid uh professionals who responded from different teams. Um and the average person who responded, they're proposal manager, they're proposal professional in some way, and they're usually doing about 51 to 150 RFPs per year. So, these are real mature organizations who are responding to RFPs. Um the average deal size is between 100k to 500k USD ACV. Uh but we also have people who are doing multi-million dollar ones and ones who are doing RFPs that are for like 10k. So, we have a really wide mix of people who responded, which I think is great.

>> And then to jump into the cohort, so how we broke it out. So, we've got the high win cohort, which is 51% of the RFPs that they participated in over the last 12 months they won. Then we've got the mid win cohort between 26 and 50%, and then the low win cohort, which is 0 to 26%. So, what we really wanted to focus on in this particular report is actually the delta. So, not generalities about kind of everyone that responds to RFPs, you know, where the numbers moving, but what is the actual difference between people in the high win cohort and the low win cohort, and a few extra facts just about the high win cohort is every single respondent that was in the high win had a dedicated bid manager and they were roughly doing about 150. So, they're on the larger scale side of things and nearly all of them um were in the middle of maturity as far as their uh part of the organization's age. So, they weren't teams that had started or got spun up in the last 12 months, nor were they teams on average that had existed for over 5 years. They

were kind of in that middle range of 1 to 5 years. So, maybe had some flexibility with their processes and were still kind of growing into it. So, that's really what the report focuses on is that contrast between the two. >> Yeah, and to jump right into it like the about the actual data we received is um people win and lose based primarily on their proposal strategy and execution, which is huge. Um so, and I I mean that in broad strokes, but the steps within your proposal process, if you're actually following it um with your execution of the process, um the sales strategy supporting that process and who is in charge of what pieces of that process, right? It's all about those things. Um if you have a low win rate, um it's an operating model problem. Whereas, if you have a high one, your operating model is doing great. So, most teams that are losing RFPs it's because their system is perfectly designed to produce the results they currently achieve. So, if you're only winning 20% of your RFPs, that's because your model is built

to deliver that 20%. If you're if you have a 50% win rate, it's cuz it's built to achieve that win rate. So, just keep that in mind as we are we're going through the data. >> Yeah, and some of the data drives the best practices that no longer win. So, what are those things that everyone says that seemingly are true, but not necessarily? And and we learned a lot. There's six kind of core ones um on the top that we wanted to go straight into, which is the more bespoke writing the better, Right? So, the more customized the responses are, the more time they're spending on that, the better. Relationships are the number one way to win RFPs. You've got to have prior relationships, deep relationships, etc. That SMEs should be involved in the drafting process, so they can make sure it's accurate. That execution is going to matter far more above any kind of process or methodology that you've deployed or spent time on. That bid teams are there to increase efficiency, like an accounts receivable function or something. It's like, the

more time we can save other people in the organization, the faster we can do this, the better. And that teams, you know, with AI, with technology, can now do more with less. So, all of these, one way or another, were disproven through the data that we captured. The biggest single discrepancy was the difference of priority, or what winners attributed their previous wins to. So, customer insight here is just a huge difference between the low win cohort, their level of importance on that, and the high win cohort. So, while they kind of treat equally things like win themes, team expertise, the level of compliance with the RFP itself, where things really diverge is how much they think that the relationship matters and the price matters. So, while low win teams said customer insight is one of the lowest importance or attributed things for their wins,

customers on the high win rate side, organizations on the high win rate side, put that as their number one thing. So, these people have moved past just giving compliant responses or being responsive and then providing additional context. They're genuinely taking the time to do a lot of customer research and then actually provide insightful responses. They're providing numbers that aren't just the price of their product or service. They're providing numbers that are maybe based on that company's annual report. They're providing business case. They're showing that they care and understand their actual needs. They're giving those prospective customers confidence that you actually understand what they're trying to achieve through that RFP process. Another thing that really differentiates them is that there's a direct correlation between the amount of automation that the high win cohort does and their win rate and then the low win cohort. And to be clear, it's not that the low win cohort is not doing any automation. They're doing probably a lot

