How I Turned Days of Proposal Research into Minutes (and Why You Should, Too)
I cut my proposal research time from 3 days to 9 minutes.
This blog post will show you EXACTLY how I do it, with my videos and prompts!
Thanks to a little AI magic, you can be the proposal magician you’ve always dreamed of becoming.
Seriously.
If you're spending hours digging through financials, scraping LinkedIn profiles, and decoding industry shifts just to tailor a proposal... I’ve got something for you.
Why Personalization Still Wins (and Always Will)
According to recent data, personalized proposals win 36% more often.
That stat isn’t surprising to anyone who’s actually written one.
Buyers want to feel seen. They want to feel like your proposal was crafted just for them, not ripped from a dusty folder labeled “2022_Generic_SaaS_final_FINAL_FINALFOREAL.docx.”
When I send out a proposal, I regularly hear things like:
“This is the best proposal we’ve ever read.”
Am I bragging? Heck yes I am.
But I get these accolades even though you’re 100% a better writer than I ever will be.
I get them because every word in the proposal feels like it was written for the customer.
It’s because I do the research, and that research bleeds into every sentence.
The Old Way: How I Used to Do Customer Research (Last Month)
Before AI came to save me, my research hours looked something like this:
Reading financial reports to understand company growth
Scanning Crunchbase for funding rounds and acquisitions
Listening to podcast interviews with execs to hear priorities in their own words
Checking LinkedIn Sales Navigator for hiring trends and personnel shifts
Reviewing any CRM notes or call transcripts from sales
Pulling FOIA requests (for public sector bids)
Surfing Reddit and niche communities for the unfiltered truth
Reviewing every doc sales and presales ever wrote about the client
After that delightful chaos, I’d spend even more time organizing all that info into a digestible research doc that my team... usually ignored 🙃
And then I’d manually thread insights into the proposal myself during reviews, rewrites, or (let’s be honest) at the 11th hour before submission, usually whilst eating Swedish Fish. We all have our late-night proposal snacks.
Was it worth it? Yes.
Was it sustainable? Absolutely not.
The New Way: AI-Powered Research in 15 Minutes or Less
Now, I delegate all that initial research to a tool called Deep Research by OpenAI.
It’s like having an elite analyst as my best friend and means I eat a whole lot fewer Swedish Fish.
Here’s what it does (better and faster than me, which stings a little):
Gathers info from 50+ trusted sources, including LinkedIn, company sites, financial databases, and press releases
Surfaces insights about the company’s industry, competitors, and regional challenges
Gives stakeholder-specific details, often with direct quotes
Provides advice on how to tailor your proposal based on all of that
Delivers a structured, clean report in under 15 minutes
That’s days of work in minutes.
Don’t believe me?
Here’s exactly what I do:
How I Use These Reports
Once I’ve got the report in hand, I can:
Build better kickoff docs for my proposal team
Feed insights into AI-native proposal tools (like AutogenAI) for automatic personalization
Create custom ROI and Cost of Inaction (COI) content
Tailor executive summaries and win themes without breaking a sweat
From Research to Response: What I Do Next
AI research is only helpful if it actually shows up in your proposal - and this takes even more time than doing the actual research and is tough to do well. That’s where a tool like AutogenAI comes in.
With AutogenAI, I plug the Deep Research report directly into the platform. It uses that intel to generate personalized proposal responses, complete with tailored intros, proof points, and messaging that speaks directly to the buyer’s priorities.
Basically, I stopped begging SMEs to personalize content (because spoiler: they won’t because they’re just as burned out as we are).
And instead, I let the software do it consistently and correctly.
I even teamed up with the AutogenAI team to show you the exact workflow I use.
You’re welcome.
Want to Try This?
Start by jotting down how much time your team currently spends gathering customer intel.
Then try Deep Research. Compare the time saved. Feel the stress melt away.
If you aren’t using a proposal management tool that can handle the integration between great content library documentation + personalized information…then, uh, you need to.
This is like telling people in 2015 that they should probably get off-prem and move to the cloud.
Final Thoughts
I didn’t write this to give you a theory. I wrote it to give you something you can use today.
So if you’ve got questions, or want help figuring out how to implement this in your own process, reach out. I’d love to hear how you’re experimenting with AI for research and response.
Keep Learning
👩💻 Personalization Done Right by Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman on Harvard Business Review
👩💻 Why Delivering a Tailored Insight is Essential to Sales Success on Challenger Inc.
📖 Human + Machine, Updated and Expanded: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty
🛠️ An AI-native proposal management software that is constantly inspiring me: AutogenAI
(AutogenAI did not sponsor this post. But they did sponsor a similar newsletter, and I want everyone to see what is possible with a next generation proposal management tool - because I know a lot of ya’ll out there are stuck using an old one. Ok the end.)
