SME collaboration, the six-month update
Revisiting the September 2025 SME-collaboration series. Which patterns persisted in real teams, which ones had to be rewritten, and the one I was wrong about.
Six months ago I wrote a four-part series on SME collaboration. The core claim was that SME bottlenecks are a workflow problem, not a staffing problem, and four practices — async asks, ticketed interviews, capture-call structure, and a SME-friendly KB — could move the number that Qorus has tracked flat for six years running: the 48% of teams who name SME collaboration as their top challenge.
Six months is a reasonable interval to ask whether the advice held up. This post is that check-in. Three patterns persisted, one had to be rewritten, and one I got wrong.
What persisted
Async asks beat meetings, almost always. Part 1 argued that a written, structured ask posted in a thread beats a scheduled meeting for 70–80% of SME interactions. That held. Teams that adopted the pattern report that SME response times halved, and SMEs who initially resisted (“I prefer to just talk it through”) became the strongest advocates within a quarter. The exceptions — genuine back-and-forth debates, capture-call discovery, or post-mortems — still belong in synchronous conversation. But for “how does our encryption work” or “is this past-performance reference a good fit,” async wins.
Ticketed asks with deadlines close faster than standing Slack threads. Part 2 described the SME ticket pattern — a named question, a classification, a proposed answer, a specific deadline tied to the response. The key word is specific. “By EOD Tuesday” closes. “As soon as you can” does not. Teams that enforced deadlines saw median SME response times drop from ~3 days to ~20 hours. Teams that kept soft deadlines saw no change.
The SME-friendly KB post is aging the best. Part 4 described a KB structured around the questions SMEs actually get asked, not around the structure of past proposals. Six months later, this is the pattern with the highest adoption and the stickiest retention. Once a team restructures their KB to match the DDQ question taxonomy, SMEs start using the KB themselves to answer questions directly — which is the actual endgame of SME workflow. No proposal manager in between.
What had to be rewritten
The capture-call structure post has aged poorly. Part 3 prescribed a fixed 60-minute capture-call template: 10 minutes on the buyer, 20 on the competitive landscape, 20 on the win themes, 10 on the next-step asks. The template worked when I wrote it. It doesn’t work in 2026.
The problem is two things. First, remote-work patterns shifted how capture calls actually happen — many are now asynchronous via recorded video plus a shared doc, not a live 60-minute meeting. The 10/20/20/10 template doesn’t map onto that format. Second, AI-assisted pre-work has changed what a capture call should do. The buyer research the call used to surface can now be pre-assembled before the call; the call time should be spent on the judgment questions that assembly can’t handle.
The rewritten version of that post will land in April. The short version: a capture call in 2026 is 30 minutes of judgment work preceded by 45 minutes of AI-assisted buyer research the attendees read before arriving.
What I was wrong about
I oversold async. I wrote Part 1 as if async was the right answer for most SME interactions. I now think async is the right answer for most questions, but synchronous time remains load-bearing for relationships. An SME who has never met the proposal manager in person (or on video) responds more slowly to async asks than an SME who has. The async pattern works, but it works better on top of a relationship that was built in real time.
The practical implication: a new proposal manager joining a team should not move SME interaction to async on day one. They should do 4–6 weeks of synchronous relationship-building first. Then async starts closing tickets at the rate I described in Part 2. Pure-async from day one of a new proposal manager has a visibly slower ramp, and I didn’t acknowledge that in the original piece.
The 48% number
The Qorus research that motivated the series said 48% of proposal teams named SME collaboration as their top challenge, steady for five consecutive years. The 2025 update extended that to six years, still at 48%. I don’t have the 2026 number yet — Qorus publishes in Q2 typically. I’d be cautiously surprised if it had moved materially.
This is the honest thing to say: the teams I work with who implemented the four practices in the series saw their own SME friction drop. The industry-wide number hasn’t. The reason is that most teams don’t implement the practices — they read about them, nod, and continue the previous pattern. The 48% is a ceiling on what awareness alone produces. Implementation is a separate, harder thing.
The takeaway
The advice from six months ago mostly holds. The ticketed-ask and SME-friendly-KB patterns are the two I’d double down on. The capture-call template needs a rewrite to match how work actually happens in 2026. And async works best as an overlay on an established relationship, not as a replacement for one.