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3 ways RFPIO-HubSpot integration streamlines proposal management and closes more deals

3 ways RFPIO-HubSpot integration streamlines proposal management and closes more deals

Integrations

Selling a product takes work. Sales agents spend their days calling leads, responding to inbound queries, tracking progress, meeting quotas, […]

Category: Integrations

3 ways RFPIO-HubSpot integration streamlines proposal management and closes more deals

3 ways RFPIO-HubSpot integration streamlines proposal management and closes more deals

Integrations

Selling a product takes work. Sales agents spend their days calling leads, responding to inbound queries, tracking progress, meeting quotas, and juggling a lot of paperwork in partnership with revenue and finance teams — but that’s where RFPIO and HubSpot come in to make life a lot easier.

Sales platform technology has improved so much that the tedious, manual parts of the sales process — like proposal management, document generation, and content sourcing — can now be handled by great AI, like the proprietary technology that powers RFPIO.

RFPIO is an AI-enabled software that makes it easier for sales teams to create their best content, respond to opportunities, and deliver on expectations.

And HubSpot is a powerful CRM that enables sales, marketing, and customer care teams to find, track, and nurture prospects, engage existing customers, and deliver the right message at the right time.

Companies of all sizes can benefit from combining RFPIO and HubSpot. Sales, presales, proposal, marketing, analyst relations, customer support, IT, and legal teams can collaborate better and save time on proposal workflows by cutting out the tedious, manual tasks from the process.

Customer revenue teams and sales teams already spend their days in their CRMs, so it’s easy to keep momentum and reduce screen-switching by extending proposal operation right into the platform where they’re already working.

Benefits of integrating RFPIO with HubSpot

With the RFPIO and HubSpot integration, teams can submit project requests, track progress, and access proposal content without ever leaving HubSpot. Sales and proposal teams do their best work when they’re truly collaborating, and connecting HubSpot with RFPIO is the best way to save time and win more business.

3 ways to use RFPIO with HubSpot to automate and streamline proposal management

1. Launch and track RFPIO projects directly from any HubSpot Deal page, leveraging existing content from account and opportunity objects

Sales teams across industries can use this integration to streamline the project creation process for anything like RFPs, RFIs, and Security Questionnaires. With RFPIO and HubSpot, sales teams on HubSpot get direct visibility into project completion status, without needing to log into the RFPIO platform. The integration can also be configured to send automated notifications and task assignments to project owners and SMEs, jumpstarting collaboration between revenue and proposal teams.

You can also drill down and track project status from any HubSpot Deal page at the project, section, or owner level, with built-in executive dashboards and summaries providing the insights your team needs.

Example: A salesperson has gotten their excited prospect over to the contracts phase of closing their deal. Because of a high volume of deals closed thanks to a major promotion, the revenue team is a little under water and needs more time to finalize the contracts. But with the HubSpot-RFPIO integration, the salesperson can follow the progress of the paperwork within HubSpot and provide updates to the prospect without needing to further bog down the revenue team with requests for status updates.

2. Customer-facing teams can automate much of the response process when answering requests and questions

Teams can program and automate the right answers to prospect or customer questions in real time, and when creating proactive proposals. This leaves sales teams with more time on their hands to handle queries and proposals that are more complex.

RFPIO’s patented import technology works for all types of proposal request document types. RFPIO also exports polished and personalized responses onto templates or original files. And the dynamic Content Library serves as a content repository and collaboration hub that’s enhanced by an AI-powered answer recommendation engine.

This automation results in significant process efficiencies, which in turn allow all customer-facing teams, especially those who triage incoming asks, to focus on personalizing responses that optimize the sales, onboarding, and customer support experiences.

Example: A sales manager notices that his team is getting the same handful of technical questions over and over again about their product via email and on the website’s chatbot. He goes into the RFPIO Content Library and fills in the answers that need to be fired off to these customers, and thus reduces the volume of questions routed to live sales agents by 10%—so they can better spend that time on the phone and closing deals.

3. Sales managers can keep teams aligned and projects on track

Managers can receive automated notifications and send task assignments to project owners and SMEs—and project requesters and creators can track the progress of current projects from the same place they submitted them within HubSpot.

This means proposal and customer-facing teams are better aligned, and can enjoy a significant reduction in status updates via email, Slack, or phone that just waste time. They can check project status on the related HubSpot Deal, communicate whether a project is “Approved” or “Declined” through HubSpot, and access completed response packets in HubSpot that have been delivered by RFPIO.

