Blog · Author
The PursuitAgent research team
Research & Analysis · 55 posts.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in April
The anniversary reading. A year of incumbent review sentiment, with a cut on what changed in April 2026.
The federal task-order RFP wave of 2026
IDIQ task-order patterns from the first half of 2026. How response windows, page caps, and evaluation schemes have shifted — and how teams are staffing against them.
State of Proposal Tools — Wave 2 2026
The second annual research drop. 45 vendors across four archetypes, updated capability matrices, pricing-pattern fractures, the grounded-AI taxonomy, and what changed vs. Wave 1 in August 2025.
State of Proposal Tools — Wave 2 preview
A preview of the Wave 2 annual research drop. What we know now that we didn't in August, what the category looks like heading into year two, and which five shifts we're going to document in the full release next Sunday.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in March
The monthly reviews aggregation. Two incumbents took notable hits on recent feature-release quality; one sub-category showed consistent positive movement. Links, quotes where they clarify the trend, and no speculation beyond the data.
Vendor risk management, patterns we see on the procurement side
A cross-cut of roughly 200 DDQs from the last six months — the fields that repeat, the fields that vary, and what the repetition tells us about how vendor risk teams actually operate.
A 2026 map of enterprise procurement platforms
Coupa, Ariba, Workday, Ivalua, GEP, and the newer entrants. Where AI shows up in each platform's RFP workflow, what's real, what's marketing, and what it means for vendors who have to respond through these systems.
Our infra spend for proposal workloads, year one
Database, inference, storage, and ops. What we spent running proposal workloads over our first year, broken down by category. Where the cost curves went where we expected, and where they surprised us.
The defense RFP cycle: March patterns
A teardown of DoD small-business contracting patterns in March across the last three fiscal years. Where the peaks are, what triggers them, and what the shape of March 2026 suggests about FY Q2 volume.
A cross-cut of 30 municipal RFPs
Patterns in sub-state procurement across 30 municipal RFPs posted in Q4 2025. Where buyer-side guidance is catching up to federal norms, where it's still behind, and what the data says for a vendor deciding whether to chase this tier.
Civic RFP transparency trends, state by state
We scored 50 state procurement portals on five transparency criteria — addenda visibility, debrief access, vendor Q&A publication, awarded-vendor disclosure, and data-portability. Wide variance, four leaders, and a long tail.
What 120 public debrief transcripts tell us about why bids lose
We read 120 public debrief and protest decisions — federal GAO and state equivalents — and coded the stated reasons for losses. Four patterns repeat. Three things surprised us.
Federal spending cycles, 2025 to 2026
Continuing resolutions, shutdowns, reopenings. How the federal fiscal calendar actually shapes RFP cadence, and what proposal functions that touch federal work should plan for through mid-2026.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in January
Monthly sweep of public review activity on Loopio, Responsive, QorusDocs, and Upland Qvidian. Q4 fallout shows up in January — renewal cycles, budget cuts, product regressions flagged in the wild.
Healthcare RFP trends for 2026, early read
Seven clauses that were not in 2025 healthcare RFPs and are now showing up repeatedly in the Q4 2025 sample. What they tell us about buyer priorities for the year ahead, with sourcing where it is public.
Procurement budget forecasts for 2026
An early read on federal, state, and enterprise procurement budgets for 2026. Where the RFP dollars are moving, what categories are expanding, and what that implies for the proposal teams covering them.
Year in RFPs: 2025 — the data and the narrative
The canonical year-end synthesis. What moved in the RFP category in 2025, what did not, what the public data says about vendors and buyers, and three predictions for 2026 with the evidence behind them. 5,000 words, twenty-six sources.
The end-of-year reading list for proposal operators
Fifteen links outside our bubble — books, long essays, research papers, category-adjacent writing. Not a proposal-industry reading list; the reading that makes proposal work feel new when you return to it in January.
