Trello

What is Trello?

Trello is a visual collaboration tool built on boards, lists and cards. Small teams use it for almost anything, and many sales and bid teams run their opportunities or their tender pipeline on a board: one card per bid, moved from list to list as it progresses, with the requirements pack attached and a checklist of what still needs doing.

A Trello board is good at showing where each bid stands. It does not write the response. The card holds the brief, the deadline and the comments where the team argued about whether to bid. The response itself gets written in another tool, and none of that context comes with it.

Turn the card on the board into the response the bid needs

Cobl reads the boards, lists and cards you connect, with their descriptions, checklists, comments and attachments. That context sits in a deal workspace next to the bid evaluation, the go/no-go, the questionnaire response and the proposal, so the documents start from the card rather than from a blank page.

Attachments matter most. The requirements pack attached to the card is read as source material, which is where bid management starts: reading what the buyer asked for before deciding anything.

What Trello and Cobl look like on a live deal

A small engineering firm tracks every tender on a Trello board. A new card lands in the Qualifying list, with the tender documents attached and a comment from the director asking whether the firm has the capacity. The bid lead opens a deal workspace in Cobl from the card. The bid evaluation reads the attached documents and sets the requirements against what the firm can prove, and the go/no-go follows the same afternoon.

The card moves to Writing. The questionnaire response and the technical memo are built in the workspace, drawing on past submissions in the Shared Drive. The board keeps doing what it does well, showing status, while the work behind each status now exists. Nothing is submitted without review.

Key features of the Cobl Trello integration

Cards, checklists and comments as context

Cobl reads the cards you connect, including descriptions, checklists and comments. The discussion the team had on the card informs the response. Checklists show what the team already decided is required for this bid, and comments show the concerns raised along the way, such as capacity or pricing risk. Both inform the evaluation instead of being lost when the card moves on.

Attachments read as source material

Requirements packs and briefs attached to a card are read as input, so the bid evaluation and the response start from the buyer's own documents. A tender pack is often several files: the main document, an annex, a pricing schedule. Each attached file is read, so a requirement buried in an annex still reaches the evaluation and the response.

Every document for the bid in one workspace

Bid evaluation, go/no-go, questionnaire response, technical memo and proposal sit on the same deal, instead of being scattered across attachments on a card. The card on the board and the workspace behind it describe the same bid. When the card moves to Submitted, the documents it refers to already exist, share one context and are exported as editable Word and PowerPoint.

Works with your chat, files and docs

Trello context combines with discussion in Slack, past submissions in Google Drive and documentation in Confluence. The board stays the view of status for the whole team and the workspace holds the writing, so nobody has to choose between the two tools or copy context from one into the other.

Frequently asked questions

Does Cobl integrate with Trello?

Yes. Cobl connects to Trello so boards, cards and their attachments can drive the documents a bid needs, from the evaluation to the proposal.

What Trello data does Cobl access?

The boards, lists and cards you connect, with their descriptions, checklists, comments and attachments, read through the access the connected account holds.

We track our pipeline on a Trello board. Does that work?

Yes. If each card is a deal or a bid, Cobl treats it as one and runs the workspace from there.

Can Cobl read a tender pack attached to a card?

Yes. Attached documents are used as source material for the bid evaluation and the response.

Can I edit before anything is sent?

Yes. Cobl produces drafts. Precise changes go through the inline editor and approval stays with your team. More on data handling sits on the security page.