As we prepare to ring in the new year, it seems a good time to review the evolution of the proposal management space. Let’s take a look back at the trends and technology innovations that have transformed the proposal process—and how QorusDocs has contributed to this transformation—in order to understand the best practices and strategies that will drive business growth and profitability for organizations moving forward.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, I’ll share some of my insights into what’s coming down the pike—for QorusDocs and the industry as a whole—to help our valued customers make informed decisions and achieve revenue goals amidst an unpredictable economic and business landscape.
Let me start with a bit of background about QorusDocs. After launching as a three-person team based in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012, we moved the QorusDocs headquarters to Seattle in 2016 to be closer to the booming tech market. We further expanded our global presence to London in support of the strong growth in the proposal management technology market.
As more and more companies began to recognize the revenue-boosting benefits of AI-powered proposal software—and with the industry expanding in kind—QorusDocs shifted focus to align more tightly with our customer’s needs, business trends, and new technologies. And we’re continuing to innovate and grow, helping organizations around the world reap the benefits of automating and accelerating their proposal process.
Initially, our focus was on general document assembly and generation. But we recognized that sales and business development teams were struggling with specific documents, like RFP responses, proposals and pitches. We developed software around that theme to streamline the entire proposal process—from content management and collaboration to document creation—helping customers create compelling pitches, self-service proposals and respond to RFPs more efficiently and effectively. Over time we introduce more domain specific capability that helps legal, technical and professional services firms optimize their proposal process.
By organizing, making available, and intelligently recommending content, QorusDocs AI proposal software helps bid and proposal teams, business development professionals, sales teams, and other revenue-focused stakeholders across the organization streamline and simplify the proposal process and efficiently create winning documents. We’re constantly innovating to ensure our software delivers the optimal experience and results for our customers.
Not to brag but QorusDocs is an experienced leader in the use of AI technology. We’ve been using AI in an ethical, trustworthy way with our customers since 2020 when we introduced Natural Language Processing (NLP) into the product.
Now, with the emergence and continued expansion of generative AI in the industry, we’ve launched our AI assistant, QorusDocs QPilot, to enable our customers to quickly create documents of all kinds—proposals, RFx responses, pitches, presentations and more—with AI skills specifically tailored to the needs of professional services organizations.
QPilot delivers AI experiences unique to business development professionals and proposal teams to help our customers—from law firms and IT solutions providers to AEC and accounting firms—close more deals and boost profitability. By putting the most engaging content at your team’s fingertips, our purpose-built AI proposal software enables your teams to spend less time on the tedious, labor-intensive steps of document creation and more time investing in clients—which can be a real gamechanger for client acquisition and retention and revenue growth.
QorusDocs was ranked #1 for two years running in the proposal management software category in SoftwareReviews' Data Quadrant Awards, scoring:
91% in Created Business Value for Users (vs. 85% average score)
88% in Quality of Features Satisfaction (vs. 82% avg. score)
96% in Document Management (vs. 86% avg. score)
95% in Proposals and SOWs Feature Satisfaction (vs. 86% avg. score)
We also earned the highest scores among competitors in vendor support (93%) and availability and quality of training (94%). And if that wasn’t enough accolades, QorusDocs also earned the top score (89%) in Product Strategy and Rate of Improvement by users, highlighting the impact and strong customer ROI results of our new AI Assistant, QPilot, which we introduced in June 2024.
Our team is dedicated to staying ahead of the curve when it comes to product strategy, consistently augmenting our solution with new AI-powered capabilities to simplify, accelerate, and bring ease to our customers’ proposal process (and keep winning us awards).
One area we’re especially excited about is templates, specifically our new generative AI capabilities for Word and PowerPoint Smart Templates. By automating the basic personalization process and merging data and content from various sources into customers’ polished, branded templates, QPilot’s AI Templates empower business development teams to create customized pitches and proposals in record time.
With the introduction of QPilot AI text fields, we’re taking proposal automation one step further by using the power of generative AI to transform, rewrite, summarize, analyze and report back on the content it references, before merging the output into your professionally-styled document or presentation template.
Here are a few other examples of QorusDocs QPilot product innovations that continue to differentiate our offerings in the industry and win us awards year after year:
Searchable subject-matter-focused libraries with the ability to connect multiple sources of information (e.g., corporate data, product or service information, bios).
Centrally managed skills. We’ve built QPilot in a way that enables organizations to build and share a collection of centrally-managed Smart Skills (aka prompts) with teams—tailored to the organization’s processes—to expertly tackle a wide variety of common proposal tasks. For example, you can configure a Skill to analyze RFP requirements, outline a proposal narrative, draft an executive summary, or check for red flags and inconsistencies.