Example: A proposal team is anxiously waiting to hear back from their partnering sales team about several large accounts waiting to be signed and closed. Instead of sending a Slack to the busy sales manager, they can log into HubSpot themselves and see the status of the RFPIO project items in the contact page.

Knock out inefficiencies and give sales teams the time to win more than ever with RFPIO and HubSpot

Your sales, proposals, and revenue teams need to collaborate to close as many deals as they can, as quickly as possible. Using the RFPIO integration with HubSpot, this collaboration is easier than ever and happens within the software where these teams already spend their days.

 

 

Where’s the answer? Ask Slack!

Where’s the answer? Ask Slack!

Integrations

“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If I were writing the poem, The Rime of the 21st Century Proposal Manager, it might include the lines:

Data, data everywhere, Not a clue to find
As silos rise, I lose my mind.
I chase my tail. I chase your tail.
My efforts always seem to fail.
Chaos abounds.
My head spins round.
Where, oh where, does my answer lie?
In the depths of our silos, it seems to hide.

I’m no poet, wouldn’t you know it?

But I am a Senior Proposal Manager at Illuminate Education, Inc., and I am charged with taming our data sprawl problems using RFPIO. I started by creating a data map. By assigning collections, tags, and subtags, I can migrate from data everywhere, including…

  • Google Drive
  • Confluence
  • Drop Box
  • HubSpot
  • Website
  • Client Library
  • Resource Center
  • Individual PCs

…to a consolidated Content Library in RFPIO. At that point, a new $64K question pops up: Can I make it accessible to everyone in the company? I could add as many RFPIO users as I wanted at no extra cost. But introducing another new software platform to the team is a challenge. Not because I doubt the value; but because some people resist change—even if it helps. It’s a lot easier to call me than to learn a new process!

Enter RFPIO® LookUp, which makes the RFPIO Content Library accessible from Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, and, most importantly for Illuminate, Slack. The LookUp for Slack is the wrecking ball I need to break down all of the data silos used across my organization.

All teams use Slack. We talk, ask questions, and collaborate with Slack. Now we can extend this engagement to include RFPIO proposal projects. Log into Slack, ask a question, and BOOM! There’s the answer. Using @mentions or inserting a tag using #hashtags, users find their answers. They can even do it from their phone! All activity is captured by RFPIO for tracking usage and uncovering retraining opportunities.

Slack questions are easy to add to our knowledge base. We simply grab the conversation from Slack and create a new Q&A pair. Our workflow delivers the new content to moderation for edits and enhancements. Once moderation is done, the content is available in the library.

Slack evolves into an on-demand knowledge base. Through Slack Bot, we eliminate the “I need an answer and I need it now” dilemma. As a self-service tool, management teams, sales, SMEs, customer support, and all Illuminators can get answers or content quickly. Fast answers. Quick responses. Improved quality. What more can you want?

While RFPIO® LookUp for Slack is a huge help for all your users, your sales team will be doing happy dances! To just type in a question on their phone or laptop while sitting with a customer, and get a trusted answer—well, that is huge.

Sales is your biggest challenge. They’re busy, short on patience, rely on others, and hate change. Training this team is a challenge. LookUp for Slack simplifies integrating sales into the RFPIO proposal process and exposes them to an Content Library knowledge base.

If you’re looking for more information about how I am implementing RFPIO® LookUp at IlluminateEducation, check out my RISE UP session! If you like detailed anecdotes, data maps, and user adoption hacks, you’ll probably get a kick out of it. Although, admittedly, I may be biased.

Building a portal to your company knowledge base from Slack is just the beginning of what RFPIO® LookUp can do. LookUp is also compatible with Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and more! Learn more here.

How to use the Microsoft Teams integration to optimize RFPIO features

How to use the Microsoft Teams integration to optimize RFPIO features

Integrations

“Poise counts!” — Cosmo Kramer

Oh Kramer! How times have changed since the days of Seinfeld. But there is something to be said about “Poise counts,” especially for Proposal Managers from the minute that RFP hits their inbox to the second before it’s due. We all know that being organized helps us from getting our hair in a twist and in this blog I’ll talk about how the integration between Microsoft Teams and RFPIO puts you in even more control of your team and deliverables, so not only will your proposal “own the catwalk” but you’ll be seen as a poised, reliable, and trusted proposal professional.

Many years ago I learned a valuable lesson about how important poise is to proposal professionals. While working as an independent consultant, I made the mistake of using an image on my business card of an over-caffeinated and disheveled “proposal veteran” with glasses broken and taped together. My intent was to display my commitment to hard work…something along the lines of, “Put this workaholic to work for you!”

