By Ganesh Shankar, CEO & Co-founder, Responsive
For a long time, the proposal process occupied an odd position in enterprise sales organisations and was treated as operational rather than strategic. Responses to RFPs, security questionnaires, and due diligence requests were something that had to get done, usually under time pressure, usually by whoever was available. The output often reflected that attitude. The question now is whether that approach is durable as the competitive environment around enterprise sales tightens.
The Buying Environment Has Shifted, and So Has the Pressure to Respond Well
The context in which enterprise proposals are evaluated has changed considerably. McKinsey’s B2B Pulse research has consistently found that B2B buyers now use an average of ten channels across their purchase journey, and that more than half say they would switch suppliers if they experienced a poor-quality experience at any point in the process.
The formal proposal — whether an RFP response, a vendor questionnaire, or a structured bid — is one of the most concentrated expressions of that experience. It is where a selling organisation’s understanding of the buyer’s problem, and its ability to articulate a credible response, is most directly evaluated.
At the same time, Gartner’s 2026 strategic predictions point to a future in which a significant share of B2B procurement will be intermediated by AI agents — systems that evaluate vendors against structured criteria, compare documentation, and make or recommend decisions with limited human intervention. The implication for sellers is significant: the quality, completeness, and consistency of the information they provide in structured responses will matter more, not less, as procurement becomes more systematized.
The Proposal Is a GTM Asset
One of the more important reframes happening in forward-thinking sales organisations is recognizing that a proposal is not just a formality. It is often the most detailed, structured articulation of what a vendor believes about a buyer’s situation and how it proposes to address it. Procurement teams read proposals carefully. They compare responses across vendors. They inform shortlisting, pricing conversations, and implementation planning.
Treating that document as something to be assembled quickly from available parts is a significant missed opportunity. The content decisions embedded in a strong proposal — what to emphasize, how to frame capability, which evidence to deploy, how to address risk — are the same decisions that drive GTM strategy more broadly. The proposal process is not separate from go-to-market thinking. It is one of its most direct and visible expressions, delivered directly into the hands of the people making the decision.
Where the Gap Shows Up in Practice
The operational reality for most enterprise response teams is a familiar one: high volumes, tight turnarounds, and institutional knowledge that is scattered across people, documents, and systems that were not designed to work together. Subject matter experts are pulled in late, content is reconstructed from memory or last year’s submission, and the final document reflects the constraints of the process as much as the actual capabilities of the organisation.
The downstream effects are predictable. Responses that are accurate but generic. Answers that are correct for a previous version of the product. Sections that address the question asked without connecting to what the buyer actually cares about. None of these are catastrophic individually, but they compound — and they are noticed by buyers who are evaluating multiple vendors at once.
What High-Performing Response Functions Look Like
The organisations managing this well tend to share a few characteristics. They maintain a content foundation that is current, searchable, and organized by the questions buyers actually ask — not just by internal taxonomy. They have a process that builds in enough time for genuine tailoring, rather than last-minute assembly. And they have clear ownership of the response function, with enough standing to involve the right people at the right moments in the right depth.
Increasingly, they are also using AI to handle the mechanical work — retrieving relevant answers, populating first drafts, flagging outdated content — so that human effort concentrates on the judgment-intensive work that actually differentiates a submission. The insight here is that AI does not fix a broken process; it accelerates whatever process exists. organisations that have invested in clean, well-organized knowledge find that AI gives that investment real leverage. Those starting from a less structured position tend to find that AI surfaces the disorganisation faster than it resolves it.
The Strategic Case for Getting This Right
For enterprises where a meaningful share of revenue flows through structured procurement — RFPs, competitive bids, formal vendor evaluations — the proposal process is one of the more consequential operational decisions a GTM team can make. It touches win rates, deal velocity, and the impression the organisation leaves at exactly the moment when buying decisions are being formed.
The organisations beginning to treat it with that level of seriousness are not simply submitting better proposals. They are building a capability that compounds over time — better content, better process, better outcomes — and that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate. In a sales environment where differentiation is hard to sustain, a consistently excellent response function is a durable advantage worth building deliberately.