High-performing bid and proposal functions recognise that sustained success in an automated world depends as much on remembering their true value as it does on redefining it. Because automation only accelerates what you already have. And, unless what you already have are strong foundations – purpose, people, process, content, and intent – even the most advanced automation won’t deliver on your ambitions or, indeed, your technology vendor’s promises.

Tending the Rabbits (Or, Letting the Machines Do It)

Our automated world isn’t new; it’s simply different. Our discipline has been automating for decades. From primitive word processors and early email clients in the eighties, to the advent of RFP and proposal automation in the nineties with Qvidian, to today’s Generative Pre-trained Transformers, Large Language Models, and Agentic Workflows, the value for proposal professionals has never been in what these tools do, it’s in how they’re applied.

An AI-automated world for the bid function is alluring. And, just like Lennie needed George in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”, AI needs the proposal professional. Qvidian’s technology-agnostic study into AI adoption in proposal management identified that early stakeholder expectations of “the big green magic AI button” have quickly given way to the sobering reality that the key outcomes expected of AI – acceleration, accuracy, repurposing, and personalisation – require the aforementioned foundations that many teams don’t actually have.

The Boss’s Office (Or, Where Value Used to Sit)

Remember your true value before attempting to redefine it. Throughout my career, I’ve found and fixed critical underinvestment in bid teams. Most organisations invest more in marketing (brand presence, demand generation, mar-tech) and sales (headcount, enablement, sales-tech) than they do in their proposal function.

Yet you sit at the critical inflection point where years of marketing spend, quarters of pipeline development, and millions in sales investment either generate revenue or evaporate. This is a C-suite blind spot in the prospect-to-revenue sales motion that is hemorrhaging value. Your value.

The solution is simple: stop accepting the role of service function and start asserting your role as a revenue enabler and focus on conversations of value with the C-suite rooted in core business imperatives like driving profitable revenue, managing risk, and controlling costs.

The Riverbank: A Different Future for the Bid & Proposal Function

The riverbank is where George and Lennie’s dream was tested against reality. The biggest test in your automated world isn’t just technological, it’s existential. In reality, is your bid and proposal team seen as a service function that responds to requests or valued as a strategic function that shapes outcomes? Do you view automation as another cool tool or as an opportunity for organisational transformation – redesigning roles, measures, and operating rhythms?

Automation is forcing these questions higher and faster up the C-suite agenda than ever before. As a result, the value of enlightened proposal teams is no longer created just at the point of RFP. It’s created long before the RFP arrives and long after the response is submitted. This means redefining your value throughout the sales motion, from prospect to revenue. Bid and proposal leaders who step confidently into the conversations happening at the C-suite riverbank, having first remembered their value, will claim the seat they should have occupied long ago.

The future of the bid and proposal function won’t be written by the automation you invest in. It’ll be written by the purpose, people, process, content, and intent that you bring to automation. In this regard, Qvidian is unique in the market – empowering you to bring purpose, intent and strategic clarity to every automated moment.

And that’s your value, remembered and redefined.