How a Sales VA Handles Proposal Preparation
It is 9:40 on a Thursday night and the founder of a fourteen-person B2B services firm has three things open on her laptop.
The first is a document called Proposal_Meridian_v4_FINAL_USE_THIS.docx. It is the proposal for the largest opportunity in her pipeline this quarter. She promised it on Tuesday. It is now Thursday. Pages one through six are done, because pages one through six are the same in every proposal she has ever sent. Page seven is the part that matters — the bit where she has to explain how the implementation actually works for a business with four regional offices and a legacy system nobody wants to talk about — and page seven has been blank for two days.
The second is an email thread with her technical lead. She asked him on Monday for two paragraphs on integration. He replied on Wednesday with nine bullet points, six of them internal jargon, and a note saying “shout if you need more.” She needs more. She has not had time to ask.
The third is a spreadsheet where she tracks proposals sent. Nineteen rows for the year to date. Four marked “won.” Six marked “lost.” Nine marked with nothing at all, because she never found out what happened and at some point stopped asking.
Here is the part that should alarm anyone running a sales operation in 2026: none of this is a discipline problem. She is one person doing a job that, at every organisation large enough to have measured it properly, requires nine.
The Proposal Is Where the Pipeline Goes to Die
Everything upstream of the proposal gets attention. There are books about prospecting. There are entire software categories for lead generation, sequencing, and call recording. Sales leaders can recite their meeting-booked rate from memory.
Then a buyer says “send me a proposal,” and the process falls off a cliff into a document nobody owns.
The numbers are worse than most teams assume. Opportunities that reach the proposal stage carry a 47% win rate according to RAIN Group research, and the average proposal takes roughly 25 hours to assemble — three full working days poured into a document that fails more often than it succeeds. Loopio’s seventh annual benchmarking study, which analyses data from more than 1,500 teams worldwide, puts the figure higher still for formal responses: teams now spend 33 hours per RFP, down from 35 the year before, with SMBs averaging 27 hours, mid-market 33, and enterprise teams 39.
Multiply that out. Organisations now respond to an average of 166 formal requests per year, up from 153 — 79 for SMBs, 164 for mid-market, 260 for enterprise. At 27 hours each, a small business responding to 79 requests is spending over 2,100 hours a year on proposal production. That is more than a full-time role, distributed across people who all have another full-time role.
And a meaningful share of that effort produces nothing at all. Industry benchmarking suggests roughly 20% of RFPs go unfinished each year, representing an estimated $725,000 in lost revenue per organisation annually. Not lost on price. Not lost on product. Lost because nobody finished the document.
Twenty-five hours per proposal. Forty-seven percent win rate. Roughly one in five never submitted at all. The single most expensive document in the sales process is also the one most likely to be produced by whoever happens to have a free evening.
The pattern here is the one that shows up everywhere in sales operations once you look for it. Proposal work is continuous — it arrives unpredictably, it never finishes, and it has no natural owner. Closing is episodic — it has a meeting, a date, and a person on the other end. When continuous work competes with episodic work inside the same person’s calendar, the continuous work loses every single time. That is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic.
What Proposal Preparation Actually Involves
Ask most founders what goes into a proposal and they will say “writing it up.” That is roughly a tenth of the work. Here is what the job actually contains, in the order it happens.
Requirement extraction. Reading the RFP, the call transcript, or the email thread, and pulling out every explicit requirement and every implicit one. For formal tenders, building a compliance matrix so nothing gets missed. For commercial proposals, working out what the buyer actually asked for versus what they said.
Qualification and go/no-go. Deciding whether to bid at all. Seventy-five percent of teams use a go/no-go process, an eight-point drop from the previous year — a decline that suggests teams are bypassing formal evaluation to keep pace with mounting submission pressure, favouring quantity over strategic alignment. Meanwhile 81% of top performers — the teams winning more than half their bids — use a go/no-go process. The correlation is not subtle.
Content assembly. Pulling the right case study, team bios, security answers, pricing structure. Eighty percent of top performers maintain a content library for proposal reuse. Most small teams have a folder called “old proposals” and a memory of which one was good.
Subject-matter extraction. The hardest and least visible part. Getting the technical answer out of the person who has it, in a form a buyer can read. Every RFP involves an average of nine contributors to complete, and turning nine people’s fragments into one voice is a project management job wearing a writing job’s clothes.
