Winning Strategies
Competitive intelligence technology and general strategy tips to avoid common pitfalls, unseat the incumbent, and win the bid contract.
Proposal Color Team Reviews Explained (And How The Bid Lab Does It Better!)
Proposal color team reviews stage a bid's development through Blue, Pink, Red, Green, Gold and White checkpoints. Here's what each one checks, how they map to plain-English stages, and when the color vocabulary helps versus gets in the way.
How to Use AI in Bids, Proposals, and RFPs
Use AI for the reading, sorting and first draft - not the judgment, the claims or the final word. Here's the task-by-task map across a bid: what to delegate at each stage, what has to stay human, how to prompt for output worth editing, and what should never reach a submission unedited.
Outsource Proposal Writing: What Small Businesses Should Know
Outsourced proposal writing comes in four engagement shapes — per-bid fixed fee, hourly, retainer and success-fee — and they suit very different situations. Here is what each includes, what to ask before signing, the red flags worth walking away from, and the work that stays yours regardless.
Using Generative AI in RFP Writing
AI-drafted proposals lose because they converge - several bidders, similar tools, interchangeable answers. Here are the failure modes evaluators actually notice, what's now happening with AI on the agency side of the table, and how to use the tools without producing average copy.
5 Mistakes People Make When Copying and Pasting in an RFP
Reusing an old solicitation is normal and sensible - the risk is what survives the reuse unedited. Here are the five things that go wrong reliably, which sections are safe to carry over, how to avoid publishing internal material, and what the final check has to cover.
Using AI RFP Solutions: Dos and Don’ts
No general federal rule requires you to disclose AI used in drafting - the rules being written cover AI you deliver, not tools you write with. Here's what actually applies as of August 2026, what is only proposed, what you certify on submission, and why data handling is the bigger question.
The Pros of Hiring RFP Response Pros
Building a proposal team, outsourcing it, or running a hybrid are three different bets, and bid volume is what decides between them. Here is the threshold math, the key-person risk nobody prices in, what hybrid actually looks like in practice, and what in-house gives you that no external team can.
Do You Need RFP Writing Services?
RFP writing services turn a solicitation you have decided to bid into a compliant, submission-ready response. Here are the six deliverables a standard engagement covers, the four pricing models and what to watch in each, what the provider needs from you, and the four things no service includes.
Do You Need an RFP Consultant?
An RFP writer produces the response; a consultant owns the strategy and compliance around it; a bid manager runs the schedule; a full-service firm does all three. Here's what each role actually solves, which symptom points to which, and why hiring at the halfway mark is the costliest option.
Bid Analytics: What to Track and What It Tells You
As technology advances, so does the data we produce. Unlike our ancestors, we’re now capable of creating photos, videos, text files, and other forms of data all on our own. This has led to the rise of what we now call Big Data. Companies are among those who benefit from Big Data the most. Data…
Tips to Unseat the Incumbent and Win the Bid
Incumbents win rebids more often than not, but the advantage is built on familiarity and switching risk — both of which you can work on years before the solicitation drops. Here is how to research the incumbent through public records, neutralize the risk objection, and position your bid to displace them.
Procurement Solutions and the RFP Process in the Digital Age
Many people hate Request for Proposals (RFPs) – I mean really hate RFPs. And it’s tough to blame them. Oftentimes, RFPs are hundreds of pages long, requesting painstakingly detailed information about a product or service with the understanding that responses are contractually binding, pricing should be firm, and due dates strictly adhered to.
How to Win RFPs: 5 Steps to Winning Bids in Business
Winning business with RFPs comes down to five proven steps: understand proposal bidding, build a smart search process, stand out to evaluators, use technology where it helps and treat every result as fuel for the next bid. Here's the playbook, refined across hundreds of wins.
RFP Business Strategy: 4 Steps to the Right RFP Response
Before committing a team to an RFP, check four things in order: the real deadline, whether the scope of work matches what you do profitably, whether the evaluation criteria make you competitive, and what the addenda have changed. Most no-bid decisions should be made in the first hour, not the final week.
Tips to Win After Losing an RFP
After losing an RFP, do three things: request a debrief while the decision is fresh, obtain the scoring through public records if the debrief is thin, and run an internal post-mortem before the details fade. Most teams lose more bids than they win — what separates them is whether the loss produces information.
6 RFP Myths That Keep Small Businesses From Bidding
We’ve all fallen into the trap of believing RFP myths as facts. However, believing in these myths can cost you (read personal sleep coupled with added stress). Importantly, they can cost your business too — money, resources, and even team morale. In this article, we debunk three common RFP myths to help you gain the confidence…
Win More Bids: 10 RFP Facts That Will Help You Write Proposals
When you think of an RFP, it’s not wrong to think of completing what seems to be an endless document full of questions. It’s easy to forget that so much research, insight and careful strategy goes into developing a proposal. RFP writers are always finding innovative ways to inform their process by incorporating new trends…
RFP Response Strategy: Why Human Intelligence Is Necessary
Small and medium-sized business leaders all over the world share one common takeaway from the past year. At some point, each and every one of them has had to rethink some, or all, of their business strategy. Those who respond to RFPs in the public or private sector are no different. As everything was put…
Does the Lowest Bid Win the Contract?