more automation than many people were doing 3 years ago. It's that the high win cohort continues to pull away in the amount of content they're able to reuse. So, basically, they're not starting from empty slates, nor are they even starting with, you know, 40% of the proposal um ready to go all the core aspects of it drafted. They're starting with 65% of the content they need, 70% of the content they need. And that level of automation and content reuse, the fact that they are so organized and ready to go means that they can reinvest that time in providing those customer insights. And the bespoke time they do spend is on the right things rather than trying to figure things out, pull from SMEs, or go backwards and forwards in their process trying to get the content they actually need. Another part is that they have a more defined process in general. So, we broke that out by the number of elements. So, not specifically the number of steps that they have in their process, but

actually the number of things. So, an element would be something like a go no go, which most teams had, uh win themes, which most teams had. But, there's a short list rate and a win rate correlation to other things as well. So, maybe one example was customer research, more structured intakes, um postmortem learning and putting that into the next bid. Having those additional elements helps you stack your win rate, make sure those learnings are going through and overall you're having a more mature and advanced process. So, you can learn more about that in the report itself as well. And just to visualize the difference there is that those content systems are creating capacity for responding insightfully. So, when we actually look at the time stack and like how much time these teams are spending on different elements, yes, the low win teams are reusing content. They are maybe spending some time on customer insights, but they're spending so much of the time just on the fact their process is not

mature. So, there's process inefficiencies, they're going backwards and forwards through things and then they're doing a kind of bespoke writing as well because they can't find exactly what they need straight away. Their content management is just not in a place where it's possible to have that much content reuse. Whereas, the high win teams are coming in with a huge foundation of reuse content ready to go, freeing up their time to do more research, get more insights, learn more maybe from that sales team. And then when they're spending their time on bespoke writing because they're absolutely still doing huge element of that, they're spending it in the right spots, on the right things, the things that actually matter, the things that move the dial and they know that because they've done the customer research to know what moves the dial for this particular prospect. >> Yeah, I think one other big thing that surprised me. Like I this wasn't even on my radar. When we were asking questions, it just the data made it so interesting. And that is a that SMEs

actually can be a huge problem in your win rates. Um and I think if you are on LinkedIn for 2 seconds, if you go to a conference and talk with other proposal professionals, SMEs are going to be one of the things that come up because they are really hard to to get to actually respond to your responses in your RFP or to check it or in your proposal specifically. Um So, the data that we found around this was a high win teams actually use SMEs less and it might be partly because of the reasons of them being so difficult to to capture their time to help us. Um what we have seen is if you are are a high win rate cohort, you're probably using SMEs just to check specific responses that you really need help with. But, they are not drafting your responses. They're not writing them from scratch. Um you're using them as little as possible. Um and what we're seeing is is the high win cohort, the proposal team really wins that narrative. And this is across industries, even really SME heavy industries.

So, this isn't like just for like SaaS or something where you might not need an SME as much. Um and what we're seeing is is part of the reason is SMEs are really good at writing technically accurate responses, but they're not very good at taking that customer insight and like we talked about earlier and writing that into the narrative. They're not good at being persuasive in that writing. Um and so, that is another the reason why. So, if you're really like relying on your SMEs to respond to your RFPs, that is going to be like a true hindrance on your actual win rate, not just on your process and efficiencies. Sorry, that one just like surprised me so much. Um But, there's also the bid revenue dependence effects. Um and that is the more revenue that, you know, depends on your proposals or your RFP win rates, the more your win rate depends on structure and insight. Um and so, what we're really seeing here is teams that are in bid critical organizations where like 26% to 75% or

more of your revenue comes from RFPs, they behave very differently from those where bids are just like seen as peripheral for like just admin, not really contributing to your your revenue. Um and there's other like performance outcomes that are diverging too. So, the the high performers, the people with high win rates, um they're winning because they are treating their bid engine as a strategic revenue system, like all the way up to the top, right? Um whereas like the low win rate cohort, they're in the the same revenue environment, but they lose more because they treat bids as that administrative paperwork, as that cost center, that overhead, whatever you want to call it, kind of a negative connotation within the organization. Um and the dependence on bids amplifies whatever the organization is already doing, both the good and the bad. So, it correlates more strongly with win rates, their maturity, their content practices, or their AI adoption. Like this is the number one thing. Um so, each step in