Drafting and tailoring. Turning generic content into something that reflects this buyer’s stated problem, in their language, with their constraints named back to them.
Pricing construction. Tiers, options, inclusions, exclusions, and sign-off on discounts where required.
Design and production. Making it look like a company that can be trusted with money produced it — charts, screenshots, formatting that survives being forwarded as a PDF.
Review coordination. Getting the right eyes on it before it goes, on a deadline, without the review becoming a rewrite.
Post-send management. Tracking opens, chasing responses, logging outcomes, running the follow-up cadence, and feeding results back into the library so the next one is better.
Look at that list and note how much of it is not writing. Most of it is coordination, extraction, verification, and follow-through — exactly the work that evaporates when the only person available to do it is also the person who has to be on calls all day.
The Speed Problem Discipline Cannot Solve
Proposal speed is measurable, and the measurements are unforgiving.
Proposify’s 2026 analysis of 742,137 proposals across 30 industries, representing $3.06 billion in sales value, tracked the full journey. Average time to create a proposal: 17 minutes. Average time from send to the prospect opening it: 34 minutes, twice as fast as the previous year. Average time from opening to closed-won: 2.5 days.
Read that again. Seventeen minutes to build, thirty-four minutes to get opened, two and a half days to close. The bottleneck in your proposal process is not the buyer. It is the gap between the discovery call and the send button — the gap our founder is sitting in at 9:40 on a Thursday.
The cost of that gap is quantified. Industry analysis of proposal outcomes finds that sending a proposal within 24 hours of a conversation increases the chances of winning by up to 25%, and deals where prospects get answers to questions within four hours have a 35% higher close rate than those where the response takes more than a day. And the long tail is brutal: deals that drag past 50 days carry win rates of 20% or less, against 47% inside that window.
There is a second-order effect most teams miss. Sixteen percent of proposals are won within ten minutes of opening. Those buyers had already decided; the document was a formality. Which means every day a proposal sits half-finished is a day spent letting a decided buyer un-decide.
You cannot fix this by trying harder. A founder who is on calls from nine to five cannot also produce a tailored, reviewed, designed document inside 24 hours of every one of those calls. The only variable available is who does the work.
Why Good Salespeople Still Send Bad Proposals
For the first time in five years, Loopio’s benchmarking found that bandwidth has overtaken subject-matter-expert collaboration as the number one challenge for response teams — a 20-point surge reflecting teams significantly increasing their submission volumes without a corresponding increase in headcount.
That is the whole story in one sentence. Volume up, headcount flat.
The human cost is documented and grim. Surveys of members of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals found that 72% reported emotional exhaustion, 82% felt overworked, and 19% admitted to working nights and weekends. Research by Mairi Morrison, a senior proposal manager at Strategic Proposals in the UK, compared 200 APMP UK members against the 2020 UK Workplace Stress Survey and found that while 59% of the general workforce reported stress or mental health issues, the figure in the proposal industry was 88%.
And it degrades output in ways that show up on the scorecard. As one 2026 analysis of proposal team leadership put it, writers wait days for critical technical input, then are expected to turn it into high-scoring content overnight when the information finally arrives. Every organisation that has ever run a bid knows this rhythm: nothing, nothing, nothing, panic, submit, silence.
Here is the diagnostic question worth sitting with. Only 13% of teams attribute their losses to proposal quality — teams are broadly confident in what they submit. Yet advancement to shortlist fell from 54% to 46% in a single year. Either the confidence is misplaced, or the losses are happening somewhere other than the document itself: in the ones that went out late, went out generic, or never went out at all.
Bandwidth is now the single biggest constraint on proposal performance — a twenty-point jump in one year. It is not a knowledge gap. It is not a template gap. It is a headcount gap, and it has been misdiagnosed as a discipline problem for a decade.
The Document Itself Is a Set of Measurable Choices
Once someone has the time to do the job properly, the job stops being guesswork. The Proposify dataset turns proposal construction into a set of decisions with known effect sizes.
Length. Winning proposals average 11 pages; losing proposals average 13. Broader analysis is starker: five-page proposals close roughly 50% of the time, while 30-page proposals drop to about 35%. The instinct to prove effort through volume is actively counterproductive. One seller on r/sales described nearly sending a 138-page PDF before catching himself and booking a live review instead; another practitioner’s summary of the thread was blunt — “Stop writing long proposals, no one reads them.”