The lowest bid does not automatically win. Public awards go to the "lowest responsive and responsible bidder" - and those qualifiers are how compliant, well-regarded vendors beat cheaper competitors. Here's what each term means and how to use them to your advantage.
Bid Response: 3 Common Mistakes When Submitting an RFP
Most losing proposals are not outscored - they are removed before scoring. Here's the full list of what actually gets responses rejected, when in the process each failure bites, which four dates matter, and why the requirements that depend on third parties are the ones that sink bids.
Why Your Local Agency RFPs Matter
There are 90,837 local governments in the US, and every one of them buys. Here's why local agencies are where most small businesses win their first public contract, whether local preference policies are real, how stable public work actually is, and the unglamorous mechanics of getting on a vendor list.
Maximize Your Chances of Winning the Bid
While 2021 has seen a lot of businesses close their doors for good, many windows have opened for the business owners of tomorrow. Maybe you’ve already created a great website, recruited valuable employees and built a solid supply chain. Maybe you’re even ready to begin exploring responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) as a way…
What’s Your RFP Strategy?
Your RFP strategy is perfect, right? Well… almost. You could be missing out on some great opportunities by not including an effective Request for Proposal (RFP) strategy alongside your other tried-and-true methods. RFPs continue to grow in popularity and are commonly produced by a wide variety of corporations, not just government entities. If your business…
RFP Automation: Debunking the Most Common Myths
With all the recent buzz around RFP automation, it’s easy to forget that automation is already an integral part of our everyday lives. Automation powers everything from smart home devices to word-processing software that checks your grammar. In the proposal industry specifically, its purpose is to simplify your RFP process, allowing you to respond to…
5 New Tech Trends Impacting How Companies Should Approach RFP Responses
In the proposal industry, automation represents a future characterized by better quality and less painful RFP responses. And we’re nearer than ever before to achieving this goal. As companies are aiming to submit more bids in a shorter period of time, they’re looking to RFP technology as a means of analyzing data, shortening man-hours, and…
How to Win More RFPs
Chances are you’ve had moments when writing a proposal where you felt like giving up. It’s hard to ‘just keep swimming’ when you aren’t sure if your hard work will pay off in the end. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if there was a simple formula for creating a winning bid? The problem with…
What Is a Bid Proposal?
A bid proposal is the formal, binding document a business submits in response to a solicitation, setting out what it will deliver, how, when and at what price. Here is what goes in one, how buyers evaluate it, and why most proposals are eliminated before anyone reads the solution.
Increase RFP Responses in a Difficult Market
If only there were more than 24 hours in a day. If you’ve gone through the RFP process before, you probably know the feeling. Developing RFP proposals to grow your business takes time, effort and lots of patience. With all the other business responsibilities you’re juggling, it can be hard to imagine submitting more responses…
How Intelligent RFP Search Saves Valuable Time for Salespeople
Think back to the last time you wrote a research paper. Perhaps you’re remembering the days of college term papers and MLA formatting. You probably spent hours in front of a computer, hoping that using just the right search terms would bring up the perfect source for your paper. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you…
Automation and Proposals: 10 RFP Tasks To Automate
When you hear the word “automation,” you may think of factory workers being replaced by robots, or reports that AI might someday take over the world. But at The Bid Lab, automation means something different. It means less work for you and an increased chance of winning your bids. And it’s all done by humans…
RFP Tips & Tricks for Your Next Response
Managing an RFP response means running it as a project - backward schedule, named owners, rehearsed submission. Here's how to sequence the work from the day the solicitation lands, keep contributors on track, reuse content without getting caught, and submit without a technical failure.
RFP Responses: 5 Steps to Adapt Your Bid Response During Covid
The COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching effects have brought uncertainty for all. This is especially true for those working in the marketing and business worlds. Circumstances are changing daily while we strive to achieve a new normal. While the pandemic has brought about a myriad of challenges, our world has gone digital at an impressive…
Coronavirus Business Strategies from Clients of The Bid Lab
The year 2020, aka “The Year Of The Coronavirus,” began as any regular year. No one in October 2019 would have predicted the highly contagious, deadly viral outbreak within the next few months. Therefore, the circumstances of the shutdown meant organizations needed to quickly adapt to a “new normal.” So, for many, that meant adapting…
Why Your RFP Pricing Strategy Is Costing You
Four pricing mistakes cost bidders contracts: pricing blind to the market, costing the best case, wasting the question period, and offering a single take-it-or-leave-it number. Bidding too low is as damaging as bidding too high — a contract won on an unsustainable price becomes a delivery problem.
Do RFP Tools Work?
RFP tools work for the mechanical parts of bidding and fail at the parts that decide who wins. A category-by-category verdict on search, content libraries, AI drafting, design and compliance software — and how to work out which one your business actually needs.
Bid Consultants: To Use or Not To Use
While hiring a consultant may seem like an easy and efficient way to tackle the RFP process, there are a few things to keep in mind if you do choose to do so.