The 2025 proposal-tool hype cycle, mapped
Who peaked, who plateaued, who crashed, and who quietly held a line this year in the proposal-tools category. A data-grounded map of vendor posture across 2025, drawn from public reviews and pricing signals.
Anatomy of an enterprise SaaS RFP, 2025 edition
An annotated teardown of a representative enterprise SaaS procurement. Data-residency, AI-usage clauses, three recurring red flags, and where the 2025 version has diverged from the 2024 template.
Q4 2025 RFP volume retrospective
A sector-by-sector look at what the final quarter of 2025 told us about buyer priorities, AI-disclosure requirements, and where volume landed versus Q4 2025.
AutogenAI one year later: follow-up on the August teardown
Revisiting the AutogenAI teardown from August. Three things that changed in their positioning and product, two that didn't, and one thing we got wrong the first time.
An anonymized winning proposal, torn down
A public-sector award with public artifacts. What won, what the scoring rubric rewarded, and three things a typical proposal team would have gotten wrong.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in November
The monthly aggregation of public reviews for proposal-management and RFP-automation tools. Q4 competitor deltas, new reviewers, and what customers are praising and complaining about this month.
The annual security-questionnaire cycle, four industries
SaaS, healthcare, defense, finance. How the timing, volume, and question distribution differ across four regulated B2B industries, and why the cycle shape matters for staffing.
Security-questionnaire volume in 2025, the data
Safe Security's 500+/year claim, tested against the volume we see across our own fleet. Category breakdowns, seasonal spikes, and the questions that are growing fastest.
Anatomy of a multi-award IDIQ solicitation
Reading a federal multi-award IDIQ end-to-end. Task orders, ceiling prices, evaluation factors, and three red flags to catch before bid/no-bid. Annotated walk-through of a recent civilian-agency vehicle.
Loopio at ten: what a decade of reviews tells us
Reading 10 years of public Loopio reviews end-to-end. The trajectory of buyer sentiment from 2016 to 2025, what the product fixed, what it never did, and what the trajectory predicts for incumbent RFP tools generally.
Healthcare RFP compliance patterns
An analysis of HIPAA, HITRUST, and data-residency clauses across 50 hospital-system RFPs. What language is now standard, what is still customer-specific, and the three clauses that have sharpened since 2024.
Q3 2025 RFP volume, by sector and state
What SAM.gov and state procurement portals tell us about Q3 2025 RFP volume. The sectors growing, the states moving, the federal categories rebounding from a slow Q2, and the data we cannot reconcile.
Vendor onboarding DDQs across four industries
Finance, healthcare, SaaS, and defense. The same 200 questions in four different rephrasings. A teardown of how the category-specific framing changes what the buyer expects to see in the answer — and what stays the same underneath.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in September
Monthly aggregation of public review activity across the major proposal-management vendors. Four competitor deltas worth noting from September 2025.
State RFP subcontracting requirements, decoded
Five states, six clauses, and how they score. A research teardown of state-level subcontracting and small-business participation requirements with citations to each procurement code.
What a Forrester Wave on proposal tools would need to evaluate
Forrester has not published a Wave specifically for proposal management. A criterion-by-criterion read of what such a Wave would need to measure — where the generic rubric fits real buyer behavior, where it lags.
State of Proposal Tools — Wave 1 2025
The annual benchmark. What customers say about the incumbents and the challengers, what's true in pricing, where the AI moment lands honestly, and what changes in 2025.
What a Magic Quadrant for proposal management would need to evaluate
There is no Gartner Magic Quadrant for proposal-management software. What a hypothetical MQ would need to measure — where the framework translates, where it would have to add new axes for grounded AI.
QvidianPro reviews, five years in retrospect
Sentiment trajectory across 200+ public reviews of Upland Qvidian. Where reviewer language stayed consistent, where it shifted, and where the product stopped tracking the market.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said in July
Monthly aggregation of competitor review deltas and our own. What changed in July's review feeds across Loopio, Responsive, Qvidian, AutogenAI, and us.