Structure. Winning proposals contain seven sections on average, typically running cover page, executive summary, approach, deliverables, team, pricing, and terms or next steps.
The pricing-page myth. The common excuse for a thin proposal is that buyers only read the price. The data disagrees: buyers view 93% of the proposals they go on to sign, and 80% of the ones they ultimately reject. Every page is either building the case or quietly damaging it.
Visuals. Eighty-three percent of winning proposals include images, averaging twelve. Only 20% of proposals include video, yet when a buyer watches one, the proposal is 3.3 times more likely to close.
Commercial presentation. Companies using interactive pricing win twice as many proposals and are 21% more likely to close, and proposals including a client input form close at 41%. Separately, offering multiple packages rather than a single option lifts win likelihood by 36%.
Friction removal. Proposals with e-signatures have a 15% higher close rate and close 60% faster. And the finding that should be printed and pinned above every sales desk: signing the proposal yourself before sending it increases the close rate by 65% and closes 25% faster.
None of this is exotic. All of it is the kind of thing that gets skipped when the document is being finished at midnight by someone who just wants it gone.
After You Hit Send Is Half the Job
The proposal is not the close. It is the opening of a decision process that happens in rooms you are not in — and the signals coming back are readable.
Buyers view a winning proposal 12 times on average, against 8 for a losing one, and spend 25.3 minutes with it versus 15.8 minutes — roughly 60% more time on the proposals that close. When more than one stakeholder views a proposal, the close rate jumps by 20%.
Revisions, which most sellers dread, are the strongest positive signal in the dataset. One round lifts the close rate 18%; two rounds, 28%; three rounds, 45%. Even discounting, conventionally treated as value left on the table, correlates the other way: proposals with discounts carry 75% higher average value, jumping from around $20,000 to $35,000. Buyers who argue about price are buyers who are buying.
Then there is follow-up, where most of the money is lost. Forty-eight percent of reps never make it past the second follow-up, even though 75% of buyers expect two to four touches before deciding, and average time to acceptance is 7.7 days. The cadence that works is specific: same-day send; a targeted question at day three referencing a particular page rather than “just checking in”; a new angle or a new stakeholder at day seven; a direct timing question at day fourteen. And when tracking shows a reopen, the consensus among practitioners is to call immediately, every time.
This is not complicated work. It is relentless work, and it is precisely the work that a closer with six live deals will not do consistently, because it is continuous and everything else on their calendar has a meeting attached.
The Human in the Loop
Which brings us to the obvious objection: surely this is exactly what AI is for.
Partly, yes. Generative AI has become standard equipment in proposal work. Adoption jumped from 68% to 79% in a year, with 84% of those teams using it at least weekly, and 62% now use AI to generate specific answers, a 16-point surge. Anyone refusing to use these tools is choosing to be slower for no reason.
But notice what did not happen. Adoption surged, and bandwidth still became the number one challenge. Advancement rates still fell eight points. If drafting speed were the binding constraint, those numbers would have moved the other way.
The reason is what the practitioners themselves fear. Lohfeld Consulting polled 275 bid and proposal professionals on their biggest concern about AI in proposal writing. Forty-two percent named hallucination, 33% named “AI Speak,” 17% named security, and 8% named bias.
Hallucination in a proposal is not an embarrassment, it is a disqualification. A fabricated certification, an invented past-performance claim, or a security answer that maps your controls to the wrong framework does not lose you style points — it loses you the bid and, in regulated procurement, exposes you legally. Tribunals have started noticing: in a single September decision, the US Government Accountability Office dismissed four protest filings by one firm that had lodged fifteen pro se bid protests in eight months, including several after being sanctioned. Commentators noted that prior to 2025, no public decision had discussed generative-AI misuse in federal procurement at all.
“AI Speak” is the subtler killer. Lohfeld coined the term for language that sounds technical and intelligent while communicating nothing concrete or differentiated — what they describe as “professional-sounding drivel” that obscures strengths and reduces proposal scores. Every evaluator has read the sentence about leveraging cutting-edge methodologies to drive innovation. None of them has ever scored it well.
