Erica Weber

AI isn’t replacing proposal and grant writers. It’s raising the bar for what great ones look like — and quietly weeding out the average ones. Let’s be honest: we’ve all watched the nervous chatter ripple through the proposal writing world. Will AI write our RFPs? Will it kill the cover letter? Will a chatbot steal my government contract win? Short answer: no. Longer answer: not if you know what you’re doing. Here’s what’s actually happening. AI has become an extraordinary accelerant for...

Your team is tracking 23 metrics in Gong. Twelve of them are making things worse. Gong is extraordinary. It captures so much — talk ratios, filler words, competitor mentions, question rates, deal timelines, engagement scores. The dashboard can look like mission control. And that's precisely the problem. When everything is measured, nothing is prioritized. The human brain can hold roughly four to seven items in working memory at a time. Ask a rep to optimize for twelve metrics simultaneously...

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...