your revenue dependence increases the likelihood of being a high win rate team, but only if the ownership and insight systems are in place. Uh so, if you guys on this call, if you're a proposal leader, if you're a sales leader, what does this actually mean for you? It means if bids are driving your business, the business you've got to invest in your proposal engine. Um you have to invest in your structure, your governance, your insight, so like the pre-RFP information that you get, um and your FTE, like your people, not just like your systems and your software. Um so, if you are like currently sitting in a bid team, and you notice that your sales team, your leader leadership, proposal, marketing, sales leadership, whoever they are, if they are treating you as like a cost center or overhead or just as admin, then they are doing more harm to their revenue than just wasting your time. Like they're having um a truly detrimental effect to your revenue. Like I can't hammer this home enough. Like it doesn't just feel bad, it's going to be

bad for your whole organization. Um, and the data is just unambiguous about this. So, when competitive bids represent a large share of your revenue, like you have to invest in these things. I'll stop I'll stop ranting about it, but uh, it's just like take that as seriously as you can. Um, another really interesting thing and something that I really want to see the data come in on is all about AI. All right, like how does AI help us win? Cuz we see this in so much marketing, like AI is going to help us win more. Well, yes and no. So, um, AI usage, um, what we're seeing is nearly half the teams that responded, they use AI proposal tools. Uh, but AI adoption alone is not separating the high performers from the middle performers or the low performers. Um, and that doesn't mean that AI lacks value or that we shouldn't care about it, but it means that most organizations are using it on top like if you're a low win rate, you're using that AI on top of really weak foundations that we are already talking about. Because like as we all know, AI amplifies whatever

system is plugged into. Bad system, amplify it. Good system is going to amplify that. So, if you're a low performing team, um, we already see we see this so much, like AI is accelerating the poor processes, it's generating more generic content, it's not using that insight, right, that we talked about. It's uh, deepening those rewriting cycles, which as we already seen is a huge problem, and it also masks that really weak clear like qualification process that we have to be good at. So, if you guys are a proposal or sales leader, what does this mean? Does it mean you forget about AI? Absolutely not. Um, basically it just means that AI is not a shortcut to high win rates, right? It's value depends entirely on the underlying process, your insight intake, your win theme definition, um, bid that SME models, and the content governance. So, if you if you have all those things down and you're using AI on top of it, like you are golden. You're going to be doing so well in a lot easier way, but if you don't, um,

it's it's not going to help you win more. So, uh, future state Oh, Jasper, I'm handing that over to you. >> Of course. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, the future state is the teams that will win in 2026, based off all of this data, is the ones that demonstrate customer insight to the questions that matter, right? First and foremost, they're going to be providing those types of responses, not your generic, not your AI slop, not your responses from 3 years ago that are now outdated. They're going to be providing up-to-date, accurate, sure, but actually insightful responses. They're going to run a more governed and well-resourced bid engine. These are not going to be the teams that get gutted or halved and then replaced, you know, with AI, quote-unquote. These are ones that have well-resourced, um, with bid engines that are ready to scale. They know how much head count they're going to need to add. They know how much time it takes to do certain things. They're ready, uh, to get traction and to scale very quickly into more and more wins.