Proposal teams don’t want their responses created through a frantic, chaotic process, no matter how hard the leader of the process is working. Organizations that rely on proactive responses from sales or reactive responses to requests for proposals (RFPs) – for a revenue stream – recognize that their response has to be an accurate reflection of the organization as a whole.

At Microsoft—where hundreds of sellers have RFPs in flight all over the world—RFPIO puts knowledge and organization at our fingertips so that all of our users (including 100 proposal professionals) can feel empowered to represent our organization’s mission statement “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

We have adopted, capitalized, and evangelized the capabilities of RFPIO for about 7,500 RFPIO users and 25K+ re-usable assets. But it’s RFPIO’s integration with Microsoft Teams that has been a game-changer for knowledge sharing, user onboarding, and increasing efficiency.

Microsoft Teams for knowledge sharing

In our “Resuable IP Team Site,” one of the first RFPIO channels we set up was our chatbot. RFPIO users at Microsoft use a chatbot to search our knowledge base for relevant content. We’ve essentially turned Teams into an on-demand knowledge base. We can:
● Use @commands to keyword search RFPIO for Q&A pairs.
● Preview top search results in the Teams chat window, or easily view all matching Q&A pairs in RFPIO.
● Control which Teams users have access to specific RFPIO Content Library content.

In this Teams site we added a QuickStart guide that provides an overview of what’s in the knowledge base, how the chatbot finds answers, and instructions for finding secure content.

All users are added to this Teams site and many have taken advantage of the chatbot. Because we can easily monitor this space, we’ve welcomed many new users who have asked for support either for a little hand-holding for finding content or to request content, that we quick-turn curate for future use.

Microsoft Teams for user enablement

The chatbot Teams channel QuickStart guide is one of many RFPIO how-to guides and best practices we make available within Teams. Posting to both the public (all users) and private (proposal professionals only) channels we regularly post “Did You Knows?” to keep everyone updated and informed – whether it’s important new content that has been recently curated, or a new feature, tip or trick, our RFPIO governance team remains visible and engaged with all users across Microsoft.

Microsoft Teams for RFP efficiency

One of the most important Teams integrations that we have leveraged is that of pulling an RFPIO project into a Team site. We show new sellers how projects from RFPIO can be added to their opportunity in Teams and document all the RFPIO functions that can be performed in Teams without needing to switch between platforms. Having ONE “runway” definitely supports a cohesive response fabric.

Ultimately, the goal of using RFPIO is to give time back to sellers, subject matter experts (SMEs), Proposal Managers, and Content Managers.

With the Teams integration, we increase that time payoff because users can collaborate on RFPIO projects without the need to leave Teams! Through their RFPIO dashboard in Teams, users can monitor project status and:
● Control project visibility of 3rd-party/guest signers.
● See when and where others have viewed, edited, downloaded, or signed documents.
● Automatically store and retrieve previous versions of signed documents.

We can also execute essential RFPIO features in Teams such as analyzing project resources, assigning authors, and uploading documents.

Improve RFPIO collaboration with Microsoft Teams

We partnered with RFPIO to give everyone time back to focus on selling digital transformation. While it already helped break down silos, reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, and drive consistency and compliance, the Teams integration has allowed us to multiply those gains exponentially.

With a team of 100+ proposal professionals and user-base of 7,500 – it helps me maintain my poise, too.

The Microsoft Teams integration is part of the RFPIO® LookUp Subscription. Learn more about Lookup here, or schedule a demo to see the full platform in action—Microsoft Teams integration and all.

Create proactive proposals at scale with proposal automation software

Create proactive proposals at scale with proposal automation software

Integrations

Salesforce found that salespeople spend 66% of their time generating quotes, writing proposals, and chasing down approvals instead of closing deals. According to Blake’s edict (Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross), that doesn’t leave much time for coffee. If a Cadillac is within reach, then why would your sales team be spending most of its time going after steak knives?

There’s no questioning the importance of proactive proposals in the sales process. The configure, price, quote (CPQ) software category is expanding rapidly for good reason. Automation of proactive proposals, scopes of work (SOWs), quotes, service level agreements, (SLAs) and their ilk accelerates close rates and increases visibility in the process.

Traditionally, proactive proposals required extra time because salespeople wanted to personalize them for an optimal customer experience. The thinking is sound here. You feel like you have a good shot at a deal, you want to put your best foot forward. The problem is what you have to go through to execute.