And then there is the buyer on the other end, who has changed. TrustRadius’s 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, based on responses from 1,862 technology buyers and 444 vendors surveyed globally in January 2026, found that 63% of buyers used AI during their purchase journey, but 94% of those buyers fact-check its responses at least some of the time. Trust in vendor-controlled material is falling fast: the share of buyers who trust online resources less than the year before rose from 39% to 47%, analyst reports are now used by only 13% of buyers — a 63% decrease since 2022 — and vendor marketing collateral ranked last among the resources buyers actually consult. Fifty-three percent spoke to a peer during the process, and every one of them found it at least somewhat helpful.
So the buyer receiving your proposal is running everything in it through a verification process. Which makes accuracy a competitive weapon and fluency worth almost nothing on its own.
Seventy-nine percent of proposal teams now use generative AI. Ninety-four percent of buyers fact-check what AI produces. The two figures are on a collision course, and the only thing standing between them is a person who checks.
The honest position is this: AI is excellent at volume and poor at judgement, and proposal preparation is judgement applied to volume. A model can draft seven sections in ninety seconds. It cannot know that the buyer’s operations director asked a pointed question about handover in the second call and that answering it directly on page four is worth more than the entire company-history section. It cannot decide that this particular tender is not worth bidding. It cannot tell that your technical lead’s nine-bullet reply contains one sentence that, expanded, is the whole win theme.
A trained person operating good software beats the software alone, and it beats the untrained person alone. That is the entire argument, and it happens to be the model VAConnect was built on.
The South African Advantage
If the answer to proposal chaos is a dedicated person, the next question is where that person sits. For businesses in the UK, Europe, and the US East Coast, South Africa has a specific and measurable case — and it is strongest precisely for work like this.
The clock, and why it decides proposal work
South Africa runs on GMT+2 with no daylight saving adjustment, putting it one to two hours ahead of the UK and inside the full European working day. Nine in the morning in London is eleven in Cape Town. There is a six-to-eight hour live overlap every working day, and a solid three-to-five hour window against US East Coast mornings.
For proposal work this is not a convenience, it is the whole mechanism. Proposals are iterative: draft, question, answer, revise, review, send. Each cycle needs a live human at both ends. The Philippines sits at GMT+8, seven to eight hours ahead of the UK, which means every question-and-answer round trip costs a calendar day. On a proposal with a 48-hour window and four rounds of clarification, that difference is the difference between submitting and not.
There is a second-order benefit that matters given everything above. A discovery call that ends at four in the afternoon in London ends at six in Cape Town. The extraction, the outline, and the first draft can happen that evening and be waiting at 8:30 the next morning — inside the 24-hour window that lifts win probability by up to 25%, without anyone working a night shift.
English, register, and the cost of a wrong word
Proposals are read by people looking for reasons to disqualify. Register errors give them one.
South Africa scores 602 on the EF English Proficiency Index, well above the global average of 488 and above both the Philippines at 578 and India at 563 — 13th globally, first in Africa, in the “Very High” band, and one of the few non-European countries in that band.
The score matters less than what sits behind it. British and European professional writing runs on understatement, qualification, and restraint. An executive summary that oversells reads as amateurish to a UK procurement panel and as normal to a US one. Knowing which is which is not a skill you can train in a week, and it is the difference between a proposal that reads as though it came from inside the market and one that reads as though it came from outside it. South African professionals grow up inside British and American business, media, and sporting norms, which is why accent neutrality and language fit are consistently cited as South Africa’s competitive advantages over the Philippines and India for buyers in these markets.
Measured quality, and the attrition argument
Independent sector data puts South African delivery 18% higher on customer satisfaction than comparable Indian and Philippine operations, per BPESA and Invest SA’s investor handbook, with South Africa tying second with the Philippines as Most Favoured Offshore CX Delivery Location while outperforming all peers on customer satisfaction by 18%.
But the number that actually decides proposal work is attrition. South African contact centres report annual attrition of 10–18%, against 30–40% in the Philippines and 30–35% in India.
South African attrition runs 10–18% a year. The Philippines runs 30–40%. For a role whose entire value is remembering what worked last time, that gap is not a cost line. It is the product.