The AutogenAI teardown: UK-origin RFP AI, two years in
What's public about AutogenAI: UK origin, generation-heavy stack, where they win in EU procurement, where the citation discipline is thin, and what we learned reading their materials.
Proposal win rates by sector, Q1 2025
A public-data synthesis of proposal win rates across healthcare, SaaS, defense, and state/local procurement for Q1 2025 — what's measurable, what isn't, and where the sector cuts diverge.
Anatomy of a 112-page DoD RFP
A composite walkthrough of a 112-page Department of Defense solicitation — section structure, scoring methodology, evaluation factors, where the editorial weight actually sits. Drawn from public DoD RFP patterns on SAM.gov.
Win rates by RFP format: government, commercial, DDQ
Public data on win rates is sparse and inconsistent. Here's what the GAO bid-protest record, APMP benchmarks, and vendor-published numbers actually let you say — and where the data gaps are big enough to matter.
Anatomy of a mid-sized municipal RFP: Chicago-shaped
A walk through the structure of a typical mid-sized municipal RFP — front matter, technical scope, evaluation, contractual riders — using a representative Chicago-shaped solicitation as a composite worked example.
The Responsive teardown: what 'enterprise-grade' means
A feature-by-feature look at Responsive (formerly RFPIO) — content library, AI, workflow, reporting — using public review sites as the primary signal. Where they win, where they don't.
Federal RFP word counts, 2024 to 2025
What two years of public federal RFPs on SAM.gov tell us about response-document length, page-count caps, and the directional drift of complexity. Research note with sample-size caveats.
Anatomy of a 28-page California state RFP
A walkthrough of a representative 28-page state-of-California RFP — the structure, the scoring framework, the compliance language, and the patterns that recur across California state procurements.
The APMP BOK 2025 update, decoded
The APMP Body of Knowledge is the closest thing the proposal profession has to a canonical text. Here's what it covers, how it has evolved, and where the 2025 update sits relative to the practice — based only on what's public.
SAM.gov RFP volume, Q1 2025
What the federal procurement portal published in the first quarter of 2025. Public data only — directional signals on volume, agency mix, and category drift, with the SAM.gov citations to verify each claim.
The Loopio teardown: what 1,700 customers are actually paying for
Loopio is the category's reference customer. Reviews, pricing signals, and product surface area, taken seriously. What it does well, what it doesn't, and what 1,700 customers are buying when they renew.
The Responsive pricing trail: what three years of leaks reveal
Responsive (formerly RFPIO) lists no prices. Three years of public data — job postings, G2 reviews, customer signals, and indirect references — let us describe the shape without inventing the numbers.
Anatomy of a 40-ish-page state RFP: a composite teardown
A structural walk through a typical mid-sized state RFP — modal-verb density, scoring rubric, buried disqualifiers. Composite teardown built from public state procurement patterns, not one specific document.
Five years of APMP salary data, in one chart
What the APMP salary surveys tell us — and don't — about proposal-team compensation over the last five years. A teardown of the public dataset, the methodology, and the gaps a careful reader has to keep in mind.
Embedding model selection: why Gemini Embedding 2 for proposals
A teardown of how we evaluated four embedding models — Gemini Embedding 2, OpenAI text-embedding-3-large, Cohere embed-v4, and Voyage — for a proposal corpus, and the methodology that drove the choice.
What the 2025 federal procurement data tells us about RFP volume
SAM.gov publishes the official record of federal solicitations and contract awards. Here is what the 2025 dataset says about RFP volume and what proposal teams should read into the trend.
Five patterns we see in Georgia state procurement postings
A structural read of patterns that recur across Georgia Procurement Registry solicitations. Five observations about how Georgia agencies draft RFPs and what each pattern tells a vendor about how the buyer thinks.
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