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RFPIO CPO/CIO talks about human-AI collaboration in new UX

RFPIO CPO/CIO talks about human-AI collaboration in new UX

Products/Features/Solutions

Less than a decade ago, B2B customers would likely approach potential vendors through one of five channels. I’ll give you […]

RFPIO CPO/CIO talks about human-AI collaboration in new UX

RFPIO CPO/CIO talks about human-AI collaboration in new UX

Products/Features/Solutions

Less than a decade ago, B2B customers would likely approach potential vendors through one of five channels. I’ll give you a hint: their procurement departments weren’t one of them. The number of channels has doubled today, and procurement departments are increasingly tasked with initiating and negotiating purchases, usually through RFPs.

Around that same time, RFP response time was cut in half, from an average of 12 months to six. Additionally, increased regulations and security requirements make the purchasing and bidding processes far more complex.

Today’s business climate is all about doing a lot more with less, but leaving many of their largest potential deals on the table because a company doesn’t have the time or resources to create winning proposals isn’t a viable option.

The best solution is empowering existing teams with the necessary resources to drive more revenue.

I recently sat down with RFPIO Chief Product Officer, Chief Information Officer, and cofounder, AJ Sunder, to discuss how RFPIO’s new UX — introduced in the company’s latest launch — advances collaborative AI capabilities that will help add human-driven value to response departments without overburdening proposal professionals or SMEs.

Wendy: Good morning, Sunder. Please tell us a little about yourself and the vision behind RFPIO.

Sunder

Sunder: Before founding RFPIO with Ganesh Shankar (RFPIO CEO) and Sankar Lagudu (RFPIO COO), I worked in various roles in software development, including as developer, product manager, software test engineer, database admin, architect and information security analyst. I have spent the better part of my career in telecom, healthcare, aerospace and defense before SaaS.

While working together for a startup, Ganesh, Sankar and I had different experiences with RFPs due to our various roles. We found that the RFP management processes we encountered were often inefficient and time-consuming, leading us to create a better solution.

So when we decided to start our own company, we knew that response management was an area where we could make an immediate impact. We aimed to simplify the RFP process and make it more user-friendly, which led to the development of our patented import process, setting us apart from our competitors.

Initially, I focused on engineering and customer success when we started RFPIO. I currently manage product and engineering.

Wendy: Can you describe some of the reasons you decided to reimagine the UX?

Sunder:  We decided to launch a fresh and brand-new interface for our application because we recognized that UI and user experience standards are evolving faster than ever before. Our users are exposed to new and innovative applications every day through their mobile devices and the internet, which leads to rapidly changing expectations. We aimed to keep up with these evolving standards by embracing more recent technologies that provide better performance and greater flexibility.

However, our goal wasn’t to simply rewrite our application. We wanted to reimagine it from every angle, with a particular emphasis on integrating AI. Since the launch of RFPIO, AI has rapidly advanced, and we saw an opportunity to seamlessly incorporate it into the user experience. By doing so, we are able to improve the overall user experience while also making AI a natural part of it.

And finally, the new user interface has allowed us to bring a lot more capabilities, and time-saving features to the platform that would have been more challenging to fit into our classic interface.

Wendy: Can you tell us a bit about your philosophy on improving the user experience?

Sunder: Absolutely. At the heart of our philosophy on improving the user experience is a commitment to investing in both our internal research, expertise and customer feedback.

Internally, we dedicate significant resources to researching and developing new ways to make our application more intuitive, efficient and enjoyable for our users. We also placed great emphasis on soliciting feedback from our customers. This includes conducting user research, gathering feedback through surveys and customer support channels, and regularly engaging with our users. By listening closely to our customers, we were able to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Wendy: How much customer or user input went into the new UX?

Sunder

Sunder: At RFPIO, we strongly believe in building solutions in close partnership with our users. We recognize that our customers are experts in their own domains and have unique perspectives and insights that can help us build better solutions. That’s why we regularly gather feedback from our customers through various channels such as surveys, customer support interactions and user research.

For the new UX, we conducted extensive user research to understand our customers’ needs and pain points. We interviewed users, observed them in their natural environments, and analyzed their workflows to identify areas where we could improve the user experience.

While customer input is essential, it’s equally important that our product teams have the expertise and creativity to translate problem statements and pain points into elegant solutions. Our teams work hard to synthesize the feedback we receive, identify patterns and themes, and then design and build solutions that address those needs in intuitive and efficient ways.

Overall, the new UX is the result of a collaborative effort between our customers and our product teams. We’re confident that our customers will appreciate the enhancements we’ve made and that the new UX will help them work more efficiently and effectively

Wendy: Can you tell us more about helping users rapidly evaluate requirements in government RFPs, and other dense, narrative documents?

Sunder: When someone receives a request for proposal (RFP), one of the initial challenges is figuring out whether it’s the right fit for the business, is it worth pursuing, and what it will take to pursue the opportunity. This requires carefully examining the RFP to understand its requirements and key entities. It can be a time-consuming process, so we’ve invested in user experience (UX) and machine learning to help streamline it.

Our machine learning algorithms can quickly analyze dense, narrative documents commonly found in public RFPs and suggest which sections to focus on — what are some of the key requirements, timeline and so on. This way, our users can get a snapshot of what the document is about and make informed decisions about whether to pursue the opportunity.

It’s important to note that this technology is not a substitute for reading the entire document, but it can help users quickly identify the key information and involve the right stakeholders in the decision-making process. By investing in UX and machine learning, we aim to simplify the evaluation process and save our users valuable time and effort.

Wendy: How is the work that your [development] team is doing an important step forward in how proposal and response teams interact with AI technology?

Sunder: We use AI as an assistive technology that supports and enhances the work of proposal and response teams. We recognize AI’s potential to improve efficiency, accuracy and speed, but we are also acutely aware of the responsibility that comes with implementing such technology.

That’s why we have designed our AI systems to work in conjunction with human experts, who are always in the loop to oversee and guide the AI’s decision-making processes. Our approach ensures that our AI technology is transparent and accountable, and that it reflects our core values of ethics and responsibility.

In terms of how our work is an important step forward, I would say that it lies in the balance we strike between the benefits of AI and the importance of human oversight. By using AI to assist proposal and response teams, we are able to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable resources for higher-level, strategic work. At the same time, our human experts ensure that the AI’s recommendations align with our clients’ needs and expectations, and that we remain mindful of the ethical and legal considerations surrounding the use of AI in proposal and response processes.

Wendy:  Can you elaborate on how you see RFPIO users collaborating with AI?

Sunder

Sunder: Certainly. At RFPIO, our goal is to make AI an invisible assistant for our users, seamlessly integrated into their workflow and providing valuable insights and suggestions without being intrusive or disruptive.

In practice, this means using AI to automate time-consuming tasks like document analysis and response drafting, freeing up more time for users to focus on higher-level tasks like strategy and collaboration.

For example, when a user receives an RFP, they can quickly upload it to our system where AI algorithms analyze the document and extract key information such as requirements, deadlines and contacts. This information is then organized and presented to the user in a clear and structured format, allowing them to easily review and assign tasks to team members.

When it comes to response drafting, our AI-powered suggestion engine provides real-time recommendations for content based on the user’s inputs and past performance. This can include everything from specific answers to common questions to more general suggestions for tone and formatting.

Throughout this process, we place a strong emphasis on maintaining the human in the loop, enabling users to review and approve all AI-generated content before it is finalized. This ensures that users retain control over the final output and can make any necessary adjustments to ensure it accurately reflects their organization’s voice and messaging.

Overall, we see AI as a powerful tool for improving collaboration and efficiency in the proposal and response process, and we’re committed to making sure it remains a helpful assistant rather than an intrusive technology to contend with.

Wendy: There’s already been a ton of buzz about GPT assistant. Why is there so much interest in RFPIO’s approach to content-generation technology?

Sunder:  At the heart of responding to RFPs, security questionnaires, and proposals is the task of writing quality content that effectively communicates our customers’ unique value propositions. This is an area where GPT excels, and we’re thrilled to be incorporating this cutting-edge technology into our platform to help streamline the content-generation process.

With GPT, we’re able to offer our users an AI-powered writing assistant that can help them draft compelling and persuasive responses to even the most complex questions. This technology allows our users to tap into the power of natural language processing and machine learning to generate high-quality content more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

Overall, the interest in RFPIO’s approach to content-generation technology is driven by our focus on making the content-generation process more efficient, while also maintaining a high level of quality and accuracy. We’re excited to continue exploring the possibilities of AI-powered content generation and to help our customers achieve greater success in their response management efforts.

Our customers recognize the potential of this relatively new technology.  And this is reflected in the volume of inquiries and the interest we have seen so far. But I should note that this interest ranges from curiosity to outright enthusiasm to embrace it.

Wendy: How does GPT assistant differ from ChatGPT?

Sunder

Sunder: GPT assistant is a proprietary AI application developed by RFPIO specifically for the purpose of assisting with RFPs, security questionnaires, and proposal content generation. ChatGPT is a general-purpose chatbot built by OpenAI that can be used for a wide range of applications. While both use the same underlying large language models, our GPT assistant is specifically designed to understand the nuances of the content we work with and provide more relevant and accurate suggestions.

Additionally, our GPT assistant is integrated into our RFPIO platform, allowing for a seamless and secure collaboration between the user and the AI assistant. The information and data used by our GPT assistant is kept private and confidential, ensuring that sensitive information is not shared or compromised.

Wendy: Will GPT assistant and other generative AI help encourage SME and executive buy-in, and if so, how?

Sunder: Yes, I believe that GPT assistant and other generative AI technologies will help encourage SME and executive buy-in. By leveraging GPT technology to assist with content generation, we can significantly reduce the time and effort required to create high-quality responses to RFPs, security questionnaires and other content-driven requests.

The potential impact on productivity and efficiency is significant, and we are optimistic that our customers will embrace this technology when they see the real value it can provide.

Furthermore, the ability to generate content quickly and accurately with the help of GPT technology can also help our customers win more business. By creating high-quality responses faster and more efficiently, our users can improve their chances of winning bids and securing new contracts.

Of course, we understand that there may be some concerns around the use of AI in content generation. That’s why we are committed to ensuring that the technology is used responsibly and that it always works in conjunction with human expertise and oversight. Ultimately, we believe that the benefits of this technology will far outweigh any potential drawbacks, and we are excited to continue exploring new ways to help our users streamline their workflows and achieve their business goals.

Wendy: There’s so much positive momentum surrounding the company and its response management platform — why do you think that is?

Sunder: At the heart of it, RFPIO’s response management platform fills a critical need in the B2B space. In today’s fast-paced business world, request response has become the backbone of most business interactions. From RFPs to security questionnaires, businesses are constantly receiving requests for information, and the ability to respond efficiently and effectively can make or break deals.

Our platform allows businesses to streamline and optimize their response process, freeing up valuable time and resources for more strategic pursuits. We’ve seen firsthand how our technology can have a huge positive impact on businesses, both in terms of winning more deals and improving overall productivity.

But it’s not just about technology. We’ve worked closely with our customers to understand their pain points and challenges when it comes to request response. By truly listening to their needs and translating those problem statements into elegant solutions, we’ve been able to create a platform that truly meets the needs of our users.

Overall, the positive momentum surrounding RFPIO is a testament to the power of strategic response management and the value that our platform brings to businesses across industries.

Wendy: Thank you, Sunder. That was fascinating!

Sunder: My pleasure.

If you’d like to learn more about RFPIO’s new user experience and GPT assistant, let us know.

 

How to find RFPs and win them

How to find RFPs and win them

Selling & Enablement

Every year, private organizations and government agencies award millions of dollars of business to vendors using the request for proposal (RFP) process. Consequently, responding to RFPs is a crucial part of any sales strategy and a great way to increase revenue. However, before you can take advantage of these opportunities to benefit your business, you have to know how to find RFPs.

Chances are you made it to this post by searching the internet — which is a great start. It won’t surprise you to know that’s one simple way to search for RFP opportunities. The internet plays host to thousands of organizations inviting vendors to bid to win their business. But joining or browsing an online RFP database isn’t the only way to find RFPs. You can also proactively submit your information to prospective buyers using online vendor portals. 

In this post, I’ll start with a few basics including key definitions that will help you understand the types of RFPs you can find online as well as their pros and cons. In addition, I’ll share the best RFP databases and how to get invited to closed RFPs. Finally, I’ll offer tips for winning more RFPs so when you find them, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Know what you need? Jump ahead here:

Key RFP definitions

Before we get into where to find RFPs, it’s important to start with the basics. So, let’s explore the RFP meaning and answer a few common questions. Then, we’ll go over several common types of RFPs you may encounter.

RFP definitions

What is an RFP?

RFP stands for request for proposal. A request for proposal is a document soliciting information from potential vendors. The document includes a collection of RFP questions that help buyers gather standardized information, compare and select the best supplier for any given project.

Why do companies use RFPs?

RFPs organize complex procurement projects and improve objectivity in supplier selection. In addition, the thorough nature of the process reduces overall vendor risk. Ultimately, this helps buyers reduce the overall cost of procurement and create long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships. 

Many private companies have a procurement policy that requires bids from at least three potential suppliers before they can move forward with a purchase. Likewise, agencies at all levels of government are required to issue RFPs publically to ensure that contracts are awarded and tax dollars are spent in a fair and transparent way. Accordingly, you can find open government RFPs online.

Who issues RFPs?

Almost every type of organization uses RFPs as a part of their procurement strategy. For example, RFPs are commonly issued by private companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies.

Two types of RFPs you can find

Open RFPs

An open RFP, sometimes called a public RFP, is available for anyone to respond to. Generally, these RFPs appear on the RFP issuer’s website and can be downloaded for response. While some private organizations may occasionally take this approach, most often, government agencies issue open RFPs.

Government RFPs
Government agencies create the most open or public RFPs. Federal, state or city agencies use the RFP process for most of their procurement needs. As mentioned above, procurement in the public sector is subject to complex regulation. Indeed, RFP regulations ensure a fair, auditable, objective and transparent vendor selection.