Old way challenges

This manual process might involve working from a Word document or PowerPoint deck that includes multiple versions of paragraphs or slides. A salesperson would start building their proactive proposal by deleting the paragraphs or slides that don’t apply and augmenting those that do. The process quickly devolves into a time suck if your sales team has to navigate:

  • Multiple platforms or applications — Between the CRM, content management system, and Microsoft docs, too much time is lost switching between applications. And that’s not even including email or Slack or the support ticketing system that’s also likely in play. Switching between apps is a productivity killer, accounting for up to 40% of a worker’s time.
  • Decentralized content (marketing, technical, legal, etc.) — Even if all your sales-ready content is organized in a content management app or shared drive, your sales team still has to find it, make sure it’s the right version, and import it into the proactive proposal. There’s also always a question of whether or not the proposal includes all the content necessary to be effective. Who has visibility into quality control?
  • Non-branded formats — Many organizations at the very least create their Word doc or PowerPoint deck template according to brand guidelines. But even then, versions get saved to local drives for easier access. Margins are pushed to include more content. Fonts are changed to add “emphasis.” Multiple edits done with each proposal creation result in a Frankensteined template that doesn’t accurately reflect your company’s brand. Next thing you know every salesperson is sending out their own unique proposal, which can present severe disconnects during handoffs.
  • Complex solutions to multiple problems — The more complex your solution, the faster your proactive proposals will go off the rails if they’re not tightly controlled. How can you provide salespeople with the freedom to be creative while ensuring their proactive proposals consistently represent a deliverable solution time and again?

Any solution you implement to help your sales team with building proactive proposals must include:

  1. Customizability
  2. Automation
  3. Repeatability

There’s only so much time in the day. Sometimes your sales team is under the gun to create multiple proactive proposals or SOWs. While that’s a good problem to have, you still need to be prepared for when it happens. The last thing you want is to under-deliver, especially at the early stages of a customer relationship.

Introducing Salesforce Proposal Builder

Integrating Salesforce Proposal Builder with RFPIO hits on all three of the solution requirements—customizability, automation, and repeatability—and much more. Our customers are already realizing huge gains in sales team efficiency. For example, ECS, a cybersecurity firm, integrated Salesforce Proposal Builder with their RFPIO platform to help with SOW development. A process that used to take 45 minutes to two hours per document now only takes a few minutes of clicks and navigating dropdowns.

“Each customer has a different problem. Each requires a different solution. Through customizable capabilities that Proposal Builder offers, we realize how much of a positive impact it makes on us, and therefore, on our customers”

-Jeff Rozines, Channel Manager at ECS.

Top-level benefits beyond the huge time savings include:

  • Always working from approved content. RFPIO can act as your knowledge management platform so sales has access to the most up-to-date content available.
  • Spend more time in Salesforce. Avoid the need for complex training, and simplify onboarding of new sales reps. Generate self-service proposals without the need to visit other applications.
  • Take advantage of the great content and subject matter expertise curated in RFPIO for use in requests for proposal (RFPs) responses.

Set up the self-service user experience once and then update as necessary. Working in RFPIO, you’ll create the building blocks of your proactive proposals. This is where you create the user experience for sales, build templates, and connect content. From there, it’s just a matter of showing salespeople where they need to go in Salesforce to initiate their proactive proposal.

Initiate a proactive proposal project directly from Salesforce

The software walks them through the Proposal Builder step by step.

  • Work from response templates to standardize the look and feel of your proposals.
  • Compile section templates into a comprehensive proposal by automatically knitting together fundamental areas of information based on clicks through dropdowns.
  • Customize content such as testimonials, use cases, implementation timelines, and pricing by using catalogs.

After a few clicks, your salesperson has a final proactive proposal, in Microsoft Word format, ready to send to prospects or customers.

Of organizations planning to respond to more RFPs in 2021, 82% also aim to complete more proactive proposals82% of organizations planning to respond to more RFPs in 2021 also aim to complete more proactive proposals. The most efficient way to make that happen is with Salesforce Proposal Builder for RFPIO. Schedule a demo today!

Integrating Salesforce is a simple way to add tons of value to RFP software

Integrating Salesforce is a simple way to add tons of value to RFP software

Integrations

This is about as “meta” as it gets in RFP software sales: RFPIO client Salesforce is currently in the process of integrating Salesforce with its RFPIO response management solution. How can a CRM integrate with itself? As Cosmo Kramer once said, “I must be at the nexus of the universe!” 

More than 30% of RFPIO customers who use Salesforce have already integrated the solutions. The Salesforce integration is by far the most popular CRM integration at RFPIO — 20x more customers use it than our next most popular CRM. So why do customers love it so much? 

Visibility and efficiency to start, but there’s more to it than that. 