We curate and maintain a collection of the best prompts for business development professionals (that we are constantly adding to and improving) to streamline pitching.
With shared history across apps, QPilot lets you pick up a conversation right where you left off, even when you switch apps.
Our longstanding partnership with Microsoft ensures seamless integration with Microsoft Office 365, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. In fact, QPilot is embedded directly inside of Microsoft 365 apps, enabling teams to work seamlessly in their everyday environments—a huge ease-of-use advantage that saves time (and headaches).
When it comes to generative AI tools and technology, security and data privacy are top of mind for business leaders—and rightly so. The last thing an organization wants is for private enterprise data to leak into the public sphere through a public-facing generative AI tool.
For our customers’ peace of mind, we’ve built our generative AI proposal management strategy around Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services because:
It’s a secure and private generative AI technology.
It doesn't make your content available to other Microsoft or QorusDocs customers.
It doesn't use your data for its own service or for training its models.
The QorusDocs solution is built on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
We work across a broad spectrum of the organization (and tailor QorusDocs features to each stakeholder’s distinct needs).
It takes more than just the bid team to win deals. With this consideration in mind, QorusDocs’ capabilities are tailored for contributors across the business, including subject matter experts who contribute to pitches and presentations, sales teams and business development teams who create brand-controlled proposals, and bid and proposal teams who handle strategic proposals and RFP responses.
We also plug into Microsoft’s technology stack, pulling content in from applications like SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. This functionality means that organizations can control and manage their own content—and use and share it across the breadth of departments in their organization to increase productivity and security.
We put a lot of energy and discipline into building out customer value and making sure we offer our customers the very best overall experience to help them meet their objectives, efficiently and cost-effectively.
Today, QorusDocs is an invaluable asset for service organizations in legal, professional, and technical fields. With QPilot leading the way, our plan is to continue to develop functionality in our software that helps companies in these niche markets create compelling pitches, proposals, presentations and RFx responses efficiently, securely, and seamlessly to drive higher win rates and keep the revenue wheel turning.
Plus, as we grow, we’ll introduce new markets and find different ways to:
The B2B sales technology landscape has exploded in recent years with a wide range of AI-powered technologies, everything from CRM, prospecting, and lead generation solutions to sales automation, data intelligence, and demo tools.
Notably, “closing solutions”—and proposal management solution in particular—have rapidly gained traction in the eyes of leaders tasked with creating efficiencies, boosting productivity, and enhancing revenue generation capabilities.
The rise in the popularity of proposal management solutions is no surprise. Just think about the hours, effort, and commitment required to bring an enterprise deal from lead to close. AI proposal software like QorusDocs makes all the difference in helping revenue-focused teams close deals in a competitive marketplace. In fact, in a 2024 buyer experience report, 100% of QorusDocs users felt our AI-powered solution was critical to the success of their organization.
With the flow of RFPs showing no signs of slowing down, organizations need the capacity to respond to the growing number of opportunities or risk leaving significant money on the table. Adding AI proposal management software to the tech stack is the most effective and cost-efficient way to simplify and streamline the proposal process to manage the flow of opportunities, optimize business development efforts, and shorten the deal cycle to drive more revenue.
With indicators pointing to continued expansion of the proposal management technology landscape—especially in light of the growing acceptance and deployment of generative AI tools and technologies, we’re poised to innovate and evolve to ensure our customers can deliver personalized, accurate, and on-brand response documents that differentiate their offerings from the crowd.
We’re witnessing the evolution and increasing adoption of AI in the proposal management space and across the proposal process and are excited to execute on some of the new technology opportunities available to us now.
We’re determined to bring AI into every facet of our proposal management solution and, as our track record demonstrates, we’re committed to helping our customers create a secure, efficient, and frictionless AI-powered proposal process that helps boost win rates and consistently meet revenue targets.
At QorusDocs, we’re dedicated to transforming the proposal process for our customers, both through our innovative, award-winning software and via a vast library of helpful resources, tools, and best practices—from informative guides, ebooks, and blog posts on a range of timely proposal management-related topics to our time-saving Template Hub and an entire resource center dedicated to the unique needs of professional services organizations.
For a deep dive into the power of AI proposal management software to transform your proposal process and boost top- and bottom-line revenue, check out our Definitive Guide to AI in Proposal Management and the Ultimate Guide to Mastering Proposals, Pitches and RFPs.
And if you’re looking for some tips on what to consider when adding AI proposal management to your organization’s tech stack, download The Buyer’s Guide to Generative AI Proposal Management Software.