Education RFPs
Because they operate with some portion of public funding, schools and universities often follow procurement guidelines that are nearly identical to government policies. You’ll find lots of RFP opportunities on school district and university websites.

The pros and cons of open RFPs

Open RFPs typically prioritize price over most other factors. To avoid countless back-and-forth questions, open RFPs contain a lot of information and include rules, contract terms and conditions, and more. Consequently, they are often the longest kind of RFP. For example, public sector RFPs average around 116 pages.

It is also important to note that open RFPs have stringent requirements. Often they require very specific minimum qualifications and submission format. An open RFP may go as far as to specify that responses must be in a table format, use 12-point Times New Roman font, be printed and have hard copies submitted via postmarked package.

While open RFPs may receive dozens of responses, many may be unqualified. But, the procurement team still has to read each one to know which vendors might be a good fit. Consequently, RFP evaluation takes weeks or even months to complete.

For some businesses, the time-consuming and highly competitive nature of these RFP opportunities make them less appealing. However, government contracts also tend to be high-value with the potential for longer contract terms. So, having a strong bid or no-bid process is a must to balance the pros and cons of responding to open RFPs.

Closed RFPs

Many private organizations use closed RFPs, sometimes called invitation-only RFPs or private RFPs, to compare and select vendors. In this process, the issuing organization or consultant conducts market research, chooses a select group of vendors and privately issues the RFP to them, inviting them to submit a proposal. The small group of vendors may be selected based on data collected from a request for information (RFI), a request for qualifications (RFQ), reputation, area of expertise or experience.

Business RFPs
Corporations and companies of all sizes regularly issue RFPs for any goods or services you can imagine. They use them to evaluate new vendors and verify that they’re getting the best value from their existing vendors. Closed RFPs usually focus less on price. Instead, buyers seek vendors who can become partners, are the most qualified or deliver the best return on investment.

Because most corporations are private, they aren’t subject to the same level of regulation as public entities. Therefore, they often choose to create closed RFPs. Generally, it is simply a matter of efficiency.

Consultant- or broker-managed RFPs
When high-stakes, specialty procurement projects arise, many businesses engage with a consultant or broker. The consultant is an expert in a particular industry or type of procurement. So, they manage the RFP process on behalf of their client. For example, a business may seek out a consultant to help with a complex procurement project for a new IT network, employee benefits or company insurance. Because consultants and brokers have a deep understanding of their niche market, they tend to issue closed RFPs to select vendors who are the best fit for their client.

First, they work with stakeholders to gather requirements and provide expert advice. Then, they create the RFP, select which vendors to invite and manage communications. Finally, they evaluate the responses and provide recommendations to the client.

Pros and cons of closed RFPs

Unlike open RFPs that may garner dozens of responses, closed RFPs limit the number of proposals a buyer receives and has to score. This means competition is a lot easier and it speeds up the overall RFP timeline. However, the size of the contract is often smaller, and may be subject to lengthy negotiation and shorter terms.

Hybrid RFPs: Invited vendors but open RFP

The hybrid RFP approach is less common, but still deserves a mention here. This is when an RFP is issued individually to a handful of vendors, but is also posted in an open invitation. If an organization struggles to garner adequate exposure or interest in their RFP using an open RFP approach, they may reach out to a handful of qualified organizations to request a proposal. 

Non-profit RFPs
Hybrid RFPs are most frequently used by non-profit organizations. Because they receive tax benefits, public grant funding and donations they strive for transparency in their procurement processes. Unfortunately, their website or brand may not have enough exposure to simply post their RFP online and receive the required number of responses. A hybrid approach solves this and means you can find their RFPs online.

How to find RFPs

Now that we’ve covered key definitions as well as the types of RFPs you can respond to, let’s explore how to find RFPs for each category. Finding open RFPs is simply a matter of knowing where to look. On the other hand, being included in closed RFPs takes a little more work.

Two ways to find open RFPs

There are two main approaches to locating open RFPs. You can subscribe to an RFP database or look for RFPs manually. 

Use an RFP database

If you want to implement an RFP strategy to grow your business as quickly as possible, an RFP database subscription may be worth the cost. There are a number of sites that scour government and business websites and collect RFP information. Then, they place the RFP into a centralized, searchable database. This allows you to quickly sift through hundreds of RFPs and find the opportunities that are the best fit. Most are subscription based and cost anywhere from $10-50 per month.

Best RFP databases
There is a lot of overlap between RFP services, so it’s important to do your research and pick the best RFP databases for your business. Consider how often the database is updated, if they regularly have RFPs that align with your business and if they will send you automatic email notifications based on your qualifications.

Search for RFPs manually

A manual search for RFPs requires practice and research, but it’s the most cost-effective way to find new opportunities.

Google search for government RFPs
Because government organizations are required to make their RFPs public, they post them on their websites or in a searchable portal. You can quickly and easily find almost any state or local procurement page or portal with a simple Google search. When you search for an RFP opportunity, remember that each state may use different terminology. For example, try searching by the state or municipality name plus contracts, procurement, RFPs, request for bid (RFBs), or invitation to tender (ITTs).

Find open RFPs on social media
While less common, some organizations post their RFPs on social media. LinkedIn is the most popular social network for finding RFPs, but you will also see some on Twitter. Luckily, the search functionality on these networks makes RFPs easy to find. Simply search your industry and ‘RFP’ to browse through the results and find the latest open opportunities.

How to get invited to closed RFPs

Being invited to participate in a closed RFP is all about getting your company’s information to the right people. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this, but here are two that I’ve found to be most effective.

Proactively reach out to potential buyers

If you want to be included in RFPs from private organizations, the first step is to make sure they know who you are. Unlike using capture management, which proactively pursues known upcoming RFPs from specific targeted companies, being included in unknown future RFPs may be as simple as raising your hand.

Align with presales, sales and marketing
This approach requires research and a team effort, so it can be time consuming — but I’ve also seen it work. If your organization has a presales, sales or marketing team, they may already have initiatives to proactively connect with specific buyers. This approach is often called account-based marketing (ABM). 

The first step ABM is to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you thrive within a certain industry, use this information and your ICP to identify top accounts to target. Then, align your efforts with presales, sales and marketing.

As part of your efforts to get into a particular company, reach out to the company’s procurement team. Let them know you’d like to be considered for future RFP opportunities and ask if they maintain a vendor database. If so, explore how to be included as a prospective vendor. Often, it’s as simple as filling out an RFI.

Note: Procurement teams get a lot of these calls so it’s important to stand out. Be knowledgeable about their business, unfailingly friendly, courteous and patient. It’s also useful to share any diversity certifications, qualifications or local connections you may have.

Register as a supplier or complete a vendor profile

Many large organizations accept vendor applications online. The process has different names including supplier registration, a vendor form or a vendor profile. If you know you’re a fit for a specific company, check their website for one of these forms.

Examples vendor registration pages

Get on a broker or consultant’s radar

There are brokers and consultants that use RFPs to serve a wide range of industries. In fact, you likely already know who they are within your sector. But, the real question is, do they know who you are? Procurement consultants want to deliver the best results to their client, so if you can provide value, introduce yourself.

When you do reach out, be brief. Send an introductory email with a few lines about how you serve their client base and what sets you apart. Then, ask about their vendor onboarding process and if there’s a vendor profile they use to track available suppliers. If you don’t get a response in a week or so, follow up and attach a short vendor profile of your own.

Once you connect with someone, follow up with them from time to time to stay top of mind. Remember, be genuine and provide helpful information. If you can build a relationship with a broker or consultancy firm, they are more likely to trust you, include you in RFPs and provide insights about customer trends.

5 tips for winning more RFPs

1. Make sure you’re qualified

Pay close attention to the requirements and evaluation criteria and prioritize your efforts. It’s easy to get caught up in answering as many RFPs as possible. However, if your chances to win are low, dedicating time and attention to creating a proposal is probably not worth the time. When you find RFP opportunities, ensure they pass your to bid or not to bid criteria. Responding to too many RFPs with fast proposals will impact your win rate and tax your proposal team resources.

2. Research your prospect

Learn as much as you can about the buyer. With more background and context, you’ll be able to better address the buyer’s needs and goals. If you’re responding to a government RFP, look for a previous proposal that won the contract. Just like RFPs are public, often the responses from each vendor are as well.

3. Pay attention to the instructions

Carefully read the instructions before beginning your RFP response. Identify every requirement and include them in an RFP compliance matrix (this process is sometimes called shredding the RFP). This is particularly important when you respond to government RFPs. If your proposal isn’t delivered as specified or doesn’t meet the submission criteria, they may not read past the first page. Instead the procurement manager may just throw all of your hard work out.

4. Ask questions

RFPs are complex, and unfortunately, some questions aren’t always clear. Instead of guessing at what the buyer meant, ask them. Even if the RFP timeline doesn’t provide a vendor question period, send the inquiry. Not only will it help you get insight, but it also shows the buyer you’re invested in understanding their business and being a partner.

5. Make sure your messaging hits the mark

Make your responses customer-centric and provide specific benefits. Address their primary needs and convey your understanding of their goals. Finally, when using your proposal knowledge library to create quick responses, don’t forget to tailor your answers to the buyer.

A final bit of advice

If your ultimate goal is to answer more RFPs (and win them) to grow your business, it’s important to not only search for RFPs, but ensure that your current response process is as efficient as possible.

However, if you’re already facing heavy workloads and tight deadlines, it’s going to be difficult to ask the proposal management team and SMEs to do even more. You have two options: hire more staff or adopt RFP software.

Naturally, I recommend RFP software (specifically, Responsive) because our average customer reduces their response time by up to 50 percent. They are then able to redirect that time toward improving their content library, optimizing processes, finding new RFPs, customizing responses and increasing RFP submissions by 5-15 percent. 

If you want to explore what Responsive can do for your business, you can see it for yourself by requesting a demo or use our return on investment calculator to see the results.

Data Axle gains 30-50% in productivity with dynamic response management

Data Axle gains 30-50% in productivity with dynamic response management

Customer Stories

Data Axle is a 50-year-old data-driven marketing agency who helps Fortune 500 companies find new customers and be more relevant to their existing customers. It’s a complex business that, as you’d expect, requires complex request for proposals (RFP). When the company’s growth started to demand more automation, the Sales Enablement team seized the opportunity to develop a better process for RFP responses—one that actually took advantage of the features RFPIO offered—and ended up developing a dynamic response management process that is now used for RFPs, RFIs, and other client-requested information.

Data Axle results to date:

  • Respond to RFPs 30-50% faster
  • Sales Enablement team answers up to 80% of questionnaires before reaching out to SMEs
  • Happier users as a result of simplified content governance

Prepping Content Library for self-service

Data Axle has multiple divisions, has made multiple acquisitions, and—like any business—has new employees that need to be quickly brought up to speed on the business.

While they had a large RFPIO Content Library that could theoretically simplify the process of responding to RFPs, in practice, it wasn’t working out that way. The library contained thousands of pieces of content, but they were stale. Nobody was making updates to keep the information current, and few of the staff had access to it anyways. When someone needed help, they would skip right past the library and go straight to product owners or subject matter experts (SMEs) for help.

“We decided to start with the Content Library,” Tiffany Ramos, Data Axle Sales Enablement Manager, explains. “[So employees] could self-serve with company information, product-level content, and then all of our services content.” Doing that required making sure the content was both current and well organized.

For the first part, the Sales Enablement team started to assign SMEs content updates on a rolling schedule. Experts are tasked with reviewing around ten items of content each month to check for currency and make any needed updates.

Creating (and maintaining) a single source of truth

They also redid custom fields at the RFPIO Project level, to help with the counts that the company information sections of RFPs regularly require. The number of employees, customers, and business records in their database are all things that change frequently. By using custom fields and creating a regular process for updates, they only have to modify the information in one place to know the current information will then show up everywhere else.

To improve the way their content is organized, they shifted from using question-and-answer formatting to having content devoted to larger topics. They include all the relevant questions and answers for that topic on one page, so it’s easier for users to find the information they need in one place. That reduces the size of the Content Library, but still allows users to search for any alternative questions not covered on the page.

All of that has ensured users can easily find the content they need quickly. And even better, they don’t have to worry about the information’s accuracy.

Educating everyone to use the Content Library

With a comprehensive, accurate Content Library in place, the next challenge is getting everyone to use it.

First, they wanted to make sure everyone in the organization could access the library. RFPIO’s unlimited user license model made that possible. Next, Sales Enablement added a Content Library course to the standard onboarding process.

Not only do they educate everyone to know where the Content Library is and how it works, but org settings are updated so that every time a seller or account manager logs in, they go straight to the Content Library. That ensures they never forget it’s there when they need it.

And it’s worked. People in the company often turn to the Content Library first when they need information. As soon as SMEs are assigned questions to answer for an RFP, they head over to the Content Library to find any past answers to work from. That’s much more efficient than writing each answer from scratch.

Creating a feedback loop to keep improvements coming

While the new process has been a big step up from how things worked before, maintaining a dynamic Content Library is ongoing. Content changes and use cases for the Content Library expand as more users are exposed to its capabilities. Data Axle recognizes that there’s always room for improvement. So they make a point of soliciting feedback and making changes based on what they learn.

They have regular conversations with users to learn what they like and don’t like about the product and process. And when they hear suggestions for ways to make it better, they jump in and do it.

Tiffany also notes that she loves being on the other side of that feedback loop with RFPIO as well. “We appreciate the fact that RFPIO will make adjustments to the solution based on user feedback,” she says. “I love that. I get so excited when one of my changes has been implemented.”

Gaining traction with happier users

A big technology challenge that companies routinely face is getting employees to actually use the products they buy. With RFPIO though, employees are happy enough with the product to make this a non-issue.

Tiffany keeps an eye on the usage statistics and sees plenty of evidence of the difference the tool makes, including positive feedback from users.

Multiple SMEs have also volunteered that RFPIO makes it easy to update content. Much of the positive user response can also be attributed to the sales enablement team’s consistent outreach and promotion of RFPIO and its benefits.

Between RFPIO’s performance and sales enablement’s non-stop championing, not one user has complained about the new response management process. With 300 RFPIO users in the company, a complete lack of complaints is saying something.