Here is why that is the decisive metric for this specific job. A proposal specialist’s value is almost entirely accumulated context — which three case studies land with which buyer type, which security answer got pushed back on last quarter, which competitor keeps appearing on shortlists, which internal SME actually replies and which one needs chasing twice, which pricing structure your best-fit clients say yes to. None of that lives in a CRM field. It lives in a person. At 35% attrition you rebuild that knowledge roughly every three years, in pieces, badly. At 15% you compound it.
Cost versus quality, stated honestly
BPESA’s March 2025 sector reporting puts South African cost savings at 55–65% versus UK, US, and Australian in-house hiring. Set that against what the alternative costs. A dedicated proposal writer in the US runs an average of $78,385 a year on Indeed’s data from 335 job postings, with ZipRecruiter putting the average at $81,248 and the 75th percentile at $90,500 — before employer taxes, benefits, software, recruitment fees, and the three-month ramp. In the UK, add employer National Insurance, auto-enrolment pension, holiday cover, and a recruiter placement fee typically running 15–20% of first-year salary.
VAConnect’s managed placements start from $1,088 per month.
Now the honest counter-argument, because a comparison that only runs one way is not a comparison. South Africa runs 10–20% more expensive than the Philippines for equivalent roles. That premium is real. What it buys is timezone fit, register fit, and roughly half the attrition — which, for a role whose entire output is documents that a sceptical buyer will fact-check, is not a luxury purchase.
The cheapest possible person, unsupervised, sourced from a marketplace, is not a saving. It is an uninsured bet on the most expensive document in your sales process.
Managed, Not Matched: What Actually Sits Around the Person
There is a reason this article keeps returning to structure rather than talent. Good proposal people exist everywhere, including on freelance marketplaces. What does not exist there is anything holding the arrangement together when it strains.
VAConnect started in 2008 as Lime Tree Consulting Solutions, founded by Karen van Zyl before “virtual assistant” was a term most South African businesses recognised. In 2014 it became VAConnect, built around the managed model — not a marketplace, not a freelancer pool, but a fully managed service where every VA is recruited, trained, monitored, and supported so the client never has to manage the manager. It is now Africa’s largest managed VA agency, with 98% client retention and a team of 40+ behind the placements.
That retention figure rests on four proprietary platforms. VAJobs.co.za handles sourcing, with skills testing, background checks, and cultural-fit assessment built into the pipeline before any candidate reaches a client shortlist. VAVarsity trains and upskills assistants before they ever touch a client’s systems. Atomic Energy monitors wellbeing and workload — the anti-burnout infrastructure, which given the 72% emotional-exhaustion figure in proposal work is not decorative. VAPIness runs two-way structured feedback, so issues surface early and the working relationship strengthens over time rather than eroding.
For proposal work specifically, a Sales VA covers the coordination and production layer: requirement extraction and compliance matrices, content library construction and maintenance, drafting and tailoring, chasing SME input on a schedule, formatting and production, review coordination, tracking after send, running the follow-up cadence, and logging outcomes so the library actually improves. The published SVA scope runs across lead qualification, CRM hygiene, pipeline management, and outbound, with proposal preparation sitting inside it alongside appointment setting and follow-up sequences.
What it does not cover is worth stating plainly. A VA does not set your pricing strategy, does not make the go/no-go call on a major bid, does not sign anything, and does not replace your technical authority on what you can actually deliver. Delegating the work is not delegating the accountability. What a VA does is make sure the work that surrounds those decisions actually gets done, on time, every time — which is the part that currently is not happening.
The client evidence is specific. Mark Ferreira, VP of Sales at NovaSpark Technologies, on a placement running past fourteen months: “My team closed 30% more deals in Q1 because they were spending time selling, not admin.” Lisa Thornton, founder of Apex Growth Partners, reports output per rep doubling after her SVA absorbed prospecting lists, follow-ups, and meeting prep, with the placement still active after twenty months. And if a match does not work, the replacement is free — “no fees, no friction” — with most matches filling in two to three weeks.
The First Ninety Days
Delegation fails when it is treated as a handover rather than a build. Here is what a realistic ramp looks like on proposal work.
Days 1–30: capture. The VA sits behind you rather than in front of the client. They read every proposal you sent in the last twelve months, won and lost, and build the content library that does not currently exist — case studies tagged by industry and problem, standard security answers, team bios, pricing structures, boilerplate that is actually good. They document your review process, which probably means writing it down for the first time.
