What Bid Managers Wish Their Sales Teams Understood

It's 4:47 PM on a Friday. A sales rep forwards an RFP to the bid team with a note: "Client wants this by Wednesday. Should be straightforward. Let me know if you need anything."

The bid manager opens the document. It's 140 pages. There are 87 individually scored requirements, a mandatory pricing template with 23 line items, and three appendices that need technical diagrams. "Straightforward" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

This scene plays out in companies every week. The sales team commits to a deadline without checking bid capacity. The bid team scrambles, cuts corners, and produces something that's good enough to submit but not good enough to win. The loss gets chalked up to "competitive market conditions." Nobody talks about the real problem.

The real problem is that sales and bids often operate as separate units with separate priorities, and that disconnect costs companies contracts they could have won.

Here are five things bid managers wish their sales teams understood.

1. We Can't Write a Good Response in Three Days

There is a widespread belief that proposal writing is mostly typing. That someone hands you a question and you bang out an answer. If that were true, three days might be plenty.

Here is what actually goes into a quality bid response:

• Reading and parsing the full RFP document, not skimming the executive summary
• Building a compliance matrix to map every requirement to a response section
• Identifying mandatory versus desirable criteria and understanding the scoring methodology
• Coordinating with subject matter experts for technical content
• Drafting, reviewing, and revising each section (often multiple rounds)
• Assembling pricing with input from finance, delivery, and commercial teams
• Formatting to the client's specifications, which are sometimes absurdly detailed
• Final quality review, proofreading, and compliance check
• Production and submission, including any portal uploads or physical copies

A realistic timeline for a medium-complexity RFP is two to three weeks. Complex bids with technical demonstrations or site visits need four to six. When you compress that into three days, you don't get a faster version of the same quality. You get a worse product.

2. The Client Relationship Doesn't Replace the Written Response

"Don't worry about section 4.3, I've already talked to the project sponsor about our approach. They loved it."

That's great. But the project sponsor probably isn't on the evaluation panel. And even if they are, they're scoring what's on paper, not what was discussed over lunch.

Formal RFP evaluations work on a scoring matrix. Evaluators read your written response, assign a score based on published criteria, and move to the next submission. In public sector procurement, evaluators are sometimes required to ignore any prior knowledge of bidders. In private sector, the evaluation panel often includes people the sales team has never met.

This doesn't mean relationships are unimportant. They're essential for intelligence gathering, understanding the client's real priorities, and positioning before the RFP drops. But the bid team needs that intelligence translated into written content that scores well against published criteria.

3. Go/No-Go Exists for a Reason

Not every RFP is worth chasing. This is a hard message for sales teams that are measured on pipeline volume, but it's one of the most important disciplines in bid management.

When you pursue everything, you spread the team thin. Response quality drops across the board. Win rates decline. The team burns out. And paradoxically, you end up winning fewer contracts than if you had been selective.

A good go/no-go decision framework evaluates strategic fit, capability match, competitive position, relationship strength, and commercial viability. It forces an honest conversation before resources get committed.

The bid team isn't being difficult when they push back on an opportunity. They're trying to protect the quality of every active bid, including the ones sales cares most about.

4. Last-Minute Information Kills Quality

Picture this: the bid team has been working on a response for two weeks. The narrative is tight, the compliance matrix is complete, formatting is done. Then, the day before submission, someone sends over updated pricing. Or revised CVs. Or a completely new technical approach that sales agreed to in a call the bid team wasn't on.

Late changes don't just mean extra work. They introduce errors. When you swap out a pricing table at the last minute, the numbers in the executive summary no longer match. When you change the technical approach on day 14 of a 15-day bid, every section that referenced the original approach now has inconsistencies. These are the kinds of mistakes that evaluators notice and that cost points.

The fix is simple in concept: get the bid team the information they need at the start, not the end. If pricing is going to take two weeks to finalize, say that upfront so the bid schedule can account for it.

5. We Need Your Input Early, Not Your Edits Late

There's a pattern that drives bid managers up the wall. The sales team is largely absent during the writing phase, when their client knowledge and strategic insight would be most valuable. Then, the night before submission, they appear with a red pen and start rewriting sections.

Late edits from people who haven't been involved in the drafting process are dangerous. They don't account for how sections connect to each other. They introduce inconsistencies in terminology. They sometimes contradict statements made elsewhere in the document. And they always cause stress at the worst possible time.

SME involvement follows the same principle. The best time for a subject matter expert to contribute is during the outline and first draft stage, when their knowledge shapes the response structure. Reviewing a near-final draft is far less valuable because by that point, the architecture of the answer is set.

What a Good Handoff Looks Like

When sales passes an RFP to the bid team, the quality of that handoff directly predicts the quality of the response. Here is what a good handoff includes:

That might seem like a lot to ask. But most of this information already exists in the sales team's head or CRM. Packaging it takes 30 to 60 minutes. Skipping it costs the bid team days of guesswork and rework.

Sales and Bids as One Team

The companies that consistently win contracts don't treat sales and bids as separate functions that hand work back and forth over a wall. They operate as a single pursuit team from the moment an opportunity is identified.

That means the bid manager is involved in early client meetings, not just brought in after the RFP drops. It means sales stays engaged through the writing process, available for questions and context. It means both teams share accountability for the result.

This isn't about blame. It's about recognizing that sales and bid management are two halves of the same process. When they work together early and often, the proposals are stronger, the win rates go up, and both teams spend less time on wasted effort.

The best sales professionals already know this. They treat their bid team as a strategic partner, not a production department. And the results speak for themselves.