Accelerating the RFP process

“All of this in conjunction has helped us be able to answer RFPs quicker,” Tiffany says. Data Axle has seen a 30-50% improvement in how quickly they complete their RFPs. And they don’t just meet more deadlines now, they often beat them. Crucially, none of that speed comes at the expense of losing accuracy.

As a nice bonus, the faster process leaves the Sales Enablement team open to help out with other client-requested information and questionnaires. Prior to the rollout of the Content Library, employees would send any other client-requested information and questionnaires to a specified email address, which felt like passing them over to a black hole. Now, Sales Enablement has taken over the process and they’re able to answer around 80% of the questionnaires they receive. And they can manage about a third of all the answers themselves, without needing additional help. That leaves the SMEs more time to focus on other priorities.

Before active RFPIO engagement After active RFPIO engagement
RFP responses were often rushed and submitted just before the deadline. RFPs are completed 30-50% faster and often submitted before deadlines.
Content library grew unchecked, becoming messy and difficult to search efficiently. Assigned SMEs to rolling content reviews and implemented content management processes to reduce library size and ensure accuracy.
Responders dreaded RFPs coming in. Responders have confidence that the processes and content are reliably managed through RFPIO.
Client-requested information and  questionnaires needed to go to an e-mail address that felt like passing them over to a black hole. The Sales Enablement team has taken over the process and now answers around 80% of the questionnaires they receive.

RFPIO comes out as the due diligence review winner every year

Completely reorganizing a process like this requires a lot of work. But it has paid off for Data Axle.

Data Axle also recently launched RFPIO® LookUp in their instance. Employees can use RFPIO LookUp to respond to client questions so they don’t have to toggle between the RFPIO application and the application they’re already using. To help ensure a successful rollout of RFPIO LookUp, an internal email promotional campaign informed users about the new benefits and instructed them on how to use it.

Data Axle knows better than to get complacent. As happy as they are with RFPIO and their current process now, they’re open to change—if they see a better way of doing things.

“We do our due diligence each year on what’s out there in the marketplace,” Tiffany noted. ”But each year it’s clear that RFPIO surpasses the other solutions to meet our needs.”

“While no solution may be perfect, getting things 90% complete before exporting responses is wonderful,” she adds.

About Data Axle

Data Axle is a leading provider of data, data-driven marketing and real-time business intelligence solutions for enterprise, small business, nonprofit and political organizations. The company’s solutions and award-winning Axle Agency enable clients to acquire and retain customers and enhance their user experiences through proprietary business and consumer data, artificial intelligence/machine learning models, innovative software applications and expert professional services. Data Axle’s cloud-based platform delivers data and data updates in real-time via APIs, CRM integrations, SaaS and managed services. Data Axle has 50+ years of experience helping organizations exceed their goals. For more information, visit www.data-axle.com.

Everything you need to know about healthcare RFPs

Everything you need to know about healthcare RFPs

Products/Features/Solutions

With an aging population, it might not surprise you to learn that healthcare is the fastest-growing industry in the world. It’s no coincidence that insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and other healthcare organizations also have the fastest-growing demand for products and services.

To help ensure all vendors meet their budgets, timelines, and other requirements when purchasing those products and services, healthcare organizations, like those in other industries, issue requests for proposals (RFP).

What is a healthcare RFP?

A healthcare RFP is a way for buyers to collect and organize necessary information for evaluating potential vendors. RFPs are structured in a questionnaire format, giving organizations a clear, side-by-side comparison of the prospects bidding on the project. Most importantly, each new RFP is an opportunity for new suppliers and vendors to win new business.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the unique challenges with healthcare RFPs and best practices to benefit both buyers and vendors.

Elements of a healthcare RFP

A healthcare RFP should include:

  • The project background and an overview of the problem
  • The ultimate project goals
  • Description of needed goods or services and budget
  • The RFP timeline and vendor deadlines
  • RFP decision requirements including qualification, submission and evaluation criteria
  • The organization’s terms, conditions, and regulatory requirements
  • A vendor security questionnaire (although that might fall later in the buying cycle)

Types of healthcare RFPs

The most common types of healthcare RFPs include:

  • Professional services and consulting
  • Medical and surgical equipment
  • Facilities and maintenance
  • Healthcare information technology (HIT) systems
  • Laboratory and research services
  • Medications and pharmaceuticals
  • Support services and staffing

How to issue and manage healthcare RFPs

Issuing and managing an RFP happens in a simple three-step process.

1. Creation

Identify the issue, assess specific needs, and define the scope of a project. Understanding the core of the issue will enable an understanding of what the best solution is. Collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize the factors that will help you make your final selection.

Before writing your RFP, select prospective vendors, conduct research, and explore industry trends to ensure relevancy when drafting your RFP.

Using feedback from your internal teams, your research, and the background you’ve learned, you can draft your RFP.

2. Administration

Whether you issue your RFP publicly or to a select group of prospective participants will depend on the regulations that govern your procurement process.

During the question and answer period, collect and collate any necessary clarifications, providing uniformed questions to all prospects to ensure fairness.

3. Evaluation

Review your collected RFP responses and start by reviewing them for compliance. Next, ensure that vendors meet the stated minimum requirements. After that, score sections that contain closed-ended questions. An RFP software solution can save time by scoring automatically.

Engage SMEs and stakeholders for more complex response evaluation before making your final selection. An RFP management platform can simplify side-by-side comparisons when making a decision.

3 tips for responding to a healthcare RFP

  1. Create and optimize a content library – Cut down on repetitive work by saving and organizing past RFP questions and responses, as well as templates. Proposal software can centralize your knowledge base and automate your workflow by suggesting answers to previously seen questions.
  2. Streamline SME collaboration – A content library can help you complete as much of the proposal as possible before sending it to your SMEs. By suggesting potential answers based on past proposals, you lighten the SMEs’ load and complete RFPs in less time.
  3. Only answer RFPs you can win – Consider RFP deadlines, available resources, requirements and deal-breakers. A powerful software tool can facilitate bid or no bid decisions.

Improve efficiency by removing emails from the response process

RFPIO seamlessly integrates with most of the tools you might use to send and receive RFPs, including five CRMs and four communication apps.

Scale your response process as industry and customer needs change

RFPIO’s AI-enabled Content Library lets admins and approved users quickly update stored messaging to simplify adapting to changing market needs.

Keep your content current

Built-in curation tools quickly help you create content review cycles, find duplicate content, and flag posts that need review.

Ensure regulatory compliance

Embed compliance reviews right into your workflow to make sure all content is compliant and simplify security questionnaires.

Healthcare companies respond faster with RFPIO

RFPIO is the response management platform of choice for leaders in the healthcare industry.

The key area we’re seeing success with RFPIO is being able to handle multiple RFPs at the same time. There’s no way we could have simultaneously responded to 16 RFPs with a two-person team if we were still using a manual process.

Learn from the experts on response

Healthcare procurement and fulfillment is complex with multiple regulatory requirements. RFPIO is a tool designed to streamline the process by helping proposal professionals navigate complexities, enabling them to craft clear and compelling documents.

Schedule a demo. We’ll demonstrate how RFPIO might help you focus on the most important parts of your job and safeguard compliance.

Tender management explained

Tender management explained

Product & Best Practices

When a business, nonprofit organisation, or government agency needs to make a major purchase, such as materials required to manufacture their goods or services to keep the organisation humming, they typically initiate a bidding process before zeroing in on their best option.

If the purchasing organisation is in the United States, the bidding process begins with a request for proposal (RFP). In many other parts of the world, the request is called a tender. In turn, the vendors respond with a proposal, or more commonly outside the U.S., a bid (or response).

In this blog post, we’ll take a deeper look at the tender management process and how organisations can optimise their purchasing outcomes.

What is tender management?

Tender management is the structured process of getting information from the market to make a purchase or responding to a request sent by another organisation to purchase from you. It is about ensuring that bids or purchases align with company values, needs, budgets, security and compliance requirements, and so on.

Tender managers are responsible for coordinating with department leaders to create a list of potential vendors and send a detailed questionnaire that covers everything from vendor history to purchase specifications to legal requirements. They may also be responsible for crafting bids in response to tenders.

Confusing? Perhaps, but it’s also worth noting that in many companies, tender managers both send and respond to tenders. To avoid confusion, let’s call the questionnaire a tender and refer to the response as a bid.

  • Bid vs. tender vs. proposal management

    • Bid, tender, and proposal management are often used interchangeably. Traditionally, bid and proposal management are synonymous. Both are about the process of responding to tenders (or RFPs).

    Today, some companies use tender management to describe both the purchasing and bidding process.

    Who participates in the tendering process?

    There are generally several stakeholders involved in the tendering process. Tender response teams may include personnel from:

    • Sales
    • Procurement
    • Operations
    • Logistics
    • Finance
    • Human resources
    • Marketing
    • Legal
    • Information technology and security
    • And more

    Additionally, larger companies may have a dedicated bid team, which might include a bid manager to oversee the entire process, a writer or two, and an editor.

    How the tender management process works

    As with RFPs and all other questionnaires a potential customer might send, tenders are detailed, specific legal documents with zero leeway deadlines. As such, it’s critical that companies design a repeatable response process before the next tender reaches their inbox.

    RFPIO’s response managers recommend an 8-step process:

  • Step 1 – Go/no-go

    • Tender response is a long process. It can take days and sometimes even weeks. To demonstrate respect for your time, that of your fellow stakeholders, and the company at large, initiate a selection process to determine whether the tender is winnable and aligns with your company’s goals.

    The process should determine whether your organisation is willing or able to provide the product or service. It should also include reports to compare success rates of previous similar bids, whether similar bids you’ve won were beneficial to your organisation, and any available competitive research.

  • Step 2 – Hold a kickoff meeting

    • Gather your stakeholders to assign roles, responsibilities, timelines, and objectives. A project management platform designed explicitly for tender responses will help streamline the process and track progress.

  • Step 3 – 1st draft

    • Up to 80 percent of a tender’s questions are relatively standard. For example, questions about company history or your IT security protocols are common. Establish a well-maintained content library to store previous answers, so you can respond to those questions quickly, efficiently, and with marketing-approved content.

    Ask subject matter experts (SMEs) to review their answers to ensure they are accurate and up to date. Ideally, you should involve them in periodic content audits to help simplify the response process.

  • Step 4 – 2nd draft

    • The second draft is the time to dig down and answer the remaining questions. You will need to involve SMEs to help craft responses to the questions that fall under their realms and your marketing department to ensure the answers meet brand guidelines.

  • Step 5 – Review and revise

    • Check that each question has complete, accurate, well-written, and proofread answers. You should also make sure that all relevant documents are attached.

  • Step 6 – Submit

    • Submit your polished response by the deadline or sooner. In fact, sooner is preferred in case there’s a glitch that requires you to submit it multiple times. Wait until you receive a receipt and let each stakeholder know.

  • Step 7 – Save and audit the responses

    • Record each answer in a centralised repository for use in future tender responses. You should also schedule routine content audits.

  • Step 8 – Hold a postmortem

    • Every response is a learning opportunity. Gather your team to gauge what went well and what didn’t.

    Understanding the challenges of tender management

    Even the best-designed tender response process has its challenges. The most common include:

  • Workflow

    • Without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, you might have people stepping on each others’ toes, or perhaps more likely, too few people willing to make the time.

    Because tender response timelines are absolute, tracking progress is crucial. A robust project management platform that works with your existing tech stack will define roles, eliminate confusion, and help ensure each response arrives within the allotted time.

  • Collaboration

    • If your company is like most, you have work silos. Even if you don’t, your workforce might span the country or even the world. Effective collaboration is a must for tender response management. Look for bid software that integrates with your existing communication apps.

    It’s also worth noting that RFPIO has no user licences, so you can include anyone you feel is valuable to your bid.

  • Disorganised content repository

    • One thing that will slow down the response process every single time is a nonexistent or disorganised content management system. Just to give you an idea of how much it can slow you down, a McKinsey survey found that average workers spent nearly 20 percent of their time tracking down information.

    Because tender responses are legal documents that require coordinating with busy SMEs and input from your marketing team, 20 percent is very conservative. Some customers find they are as much as 5x more productive when they store their information in the RFPIO Content Library.

    Best practices for tender management

    Now that you have a repeatable process in place, how should you specifically approach your next tender?

  • Understand the full scope of the project first

    • An essential part of the go/no-go process is understanding the customer’s request. When you assume rather than reading and comprehending the entire document, you risk alienating the buyer.

  • Only bid on tenders you can fulfil

    • Maybe your product or solution is a perfect match, but when you dive a little deeper into the tender, you find that you can’t meet their timeline or security requirements.

    I’m not suggesting that you should always avoid bidding when you aren’t the perfect fit. Sometimes you want to put your name out there for future consideration, but be honest with the buyer right up front, such as in the cover letter. Otherwise, you could risk damaging your reputation.

    But, as the expression goes, a bird in the hand…

    In most cases, opt for the winnable deals. Most tender response teams, and especially SMEs, are extremely busy. Directing efforts toward realistic, revenue-generating opportunities is far better than those that might only be viable years from now.

  • Develop a collaborative response strategy

    • Two- and even single-person bid teams aren’t unheard of but uncommon. The typical tender response requires choreography that almost rivals the Royal Ballet. Alright, that’s an exaggeration, but collaboration is critical.

    To strategically optimise collaboration:

    • Provide the right tools – The chances are that your company already uses one or more collaboration tools. Look for a tender response software that works with the tools people are already comfortable with.
    • Respect contributors’ time – Your SMEs each have different work styles. Some have more time than others, and some have more stored question-answer pairs. Respect contributors’ time and work styles to help foster future collaboration.
    • Clarify roles and expectations – Avoid team members getting in the way of each other by letting them know precisely what is expected of them.
  • Manage and organise tender content

    • As my mother likes to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You should regularly audit your content library to weed out the ROT, or that content that is redundant, outdated, or trivial.

    Engage your SMEs to check their own question-answer pairs. It’s a much lighter lift if you conduct periodic, such as quarterly, audits.