Days 31–60: stabilise. The VA takes first-draft responsibility. You still write the sections that need your judgement; they assemble everything else, chase the SME input, produce the document, and run the review schedule. Turnaround compresses noticeably here — the 24-hour target becomes achievable on straightforward proposals. Tracking goes in: opens, views, stakeholder count, outcomes.
Days 61–90: build. The VA owns the process end to end; you own the strategic content and the decisions. Follow-up cadences run without prompting. Outcomes are logged, losses included, with reasons. The library improves with every submission rather than staying frozen.
The day-ninety test is a single question, and it is diagnostic: can you state your current proposal-to-close rate and your median time from discovery call to send, from memory, without opening anything? If you can, the system is working. If you cannot — and most people reading this cannot right now — then you do not have a proposal process. You have nineteen rows in a spreadsheet and nine of them blank.
The Gap Is Wider Than It Looks
What is striking about the 2026 data is not any individual figure. It is how far apart two businesses of identical size and identical product can now sit on the same opportunity.
One sends within 24 hours, at eleven pages, with images, a tiered interactive price, an e-signature block already signed, addressed to three stakeholders rather than one. It follows up on day three with a question about page four, on day seven with a case study, and calls the moment the document is reopened. Its content library improved last month because someone logged why the last one lost.
The other sends on Thursday what it promised on Tuesday, at thirteen pages, to one contact, and then waits.
The measured gap between those behaviours — 25% on send speed, 20% on multi-threading, 65% on pre-signing, 3.3x on video engagement, 36% on tiered pricing — is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a business that grows and one that cannot work out why its perfectly good product keeps losing to a competitor it has never rated.
The second business almost never loses because its people are worse. It loses because nobody has the hours. That is a staffing problem, it has a staffing solution, and the solution costs a fraction of what the lost deals do.
DIY vs Generic Freelancer or AI Tool vs VAConnect Managed Sales VA
| Dimension | DIY (founder or closer) | Generic freelancer or AI proposal tool | VAConnect managed Sales VA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time from call to send | 3–7 days, whenever an evening opens up | Fast on draft, slow on the parts needing your input | Same-day or next-morning, inside the 24-hour window |
| Who owns the process | Nobody; it falls to whoever is least busy | You still own coordination and review | The VA owns process; you own decisions |
| Content library | A folder called “old proposals” | Whatever you upload once and never update | Built in month one, maintained continuously |
| SME chasing | Two polite emails, then you write it yourself | Not in scope | Scheduled, tracked, escalated |
| Compliance matrix on tenders | Built ad hoc, if at all | Tool-generated, unverified | Built and checked line by line |
| Accuracy under buyer fact-checking | Good, when you have time | Hallucination risk on claims and credentials | Human-verified against source documents |
| Register and tone for UK/EU buyers | Yours | Variable; often US-default | Matched to market, no register drift |
| Design and production quality | Whatever the template does | Inconsistent across freelancers | Consistent, branded, image-led |
| Post-send tracking | Rarely; ad hoc at best | Not in scope | Opens, views, stakeholders, reopens logged |
| Follow-up cadence | Stops after touch two, like 48% of reps | Not in scope | Day 1/3/7/14 run without prompting |
| Loss reasons captured | Almost never | No | Logged and fed back into the library |
| Timezone overlap (UK/EU) | n/a | Often 7–8 hours offset | GMT+2, 6–8 hours live overlap daily |
| Continuity of context | High, but capped by your hours | Freelancer churn; tool has no memory of nuance | 98% retention; 10–18% market attrition |
| Cover when unavailable | None | None | Backup cover included |
| Training | None | You do it, repeatedly | VAVarsity before touching your systems |
| Cost | Opportunity cost of your selling hours | $30–60/hr freelance, or a tool plus your time | From $1,088/month, fully managed |
| If it is not working | You absorb it | You start the search again | Free replacement, managed transition |
Proposal preparation is not a writing problem. It is a capacity problem that has been misfiled as a writing problem for as long as anyone has been selling. The businesses pulling ahead in 2026 worked that out and hired for it.
Ready to stop finishing proposals at midnight? Explore VAConnect’s Sales VA service or book a 30-minute discovery call. Most matches are filled within two to three weeks.