As a proposal management leader, you are not a cost center. You are a revenue center, supporting — likely even generating — a significant percentage of your company’s bottom line.
So said Kristen Carloni, Global Head of Aladdin Business Proposal Strategy at BlackRock, in her Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit presentation, “Raising the profile of your team as a revenue-generating center.” Alongside Stephen Diorio, Managing Director at the Revenue Enablement Institute, Kristen revealed three ways proposal management leaders are raising the profile of their teams as revenue generators.
Table of Contents
#1 Embrace Strategic Response Management technology and AI
AI-powered Strategic Response Management (SRM) has the power to amplify your proposal team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Companies experiencing revenue growth are 3X more likely to use an AI-powered SRM platform like Responsive.
Kristen inherited Responsive through an acquisition. The new company came with proposal technology (Responsive) included. Kristen’s team used it to build a centralized proposal content database enhanced with AI to streamline their operations, enabling more than 600 salespeople and subject matter experts (SMEs) to access information instantly. Within a year, her team doubled their RFP volume and impact.
Stephen, who is also the Senior Fellow, AI at Wharton, views SRM and a centralized content database, or a proposal content library, as essential for AI success:
- An SRM platform includes proprietary data assets that inform your AI. Your proposal database is your richest resource because it includes 100% of the knowledge, know-how, and IP in your business. It has the latest approved, compliant answers that were shared with clients.
- It’s a monetizable AI use case. In The AI Handbook for Strategic Response Management, Stephen said, “Strategic Response Management creates company value by codifying and unlocking the full revenue potential for their knowledge.”
- It’s infinitely scalable: Every customer-facing employee in your company can use the platform to answer every single customer question through every channel.
In this clip, Stephen described his notion of the question-answer flywheel, which he describes as the “engine of AI.” If hundreds of SRM users in a company are continually referencing and fine-tuning hundreds of Q&A pairs in your content library, it’s the purest scalable source of AI that you can always trust to share with customers.
“All the SMEs, marketing, and compliance people plug into it on one side, all the salespeople leverage it from the other side,” Stephen said “Questions come in, answers go out, and it gets better and better and better.”
#2 Track revenue-generating contributions
The State of Strategic Response Management Report found that 90% of bid and proposal teams play a direct and significant role in revenue generation. The best way to demonstrate your team’s impact is by tracking how much revenue flows through your proposals.
To do this effectively, you need an SRM platform that seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use — like your CRM, sales enablement software, and business intelligence tools — giving you instant visibility into your contributions.
After using Responsive for a year, Kristen gathered the data to prove her team’s impact. She showed that they had not only doubled their volume and influence but also handled the top 15% of all revenue opportunities — the most complex, high-value deals. Smaller deals moved forward without an RFP, but her team played a crucial role in securing the largest contracts. This insight helped her demonstrate to leadership that her team was a key driver of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue at BlackRock.
In this clip, Kristen shares how her team initially struggled to quantify their financial impact until she started using the Responsive Platform.
In addition to using a Strategic Response Management (SRM) platform to track and tie revenue to her team, Kristin can also:
- Report the team’s hit rate (percentage of proposals a team submits that are ultimately accepted or “won”).
- Determine whether the team is pursuing the right deals. Compare your hit rate to your win rate; if there’s a substantial drop off then dig into why. “If it’s something we can’t fix or don’t want to,” Kristen said, “maybe we should have never pursued it in the first place.”
- Forecast future impact based on the team’s increased output. Kristen was able forecast revenue up to two years out, which was further out than other teams forecasted. “We dug into the data to make sure our pipeline was set up for the future. Nobody had ever thought to use our team in that way before,” she said.
By sharing this kind of data to manage up to stakeholders, you not only highlight the value of your team’s work, you also open up conversations about resource allocation, GTM investment, bid/no-bid decisions, and more, positioning yourself as a strategic leader rather than an individual contributor.
A key component is talking to stakeholders about what they care about so you know how to frame the data to build your business case. According to Kirsten, it’s likely going to be revenue or time (but time is also money, in the form of resource costs). As an example, Kristen referenced her pitch to her COO to add Advanced Responsive AI: “She didn’t want to know how I was going to pay her back the AI investment. She wanted to know how I was going to make her a hundred million.”
#3 Align cross-functional teams
Breaking down silos and aligning with other teams like marketing, sales, product development, and legal ensures that the Q&A flywheel Stephen described earlier keeps on spinning. AI-powered SRM helped Kristen streamline collaboration and information sharing across revenue-generating teams in her division at BlackRock.
Kristen Carloni,
Global Head of Aladdin Business Proposal Strategy,
BlackRock
“We have a robust centralized content database that we make available to all 600 of our salespeople. There’s an AI chatbot and other AI features on top of that so they can get answers quickly. If you think about the scale and the impact you can get by opening it up to 600 people versus six, it’s much more compelling.”
Stephen Diorio believes that AI-led SRM drives business growth through unprecedented workflow advancements that proposal management leaders should be highlighting to leadership. The workflow impacts he mentioned in the presentation include:
- Increased sales capacity: Faster responses lead to increased volume of throughput. A salesperson that could cover 10 accounts can now cover 20 or 30.
- Bridging the seller-inexperience gap: “The killer of sales,” according to Stephen. Easily adoptable technology that helps novice and seasoned salespeople write responses is a huge impact.
- Improved resource allocation: Salespeople waste a lot of time searching for answers. Putting answers at their fingertips eliminates time wasted for them and for the SMEs they’re constantly chasing for answers.
- Data-driven bid/no-bid decisions: If the proposal team can tell from a million miles away whether or not a deal can be won, then that intelligence needs to be shared with sales. Responsive AI evaluates RFP fit in no time, arming bid and proposal teams with the data to take back to sales and explain why a decision was made one way or the other.
- Risk mitigation and compliance: AI can police whether content in the SRM library is still valid, removing redundant, outdated, or trivial (ROT) content based on your direction.
- Personalization at scale: Responsive AI creates custom first drafts of proposals based on guidelines in the imported RFX, DDQ, or security questionnaire. It also guides you through the first draft to quickly rewrite or refine individual responses for personalization using pre-built prompts.
- Better teamwork: “Growth is a tech-enabled team sport; AI and a proposal knowledge base is the campfire where everybody can contribute,” Stephen said.
Stephen Diorio,
Managing Director at The Revenue Enablement Institute & Senior Fellow,
AI at Wharton
“You can use AI to go back to subject matter experts to say the calendar year has passed, laws have changed, markets have changed…is this content still correct? I’m not going to use it unless it is. When you bless it, then I won’t have to bother you again. Your AI can police this. A CMO can have total control just turning the dials of your machine. Even better, the knowledge in that machine is the know-how of your business.”
Become a strategic growth engine
By embracing AI-powered SRM, tracking your revenue-generating contributions, and driving collaboration across cross-functional teams, proposal management leaders can move beyond operational execution and establish themselves as key drivers of revenue growth. As Kristen demonstrated, when proposal teams leverage AI, data, and collaboration, they become indispensable partners in the company’s bottom-line success.
The key takeaway? You’re not just responding to opportunities, you’re shaping them, influencing high-value deals, and driving measurable impact. Now is the time to own your role as a revenue generator and ensure leadership sees your team as a strategic growth engine.
Want to see the full presentation from Kristen and Stephen? Watch it here. You can also watch Kristen’s Summit24 presentation on-demand, “Activating and scaling SRM across your organization.”
