The Mystery of the Disappearing SME: Lessons in SME Engagement in Proposals
- Admin
- Sep 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 18
Chaos Unfolds: The Vanishing Act
It was 3:17 p.m. on a Thursday when Priya uttered the words no proposal team ever wants to hear:
“Wait… where’s Markus?”
Jordan froze, mid-sip of his third oat milk latte.
“Markus Markus? As in the only person who understands the infrastructure we’re proposing?”
Priya nodded slowly, the color draining from her face faster than Alex’s patience during a font-formatting crisis.
Markus was the designated SME for the technical volume. He was supposed to provide system architecture details, cloud compliance language, and at least two paragraphs on integration workflows. But now — with Red Team scheduled for Monday morning — he hadn’t responded to emails, missed two syncs, and hadn’t dropped a single sentence into the shared doc.
Cue the chaos.
Jordan began frantically typing into ChatGPT, hoping it could reconstruct an entire infrastructure from three acronyms and a vague sense of panic.
Priya dove into archived proposals stored in the darkest corners of SharePoint, screensharing a folder labeled: “2020_Archive_USE_WITH_CAUTION.”
Alex — the proposal manager and calendar overlord — sat silently in the Teams meeting, flipping between six tabs, three spreadsheets, and a digital sticky note wall color-coded by stress level.
She unmuted with deadly calm. “Red for blockers, blue for updates, green for SME inputs. Why is everything red?”
And Sam?
Sam, the ever-confident Capture Manager who definitely said he had this covered, had his status set to “In a meeting” — and had been that way for three hours.
Conflict Builds: The Void of Input
By 5:42 p.m., the team was unraveling faster than a SharePoint link with six redirects.
Priya had pinged Markus twice on Teams, emailed him the outline draft, and even left a voicemail. Nothing. No reply. No edits. No section content. Just digital silence.
So, she did what any overextended Technical Lead would do: she dove into archived proposals and started reverse-engineering system descriptions from a dusty file labeled: “2020_Archive_USE_WITH_CAUTION.”
Priya — the brilliant but bandwidth-stretched Technical Lead — was reverse-engineering solution details from a file last modified in 2020, hoping it hadn’t aged like milk.
Jordan, the team’s metaphor-happy section writer, saw the panic and jumped in with flair.
“Alright, listen. This solution is like a Mars rover. The client is NASA. The infrastructure is the terrain. Our system needs to navigate it—autonomously, efficiently, with real-time data uplinks.”
“Jordan,” Alex said, without turning from her screen, “this is a VA health system migration, not an interplanetary expedition.”
“Same concept,” Jordan shrugged. “Innovation. Exploration. Unpredictable terrain.”
At that exact moment, Sam finally popped into the Teams meeting.
“Hey—good news! I talked to Markus a couple weeks ago. He was totally on board.”
Priya raised an eyebrow. “Did you actually send him a calendar invite?”
“Not technically,” Sam admitted. “But I pinged him on Teams. He reacted with a thumbs-up emoji.”
Alex’s eye twitched. “Sam. You counted a reaction emoji as confirmation?”
“I mean, a thumbs-up is pretty enthusiastic.”
Alex muted herself. Possibly to scream.
Climax: The 11th-Hour “Collaboration”
Friday. 9:03 a.m. Proposal deadline: Monday. Morale: circling the drain.
Alex, clinging to her sanity by the edge of a color-coded Gantt chart, scheduled a Teams meeting to corner Markus and extract the technical input they desperately needed. She looped in the whole team — Markus included.
At 9:07, the call was well underway... but Markus still hadn’t joined.
Priya checked the attendee list. “He was invited, right?”
Alex confirmed. “Sent the invite yesterday and again this morning. He accepted.”
Silence.
Jordan began stalling with metaphors.
“Okay, think of the data as a school of fish. Our solution is the coral reef—structured, scalable, and resilient.”
Alex’s tone shifted from “Project Manager” to “Threat Level Midnight.”
“Jordan. This is a cloud migration. Not Finding Nemo.”
At 9:15, Markus finally joined the call.
“Hey—sorry! Just saw the Teams ping. Didn’t realize this was starting already.”
Sam chimed in, a little too casually:
“I figured he’d show. He said he was good to go last week…”
Alex didn’t respond. But her camera briefly turned off — probably so she could scream into a pillow.
They scrambled through a 27-minute SME interview. Priya asked rapid-fire questions. Jordan typed like a court stenographer. Markus rattled off answers while jogging on a treadmill (audio wobbly, but technically usable).
That night, Lila — the team’s formatting wizard and low-key superhero — stayed up reformatting 14 pages of dumped content. She renamed the file: “Vol2_TechSection_v8_FINAL_final_FINAL-really-this-time_LilaEdit.”
At final review, Chris (a.k.a. Nostalgia Incarnate) joined the call 20 minutes late, sipping tea and ready to pontificate.
“Back in ’98, we had a comms guy vanish mid-proposal. Moved to Costa Rica. No warning. Just left. Honestly, I respected it.”
“Chris,” Alex sighed, “we’ve heard the llama story.”
“Still relevant,” he said.
Lessons Learned: Best Practices for SME Engagement in Proposals
Disappearing SMEs aren’t just a funny plot point — they’re a real threat to on-time, high-quality proposals.
Here’s how to avoid scrambling like this team did and implement best practices for SME Engagement in Proposals.
Lock SME Time Early — With Real Calendar Invites
Verbal promises and chat reactions don’t count. Get it on their calendar, confirm twice, and send an agenda.
Use Interview Templates to Maximize Speed
Not all SMEs are natural writers. Record a 20–30-minute call. Use a pre-built template to ask about the solution's features, differentiators, risks, and proof points. Turn that transcript into usable content.
Build a Reusable SME Knowledge Base
Markus (or SMEs) won’t always be available. Create a content library with approved solution descriptions, diagrams, and boilerplate. Keep it current and accessible.
Assign Clear SME Engagement Owners
Don’t let SME coordination fall through the cracks. Assign responsibility at kickoff. Track it. Own it. Follow up like your deadline depends on it—because it does.
Next Week: Ghosts of Copy-Paste Past
Will Jordan’s love of “reuse” come back to haunt him? Will Riley catch the compliance issue before it’s too late?
Find out in next week’s episode: “The Curse of the Copy-Paste Past Performance” — a cautionary tale in tailoring what you reuse.
Got your own RFP misadventure? We want to hear it. Share your story, vent your chaos, or send us your weirdest SME excuse (bonus points if it includes emojis, llamas, or both). Drop us a message—we promise not to ping you at 2 a.m.
Mock RFP Tales: Because every proposal has a story. Most of them are stress dreams.
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