Most proposal teams think they’re better than they are

The State of the Industry. Find out where your team actually ranks. Live, anonymous, and against the rest of the room.

Ask any GovCon team how mature their bid process is and you’ll get the same answer: pretty good, could be tighter. Then the RFP drops, the compliance matrix gets rebuilt from scratch, and the win theme gets written at 11pm on a Thursday.

We’re launching the VisibleThread RFP Lifecycle Maturity Model, a five-stage framework for how teams move from ad hoc pursuits to strategic capture. But this isn’t a slideshow. As Kyle walks through the model, you’ll score yourself live and anonymously, and watch your answers stack up against everyone else in the room in real time. Nobody sees your name. Nobody follows up about your score. You just find out where you actually sit.

Kyle Peterson sees inside GovCon teams of every size, from two-person shops to organisations running dozens of pursuits at once. He’ll be blunt about what separates the teams that win consistently from the ones stuck repeating the same scramble, including the things nobody says out loud on a vendor webinar.

Then the floor is yours. Challenge the model, argue with the stage definitions, and help decide where the industry baseline should sit.

Can’t make it live? Register anyway. The recording and the full maturity report are yours either way.

What we’ll cover

1. The five stages, and the honest version of each. What Ad Hoc through Strategic actually look like day to day, not the tidy version. Including why most teams sit a stage lower than they’d guess.
2. Where you rank, live. Anonymous polling across six dimensions, with the room’s results on screen as you go. You’ll see whether your weak spot is the common one or genuinely unusual.
3. What Kyle sees that teams don’t. The patterns that show up across dozens of GovCon accounts: the habits that quietly move win rate, and the ones that look like process but change nothing.
4. The one move that gets you to the next stage. Stage by stage, the single change that does the most work, and how to tell within 90 days whether it’s landing.

Presenter line: Presented by Kyle Peterson, Vice President of Account Strategy, VisibleThread