Um, so we're going to see some very strong teams come out with that and with the AI leverage that is going to power that kind of baseline, uh, revenue engine. And then, those teams that can align sales, proposals, and subject matter experts around that one narrative, not just letting everyone kind of contribute randomly in their own way, but having a very structured process in which those different teams can contribute, making sure that they're working around one narrative. And at the end of the day, that is the RFP team's job is to make sure that it is a narrative that is persuasive, um, not just, uh, narrative that is accurate. And then, finally, that AI adoption, it's not something we're going to see go away. People are going to see that um, amplify their work extremely and they it's not going to compensate for the for the weak responses though. We are going to see a lot of AI slop. Hopefully our competitors use as much AI slop as possible to bid on these RFPs against us, right? That's what we want. But on the on the other side of that, if we're all able to have stronger processes than our competition and

leverage AI to help us hone it in rather than dilute it, then that's what's going to help us all win in 2026. >> Yeah, so there are seven things that we took away from all this data that you can genuinely start on now. Like you don't have to wait for sales kickoff season next year to to get this started. I think this is something you can probably start planning for now. Um and these are going to be the biggest levers that you can use to heighten your bid like your win rate, which of course you're going to want to do. Um and that is something that we know like we know deep down are correct, but the data now backs it up and that is starting every bid with insight. Insight about your customer and making sure you're getting into the world and everybody's on that same page about that insight before you start drafting whether that's a person drafting or AI drafting or mix of both. You have to have that in there as that first piece. Um the second is assigning clear

ownership. So like Jasper was mentioning, you need one team to own that bid. It can't be a mix of a bunch of organizations. It has to be one team. Uh the next thing is win themes and that is narrative before content. So using those insights and then building out that those win themes that you're then going to use throughout your response. The fourth is move SMEs out of authorship. If they're writing your responses right now, do whatever you can to get them out of there. Have them validate your responses to make sure they're accurate. Don't have them write. Um the fifth thing is tighten that qualification. Don't bid on low fit opportunities. Like the data just shows it's not just burning people out, which it definitely is. That's a big deal. But it's also actually hurting your win rate because you're focusing on the wrong things. Time, resources are not infinite. They're finite. So, focus on the right things. Um and then govern the content library. So, uh make sure that your content library, wherever it's pulling from, whether it's a proposal management tool, whether it's proposal management tool that you know, can get things from everywhere. Make sure that it's curated,

that it's vetted, and that it's mapped to the really critical themes that you you tend to have with your customers. And the seventh and last thing is track your shortlist rate. Um now, uh you're probably going to be like, "Christina, I've seen your LinkedIn post. You don't care about shortlist rates." And that's true. Like for KPIs, I don't care about shortlist rates. Uh but it is going to be a signal of compliance failure. And also, like if your messaging is just completely off. Right? So, that's just kind of like a a canary in the coal mine situation. Um these seven things that you can really fix or just focus on or start tracking uh before your SKO in 2026. >> Cool. And finally, yeah, where to get the the full report? So, you can get it at auto rfp.ai win hyphen rate hyphen report. And you'll also get an email if you've signed up to this webinar uh immediately after. Uh but also at the stargazy.io intelligence level. If you want to talk about that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, um you guys will be able to get it both on the website, the

stargazy.io website, but also within the community. So, people can start having conversations about it, ask questions. Uh because everything that we went through today was, of course, like a really fast overview. Um but there's a lot of in the actual report itself, there's a lot of data, a lot of information, um and a lot of the nuances that come across with all of these. Like they're like they're not all necessarily black and white. There's there's going to be nuance. And I think it's That's in the report, but it's going to be important for us as proposal professionals to be able to have that conversation and what that actually means in our in our day-to-day. >> Well, so you can drive drive that now, but yeah, happy to jump into Q&A if you want to have any questions either about the report itself or anything adjacent. Just yeah, an opportunity to dive in deeper. >> Yeah, we have a question. Jasper, I'm going to give this one to you. But it's from Brian and it's Please expand on the steps and ideas involved in govern the content library. >> I wish it was I wish it was that simple

that I could um content library governance. It's such an interesting thing and back to like the the sneeze and how you involve them in the process. I think um when it comes to that, govern your content library, I don't just actually mean libraries. Like Or or no one should mean libraries. You should really think about content holistically across the organization and the types of content that you have the highest dependence on as far as what's involved in your responses. Maybe for some teams that's a lot of like legal stuff. Maybe for other teams it's purely product most of the time. That's where I would start. And when you talk about governance, it's like, is that up to date? Are people posting updates on your product in a Slack channel at the moment? Well, that's not a great governance process. You need to be moving them to a change log potentially, leveraging that change log to respond rather than having to figure out what's actually shipped and what they're just talking about in a product channel and teams. So, there's kind of that maturity curve. So, when we say governance, just figure out A, which is the most important content that you actually need access to time and time