    The role of tender management systems

    Tender management systems help define, optimise, and manage the strategic tender management process.

    What are the benefits of a tender management system?

    A tender management system offers a structured approach for both buyers and bidders. In both cases, a structured system saves time, fosters efficiency, strengthens communication, and helps both parties achieve their goals.

    More specific benefits include:

  • For the buyer

    • Creating a tender is arguably the least time-consuming part of the tender process, but it still takes a lot of time and effort. A tender management system lets buyers collaborate with the teams requesting the product or service and other stakeholders to ensure that all requirements are covered.

    You may be able to pull similar tenders for reference from your content library.

  • For the bidder

    • The bid process is considerably more complex than the buying process in that bidders need to learn and follow the buyer’s rules. Thoroughness, accuracy, and quality are paramount. A tender management system helps ensure that bids are well-written, complete, accurate, in the buyer’s preferred format, and submitted on time.

    Additionally, a well-curated content library benefits the entire organisation.

    Tender management software

    As businesses become increasingly selective while regulations such as GDPR add complexity, more and more organisations are looking for a future-proof tender management system.

    Organisational structure has seen significant changes over the last few years. If employees aren’t working remotely, they’re often spread out over multiple locations and internal silos. All this is to say that collaboration tools have never been more critical. This is especially true for tender management teams whose members can come from any department. Some organisations even use freelancers to help write or for their expertise.

    Since time management is necessary, tender management software should help ensure you never miss a deadline. It should work how you work but also stay within buyers’ parameters. And it should provide the data that fosters intelligent decision-making and proves its worth.

    Tender response is about projects, not individual use. Individual licences inhibit collaboration and encourage skimping on resources. They also limit scalability. Look for a tender management system that grows when needed and scales back during slower times.

    What to look for when choosing a tender management system

    An ideal tender management system supports a strategic tender management process. Components should include:

    • Data – A strategic response requires data. An effective tender management system should provide customizable reports to assist with your go/no-go decision-making and informed business decision-making.
    • Automation – A tender management system is about accomplishing more while using fewer resources. Look for a system, such as RFPIO’s autoresponse or automated project management features, that intelligently works with you to boost your capacity and overall win rate.
    • Powerful integrations – Today’s CIOs prioritise consolidating their tech stacks instead of adding to them. Look for a system that integrates with your most essential tools.
    • A robust content management system – Your tender management system should not only direct you to the correct answers but also notify you of possible duplicates and outdated answers. Additionally, you should look for an accurate and comprehensive content repository for company use cases that extend far beyond tender management.
    • Import-export capabilities – Tenders arrive in various ways, including Word documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs. However, it can be difficult for multiple stakeholders to work within unknown categorising and formatting. A tender management system should be able to translate a tender into a format each user understands and revert the final product back to the original.
    • Customization – Very few people want to read thousands of words of nonstop text. Tell and show using customised tables, images, and rich text. Make your brand stand out with branded templates.

    How to use a tender management tool

    Tender management tools have multifaceted uses that benefit an entire organisation. A comprehensive content management system should be a single source of truth for two of your company’s greatest assets, its knowledge and essential documents.

    At a higher level, tender management tools save time, improve bid quality, and increase company profits. A tender management platform is a sales enablement tool that benefits all revenue-generating departments.

    And, when it’s time for the procurement department to do its thing, a tender management tool will help them create requests designed to fulfil all requirements.

    How RFPIO can help your tender management process

    If you’re looking for a way to improve your organisation’s efficiency and win rates, RFPIO is an excellent option. Our software is designed to increase collaboration and boost capacity while making tracking progress and managing deadlines easier. With RFPIO, you’ll be able to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time developing winning proposals. Chat with us to see how RFPIO can benefit your organisation.

    Tender management FAQs

    1. What is a tender?

      2. A tender is a legal document that invites multiple parties to bid on a large purchase. A tender might also refer to the bids in response to the documents.

    2. How is a tender different from an RFP?

      3. The word “tender” is far more common outside the United States. Both documents ask for formalised purchasing proposals. Both terms can also refer to the proposals generated.

    3. What is a request for tender (RFT)?

      4. A request for tender is a request for a formalised business proposal.

    4. What are the evaluation criteria for tenders?

      5. Tenders have very stringent evaluation criteria. The winning bidder will have to provide the exact deliverables, security, and business requirements, and a price that fits the buyer’s budget.

    5. How do I know if my tender has been successful?

      6. Tender success can be measured by several metrics, including quality, response time, and of course, whether you win the bid. Tender management software should help you assess quality and response time. It can take weeks or months to learn whether you win the bid. However, customers may ask additional questions, which can indicate you’re on the shortlist.

    The Year of WE: Drive revenue through sales & marketing

    The Year of WE: Drive revenue through sales & marketing

    People & Teams

    Turning chaos into confetti

    We’ve made it through the first month of the new year, and it’s time to seriously consider how we’ll be focusing our 2023 energy. Of course, a great way to look forward is first to reflect on where we’ve been.

    And as I consider 2022, I realize that the last 360-something days seem to have been all about three redundant trends:

    • The global office exodus
    • The rather curious “new normal”
    • The dreaded, ever-looming burnout

    I mean really—how many articles have you bumped into over the past year on Recovering from Burnout? Or How to Return to the Office? Or How to Navigate Working from Home while Avoiding a Return to Office Burnout?

    From where I sit—in my cozy home office in California with my corgi, Lulu, curled up next to my feet—none of these trends was new news. In fact, as founder and CEO of Summit Strategy, I spent the last year gathering a team of experts who know how to work happily (and effectively) from home; who collaborate cross-functionally with ease (long before it was deemed new or normal); and who have long ago overcome the kind of burnout one experiences from being overworked and undervalued. And if we’re being honest, nothing in business (or in life) is ever static—all of us at Summit have had to recover, return, and navigate multiple times throughout our lives.

    In fact, as I write this, I’m thinking about the fact that the most successful professionals probably experience about as many human iterations as an iPhone. We’re no strangers to challenges. But the silver lining of experiencing hardships and setbacks is gaining resilience, determination, and patience. And let’s not forget the sustainable power of humor almost every hour of every day these past few years! Despite all the drama, I’ve laughed more than I’ve cried. Heck, I’ve turned chaos into confetti.

    And here’s how:

    I’ve cracked the code to happiness AND running a successful business (Spoiler alert—RFPIO is part of that combination!).

    Integrated marketing + proposals for sales and marketing efficiency

    Here’s the deal: For many business-to-business and business-to-government (B2B/B2G) professional service enterprises, separating marketing and sales teams is a common practice, but it’s also an outdated method that hurts companies. Several years ago, it occurred to me that businesses can make the most of their marketing and sales efforts by bringing the two functions together—although most don’t, either because of perceived pitfalls or because of the fatal “we’ve always done it this way” mentality.

    Summit Strategy was conceived primarily to help small businesses win work with government agencies and commercial businesses by combining marketing and sales strategies. Helping the small business community is our company’s “why,” and we bolster small businesses through an integrated approach of marketing acumen plus proposal proficiency. We also serve various clients who are leaders in state, local, municipal, and commercial markets and who seek to pivot and expand into the federal government. Leveraging our decades of experience in those federal markets, my team coaches; helps develop business strategies; determines agencies to target; fosters meaningful relationships with primes so clients can boost their past performances; and, eventually, facilitates our clients’ pursuit of contracts as a prime (whew!).

    Summit’s approach brings coherence to the complex and otherwise fragmented methods that typically characterize marketing. We align and coordinate the delivery of a consistent, seamless, customer-centric experience across channels using curated content as the vehicle. And since content is the common currency in every market (no matter the industry), integrating marketing and RFX response increases operational efficiency and drives positive outcomes through collaboration.

    In 2022 (our first full year of business), Summit helped more than 50 clients overcome developmental blocks, build competitive advantages, improve performance, and drive their business growth. How? Largely through maximizing employee and team resilience with tools like RFPIO!

    So what’s the connection for revenue teams?

    Remember when I said that nothing in business or in life is ever static? Well, if you’ve ever worked on response proposals or if you’re reading this blog through the lens of a marketer, you know your company’s content is one of the things that’s never static. Tending to content is like tending a garden, isn’t it? You go through the process of getting it to grow (composing), then you weed out the ineffective or outdated stuff (editing), then you send it out into the world and test its effectiveness (harvesting and consuming), and then the process starts mostly all over again. Content requires constant change, especially for sales teams and marketers.

    RFPIO knows that for many companies, the intersection where marketing content meets the field organization is the request for proposal (RFP). Like Summit, the experts at RFPIO realized that great marketers use the RFP response process (proposals!) to ensure their sales teams are equipped with the latest and best marketing content—even technical writing—thereby reducing the need to call upon a subject matter expert every single time. In fact, one simple and extraordinarily effective way to curate, manage, and share content is through a collaborative proposal response process.

    When content is stored within a centralized content library (think of it like your greenhouse!), you can compare and assess its effectiveness based on what really matters—things like business development data and capture/win rates. Strategic response management software with an intelligent, centralized content library, like RFPIO, allows you to collect and assess metrics in ways that enable marketing and sales teams to learn the effectiveness of various messages, helping shape future content and strategy.

    We’ve found that a content depot becomes an increasingly valuable asset for our clients over time. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time our clients respond to an RFP or each time they launch a new marketing campaign, teams can visit their content library and draw from the most powerful content. The best part? They can also work collaboratively (and cross-functionally with teams outside their organization) no matter where they are in the world!

    Ain’t no mountain high enough

    Look, starting a company was never easy-peasy. Even on a good day, it’s powerfully humbling. But I’ve built a successful business with an enviable ethos—my team and I work hard to ensure people want to work with us and for us. In the world of B2B and B2G, there really ain’t no mountain high enough to keep us from creating winning proposals and marketing campaigns.

    If the last year has taught us anything it’s that work environments will continue to shift and change, so a positive team spirit is essential for sustainable viability. Integrating marketing and proposals—and leveraging collaborative software like RFPIO—makes the work we do potent and fulfilling. Our clients are happy because we save them time and resources. And my team is happy because they get to work collaboratively (happily and with ease), across time zones, in ways that are meaningful and lasting. We know there’s always another summit to climb, and we’re up for the adventure.

    Visit me on LinkedIn.

     

     

    What is proposal management?

    What is proposal management?

    Productivity

    I often say that proposal management is like baking a cake. Alright, that might not be the most original thought, but when you bake a cake, you expertly pull together diverse ingredients, typically from multiple sources. Then, you add your skill and flair to create a gorgeous and delicious pastry.

    Proposal management is about pulling together diverse people and information, typically from multiple sources, adding skill and flair to create a compelling and persuasive sales document. Fortunately, at least in my case, a well-baked proposal will add to the bottom line instead of, well, you get the idea.

    Proposals are generally either a response to a request for proposal (RFP) or from a salesperson whose customer wants well-defined information, usually including pricing, onboarding or logistical details, company information, and so on.

    The objectives of proposal management

    The primary objective of proposal management is to help drive more sales. More specifically, the process objectives include:

    • Determining the right opportunities
      • Is the bid winnable based on similar past projects?
      • Can you fulfill the customer’s needs?
      • Is the request consistent with your company’s business objectives?
      • Can the response nurture brand awareness?
    • Selecting the right team – A typical response team might include a proposal manager, writer, editor, and a team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The SMEs, and frankly, the whole team, can come from any department in the company as long as their expertise aligns with the request.
    • Crafting a quality response – Proposal management is just one of the places where sales and marketing intersect. It’s vital that the response represents the company in the best possible light, adhering to the company voice and tone while providing incentives for the customer to buy.
    • Meeting customer expectations – Submit your well-crafted proposal within the allotted timeline and in the customer’s preferred form

    The necessity of proposal management

    If I were to describe a proposal management process with a single word, it would be consistency. Oh wait, maybe I mean accountability. Perhaps there isn’t a single word to describe proposal management, but the consistency and accountability that come from having a proposal management process generate benefits that resonate throughout your organization. Some of those benefits include:

        • Increased productivity – Productivity is perhaps the essential goal of a proposal management system. When you design a repeatable process, you can start right in on your response rather than reinventing the wheel each time you receive a request.
        • Better collaboration – A well-designed proposal management process helps form a team of allies, even in a remote or distributed environment.
        • Streamlined workflow – Project management is a core part of a proposal management system. Track your project’s and stakeholders’ progress to ensure on-time delivery.
        • A single source of truth – Another critical component of a proposal management system is consolidating and continuously auditing your company’s records, documents, and previous proposal question-answer pairs. Democratization of your content library puts knowledge into the hands of everyone who needs it.
        • Greater revenue – The more winnable proposals you produce, the more revenue you will generate.

    Eight elements of brilliant proposal management

    If you’re a proposal manager, you might feel pulled in many directions simultaneously. A brilliant proposal management system will help you maintain a manageable cadence while improving results.

    If you run a sales team, you know that proposals are necessary for any significant sale. The same proposal management system will enable your team to drive more revenue while using fewer resources.

    There are several key features of a brilliant proposal management system, and they include:

        • Project management
        • Automation
        • AI
        • Collaboration
        • Content management
        • Eliminating paper
        • Knowledge sharing
        • Insights and analytics

    Project management

    A proposal manager has a lot of roles. When a proposal response system includes a robust project management platform, they’ll be able to track the team’s and project’s progress and manage their own time more efficiently.

    Automation

    There is a lot of redundancy in a proposal response. In fact, as many as 80 percent of questions on an RFP have been asked by other customers and answered in different responses. An automated system acts as a librarian of sorts, directing you to the correct answers in moments.

    Additionally, automation facilitates better collaboration, helps you establish roles, and maintains brand consistency.

    AI

    Artificial intelligence is an end-to-end proposal response assistant. It can help you:

        • Leverage data to qualify RFPs in your go/no-go process.
        • Estimate how long the project will take
        • Break the project up into relevant sections
        • Auto-identify the response content
        • Assign the right questions to the right subject matter experts
        • Proofread the response
        • Enable an intelligent postmortem process through data analytics
        • Conduct regular content audits

    Collaboration

    Two-thirds of employees work from home at least sometimes. That number is expected to increase. More than half of organizations operate in silos. Communication silos cost the average team about 20 hours a month.