“Each response we complete builds upon the experience of previous responses (good and bad). Our account executives spend a significant amount of time in Salesforce and the integration is valuable to them once a project has been submitted. My first RFP response using RFPIO reduced prep time by almost 70%, so now we can focus more on customised content instead of boilerplate responses.” ~ PerfectMind (read the full case study here)

Why you need it: Integrating RFP software with your CRM makes everything easier

Integrating Salesforce and RFP software workflows gives proposal and sales teams bi-directional access to all response management functionality. In other words, whether they’re working in Salesforce or RFPIO, users can perform all response management functions—from launch to development to publishing—seamlessly, without any redundancy or confusion. Here’s one possible workflow of how it can work for you:

Step 1: Sales rep launches RFPs, RFIs, Security Questionnaires, or any other response project directly from Salesforce. Expedite project creation by launching with existing Salesforce data in a few button clicks.Sales teams can send intake requests to the proposal team right from their favorite CRM (Salesforce).

Step 2: Proposal manager receives automated trigger notification of new project launch, analyzes what’s needed at intake to determine if it qualifies as an active project, and either rejects it or begins proposal development in RFPIO.Track and monitor progress in real-time

Step 3: Sales rep and proposal manager can track and monitor project progress in real-time from either application.When a new project launches, proposal managers are automatically notified

Step 4: Response packets and related documents are automatically published back to Salesforce so sales rep can send them to the prospect or customer.Sales reps can automatically send response packets to their prospects after they're published back to Salesforce

Step 5: Fine-tune proposal operations for sales and proposal teams with in-depth analytics output through Salesforce Reports Builder.Sales and proposal teams can fine-tune operations with detailed ananlytics

“The Salesforce integration has helped us align sales and proposal teams. Now, sales has full visibility into project status. They can see how a current project is progressing, or check which future projects are in the queue, all from the RFPIO dashboard in Salesforce.”

-Lauren Joy, Proposal Team Manager at Hyland (full case study here)

How you get it

The Salesforce integration raises awareness of RFPIO with more people in your organization. It becomes recognized as more than just a tool for the proposal team. It becomes the platform for expanding opportunities with prospects and customers. For example, after an integration, you can use the Salesforce Proposal Builder to create personalized proactive selling documents based on the up-to-date, brand-approved RFPIO Content Library. 

CRM integration is usually a high priority for our customers. Especially one or two years into a subscription, after their proof of concept for response management has hit its goal. 

Compared to other applications available through the Salesforce AppExchange, integration with RFPIO is a light lift. It all starts with a demo. This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on the stakeholders you want in the “room” and what you want us to prepare for them.

After you decide to add the Salesforce integration, the process moves pretty quickly. The integration fully supports Salesforce Lightning as well as the classic Salesforce configuration. It works with either or both. A seasoned Salesforce admin can have it ready in 1-3 hours as long as there isn’t a lot of custom mapping. If there are a lot of custom fields, then the configuration can stretch into a few days–still on the lighter side of configuration. 

We often recommend a trial integration. Connect an RFPIO production environment with a Salesforce sandbox to test the integration in a safe space that won’t create disruptions in your Salesforce production environment. It’s simple to migrate this trial setup to a production environment.

If security is a concern, it shouldn’t be. We’re already published on the Salesforce AppExchange, which means we went through the Salesforce security review. Also, we are quite comfortable navigating any enterprise security review. So far, we’ve passed 100% of every one we’ve been through.

“We’re using the Salesforce integration to pull data in from an existing account or opportunity. This both ensures the data is matching and also means there are fewer fields to fill out–saving time and avoiding errors”

-Lisa McNeely, Proposal Services Team Manager at Hyland (full case study here)

What you can expect 

You’ll start seeing the value of real-time visibility and increased efficiency from the Salesforce integration almost immediately. Another huge value comes from the reporting capabilities, and this value grows over time. By creating associations between Salesforce objects and RFPIO projects, managers, directors, VPs of sales, and other teams can identify which projects were successful, which RFPs were won, and how that impacted the Salesforce opportunity outcome. You can find patterns that help identify more successful opportunities and the teams involved with those opportunities, which will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and more revenue.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Salesforce integration with RFPIO, then contact us to set up a demo.

“The Salesforce integration for intake requests is a game changer. When I started the proposal process from the ground up at my company, sales people had no idea where to send RFPs—they were just throwing them to legal. Now there’s an easy way to request support right in Salesforce!”

See how it feels to respond with confidence

Why do 250,000+ users streamline their response process with RFPIO? Schedule a demo to find out.