again. And then how do you know that it's actually accurate? How do you get it to the point where it's compelling and persuasive the way you're responding? It's not just like from the change log, it's written with its features and benefits in a way that a customer can actually consume. Um and how do you make it accessible? Is it in a place where with a touch of a button or a type of a keyword or search, you can immediately pull that information, find those features and benefits, and give it to a customer. So, it's accurate, it's compelling, and it's fast. And I would say those are kind of the three things of governance that I would start to jump into. And then when it comes to technical, that's that's a that's a huge exercise. But, um I would start with mapping the types of content and where they come from in your organization. And against those three aspects, how mature you think you are. >> Um and then uh I'll I'll take some of it, Jasper, please chime in. Um but, Sabrina, you said, "Can you define more clearly or explain a bit more about what are considered insights?" Um this is going to be just about

anything that you can learn about the customer. Like, what are what's keeping them up at night? What are their pain points? Um if they purchased you, like what are they afraid of like messing up if they purchased you? Um you know, what are what are they worried about internally in terms of their own promotions? Specifically, what are they worried about in terms of like if they're having revenue problems, like if that's, you know, somewhere publicly, um if they have to do financial reports or anything like that. It's going to be genuinely anything that is going to be very relevant for the stakeholders who you know will be evaluating or making decision on your proposal. And I know it's very, very broad. Um but, I specifically used to spend before AI, I used to spend 2 days on research alone. And then of course, like working with my capture or BD person to um get any information from calls that they had with the customer, any emails they had with the customer, um not just stuff that was publicly available. So, it's as much as you can. But, yeah.

Jasper, chime in. >> I think yeah, a really simple one is if you work on the private side, if they're a public company, they're listed, then those annual reports are just like the most fundamental thing that anyone should be reading, no matter really, even what you're selling if the deal size is, you know, 50, 100k plus, 500k, million, I mean, definitely. What is that organization focusing on strategically? And that can at least be a part of it. And then yeah, as Kristina says, there's just so much more nuance and detail that you want to get into, but I'd say like start there if you haven't started at all, and then just get more and more context. And yeah, 2 days seems like a good budget depending on the deal size for sure. Um one from Odvar around it's easy to think of uh you know, reused content as not tailored, um but there's a like a different interpretation. Absolutely. I think what the high win rate teams that like I've worked with one-on-one that like they they know what can just simply be reused as is, and the customer's not going to

care. It's not a differentiator. It doesn't matter. They just need yes in the box and move on. And they know which ones they're spending time on. So yes, they actually do have a lot of like verbatim reuse or slightly reuse for the stuff that doesn't matter, but these are good content libraries. They're not super verbose, um or too they're not just yes no, nor are they huge pages not actually answering the question they asked. They're they're they're well um done content libraries. They can reuse that. And then the only bespoke elements are the questions that are differentiated. And I guess this is probably more true for companies that sell repeatable products where a lot of the baseline stuff is the same, right? Do you support users? Can you log in with Google? All of that kind of stuff, they're not spending time there at all. What they're doing is they're spending time on the commercials, the long-term partnership, what does the road map look like, give us a company overview, the implementation timeline. That's where they're spending their time. They're not spending it in the security, legal, and box-ticking exercises. >> Also, shout out to Odvar. He's one of my

favorite sales leaders of all time. So. Um Chelsea, really quick, I'm going to answer your question. Um, so the survey size was uh we surveyed 97 uh proposal professionals. Um, and they were across This was at the very beginning when we mentioned it, so sorry if you missed it, but it was across private sector, public sector, and also teams who do a mix of both. And it was in a bunch of geographies as well, but mostly UK, US, and Australia. We have some uh Nordics and EU countries as well. >> Nicola had a good question, and I don't I don't work at all in the defense space, but just around like more bespoke and technically complex documents that really do need SMEs. I'm interested on your thoughts on this, Chris, but I've seen a sandwich approach work quite well, where you actually start with a proposal manager using drafts from like maybe similar types of projects, if there is any time being vastly similar,