    Even when people call the same office home base, some, especially subject matter experts, might work on the road. It’s no wonder that collaboration tools are some of the fastest-growing software solutions.

    Simplify collaboration with a platform that provides access to all your stakeholders, no matter where they are.

    Content management

    The best way to prepare for the next RFP, even if you have no idea who it’s coming from or what it will ask, is to maintain a comprehensive content library. Store each question-answer pair as they are answered. Systematically audit your content to ensure it is up-to-date, valuable, usable, and regularly used.

    Eliminating paper

    The average RFP response is 132 pages long. You would be shocked, or maybe not, to learn how many companies still rely on analog, paper-intensive procurement and response processes. That could cost a typical midsized organization more than around $1,500 per year in paper alone.

    Of course, there are the environmental costs of chopping down trees and processing and shipping the paper. Then, when it’s time, there’s the cost of shredding out-of-date paper.

    Next-day shipping on a single paper response averages between $50 and $80, with an annual cost of around $18,700.

    Electronic submissions are nearly carbon neutral and usually free.

    Knowledge sharing

    Eighty-one percent of organizations see content as a core business strategy. Ninety-one percent of employees experience knowledge-sharing challenges. Employees spend about 11 percent of their time, or nearly six weeks a year, searching for or re-creating information. Executives lose even more time.

    Collaboration is vital, but when company knowledge is withheld from people who work remotely or in other departments, it doesn’t do anyone much good. A brilliant proposal management system uses collaborative tools and artificial intelligence to help democratize knowledge.

    Insights and analytics

    Sherlock Holmes once said, “It’s a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” That statement is even more current today, 100 and some odd years after Arthur Conan Doyle invented the fictional detective.

    Accurate and well-presented insights and analytics help you determine whether to respond to an RFP. The data helps create company buy-in for establishing and maintaining a response process. It demonstrates your win-loss rate, the amount of revenue you’re generating, the types of bids you win, the quality of your content library, and so on.

    Who is responsible for proposal management?

    Organizations tend to approach proposal management very differently. Some organizations have dedicated proposal managers, while in others, salespeople manage their own proposals. Some proposal managers are technical writers, while others write for their marketing teams.

    Enterprise organizations might have a dozen or more people working on each proposal, while small and medium companies might have just one or two. Obviously, that seems to put small and medium-sized companies at a disadvantage, but we’ll get into how they can overcome the apparent shortcoming in a moment.

    The RFP response team

    An RFP response team consists of everyone involved in the response process. The roles might include:

        • A proposal manager – The proposal manager is the project manager. They’re responsible for overseeing the entire operation.
        • A capture (or sales) manager – A capture manager provides the sales expertise to an RFP response.
        • Proposal writers – Proposal writers are responsible for using the art of storytelling to address customer needs and accurately answer each question.
        • Proposal editors – Proposal editors check each response for errors and typos while ensuring that it matches the brand’s voice.
        • Subject matter experts – Subject matter experts aren’t typically permanent parts of proposal teams. Proposal managers might ask for SME expertise from any department, including finance, sales, product, IT, HR, fulfillment, onboarding, customer service, and so on.
        • Graphic artist – Almost no one likes to read through dense pages of technical details and statistics, which is why it’s vital to break your proposals up with some colorful graphics. Bring in a graphic designer to add charts and images to make your proposal more readable.

    Proposal manager

    Your company’s proposal manager is responsible for overseeing everything that’s proposal-related. They are project managers, librarians, and historians. They’re writers, editors, and sales enablement experts. Some are salespeople, and some are even graphic designers.

    Once a company has agreed that an RFP aligns with company abilities or goals, it’s the proposal manager’s job to keep the response train on the track. They ensure that everyone is meeting their deadlines and that their work is accurate and professional. Then, it’s the proposal manager’s job to oversee the final product before submitting it before the deadline.

    When the proposal is safely in the customer’s hands, the proposal manager should enter each new piece of company information into their knowledge base. Then, they should supervise periodic knowledge base audits.

    The challenges of proposal management

    Most large business deals require proposals, which means that proposal managers are vital to achieving company revenue goals. Dedicated proposal managers understand the challenges of their jobs, and hopefully, they’ve established systems to address the challenges before they become problems. That’s not always the case, however.

    Here are some of the challenges that full- and part-time proposal managers face:

    Company buy-in

    Do you ever feel a little like you’re whistling in the wind at work? You know you need processes for timely and accurate responses. You know you need the cooperation of subject matter experts, but finding support is a challenge. Buy-in from executives and other key stakeholders is critical for a successful response management process.

    Consistency

    One of the key factors in an effective system of any kind is repeatability. For example, your proposal go/no-go process should be nearly identical from one RFP to another, even though each process might yield different results. Your collaboration, writing, editing, and design process should look very similar to your last response, even though the two responses might be very different.

    Quality responses

    Think of each response as a marketing document. It should look as polished as your website or any other asset.

    Take the opportunity to tell compelling stories highlighting how your company will meet the customer’s needs. Be sure to include graphics and other images to break up dense copy. Edit each document for accuracy, character counts (if there are limits), and grammatical errors.

    Submitting your proposals on time (or early)

    When a proposal is due at midnight on Tuesday, it’s due at midnight on Tuesday. Don’t shrug your shoulders, assuming no one will be in the office in the middle of the night to confirm. Customers pay attention to time stamps. Some customers give higher priority to early responses.

    Maintaining a knowledge library

    One of the most time- and resource-saving aspects of a quality proposal management system is a well-maintained knowledge library. In an ideal world, your knowledge library will house, in an easily accessible manner, every relevant piece of information from the day your company opened its doors to today. No one, including SMEs, wants to repeat answers.

    It’s a never-ending circle. Workers spend almost 20 percent of their time tracking down company knowledge. Employees are far less likely to share their knowledge when stored company knowledge is inaccurate or difficult to find. When that happens, workers spend even more time trying to find knowledge, at least until they throw their hands up in frustration.

    How RFPIO can help

    Building your proposal management system is a bit like building a house. The proposal manager coordinates the materials, hammers the nails, and decorates the home. RFPIO can provide the building plans and all the tools to help you overcome the challenges outlined above.

    Company buy-in

    Company buy-in is a top-down process. First, you must prove to executives that a system like RFPIO will improve your proposal management process and drive more revenue. Then, you need to show SMEs that by investing time in setting up the Content Library, they’ll save time in the future.

    RFPIO’s proven ROI is as high as 600 percent. Many customers reach a total return on investment in less than a year. RFPIO’s advanced analytics provide the data executives want.

    Introduce your SMEs to the Content Library. Show them that they have ownership over their content and that you’ll only call on them for clarification or answers they haven’t already provided. Review the content auditing features to ensure that regular content review cycles will require less work in the long run.

    Consistency

    RFPIO is a project management platform. It will provide the data to help with your go/no-go process, help you assign tasks, and track progress. Its built-in integrations with the most popular communication, productivity, and customer relationship management apps help keep everyone together, even if they aren’t physically together.

    Maintaining your Content Library

    RFPIO will track your review cycles and remind you when it’s time to look at a document or answer or when a record approaches its shred-by date.

    Quality responses

    I already mentioned that RFPIO’s auto-response feature could answer up to 80 percent of an RFP’s questions with marketing-approved content. That means more time to craft an accurate, competitive, and genuinely compelling response.

    Submitting your proposals on time (or early)

    RFPIO’s project management features help keep your project humming along and will remind you when each deliverable is due.

    About those small and medium-sized companies

    RFPIO can help you level the playing field by providing the same actionable insights, project management features, Content Library, and accessibility as enterprise organizations receive.

    *Next Action*

    RFPIO isn’t just an RFP response platform. It’s a powerful revenue generator. Schedule a free demo to see how we can help you win more bids and become more profitable.

    Proposal management resource guide

    Proposal management resource guide

    Products/Features/Solutions

    What do nearly all large sales have in common? OK, if you read this blog’s headline, it’s hardly a trick question.

    Whether a sale began through outbound sales or marketing efforts, inbound customer queries, or requests for proposals (RFPs), nearly all customers require written proposals before making a large purchase.

    Proposal management 101

    Proposal management is the process of completing a sales proposal or RFP response accurately, completely, engagingly, and on time. The process typically involves multiple parties, including subject matter experts (SMEs), writers, editors, and of course, a project (or proposal) manager.

    What does a proposal manager do?

    If you ask a proposal manager what they do, there’s a good chance they’ll respond with something like, “What don’t I do?”

    They wouldn’t be wrong. A proposal manager is part salesperson, part writer, part editor, and mostly the ringleader of a many-ringed circus. They are in charge of crafting winning proposals and creating and maintaining processes for today’s proposals, tomorrow’s, and next year’s.

    Create new RFP response processes

    At RFPIO, we gathered our current and past proposal managers to design a response process that’s logical, agile, and repeatable. The 8-step process builds on past wins and losses, perfection and errors, to help set you up for an increased win rate and higher profits.

    • Go/no-go – Not all requests for proposals (RFPs) are worthwhile. Can you meet the customer’s needs? Do their needs align with your company’s goals and objectives? Is the deal winnable?
    • Hold a kickoff meeting – Gather your response team to assign roles, responsibilities, and deadlines.
    • Pen the first draft – Most of an RFP’s questions are relatively standard. You can respond to as many as 80 percent of the queries with answers you’ve used before. Note that doing as much of the work as possible, without calling on SMEs’ valuable time, will go a long way toward fostering goodwill.
    • Pen the second draft – The second draft is where real collaboration comes in. Call upon your SMEs to help answer the last 20 percent or so of your document’s questions.
    • Review and revise – Check and recheck your proposal for accuracy, response quality, and spelling and grammatical errors. Make sure you’ve attached all relevant documents.
    • Submit your response – Submit your complete and polished reply on time, if not early.
    • Save and audit your response – Continue the goodwill you’ve established with your SMEs by saving their answers for future use.
    • Conduct a postmortem – Win or lose, gather your team to discuss what went well and what didn’t. Apply your newfound wisdom to future responses.

    Improve old RFP processes

    Congratulations on establishing a response process. You’d be surprised at how many companies play it by ear. Still, even the best RFP response needs some tweaking now and again.

    • Only go after what’s winnable – Even the best-defined go/no-go process is subject to human excitement. It might be tempting to go after that big sale, but if it’s a bad fit, the wasted work can deplete morale, and having to read through a response that doesn’t fit might cause resentment on the part of the customer.
    • Focus on content – Do you have a content library to store previous answers? Do you regularly audit your content library for use and accuracy?
    • Define roles and responsibilities – While you can’t predict which SMEs you might need to consult for your next RFP, you can establish your core response team. Then, when it’s time to call your team to action, you can involve the SMEs and further hone roles and responsibilities.
    • Get to know your key stakeholders – People’s work styles vary. Respect stakeholders’ preferred communication (RFPIO integrates with the most popular communication applications) and work styles.
    • Repeat – Make sure all your improvements are repeatable. For example, if you assign a designated editor to one response, assign one to all.

    Manage projects seamlessly

    A response manager is, first and foremost, a project manager. It’s their job to decide whether to pursue the sale and who should be part of the response, ensure everyone has their marching orders and meets their deliverables, and record each question-and-answer pair for future use.

    Project management software, especially that which is specifically designed for proposals, will help the proposal manager through each step of the project.

    Set the response team up for success

    One of the biggest challenges facing a proposal manager is coordinating groups of individuals who might work remotely, from different offices, and even in different time zones. Here’s how some of our customers bring out the best in their distributed response teams.

    • Focus on productivity – Some people thrive on 9-5 while others work best from 7-3 or even some time in the middle of the night. Naturally, team meetings should involve everyone, and deadlines might not comply with personal work styles, but when you let people work when they’re most productive, they’ll be…well…more productive.
    • Ask for help – Managing distributed workforces is nearly impossible without assistance from project management software. Strategic response management software such as RFPIO integrates with all of the most popular communication and productivity applications, enables project managers to set up tasks and checklists, and optionally enables access from anywhere there’s an internet connection.
    • Build connections – Teams are built from diverse personalities and work styles. Step away from work mode once a week or so and hold team-building meetings with fun themes to help bring out people’s personalities and create bonds.

    How to manage winning proposals

    While proposal managers are pulled in multiple directions, the primary goal is always to create winning proposals. Here’s how our proposal managers do it.

    Optimize the proposal management plan

    Many, if not most, proposal managers don’t have the luxury of designated proposal teams. In fact, their roles and responsibilities might vary. Many are part of a sales team, and a salesperson is often expected to oversee an RFP’s completion.

    Still, small companies without designated response teams or response managers can compete with enterprise companies by following a well-designed process.

    • Learn to say “no” – Small and medium-sized businesses (and even enterprise organizations) need to conserve resources, which means saying “no” to RFPs that are either unwinnable or unfulfillable.
    • Call for help – Most proposals require input from multiple parties. In other words, it’s more than OK to admit you can’t do everything alone. Call on your sales team and other SMEs to help you complete your proposal. Sales teams may not like responding to RFPs, but they should remember that they have tremendous revenue potential.

    Define team roles and responsibilities

    A response process should begin well before you receive your first request. You should have a regular team with backups in case someone is unavailable. Additionally, you should know your SMEs, their expertise, and, hopefully, their schedules.

    Once you receive an RFP, hold a kickoff meeting to clearly define every stakeholder’s role and responsibilities.

    Establish the building blocks of your proposals

    Response managers aren’t rewarded for originality. Their job is to win bids, and the most efficient way to do that is to reuse and recycle past content, or at least some of it.

    Establish proposal building blocks by utilizing and customizing resources such as white papers, internal training, boilerplate libraries, and so on. You can also pull content from previous proposals.

    Your recycled content is not generic and boilerplate, such as with a press release. Edit or add to it to suit your customer and the specific project.

    Once you’ve identified building blocks, store them in a shared folder, collaboration tool, local drive, or response management software.

