Erica Weber

What's actually happening when a proposal comes down to dollars and cents. I want to push back on something that gets treated as gospel in almost every post-loss debrief I've ever sat through: "We lost on price." Sometimes that's true. Commodity bids, where every specification is identical and the only variable is the number on page 47, yes, price decides. But most of what gets called a proposal is not a commodity bid. It's a complex ask from an organization trying to make a consequential...

How to win in an evaluation process where a machine goes first Let's talk about something that's already happening and almost nobody is disclosing in their Request for Proposals: AI-assisted evaluation. Procurement teams are overwhelmed. They always have been. But now some of them have a new option. Feed all the proposals into a tool, let it score for compliance, flag gaps, surface differentiators, rank by criteria weight. A human still makes the final call, usually, but the shortlist the...

Why great proposals name the scary stuff first Here's something I've learned: the proposals that win most consistently aren't the ones that make everything sound easy. They're the ones that make the client feel understood in their fear. Every decision-maker reading your proposal is privately running a risk calculation. What happens if this goes wrong? What's the cost of doing nothing? Who do I have to explain that to? Is this vendor going to disappear when the hard part starts? Great proposal...