Bidding pod

The term is agency and vendor vocabulary; Upwork has no page for it. On Upwork the pod's work runs through the agency proposal rules: business managers can submit, edit or withdraw proposals on behalf of any agency member, members can submit their own, and all proposals use the agency's shared Connects. An active Agency Plus membership is required to submit most proposals.

The seats. Pods are usually described with three jobs, whatever the headcount:

• Finding. Watching the feed, choosing which jobs deserve a proposal and which member fits. This is where most of the Connects are saved.
• Writing and sending. The Upwork bidder drafts the letter, answers the screening questions and submits. On an hourly job the proposal has to come from the agency account profile, or Upwork assigns the contract to the sender.
• Reviewing. A second person reads letters before or after they go out, which is the cheapest defence against generic letters and wrong rates.

Why agencies organise this way. A pod puts one team behind one number. Upwork reports no reply rate per sender, and the shared Connects pool cannot be split by member, so a pod that is not measured separately is invisible in Upwork's own reports. The numbers that matter are proposals sent, reply rate, Connects per reply and the time from posting to proposal.

Access. Every seat in a pod should hold its own login with an agency role, not a shared member password, and the pod's tools fall under the same automation rules as any other bidding tool.