    Organize knowledge systems

    Not long ago, companies stored their documents and much of their knowledge in metal boxes called file cabinets. Okay, yes, we all still know what file cabinets are, but we also know that they are highly inefficient for distributed and siloed workforces.

    A well-organized knowledge system enhances collaboration, breaks down silos, and boosts productivity. It also makes RFP response much faster and more efficient.

    Record your question-and-answer pairs after you submit each response, and regularly audit your content to ensure it’s valuable, current, and accurate.

    Format your deliverable correctly

    Your prospect won’t read your proposal.

    The last thing you want to hear, especially after spending hours, days, or even weeks crafting a beautifully written proposal, is that the customer won’t even read it.

    That doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time—far from it. A well-formatted proposal makes it easy for customers to find what they need quickly. Here are some tips:

    • Use the right font – Serif is the easiest to read.
    • Justify left – Justify on the left and use ragged formatting on the right.
    • Use portrait orientation – People are used to reading documents in portrait orientation.
    • Double space – Double spaces between sentences are easier to skim.
    • Limit paragraph and sentence length – More than 3-5 sentences per paragraph is overwhelming, as is more than 20 words per sentence.
    • Use graphics and images – Pictures break up dense text and make it much easier to follow.
    • Avoid reds, greens, and grays – Many people are color blind and can’t distinguish between reds and greens. Grays and other low-contrast colors are difficult to read.
    • Use headings – Headings and subheadings let readers know where to find the necessary information.
    • Define acronyms – You can use acronyms, but you should first define them. Request for proposal (RFP) is one example.
    • Avoid internal references – Don’t make your reader search with statements like “See question #18.” At the very least, summarize the answer and direct the reader to one that’s more detailed.
    • Include a table of contents – Many proposals are 100s of pages long. Prevent frustration by directing customers to what they are looking for.
    • Follow the 3:1 rule – Avoid the hard sell by referring to the prospective customer’s company about three times for every time you mention your company. This is especially important in executive summaries.
    • Proofread – Run your copy through a grammar checker to ensure correct punctuation and grammar.
    • Use a one-third/two-thirds layout – Use one-third of the page as a sidebar for relevant information, such as key metrics.
    • Standardize your formatting – Your stakeholders might have their own ways of working, which is fine, but be sure to bring their content into your standard formatting to create a cohesive style instead of a jarring “patchwork quilt” effect.
    • Use your customer’s logo (maybe) – If you have permission and a non pixelated, high-resolution logo that meets their branding guidelines, attach it to your proposal.
    • Include white space – Space your content so the pages aren’t too dense.

    Deliver an organized RFP response

    Your proposal should be skimmable, but it should also invite the reader to evaluate whether you can fulfill their needs. Write your proposal to draw the reader in and keep them with you.

    • Reassure the reader – As my grandmother often said, the devil is in the details. But if you want the reader to get to the details, you’ll have to reassure them that you know what they’re asking. Summarize the customer’s requirements very early in the document.
    • Detail each step – Lay the proposal out so the customer can follow the buyer and customer journey. Tell a story and avoid jargon.
    • Build your content library – Each proposal is an opportunity to add to your content library. In turn, your content library should hold a wealth of reusable information and documentation for future responses.
    • Use proposal management software – Your proposal management tools should help you manage the project, find relevant content, and standardize the proposal’s format.

    How to improve the proposal management process

    Now that you know what an excellent proposal management process looks like, the next step is implementation. Advanced RFP response software is designed to enhance, refine, and simplify your process, freeing you to produce more bids using fewer resources.

    Upgrade your content management

    RFP software helps you organize your ever-evolving content management system by letting you manage content by tagging it and assigning it to projects. With RFPIO, you can assign star ratings so your best content can rise to the top.

    You should also regularly audit your content for relevance, use, and accuracy.

    Leverage RFP management dashboards

    Track your project’s progress with an RFP response management dashboard that provides insights at a glance.

    Scale your response management process

    Some weeks you have one project on your plate, and others, three or more. RFPIO lets you scale to your needs by allowing unlimited user access with each project.

    Integrate AI into your proposal management solution

    Think of artificial intelligence (AI) as a team member that never tires and always has a great attitude. Leverage it to help you answer up to 80 percent of an RFP. It can also analyze the RFP to help you with the go/no-go process, analyze win-loss opportunities, and help perfect your formatting.

    Using proposal management software

    RFPs are becoming much more common than they were in the past, and mere humans have a tough time keeping up. Proposal management tools help organizations respond to more bids in less time.

    The advantages of bid proposal tools

    The best bid proposal tools are designed by proposal managers to help manage each of the eight steps in the response process. Streamline your process with the following:

    • Project management – Track each team member and workflow through project management.
    • Content management – A great content management system is more than a repository. It should leverage AI to point you to the most appropriate content and help keep the content library current.
    • Collaboration – It’s almost impossible to go it alone when creating a proposal, and there’s a good chance you don’t share office space with some of your teammates. Today’s bid proposal software should include powerful collaboration tools.
    • Integrations – Most organizations use customer relationship management software, communication software, project management software, and others. Advanced bid proposal tools integrate with most of the tools you already use.
    • Business intelligence and analytics – Use insights to help determine what you can do differently in the future.

    Selecting proposal management software

    We consider a few features essential when looking for software to help with proposal management.

    • Import/export capabilities – You might receive an RFP in a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or even a PDF. Look for software that lets you import the document into a standardized platform that your team knows and then exports it into the customer’s preferred format.
    • Content management – Look for an intuitive single source of truth for all of your company knowledge and documents.
    • Integrations – Your proposal management platform should enhance your existing tech stack, not weigh it down. Look for software that integrates with the tools you already use.
    • AI assistance – Intelligent software points you to the best content, does much of the work for you, assigns questions to SMEs, and analyzes past responses and future opportunities.

    Streamlined proposal management with RFPIO

    RFPIO is mission-critical software for companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Zoom, Visa, and many, many more. Its advanced proposal management features include:

    • Import/export capabilities – Import each document from your customer’s preferred format onto your desired working template. From there, export the finished document back to the customer’s format before submitting the proposal.
    • Content management – RFPIO offers the industry’s most advanced AI-based content management system. It will answer as much as 80 percent of your document and help you keep your library free from ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial content).
    • Integrations – RFPIO seamlessly integrates with more than two dozen of the most popular business applications.
    • AI assistance – RFPIO’s continually-learning AI tool helps you maintain and utilize your content library and generate analytics to help you win more bids and demonstrate value to executives.

    Case study

    TeamDynamix, a cloud-based IT Service Management and Project Portfolio Management platform, has seen a 300 percent increase in RFP volume over the last three years. When shopping for software to address the rise in volume, they looked for scalability and efficiency.

    With RFPIO, TeamDynamix met the 3x increase and reduced turnaround time by about 40 percent, allowing them time to perfect each response and maintain consistency.

    Hop on a free demo to see how RFPIO can help you win more bids and boost revenue with fewer resources.

     

    RFP response management resource

    RFP response management resource

    Product & Best Practices

    You may have heard the adage that 80 percent of a company’s business comes from 20 percent of its customers. Many call these big customers “whales.”

    Whether or not that number holds true for your company, big-ticket sales are the holy grail for any business. While sales teams would love their whale customers to click “buy” on their website and call it a deal, large purchases require time and due diligence on the buyer’s part and at least an equal amount of effort on the seller’s part.

    Requests for proposals (RFPs) precede most large purchases and they specifically outline the customers’ requirements and goals and define the bidding process and desired contract terms. A typical RFP could have 100s to 1,000s of questions.

    If that sounds like a lot, I’m not going to lie; it is. Strategic RFP response management requires expertise from multiple stakeholders across the organization, a tightly coordinated set of deliverables, and an excellent wordsmith or two.

    Now for the good news.

    The right RFP response management processes help make short work of creating winning proposals.

    This blog post will show you how to create timely, accurate, and compelling proposals by establishing systematic response processes and hopefully land more whales.

    Understanding RFP management

    RFP management, at least from the vendor side, is the process of organizing and responding to requests for proposals. Of course, that definition is simplistic. RFP response management is about choosing whether an RFP is worth a response and coordinating subject matter experts (SMEs), stakeholders, deadlines and deliverables, and a postmortem.

    A typical RFP response includes:

    • A cover letter – Much like when you apply for a job, and perhaps even more so, a cover letter is an opportunity to shine beyond the document’s limitations. It may include information that shows you know what they need, how your company can address those needs, and maybe a little flattery, or at least a statement demonstrating that you’d like to work with them.
    • An executive summary – An executive summary dives deeper than a cover letter. It might show how you plan to address the customer’s needs, competitive differentiators, and why your company is an expert.
    • An implementation plan – This is usually part of the questionnaire. The implementation plan is about how you will meet customer needs, including timelines, onboarding and customer service team members, and so on.
    • Terms of the deal – This section details the costs, postimplementation support, and a contract. Note that the customer may not sign that particular contract, but it will show them the terms and conditions.
    • References – Potential customers want to know that you have a track record of meeting similar needs to theirs. Include at least a couple of references from a similar industry, size, or type of product or service.

    The Response management process

    Do you want to know my favorite part of a great RFP response management process? Cheating. As a matter of fact, cheating is encouraged, if not the only way, to respond effectively.

    Below is the RFP process created by our response experts. You’ll get to the cheating part in step three, but please don’t skip steps one and two.

    Step one – Should you bid or should you (no-)go?

    Not all RFPs align with your business’s goals or capabilities. It’s okay to choose not to respond to an RFP that you probably won’t or might not want to win.

    Step two – Hold a kickoff meeting

    The most critical part of an RFP process comes before you ever receive an RFP. You should know your stakeholders and have a list of subject matter experts (SMEs) with their areas of expertise and availability.

    Once you do receive the RFP, call a meeting with your SMEs, writers, editors, and others involved in the project. Fill them in on their roles, responsibilities, and deliverable deadlines.

    Step three – First draft

    Step three is almost fun, at least it should be if you have an up-to-date content and document library. Let the library do much of the work for you by responding to the questions you’ve seen before with its stored question-and-answer pairs.

    Step four – Second draft

    Depending on the age and health of your content library, you might arrive at step four with 80 percent of the work already done. Now is the time to roll up your sleeves and answer the rest of the questions. You will probably need to involve your SMEs.

    Step five – Review and revise

    When attempting to convey that your product or service is the best for the buyer’s needs, your RFP response should be perfect. Are your answers, including those from the content library, accurate and well-written? Are there any typos or grammatical errors?

    Step six – Submit the response

    Your response is polished and perfect and hopefully on time, if not early. Submit it as soon as it’s ready and wait for a receipt.

    Step seven – Save and audit the responses

    Your RFP response contains valuable information that is certain to be useful for future RFPs. Set yourself up for success by auditing your new responses and storing those with value in your content library.

    Step eight – Postmortem

    Even if you’ve answered every question with relevant and beautifully worded responses, your company’s product or service is a perfect match for the buyer, and even if you won the bid, you should always take a moment to assess what went right and what went wrong.

    Perhaps you find a bottleneck in your process or rely too heavily on a particularly busy SME who’s understandably slow to respond. Addressing those or other problems before the next project will help you prevent those issues from undermining your subsequent response.

    The challenges of response management

    Response management is challenging. Even the best response teams need help. Heck, even our response management teams need help. Here are some roadblocks you might encounter:

    • Lack of time – It can take days or even weeks to respond to an RFP. RFP software can cut that time in half or better.
    • Strict deadlines – An RFP deadline is pretty much set in stone. A slow internet connection can mean the difference between winning and losing a deal. Try to submit your proposal early to avoid unforeseen delays.
    • Disorganized content library – A well-maintained knowledge base will save you days on a typical response. A poorly maintained knowledge repository will force stakeholders to search for answers and annoy SMEs, who might have to repeat themselves.
    • Siloed and distributed workforces – RFP response is collaborative by definition. When stakeholders are spread throughout the organization and even the world, let’s just say that herding cats seems like a comparative breeze. A great RFP response platform should have its own collaboration tools and work with your existing ones.
    • Security risks – When a company suffers a data breach, it affects customer confidence and the bottom line. Be sure your RFP response platform has strict security protocols.

    How to manage RFP responses

    Perhaps repeatability is the ultimate sign of a great process—or is it agility?

    Imagine attempting to scale Mount Everest without a guide. An experienced guide knows all the well-worn trails and how to respond to changing conditions. Responding to an RFP is far less perilous than climbing Everest, but the principles are the same.

    Optimize time management with automation

    Your SMEs are some of the busiest people in your organization. Respect your stakeholders’ time by letting your process do most of the work. RFPIO leverages artificial intelligence to guide you to the correct answers to an RFP’s questions.

    Scale your response management process

    Response resource needs are tough to predict. One response might need dozens of stakeholders, while another might only need a few. You might have one RFP on your plate this week, but next week three more will appear.

    Too few user licenses might force you to ignore some RFPs, while too many are a waste. RFPIO doesn’t have user licenses. Our scalable platform enables you to assign the exact personnel you need for each response without it affecting your team’s budget.

    Upgrade your content management approach

    A well-maintained content management system allows you to access company history, documents, hiring procedures, financial information, and much more. It also protects your SMEs’ time by ensuring they won’t have to repeat past answers.

    Regularly audit your content management system to ensure that everything is accurate and up to date.

    Facilitate collaboration

    RFP response management is a team effort. If your company is anything like RFPIO, you have SMEs and other stakeholders distributed worldwide. Even if not, pinning people down for in-person meetings is a challenge.

    RFPIO enhances collaboration either directly through the project management platform or any of its third-party integration partners, such as Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, and so on.

    Employ branded response templates

    Add the final sheen to your polished and perfected response with branded response templates tailored to your organization.

    What is knowledge management?

    Knowledge management is about capturing, storing, organizing, maintaining, and generally managing all of the information that is valuable enough for a company to keep. That might include incorporation papers, financial statements, hiring policies, product information, customer details, and so on.

    Effective knowledge management also includes regular audits to ensure all the information is current and relevant. It should also flag records for disposal according to “shred by” regulations. Ideally, all knowledge should be easily accessible to those who need it.

