Finding sales leads is easy. Finding RFPs should be too.

If you work in sales, you’re spoiled for choice. You’ve got ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay, Gong, and dozens of AI-powered platforms all designed to help you find, score, and close leads faster. Entire categories of software exist to do nothing but help sales teams get smarter about their pipeline. But if you run a proposal team, you’re still refreshing clunky portals, scrolling RSS feeds, or cobbling together intake forms. It feels like proposal sourcing is still stuck in 2005.

Why is there such a huge gap between how sales teams find opportunities and how proposal teams do it? And more importantly: why hasn’t anyone built the “ZoomInfo for RFPs” yet? Our Settle team wanted to answer that question, and this post is a result of that deep dive.

Proposal sourcing today is a noisy, manual grind

Right now, most proposal teams find RFPs the hard way:

• Checking government procurement portals like SAM.gov, GovWin, or state/municipal sites.

• Subscribing to industry newsletters, association email lists, alerts, and RSS feeds.

• Collecting opportunities through partner networks or public intake forms.

• Manually copying everything into a spreadsheet to track and decide.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of these feeds, you know the problem. You either get too few opportunities, or you get far too many irrelevant ones. One week you’re starving, the next you’re drowning. And the work of deciding whether each opportunity is worth pursuing is slow, inconsistent, and expensive in human hours.

Some teams build elaborate go/no-go checklists to evaluate fit. Others just rely on gut instinct. Either way, qualification takes hours for each RFP: Does it fit our ICP? Do we have the right capabilities? Did we bid on something similar before, and how did that go? Who are we likely up against? These are critical questions, but answering them manually for every opportunity means most teams self-limit. They don’t go looking for more opportunities because they already struggle to qualify the ones they have. That usually means leaving good revenue on the table.

We’ve recently aggregated some tips on how to make sourcing better the manual way, but today we’re taking it to the next level with AI.

The real bottleneck is qualification, not drafting

Drafting proposals is a hard problem, but it has been getting a lot of attention. Tools like Loopio, Responsive, and (yours humbly) Settle are speeding up the response side with reusable content and AI-assisted drafting.

But sourcing RFPs — i.e., deciding which bids to pursue in the first place is still a painfully manual, and relatively underserved.

Every extra opportunity means hours of triage before you can even start drafting. This bottleneck means most teams don’t chase as many opportunities as they should. Instead, they accept inefficiency as the cost of doing business.

The trend: proposal volume is rising

Here’s the thing: companies that are serious about growth aren’t slowing down. They’re responding to more RFPs, not fewer.

Loopio’s 2025 RFP Trends & Benchmarks Report found that more than half of teams increased their RFP responses this year — and most plan to keep that number climbing. RFPs already influence over a third of company revenue, and the average win rate has ticked up to 45%, an all-time high.

Other reports echo this. Templafy’s survey showed employees save the equivalent of 30 workdays a year through document automation, and CFlowApps reports that U.S. organizations using proposal automation submit 46% more proposals annually, driving revenue growth of up to 12%.

It’s clearly a numbers game. More qualified RFPs means more shots on goal, and more shots mean more wins. The problem is how to scale without drowning.

Why does sales get ZoomInfo and proposal teams get spreadsheets?

The contrast is stark. Sales teams use AI to score leads by likelihood to close, enrich contacts with firmographics and buying intent, automatically flag ICP matches, predict pipeline health in real time, and more without lifting a finger.

Proposal teams, meanwhile, are still playing whack-a-mole in procurement portals.

Why hasn’t anyone built a sourcing platform that works like ZoomInfo for RFPs? An AI agent that would continuously scans portals, feeds, and networks, cross-references each opportunity with your company’s profile and past RFPs, score each one by fit and win probability, and surface only the ones that matter?

The technology to do this is not a fanciful fantasy anymore. In fact, AI has been doing exactly that for years in sales. There’s absolutely no reason it can’t be applied to proposals too. It’s surprising - and frustrating - that it hasn’t been.

The future is in AI-driven sourcing and qualification

Here’s the vision we see:

• An AI agent that never sleeps, pulling in new RFPs as soon as they’re posted.

• Smart qualification that knows your industry, your history, and your competitors.

• Win probability scoring based on past results, common objections, and competitive benchmarks.

• Competitor intelligence: AI that recognizes who else is likely bidding, based on patterns, and calculates your relative chances.

• Automated drafting that gives you a 50% head start on every response.

We already have a move on the last point. One of our clients recently submitted an RFP where 50% of the content was generated by Settle (within minutes) - and they won a massive contract. Now imagine pairing that drafting speed with AI that also sources and qualifies the right opportunities for you. You'd be unstoppable.

This is the future of proposal management: a system that doesn’t just help you answer faster but actually makes sure you’re answering the right RFPs - and scales your volume without feeling like a burden to the sales team.

What it would mean for proposal teams

Imagine a world where:

• You never fear “too many leads,” because AI filters the noise.

• You never waste days chasing an RFP you were never going to win.

• You scale your pipeline without scaling your headcount.

• You uncover hidden opportunities your competitors miss.

That’s what ZoomInfo did for sales. That’s what AI sourcing could do for proposals.

We’ve written before about the hidden human cost of RFPs. Burnout, bottlenecks, missed chances — these are symptoms of a process that hasn’t evolved. We believe that it's time to change it.

The road ahead

We’ll be the first to say: this isn’t solved yet. The proposal industry hasn’t caught up to sales tech - but it will. And we’re actively working on it.

At Settle, we’re building toward this vision: a proposal manager that sources, qualifies, and drafts at scale. Today, we already pre-fill responses in minutes. Tomorrow, we’ll help you find the opportunities worth responding to in the first place.

If sourcing and qualifying RFPs feels like your bottleneck, we’d love to hear from you. We're planning to open up our early beta soon and would love for you to be a part of it.

👉 Talk to Settle and help shape the future of AI-powered RFP sourcing.

Frequently Asked Questions about RFP Sourcing and AI

How do companies find RFPs today?

Most proposal teams rely on a mix of government portals (like SAM.gov), state procurement sites, industry associations, RSS feeds, and manual spreadsheets. Some also get opportunities through partner networks or client referrals. The process is time-consuming and often overwhelming.

What tools exist for RFP sourcing?

A few platforms provide RFP alerts or access to centralized databases (e.g., GovWin, BidNet). However, most modern proposal tools like Loopio and Responsive focus on drafting and content management - not on discovering or qualifying opportunities. True “RFP sourcing software” is still rare.

How do you qualify an RFP before responding?

Teams typically use go/no-go checklists that evaluate whether the RFP fits their ideal customer profile, available resources, technical requirements, and potential profitability. This manual triage process can take hours per opportunity, creating a bottleneck that limits how many RFPs a team can pursue.

Can AI help with RFP sourcing and qualification?

Yes. AI can scan large numbers of opportunities, compare them against your company’s past wins, losses, and strengths, and score each RFP by win probability. Similar to how sales teams use AI to qualify leads, proposal teams can use AI to focus only on opportunities worth pursuing.

Why isn’t there a ZoomInfo for RFPs yet?

The technology exists, but until recently it hasn’t been applied to proposals. Sales tech has exploded with tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo, while proposal sourcing has lagged behind. That’s beginning to change as forward-looking teams explore AI-driven sourcing and qualification.