You've been there. The RFP lands with an impossible deadline. You fire off the usual email: "Please write 500 words on our cloud migration capabilities by Thursday."
Thursday comes. The inbox stays empty.
When content finally arrives—if it arrives—it reads like a technical manual had an unfortunate one-night stand with a thesaurus. Your subject matter experts (SMEs) are brilliant at what they do, but asking them to write polished proposal content is like asking a chef to farm their own vegetables. They can do it, but it's not where their genius lives.
There's a better way to improve your RFP win rate. And it starts with putting down the keyboard and picking up a conversation.
Why Written RFP Content Requests Fail
Most bid and proposal teams default to written content requests because it seems efficient. Send an email, get content back, insert into proposal. Clean and simple.
Except it never works that way in real proposal management workflows.
Your SMEs stare at blank documents, paralyzed by the dual burden of being both expert and writer. They overthink every sentence. They bury insights in jargon. They focus on technical accuracy while missing the story that would actually win the deal.
Worse, they often don't understand what you really need. That 500-word request becomes either a 50-word bullet list or a 5,000-word dissertation on enterprise architecture. Neither helps your RFP win rate.
Why Proposal Collaboration Through Conversations Extracts Gold
When you sit down with an SME and ask them to explain their solution, something magical happens. They lean back. They gesture. They tell you about the client who had a similar problem last year. They share the "aha" moment when they figured out the perfect approach.
This is the proposal content you need. Not the rehearsed, sanitized technical specifications, but the real story of how your solution solves real problems.
A senior proposal specialist at a major financial institution discovered this after years of teaching creative writing. "Books belong to their readers," she learned from novelist John Green. The same principle applies to RFP responses—they belong to evaluators. And evaluators don't want manuals. They want to understand how you'll solve their specific challenge.
The SME Interview Framework for Better Proposal Content
Here's how to run an interview that gets you proposal gold from your SMEs:
1. Start with context, not contentDon't ask "What should we say about cloud migration?" Instead, paint the picture: "The client is a regional bank, currently on-premise, worried about security but needs to modernize. Walk me through how you'd approach this."
2. Ask for stories, not specifications"Tell me about a similar project" beats "List our capabilities" every time. Stories contain proof points, challenges overcome, and authentic details that make your proposal memorable.
3. Use the naive advantagePlay dumb strategically. "I don't understand—why would they care about multi-region hosting?" Forces your SME to explain the business value, not just the technical feature.
4. Structure without announcing itGuide them through a narrative arc without them realizing it:
What problem does the client face? (Exposition)
What makes it urgent? (Inciting incident)
How do we solve it? (Rising action)
What's the transformation? (Climax)
What happens next? (Resolution)
5. Capture phrases, not just factsWhen your SME says "It's like having Mount Doom in candle form—same firepower, none of the journey," that's gold. Technical accuracy matters, but memorable metaphors win deals.
Making the SME Interview Method Practical
Schedule 30-minute sessions, not 2-hour marathons. Record everything (with permission). Come prepared with specific scenarios, not general topics.
Most importantly, make it conversational. Your SME should feel like they're explaining something to a curious colleague over coffee, not presenting to the board.
One proposal manager discovered that asking outside sales teams "What do you want your client to feel when they finish reading?" unlocked better content than any technical requirements document ever could.
Avoiding the Technical Jargon Trap in Proposals
Remember who reads your proposals first. Often, it's procurement teams, not technical evaluators. When your SME rattles off acronyms and technical specifications, your job is to translate.
"But won't we lose technical credibility?" your SMEs might ask.
No. You'll gain human connection. The technical appendix can house the specifications. The proposal body needs to tell the story of transformation.
Building an SME Answer Library Beyond Single Documents
This method scales. Once you've interviewed an SME about cloud migration for one proposal, you have content for many. But more importantly, you understand the narrative threads that connect technical capabilities to business outcomes.
Build your interview library. Tag conversations by topic, industry, and challenge. Soon, you're not starting from scratch—you're weaving proven narratives into new contexts.
The Real Win: How SME Interviews Improve RFP Win Rates
When you interview SMEs instead of requesting written content, three things happen:
First, you get better content faster. A 30-minute conversation yields more usable material than a week of follow-up emails.
Second, your SMEs actually enjoy the process. They get to share their expertise without the burden of crafting prose.
Third, and most importantly, your proposals develop authentic voice. They sound like your team actually understands the client's challenge because you've captured how your experts really think about these problems.
Start Tomorrow: Transform Your Proposal Collaboration Process
Pick your most reluctant SME. The one who never delivers content on time. Schedule 30 minutes. Bring specific scenarios. Record the conversation.
Watch what happens when you stop asking them to write and start asking them to explain.
Your proposals will never sound like technical manuals again. They'll sound like solutions.
Trampoline helps you turn SME interviews into repeatable proposal content. Upload the RFP and it becomes a board with one card per requirement. Assign the right SME, add interview notes in the card, and track reviews to done. The AI side panel pulls phrases and past answers from your own library so you can reuse the stories you captured. It drafts in your tone, flags gaps, and keeps answers aligned to the client context. When the board is complete, the Writer extension compiles a clean proposal in Word, PowerPoint, or other formats. Pre-sales can also pull validated content into emails and security questionnaires with the browser extension. You keep the human conversation. Trampoline removes the busywork and makes the best ideas easy to find and reuse.