    Improving RFP knowledge management

    Organizations and their employees lose a lot of time to improper knowledge management. An IDC study found that employees spend an average of 14 hours a week trying to locate data. A McKinsey survey found that searchable knowledge bases can reduce that time spent by as much as 35 percent.

    RFPIO’s Content Library helps organizations improve their RFP (and companywide) knowledge management by providing a repository for all their company content and documentation in an easily accessible and highly-searchable, thanks to machine learning, single source of truth.

    Scale organizational content

    I like to shop. Perhaps you do too. As we both know, if we keep bringing new items into our homes without clearing out the old, we’ll soon overflow and might have trouble locating our favorite comfy sweaters.

    Just as we occasionally need to clean out our drawers and closets, a well-organized knowledge management approach needs regular content auditing to ensure accuracy, relevancy, and timeliness. RFPIO helps you make data-driven decisions when streamlining and scaling your content library.

    Conduct regular review cycles by turning to RFPIO to identify the content you use and the content you don’t. Additional reporting metrics include answer accuracy and who is using the content.

    Remember, RFPIO’s unlimited user model lets you engage maintenance help from any team member.

    Centralize your content library

    You might have a distributed and siloed workforce, but a centralized content library consolidates and democratizes your organization’s knowledge base.

    Future-proof your knowledge base

    Your needs today look very different from your needs tomorrow. You can help future-proof your knowledge base by performing regular audits.

    RFPIO gently reminds you when it’s time for your scheduled Content Library audit, ensuring that your content is accurate and current. The more often you issue new product features or releases, the more you should audit your content.

    Another often overlooked component of future-proofing is creating a succession plan. Sure, you might plan on staying with your company until retirement, but perhaps you’ll receive a job offer you can’t refuse or simply choose to take a vacation.

    Make sure you have a plan in place in your absence, which includes training others on the content library, including familiarizing them with tagging practices, and so on.

    Choosing response management software

    Maximizing your response output without adding employees will likely require help from a response management software. What are the key components of advanced response management software?

    RFP management software: essential features

    When assessing available software, look for the following:

    • Import/export capabilities – RFPs arrive in multiple formats, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and sometimes even PDFs. Advanced response software lets you import from any of the most commonly used formats, work within your familiar platform, and export into the buyer’s format.
    • Content management – Access all your stored question-and-answer pairs with a few clicks. Better yet, advanced response software leverages machine learning to help you find the correct answers fast and do most of the work for you.
    • Integrations – Response software should work within your existing applications to foster ultimate productivity and collaboration.
    • Artificial intelligence – Access automated answers, track progress, and generate reports using advanced AI.

    How a response management platform can support your revenue team

    The same features that facilitate response management help enable sales. Most large sales include proposals and documents such as due diligence and security questionnaires. RFPIO seamlessly integrates with sales enablement, CRM, and vendor assessment tools.

    Increase your win rate with RFPIO

    Respond to more RFPs, and boost your win rate without adding personnel by leveraging RFPIO’s advanced response software.

    Case study

    RFPIO helped a human resources organization double its win rate thanks to the Content Library. Before RFPIO, their teams spent most of their time searching for answers to questions they’d answered before.

    For those answers they did have stored, they’d often find themselves correcting errors directly in the proposal rather than in the system, meaning the mistakes were being passed down to future responses. RFPIO made it easy to store, find, and correct answers within the system, saving hours on each response, while the professional responses helped significantly boost the win rate.

    See how RFPIO can help you build better bids and increase your win rate by taking us for a test drive.

    Response management software FAQs

    • What is an RFP? – Businesses, nonprofits, and governmental agencies issue requests for proposals when seeking bids for large purchases.
    • Who owns the response management process? – Response management ownership depends on a company’s organizational structure. Some have dedicated response management teams, and in others, sales personnel might own the process.
    • Do manual response processes work? – Manual response processes do work. However, they are inefficient and have trouble keeping up with growing needs.
    • What kind of organizations issue RFPs? – Any type of organization can issue RFPs.
    • How does artificial intelligence help the response process? – I will let data scientists and software developers debate whether AI is actually more intelligent than human brains (I’m team human, at least for now), but it is undeniably faster. It can find relevant responses within seconds, while humans might take minutes or more.
    • How many users can RFPIO support at one time? – RFPIO is a project-based platform rather than user-based. Go ahead and assign as many users as you need.
    • Does RFPIO integrate with other business applications? – RFPIO seamlessly integrates with more than two dozen of the most popular business applications.
    • Is RFPIO secure? – RFPIO offers best-in-class security protocols and is trusted by highly secure tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Visa, Facebook, and far more.
    RFP response resource guide

    RFP response resource guide

    Selling & Enablement

    If you ask any salesperson about their ideal lead, you’ll likely hear that the perfect prospect is a confirmed buyer with clearly identified needs and pain points.

    Hmmm, that sounds an awful lot like companies that issue RFPs.

    An RFP, or Request for Proposal, is a document issued by buyers seeking bids for products or services. Every RFP includes a detailed description of the customer’s needs, and unless someone pulls a plug somewhere, the ultimate goal is to buy.

    Confirmed buyer ✅
    Needs and pain points clearly identified ✅

    If that’s not enough to demonstrate the value of RFPs, here are a few statistics:

    Still, most companies see RFPs as nuisances, which shows in their work. More than half of customers say the RFP responses they receive are sloppy and riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.

    So, when did these enormous revenue-generating opportunities become the business equivalent of pop quizzes that no one studied for?

    What is an RFP response?

    RFPs and proposals are often confused. An RFP is a request from a potential customer that goes to multiple vendors. Depending on the request, an RFP generally asks for a proposal, which includes pricing, product or project details, information about the bidders’ companies, deliverables, and so on.

    RFX is the parent category of several types of response request. Some examples include RFQs, or requests for quotes, which means the customer wants to see the pricing and little else.

    Another is the RFI, which is a more formal way of collecting information. Often, companies use RFIs to create preferred vendor shortlists and may pair them with RFPs.

    An RFP asks for things found in both RFQs (pricing) and RFIs (information). So the RFP is like a combo of the RFQ and the RFI. Many people use RFP as a more general term instead of RFX.

    Components of an RFP response

    The components of an RFP vary. However, first and foremost, it starts with what the customer wants. The document may ask for the following:

    • Answers to the questions asked
    • Sample contracts
    • Financials
    • Quotes or a cost estimate

    RFP response examples

    RFP proposals are sales documents, but that doesn’t mean you can send a customer a bunch of sales collateral with a price quote and call it a proposal.

    If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone who endlessly talks about themselves, you know how annoying that can be. It’s the same with RFP response. Instead of responding with boilerplate answers about what you can do for the customer, take the effort to learn about them and how you can best partner with them.

    And while you’re thinking about your prospect, the response should be organized and readable. You don’t want a customer to have to work to find answers. Instead, they want to be able to easily compare competing proposals from bidders.

    Even though it might be more laborious on your part to put the response in the format they request, they’re asking that format for a reason, and not complying could take you out of the running.

    The ideal proposal tells a compelling and engaging story for the reader. It’s informative and inclusive of the customer’s needs. A well-written response will stand out, as will a disorganized one that lacks thought and effort.

    An RFP response typically should include the following:

    • Cover letter – Explain the type of information that is included in the proposal
    • Executive summary – Summarize the proposal and why the customer should choose your company
    • The response – Answer the RFP’s questions
    • Additional information – Include applicable case studies, company history, your recommendations, etc.
    • Attachments – Include exhibits, documents, samples, reports, contracts

    For more specific examples, read here.

    How to respond to a request for proposal

    An effective RFP response is never haphazard. Like any project, it should be organized with clear deliverables and stakeholder assignments. Strategic response management software such as RFPIO takes much of the work off the response manager’s shoulders by documenting and clarifying responsibilities and integrating with existing tools such as Salesforce, Slack, and dozens more.

    Of course, project management software is a time- and resource-saving tool, but it can’t replace human beings. A systematic and organized response management system should include these human-managed steps:

    Step 1 – Determine whether you are the right fit

    It might be tempting to respond to every RFP, regardless of whether your company’s solution is the best fit. For example, the prospect may need a product or service only a large enterprise company can provide. In that case, why waste your resources and risk the chance of wasting your prospect’s time?

    This isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule. RFPIO’s CEO and co-founder, Ganesh Shankar, recently spoke with another CEO whose company strategically responded to RFPs they knew they wouldn’t win as a way to get their brand in front of the customer for future needs and to strengthen existing relationships. The keyword here is “strategic.” Perhaps coordinate with your marketing department to determine the best approach to brand awareness.

    Step 2 – Set up your process

    Your subject matter experts (SMEs) are vital to your RFP response process. However, if you have yet to choose your SMEs before the RFP is in your hand, you will use up time finding the person in your company that holds the answer. Remember that the clock begins ticking the moment you receive the document.

    According to many of the RFPIO customers I speak to on a regular basis, timelines are getting shorter and shorter each year. Companies expect faster turnaround times. You should know your process before receiving your RFP.

    While RFPs vary, there are certain elements you will almost always see. For example, you will likely see questions about your company’s overview, history, product or service features, and so on. Know who you can rely on to answer your standard questions, or better yet, have the answers to these questions in your Content Library, so your SMEs will only have to review existing information.

    Step 3 – Break down the components

    In school we were told that “on time is late and early is better.” It’s the same with RFP response. A late response will almost always be discounted, but beyond that, it could sour the customer to your company for future opportunities.

    A late response might cause a customer to question whether you value them and wonder whether you can meet your promises if you win the bid.

    An RFP may be hundreds or even thousands of pages long. You must have a complete picture of what is requested and how you should approach it. You should first determine your timeline and work backward from there. Assign team roles, responsibilities, and timelines by breaking down the components.

    Step 4 – Determine what you’ll need to include

    Once you have determined your timeline, it’s time to determine what the customer is asking for.

    • How do they want the response to be formatted?
    • What questions do they need answered?
    • What exhibits or attachments do they need?
    • What additional information, such as financial statements or contracts, do they want to see?

    How to improve the RFP response process

    Workplace processes have never been more advanced. Messaging apps have all but replaced, or at least minimized, the use of email and phones. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms track customer interactions from initial lead through their entire lifecycle. Project management software turns distributed and siloed workforces into collaborative teams.

    Why? Well, automation works.

    • 89% of companies report that their businesses grew last year, thanks to automation.
    • 92% say that automation frees employees to focus on more critical and complex tasks.
    • About one-third of businesses report achieving a 100% or more ROI in the very first year after investing in automation.

    Unfortunately, companies still need to prioritize automating their response processes.

    • 84% of companies use inefficient RFP processes.
    • 44% of proposal managers use no response software.

    That’s not to say software is required for an efficient response process, but it certainly helps–a lot. Nor does RFP software replace jobs; it simply enables employees to focus on generating revenue.

    Automate manual tasks

    As I said, RFP software isn’t out to steal anyone’s job, but you know those annoying manual tasks like chasing people down for their deliverables or trying to keep track of which documents and question and answer pairs need reviewing? Automation takes care of that for you.

    If you are a response manager or oversee a response department, you have a lot of control over what’s automated and what’s not. In a moment, we’ll discuss the sorts of tasks you might consider automating. But first, what are the goals of an efficient response process?

    The goals of an efficient process include the following:

    • Automating manual tasks
    • Keeping content up to date and accurate
    • Optimizing time management
    • Collaboration

    To reach those efficiency goals, consider automating:

    • Processes involving multiple stakeholders
    • Time-consuming tasks that don’t add value
    • Anything that might help with compliance
    • Anything you feel you are reinventing each time
    • Tools and templates
    • Answers to frequently asked questions

    Up-to-date content

    Let’s drill down a bit and talk about one of my favorite features of advanced response automation, the Content Library.

    Depending on how long your company has been in business and how often you audit your content, you could have hundreds of thousands or more records–many, if not most, of which are never used.

    I get it. Reviewing content isn’t much fun. Fortunately, as with your home, once you do that deep clean most of the rest is just maintenance.

    So, where do you start? A regular review of content. My colleague and friend Monica Patterson recently published a super informative blog post on this topic, but in a nutshell:

    • Review the content you use the most – This step is relatively easy because most used content is generally up to date. However, you still want to run it by your SMEs, including every regularly reviewed Q&A pair, document, attachment, or exhibit.
    • Review the content you don’t use — Don’t automatically archive never used content. First, ensure it’s no longer relevant and doesn’t have customer-specific or periodic use.
    • Schedule regular maintenance reviews – Establish a regular cadence of looking at content, so you don’t have things that are so out of date that you have to find a new answer.

    Having the cadence that works best for your subject matter experts is essential, which means having a relationship with your SMEs to establish a mutually agreed-upon time. If not, it will cause them more work in the future.

    Optimize time management

    When you receive a massive RFP, it’s intimidating unless you optimize your time management plan in advance. RFP response time management tactics include:

    • Understanding the scope and timeline of the project
    • Determining who to ask for clarifications
    • Defining roles within your team and engaging SMEs
    • Repurposing and reusing content where applicable
    • Tracking and monitoring deliverables and time spent

    Better collaboration

    Response teams and sales teams have a whole lot in common. Every employee in your company should have the same goal: to make the company more profitable.

    But for revenue-generating departments, such as sales and RFX response, it’s all about winning business. Unfortunately, in many companies, the two departments are siloed. When responding to an RFP, it becomes even more challenging when the response team is siloed from the SMEs they need to consult.

    While collaboration is possible using email and communication tools, response project management is hardly their forte. Response software that contains collaboration tools allows response managers to track and review progress and content across multiple channels, ensuring accurate and timely responses.

    Key performance indicators for the RFP process

    Boards of directors, C-suites, and everyone else in leadership positions want to see quantifiable results. As for the RFP response process, they want to see:

    • The types of projects you work on
    • Time and resources spent
    • Time to completion
    • On-time and late submissions
    • Win rate

    Some KPIs don’t boil down to just numbers. To best measure the efficiency of your process, survey your team and implement a project post-mortem to identify areas where you can make improvements.