trying to get that bespoke down, cut it down, and then move on to uh the SME, and then back to the proposal manager at the end. So there's kind of like a start, like here's the raw outline and framework that we want you to work to, and here's maybe the theme that we want that SME to work into, and then there's a very controlled process at the end to make sure that we're not just approving whatever SME put in, but there's going to be maybe some heavy edits if they had to write a lot of bespoke content. >> Yeah, Nicola, like I So I I have worked in the DoD and MoD uh ministry, so I get what you're saying, and it is it's it's way trickier than just about anywhere else. Um, so what I've seen work really well is as much as possible, I mean, of course, saying what Jasper said, but also uh doing interviews with them, so you're getting that information from them, unless like they have to literally like like solution something out, like drawing it out, which I know they sometimes have to do with the DoD space, but if it is something that they can just solution through and talk it out with you, and you record that, and then either you manually or like within you

and AI, then writing that out into the solution is actually far more effective and does a lot less rewriting that has to be done. Um Of course, like they then of course have to validate validate it as you know, but that I've seen that work really well. I don't know if that answers your question. But thanks, Nicola. >> Good practices for managing the content library. I'm happy to take that or >> Yeah, sorry. I'm just Yeah. >> Yeah, another another interesting one. >> Um Yeah, I just so best practices in managing a content library. I think it really I know like we've touched a little bit on it, but I think it really depends on like what you're using. And I know that's I hate it depends answers, but I do think it kind of does depend. Like if you're using a proposal management system, some of them require tagging and indexing and a lot of manual work. Um Whereas other ones do like a light

version, some of them none of it. So I think it's no matter what you're using though, I think best practices is kind of what Jasper was saying, and that's only have in there what you know you're going to reuse. Don't have a bunch of content in there that you that that you're never going to update. Like if you know it's outdated, then there's no point in it being there. And if you have a really hard time updating all the content you have, that's just it's just a waste of time. Um but if you have a proposal management system of some sort that can connect to a variety of different tools that you know gets updated. Like if you can connect it to like technical documentation, for example, or like HR policies or environmental policies, whatever it is that you know gets updated by that specific team, that to me is is really useful and a really smart thing to do. >> Definitely. I I think the future is meeting SMEs where they are. And just to kind of like expand on that

point, there was company recently that we worked with and they had the like a Fortune 500, so much of their information is actually publicly updated. Like it's mandated that they update it publicly. That just by using their website content, their public filings, etc., they could have way better responses than they were getting from their library even though they've got SMEs assigned, they're trying to review it, they're trying their best to run that whole process and have thousands of entries updated. At the end of the day, actually meeting the subject matter experts where they were, which was I actually have to complete this filing. I actually have to update these documents on our help site, that kind of thing. Um that is just like having way better practical results in reality. So, although maybe in in someone's mind you're like, "No, I want to maintain a library-based approach uh and maintain that manually and have it very structured." For some, that's actually just not practical. And you do just need to go to an approach where you can just get the information where it is actually updated. And unfortunately, um yeah,

that can sometimes involve tools like, you know, you can start with a ChatGPT there or something more generic, even just copy-pasting that information around or having links to it. And maybe giving up on certain parts of your library like a long tail. Like, if there's any responses that are getting used, you know, once in 800 questions, then maybe don't maintain that in your library. Maybe just actually go out to the source every time. As long as that takes, it might take you actually less time overall than trying to maintain a copy of the long tail of questions. >> Yeah. Um so, there's so many questions. Like, it's hard to know which one to go to next. Um I'll try and go in order though. So, uh Michael, you had a couple questions. Um So, the relationship between customer insights and then like of course the customer relationship like there is a nuance here and this is mentioned quite a bit in the report but the nuance is uh what we've seen in the past is relationship with the customer was like enough to win right like maybe you went golfing with them or you got your nails done with them like whatever

