Your proposal team knows more about your company than almost anyone else in it. Robin Davis explains how to use that to get seen as strategic.

Robin is the Founder and CEO of Metre, a healthcare-only proposal consultancy she has run for 17 years. She began as an administrative assistant to a sales team and went on to build proposal functions at two healthcare companies. On this episode of The Stargazy Brief, she and Christina Carter talk through what wins RFPs, how health plans win recompetes, and how proposal leaders change the way their organizations see them.

✹ Send a monthly RFP trends report to every department head.
✹ Use MAGIC (main attributes, gets and gains, indicators of success, competitiveness) so SMEs give you four things instead of the kitchen sink.
✹ In a recompete, own what went wrong and remind the client of everything you did, including the work outside the contract.
✹ Make the budget case in revenue.

For proposal managers, bid leads and anyone selling into healthcare who wants a seat in the room before the RFP drops.

✨ Connect with Robin Davis
✹ Connect with Robin Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsdavis/

✨ Links & Resources
✹ Metre: https://metreworks.com
✹ Metre on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/metrellc/
✹ Get The Stargazy Brief newsletter: https://the-stargazy-brief.beehiiv.com/
✹ Set up your proposal process, content and LLM workflows with stargazy: https://stargazy.io/services/proposal-brain-os

Get the RFP Analysis Report from this episode: https://stargazy.io/reports/rfp-analysis-report

✹ Simon and Arthurian Labs are providing stargazy podcast listeners with a 30-day free trial and a discount for purchases.

Bid teams put the most effort into the parts of RFP analysis that predict wins the least. That is the headline finding of the RFP Analysis Report, stargazy’s survey of 448 organizations on what happens between an RFP landing and the first word of the response.

Simon Cuthbert, co-founder of Arthurian Labs and co-publisher of the report, has led multinational sales teams whose revenue depended on RFPs. He and Christina Carter walk through the findings: why compliance work crowds out buyer research, why most teams use AI only to read the RFP, and why bid teams need the authority to say no, with the reasons written down.

If you run a bid team that gets overruled, or a sales team that bids on everything, this episode has the data.


✨ Find Simon and Arthurian Labs
✹ Connect with Simon Cuthbert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simoncuthbert/
✹ Learn about Arthurian Labs: https://stargazy.short.gy/ArthurianLabsReport

✨ Read more on stargazy
✹ Website: https://stargazy.io
✹ Join the stargazy community: https://stargazy.circle.so/join
✹ Get The Stargazy Brief newsletter: https://the-stargazy-brief.beehiiv.com/


✨ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Why don’t bid teams follow their own qualification process?
01:21 What did the 2026 Bid Analysis Report measure?
03:34 Why do bid teams skip buyer research after an RFP lands?
06:03 Who should own customer and competitor research: bid or sales?
07:22 How do you get account managers involved early in an RFP?
12:31 Should you use ChatGPT or Claude to read an RFP?
17:56 Can uploading RFPs to public LLMs cause a data breach?
19:10 Should you read the RFP first or run it through a bid tool first?
22:08 Why is customer research the least-done bid activity?
26:57 How has B2B buying changed how salespeople should sell?
32:46 How should bid teams and sales teams work together?
35:43 Why do bid qualification processes get ignored?
40:19 How do you justify a no-bid decision to leadership?
43:13 How do you turn no-bid reasons into future wins?
45:21 How do you explain win-rate data to a skeptical sales leader?
49:08 Why doesn’t effort and diligence win RFPs?

Revenue leaders don't care how many RFPs your team completed, but they do care what those RFPs did for pipeline.

Betsy Matthies is VP, Global Revenue Operations & Enablement at GitHub. Before that she ran the proposal center of excellence at AWS, so she knows what proposal teams see and what revenue leaders need from them. She and Christina Carter talk through how proposal leaders speak the language of RevOps, which proposal data belongs in front of a CRO, and how to get a seat at the business reviews where strategy gets set.

• ✹ Report outcomes, not activities. "We unblocked $3M of pipeline this week" lands with a sales leader. "We completed 15 RFPs" does not.
• ✹ Track go/no-go accuracy, content utilization against win rate, and the SME bottleneck tax. Revenue leaders want this data and rarely get it.
• ✹ Your team reads more RFPs than anyone in the company. Bring what you see to QBRs as win/loss and market friction reports, and you will be invited back.
• ✹ Betsy promoted leaders who brought her solutions to scale the business, not requests for more headcount to handle more paperwork.

For proposal and bid leaders who want revenue leadership to treat their team as a revenue driver, and for RevOps and sales leaders who want to know what their proposal team is sitting on.

Full episode page and transcript: https://stargazy.io/podcasts/how-proposal-teams-earn-a-seat-with-revenue-leaders