I didn’t start Informed Pursuit because I had spent my career in proposal management.
I started it because I hadn’t.
Informed Pursuit was created after a series of painful RFP losses and the realization that the problem wasn’t the proposal itself, it was the system behind it.
A realization that changed everything.
The writing isn’t the strategy.
THE BEGINNING
My first complex RFP was a wake-up call.
I had never written a formal RFP response. I was new to the lines of business I was being asked to sell, and I had no idea where to start or what order the work should happen in.
But I had the tools.
Teams. SharePoint. Excel. Content libraries. AI. And experienced subject-matter experts who knew their businesses.
Still, I spent four full weeks trying to piece everything together.
We lost.
So I did what any sufficiently humbled new proposal writer would do.
I started researching RFPs for Dummies.
Then I lost the next two pursuits.
By the fourth RFP, I knew I had to stop doing the same thing.
THE AHA MOMENT
I stopped looking at the proposal. I started looking at the person reading it.
Near the end of that fourth pursuit, I asked AI to review the proposal from the perspective of the person who would actually score it. I didn’t ask whether the writing was good. I asked what she would notice on the first scan, what questions she would still have after reading it, what would matter to her, and how she would score what we had put in front of her.
The answers exposed the real problem. I had been starting with the proposal when I needed to start with the buyer.
Before I wrote anything, I needed to understand who was making the decision, what they cared about, what would make them skeptical, where we could genuinely differentiate, and what evidence they would need to believe us. Once I understood that, the proposal stopped feeling like a writing assignment and started feeling like the final expression of a strategy.
A content library can tell you what you said before. It cannot tell you what you should say now.
BUILDING THE SYSTEM
The tools didn’t change. The system around them did.
Once I started with the buyer and the strategy, the rest of the process began to reorganize itself. Research moved to the beginning, strategy came before content, stakeholder priorities shaped the response, and subject-matter experts were brought in with clearer purpose.
Branding supported the message instead of decorating it. Compliance became part of the architecture instead of a final check. Finance, proof, content, reviews, and approvals became connected parts of the same pursuit, and AI accelerated the work without replacing human judgment.
Within about three months, I had rebuilt the process from intake through submission using the same tools I had all along: Teams, SharePoint, Power Automate, Excel, Claude, and multiple content libraries.
I didn’t need another platform. I needed a better way to make everything work together.
A BIGGER REALIZATION
Then I realized this wasn’t just my problem.
As the system matured, the work changed. Capacity increased, proposal cycles became shorter, and more pursuits turned into wins.
After about six months of sustained improvement, I started sharing the approach with other teams. What surprised me was how quickly they could adapt it to their own pursuits, people, and workflows without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
That made me curious. If this problem was so common, surely someone had already solved it.
So I went looking. I found proposal-writing services, content libraries, compliance reviews, AI writing tools, and expensive RFP software platforms. What I did not find was a practical way to connect all of the pieces into one pursuit system using the tools organizations already had.
That was the gap.
WHY INFORMED PURSUIT
Most organizations already have the ingredients. The opportunity is in how they are put together.
Once I saw the gap, I started asking myself a question: How do you bottle the system without turning it into another rigid software platform?
That question became Informed Pursuit.
Informed Pursuit was created to help teams connect strategy, research, stakeholder intelligence, content, branding, compliance, finance, workflow, AI, and measurement into one practical pursuit operating system. The goal is not to add another tool to manage, build another library of canned content, or use AI to generate more words faster.
It is to help teams use the expertise, information, technology, and tools they already have in a more connected and deliberate way.