it was that was enough you were buddies. Now that's not enough. Um you have to not just have that relationship with them but you have to have that really deep insight about them and prove that within your response just because the customer evaluation committee is now so much bigger. So even if you don't have that relationship with them which of course it's going to help you if you do you still need to have that deep insight that you probably didn't just get from that person you had a relationship with uh because it's it's not going to encompass all of the different stakeholders who have a genuine stake in that decision and who could easily kick you out if you don't meet with what the customer in like what they actually care about what they need to hear from you. >> Yeah. And you hear this in like the general kind of sales literature all the time like you need to multi-thread you need to meet all of the stakeholders you need to run you know who's your economic buyer versus your champion versus your user buyer. But even the best sales people on earth realistically for the deals that really matter they're not going to be able to meet everyone on the buying committee. The only way that you're getting through to

a lot of these people on the buying committee is through their responses because they're revealing their portions of their responded RFP. So at the end of the day how you find those people is you actually just try and figure out their problems and that can only come through insight. You're not going to be able to get them to to golf to nails to the bar. Um you're going to need to do as much research as you can and kind of make it undeniable that of any vendor that responded you understand each person's challenges the most in the organization and have gone deep on it and that a lot of the time is overruling any personal relationship even if you've got a CFO or something like side you know as much as they love them, they trust their stakeholders when there's, you know, three or four of them saying the same thing. >> And in terms of terminology, um I feel like every country and industry I'm in has a different one. Like I went to an asset management bidding uh conference this morning. Totally different terminology than I would ever use. So, it's it's just it's so different no matter

where you are. It's um it's a lot of fun. Uh The next one is um and once again, I'm going to have you take this one, Jasper, cuz it is um quite a bit about content management, but is tagging a big part of that content management? >> Yeah, tagging is such a such an interesting one and such a slippery slope as well. So, tagging categorization is important. Like it's critical. People say like in AI context is everything, right? And it's about how do you give a user, a person, an AI agent, whatever you're using, how do you give the context of what's going on? And right now, the only 100% effective way to do that, I think, is to categorize in some way, whether you're putting stuff in folders or using tags um to categorize things. And this is only applicable for organizations that have more complex products or offerings or services, where they need to go into an RFP and they need to basically have, hey, only this context in our organization is relevant to this

bid. Because your biggest risk, both from people just writing the responses and AI, is that they're pulling information out of the wrong bucket to the same question. So, you're getting the you're getting the question, you're going, oh great, this is the answer. You put it in. No, that's the wrong entity. No, that's the wrong product. No, that's the wrong country. And that's how you end up with a laborious and low governance process. So, that's where tagging and categorization becomes critical. So, think about it in those contexts is I think the first question that we ask to see if that's even necessary in the first place is, if I gave you a the is there two answers for anything? And if there is, then great. We're already talking about two different buckets, maybe two different tags, and then we go from there. You want to keep it as minimal as possible, but unfortunately, I think it's basically a necessity um depending on your industry. Sometimes it'll be soft to make a mistake one in every thousand. In asset management, for example, you make a mistake once in every thousand, we had a prospect that got sued for $46 million by the SEC for that. So, that probably, you know, just roll with the tag

approach if you're there. Um but outside of that, if you're selling B2C software, um and and selling a little bit more casual, then then maybe it's not the juice isn't worth the squeeze. >> Yeah. Um there there is so much nuance with this this one, the tagging, which is kind of where I wanted you to take it. Um but um I'd worry one question from you is, taking SMEs out of the question, what would an ideal team look like? Once again, I think this is going to be really dependent upon the type of team you have in the industry you're in. If you are in um like a DOD or MOD sort of situation, then they're they're always going to need to be in there to uh reviewing your content and reviewing uh the response to make sure that it's accurate, and of course, um interviewing them for the solutioning piece, cuz they're going to be um integral to that. Um same with like AEC. Uh but if you are more in like software SaaS, um then uh unless you have like really complicated solutions, you probably hardly need them at all.

