Proposals that win

What was discussed

Park Ji-hoon of AWS opened with a single idea: TITO, or Trash In Trash Out. Feed a proposal weak information and a weak proposal is all you get back. Only 20-30% of what matters is written in the RFP; the real needs, the other 70-80%, have to be asked for in person. That is why the sales team has to be in the field, and why any need sales fails to collect never makes it into a single line of the proposal. He also warned against the "triangle of death", a document that talks only about your own strengths and skips any analysis of the customer's pain points.

Proposals are almost always winner-take-all, so differentiation is everything. But in the age of AI, everyone is using AI, and the structures and sentences start to look alike. The point, he argued, is that people have to supply what AI cannot arrive at on its own. The line he left us with was blunt: "Whoever reinvents the process wins." Using AI well is no longer the bar; what counts is how you fold AI into your own process.

Cho Jun-ho, CEO of Cliwant, led with his conclusion: "Even in the age of AI, the essence of a winning proposal does not change. What changes is the complicated process around it." Instead of hunting for businesses AI cannot eat, he flipped the question to businesses that AI has made possible. Using AI well is something an elementary schooler can do (his own son has built dozens of games with it), so a professional should be able to redesign a business with it. He was candid, too: the company rolled out AI across the organization and set aside Thursday afternoons for experimentation, but as he put it, AI skills went up and the business did not necessarily grow with them.

In that context he introduced Contrl, which puts AI behind the entire public-bidding process, from identifying the right contact during pre-sales, through bid analysis and strategy, to generating the proposal itself. He demoed a search trained on seven years of bidding data that ranks agencies by how many AI project owners they have. If the domestic B2B SaaS market is worth 2 trillion won, the public bidding market is worth 200 trillion. Rather than selling a tool, the plan is to walk into that 200 trillion won market alongside customers. The most memorable story: at a bid in Singapore, before presenting, he photographed a dead display in the venue's restroom and told the client, "we can connect that for you."

Yoon Sang-myung of LG U+ introduced himself as a national-team-caliber presenter. The more VUCA the era, he said, the more face-to-face presentation matters, and he traced the shift from written reports to live presentations. Accountability ultimately rests with a human, and what only a human can create is atmosphere and the nonverbal. He fell silent for a few seconds mid-talk and the air in the room changed. Humans, he noted, are the only animals whose whites of the eyes are visible from the front, so where you are looking is itself a form of social reading. He walked through the OREO and STAR speaking frameworks, and flipped VUCA into Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agile. As the last weapon to keep in hand, he offered that humor is what makes us human, which is also why he practices his handwriting.

The group discussions converged on one conclusion. What AI hands you is a 70-point proposal; the last 30 points are the human's job. How much of the presenter is actually in the proposal, and how capable the reviewer is, decide the outcome. One group said to build up the data first, another said to find the hidden key decision-maker on LinkedIn, another observed that Korea leads with specs while overseas the relationship comes first. Whichever route, everyone agreed the last mile is human touch. One speaker's parting words stayed with us: "Nobody can tell you the textbook way to bid and win. Which is maybe why those of us who showed up to study this late at night become the people who can't be replaced."