Um you probably only need them as like a an organization where you and I both worked, um we didn't use them at all um because we didn't need to because it was our our product was so simple that we could go from end to end and feel confident that our responses were accurate. Um and so if you are in that situation, um maybe only have them review the things that you are unsure of that are completely new, that are maybe a little bit more complicated, a little bit more technical, that you don't feel com- like um comfortable answering. Like I wouldn't use them as like a a comfort blanket. I would use them only if if you think you need them. Like obviously don't put your- yourself in danger or your your company in danger of responding incorrectly, but as as much as you cannot use them, I would not use them. As my suggestion. >> Really interesting one from Julie came up around recently heard a stat 40% of the procurement teams are using AI to evaluate our bids. Do you have any insights on how to structure the response or tactics to address that issue? How do I increase the AI score?

And that in my experience with this was actually working with a procurement software that was putting in um the AI review system into it and they were talking to us about how we did it on the other side and we had a feedback system that tries to basically predict what procurement will think. Um and in our testing, it preferred AI responses over ones that we writ- wrote as humans. So this is a small sample set. I'm sure that they'll adapt and and get better at certain things, but certainly um longer responses that cover all of the requirements. So I think things that are really going to hurt people in the future is where they're not properly responsive and they're indirectly answering questions with generic template. That's really going to pop your tires when someone goes um you know, "Do you have any operations in Singapore?" and you say, "We have global operations in 20 countries and blah blah blah." without specifically naming Singapore, you're done. The AI system that's going to is going to catch you on

that where a human person like a human reviewer might be um a lot softer, I think, on your level of responsiveness to those questions and kind of assume, do some further research, that kind of thing. So I think your it does um like it does raise the bar of like how much it needs to actually respond to the question. Um and you can't miss a portion, you know, if it's three questions in the one question, you're going to want to have to tick all of those three off um to to make sure you're you are responding to that. >> Yeah, one thing I want to add is make sure that you are really talking to the like I mean, Destry just said but the evaluation score is probably going to be like one of the most important things you can focus on. So like I mean, I've seen teams where they they make sure they feed that into their AI to help use that in every single response. And then review it based on evaluation criteria for every single response. Um but I I would also say that although they're using AI to review them, they're still usually like at least in the short-listed ones, they're still having a person usually review those three to four shortlists. So you're still going

to have to have it readable to a human. So it's like this the new best writing practices I think are about to change rather dramatically, but we still have to remember that human element. >> Exactly. It's nearly like AI's going to cover the gaps in your responses, but the human's still going to be there to like find the the the differentiator. So you're still going to want that portion of it ultimately win. >> Um in terms of So somebody asked if we can share the link to the report. That's going to get emailed to you like directly after, I think. So and it's also, yeah, right here. >> Right there as well. >> Um Also, really really quickly I'll go into other major differences in the RFP process in public tender versus corporate invitations for bidding. Um there are nuances, of course, usually in wording um but no, I I usually I've I've worked in both quite a bit um in both like DOD and MOD uh which are are very very formal.

Usually they are going to be more focused on the Shipley process, whether that's good or bad that's up to you to decide, but they they do tend to be a little more formal, have quite a longer review cycle. Um but I do see that changing rapidly, whereas like the B2B like enterprise side is usually a lot more I won't say loose but I would say they're a lot more efficient with their processes. But I I really when I see differences in processes I actually see them more differences in industries versus uh public versus private. And the data by the way I didn't see any difference between best practices. So I don't think best practices change. Um Anything else Jasper? >> Nothing else Anna. Happy to call it there. Thanks everyone for your time and for your questions. Great to dive into them. Um

Yeah, look forward to you reviewing the report and we're super keen for any any feedback uh what we can capture next time. I think we learned a lot capturing information for this report, drawing out those insights and then actually being able to figure out how we can provide like a much more insightful and detailed report next time at a whole new scale. So I'm already looking forward to the to the next one but I think the insights in this is super powerful and will definitely get it started into into 2026. So yeah, keen for you to dive in and thanks for your time. >> Yeah, thank you so much everybody. >> Thanks all. Bye.