    How to choose RFP response software

    Before choosing software, take time to understand your process. If you don’t understand what you need, even the most advanced tool will not fulfill every requirement, and you could choose the wrong vendor. Look for agile, scalable software that seamlessly integrates with your existing sales enablement and communication tools.

    Make sure that the software company is flexible, listens to customer feedback, and does things with it.

    Why you need RFP software

    A shared Google or Word document doesn’t exactly lend itself to group collaboration. First, the document could have many pages, and a multiparty editing process is sloppy and difficult to track at best.

    In a siloed, distributed workforce, RFP software is a single place to go—a single source of truth. It enables you to gather answers to questions, exhibits, and documents. The software is a place where everyone sees the one correct answer. It’s also a place where everyone can work together without causing the RFP coordinator to pull their hair out.

    Essential features

    An advanced RFP response platform is a partner. It shares your goal of quantifiable and qualifiable results with the resources and bandwidth to manage multiple users and projects. Look for several features, including:

    • A content management system that serves as a single repository for all company knowledge and documents
    • End-to-end project management, including in-depth tracking capability/activity log
    • Response recommendation engine
    • Customizable analytics
    • Tech stack integrations
    • Scalability
    • Ability to import different formats
    • Ability to customize parameters

    RFPIO is your partner in proposal management. To accomplish what RFPIO does would require a full-time assistant 100% of the time, and that’s for just one RFP. Teams rarely have just one.

    Building response functionality onto sales enablement software would be very expensive and include features you probably won’t use. You want software for response teams and response management. RFPIO offers:

    • A best-in-class Content Library – A single company repository for Q&A pairs, company knowledge, documents, exhibits, and other attachments.
    • Advanced project management – Built-in analytics, advanced in-app collaboration tools, project tracking, role assignment, and clarification.
    • AI-powered Recommendation Engine– RFPIO leverages machine learning to recommend answers.
    • Integrations – RFPIO seamlessly integrates with more than two dozen of the most popular business applications, including Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Office, Hubspot, and more.
    • Scalability – RFPIO’s unique project-based pricing model fosters collaboration by providing access to unlimited stakeholders on each response. The system grows with your needs and scales back during slower times.
    • Ability to import different formats – With RFPIO, you can import from Word, Excel, other documents, and even PDFs.
    • Customizable parameters – Track project metrics in a way that makes sense to you, including by vertical, company size, product line, project type, project stage, number of questions, project value, and so on.

    Common challenges of the RFP response process

    RFP response involves a lot of moving pieces. RFP response is a collaborative process that requires input from multiple and diverse experts across the organization. Yet, more than half of companies work in silos.

    Additionally, not every company has dedicated SMEs, so you could be fighting competing priorities. And then there’s the good old problem of time. Timelines are getting shorter. Things pop up–like PTO, life in general, and, unfortunately, pandemics.

    You should also set aside time to update the content library; otherwise, you’ll spend more time in the RFP process, as it’s faster to validate content is accurate than to track down the SME and have them update content you know isn’t up-to-date.

    Then, of course, departments compete for their part of the annual budget, and sadly, some companies don’t want to, or can’t, invest in software for small teams, even though response teams pack powerful revenue-generating punches.

    Case study

    In my dealings, I’ve found that RFPIO is mission-critical software, but the proof is in the pudding. Celtra, a creative management platform organization, had a broken RFP response process. Their content was siloed, and workflow and collaboration needed optimization.

    The result was rushed responses and a poor success rate. After researching the response management industry, they chose to work with RFPIO. They found:

    • They value the support and educational content, especially around best practices.
    • They appreciate the industry-leading integrations and clean user interface.
    • Now they’re responding to twice as many RFPs in less than one-fourth the time with fewer than half the people.

    RFP FAQs

    If you have questions about RFPIO or the general response process, you can contact us anytime. Here are some of our most frequently asked questions:

    • What is an RFP? – Organizations issue requests for proposals (RFPs) to enlist bids for specific products or services from multiple vendors.
    • What is included in an RFP? – RFPs are highly detailed and contain in-depth project descriptions, background information, specific requirements, deadlines, and so on.
    • Why do organizations issue RFPs? – Organizations issue RFPs to obtain detailed bids to compare and contrast before purchasing.
    • Who responds to an RFP? – Responding to RFPs requires input from multiple stakeholders throughout an organization. Many organizations have dedicated response teams, while in others, sales teams steer the process.
    • How does RFP software help the process? – Advanced RFP software helps ensure quality and on-time response with time management capabilities, collaborative tools, tech stack integration, scalability, a flexible pricing structure, and a robust content library.
    • Does RFPIO work with our existing processes? – RFPIO seamlessly integrates with the most popular business applications, and our import/export capabilities ensure that both response teams and customers receive the format that works best for them.
    • Do we need to purchase multiple licenses? – RFPIO has a pricing structure that is rare among SaaS companies. Instead of a fixed number of licenses, RFPIO charges by active concurrent project, enabling access to unlimited users.
    • How secure is RFPIO? – I could bore you listing our security certifications and protocols, but let’s just say that our platform is secure enough for Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, and VISA.

    Optimize your RFP responses the RFPIO way

    Learn more about how your company can break down silos, effectively and efficiently manage time, and create a single source of truth in a platform that scales to your specific requirements without burdening your tech stack.

    Response management made simple

    Response management made simple

    Selling & Enablement

    When an organization seeks you out, it’s flattering. Your product or service is getting noticed. While everyone in your organization deserves tremendous kudos for the recognition, receiving an RFX is just the beginning.

    Responding to a request for proposal (RFP), request for information (RFI), request for quotation (RFQ), due diligence questionnaire (DDQ), security questionnaire, or more generically, an RFX, requires a well-honed process that highlights your organization’s professionalism.

    Please excuse the hodgepodge of metaphors, but brush off your lapels, sharpen your pencils, and put your best foot forward. It’s time to respond.

    What is response management?

    While RFXs are as individual as their issuers, they all have one common element: a deadline. An RFX might have hundreds or thousands of pages. In addition to pricing and product-specific questions, you might see questions about company history, culture, finances, the onboarding process, and so on.

    The final proposal will require detailed and accurate answers, a clear and engaging narrative, and (usually) multiple stakeholders from throughout the organization.

    Response management is the process of making that happen. Or more technically, it’s about understanding, defining, and publishing a full process. As with other projects within your organization, it includes establishing workflow, roles and responsibilities.

    Who is responsible for response management?

    Often, RFXs arrive through an organization’s CRM. From there, it might go to a response or proposal team, a single response manager, or a salesperson. Enterprise organizations are more likely to have dedicated RFX response teams than small businesses.

    However, even full-time response teams will need help from subject matter experts (SMEs) throughout their organizations. As a response manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to the project as a whole, or at least their part. Each stakeholder must understand their expectations.

    Owning the response management process

    A response manager might not be part of the C-suite. They might not head up a department, or even have a dedicated supervisory role. When they receive an RFX, however, the buck stops with them.

    Before delving further, we should back up a bit. The response manager’s role begins long before an RFX arrives and ends long after it’s out the door. Truth be told, the process is most efficient when it’s ongoing, regardless of whether the response manager is facing a deadline or not.

    Evaluate processes

    If you’re a runner, you might stretch before your daily five-mile run. During your run, you may track your heart rate, pace, and distance on a smartwatch. Afterwards, you might enjoy a deeper stretch and eat a healthy meal.

    Or, if you’re like most people, you start your work day awakened by an alarm. Then, in no particular order, you might brush your teeth, workout, shower, dress, perhaps put on makeup and style your hair, maybe drink a cup of coffee, and have some breakfast. You might also commute to your office.

    Once you get to work, you probably turn your computer on, check your email, agenda, Slack channel, and so on. Maybe you queue up some favorite work playlists and see where you stand on your goals. At the end of the day, you shut everything down and head home. Once every week, month, quarter, or however your company sees fit, you might see productivity reports.

    If you notice in my two examples, the primary activities, running and working, are really only implied. The rest are processes. None of the processes mentioned above offer quantifiable productivity, although the smartwatch certainly tracks productivity. In both cases, the hypothetical people could argue that without their processes, they would be far less productive.

    In each case, the processes are :

    • Repeatable – On an individual level, we call the processes “routines” or “regimens,” which are by definition repeatable.
    • Scalable – Planning a longer marathon training run or working from home for the day? Both processes can easily adapt.
    • Specific – Run five miles every day, wake up at the same time, arrive at work on time, and so on. All of these are specific milestones.
    • Measurable – Both processes include quantifiable goals.

    Without processes, a company’s accounts payable (AP) department could wreak fiscal havoc. A poorly defined onboarding process could lead to confusion and employee dissatisfaction. Insufficient RFP response processes will result in a poor win rate, diminished morale, SME frustration, and threaten company buy-in.

    So, let’s talk about establishing response management processes.

    Establish an accurate organizational knowledge base

    The best way to get an SME on your side is to do as much of the work as possible before calling them into the process. The best way to alienate an SME is to ask them to constantly repeat themselves. That’s where a well-maintained and accurate organizational knowledge base comes in.

    If your company is like most, it’s siloed. Perhaps you have two knowledge bases, an internal one (such as company wikis, products, services, marketing collateral, archives, and so on) and an external one (sales-based content). It’s not even unheard of for a response department to have its own knowledge base built from previous proposals.

    For efficiency’s sake, one knowledge base is certainly better than two or more. However, you need to be sure that proprietary information doesn’t end up in a customer proposal or private HR records in a company email.

    As with the overall process, the knowledge base should be:

    • Repeatable – If you record answers to commonly-seen questions, SMEs will only have to double-check accuracy.
    • Scalable – Your knowledge base should have the ability to grow with your company.
    • Specific – Are you able to provide access only as needed? Does your system help you find relevant information?
    • Measurable – Who uses it? What goes in it? The better you can measure its worth, the more likely you will have company buy-in.

    Eliminate repetition

    Repetition isn’t always bad. Knowledge base repeatability helps prevent SMEs from having to repeat themselves, but you also want to eliminate repetition–which can lead to confusion and dated or inaccurate responses–within your knowledge base.

    To help avoid repetition, define and document your layout. Use collections, response headers, and how you classify and organize your content to define your knowledge base’s layout. Make sure everyone is on the same page by documenting everything.

    When you spend hours staring at a screen, you might lose objectivity in defining and documenting. There’s a term in IT called “rubber ducking.” Essentially the concept is that if you’re stuck on something, explain it to the duck. Expressing the problem out loud helps take you out of your head for a moment.

    If you walk through it from an outside perspective, it makes it easier to see. Lay out the process and walk through it. For example, “I get this from sales, and then send it on to someone who does their part.” So, if you’re stuck, rubber duck it.

    Additionally, it’s much easier to see when it’s visual. Identify redundancies and where things might fall through the cracks. Don’t be afraid to go analog at first, such as arranging index cards on the floor.

    Automate responses

    At RFPIO, we believe in reusing and recycling content as a step toward saving the environment and hours of a response team’s time. Odds are, the RFXs sitting in your inbox right now contain multiple repeat, or near repeat, questions.

    Leveraging artificial intelligence to find past responses to similar questions will show your team, especially your subject matter experts (SMEs), that their time matters.

    Define roles, responsibilities, and the process, by starting with intelligence that is already in your knowledge base. Ask what you can do in your process that isn’t necessarily affected by other people.

    Improve SME collaboration

    Often, SME relationships feel one-way, at least to them. Put yourself in their shoes when you’re looking at your process. What are their touch points? When do they hear from you—is it only when you need something? If so, they’ll feel used.

    Understand what’s on their plate. Get their feedback and use it when you can. Talk about and offer help with tight deadlines. Ask for things like customer success stories that you can use now or in the future. They might know about the roadmap in their department to help tell the company story. They are also invested in the process. Keep them updated.

    Be specific

    It’s human nature to make assumptions about what an RFX is asking. If, for example, a prospect is looking for a specific product or service that you don’t have, don’t respond with another one. Not only do you risk alienating the potential customer, it will skew your data.

    For example, let’s say you sell a cloud computing platform and many of the RFXs you receive ask for an application security product you don’t sell. If instead of responding that you don’t have the product, you respond with your application’s security protocol, the data could be misconstrued within your company to show that there’s a sudden interest in your application’s security protocol when in reality no one asked about it.

    Scale response capacity

    If your company is like many, the demands on your response team might be light at the beginning of the year, but by the time Q4 rolls around, you barely have time to grab a cup of coffee.

    You can free up at least enough time to get a cup of coffee, and maybe even lunch, by standardizing and automating what you can.

    Response software that tracks activity can quantify how long things are taking and help you determine when you might need additional resources. It’s also worth noting that RFPIO’s pricing structure automatically scales by charging by the project rather than being locked into a specific number of users.

    Measure growth and continuously improve

    Help maintain company buy-in by quantifying your system’s value. Feed innovation with concealable and actionable data such as tracking sales and product lifecycles. You should also periodically review the overall process as a company to see where you stand on your maturity roadmap.

    • Were your responses submitted on time?
    • Were your responses accurate?
    • Did you lose anything in a competitive or compelling space?
    • What else can you do to improve your process?

    Once you have armed yourselves with data, enact incremental changes as you discover them. However, too many changes at once lend themselves to risks and red flags.

    With RFPs, you’re dealing with direct customer and market requests. Share with the company, specifically marketing and product. Go through RFPs and RFIs yearly to see what else you might offer customers and market trends. Have those conversations before the next year’s roadmap is created. Respond to the question at hand and pay attention to the questions when creating a roadmap instead of the answers.

    RFPIO can help you drive revenue growth with a smarter response management solution

    When the focus is on responding to an RFX, it’s easy to forget that the ultimate goal is to drive revenue growth, not just fill in the blanks. Fuel your revenue-generating engines with:

    Repeatability

    RFPIO saves time and work at every stage of the response process.

    • Intake – Receive RFXs through your CRM or directly through RFPIO.
    • Content Library – A typical RFX contains very few original questions. RFPIO’s Content Library leverages machine learning to help you automatically fill in up to 80 percent of the document, freeing your key stakeholders to focus on unique content and other revenue-generating opportunities.
    • Export – Export your response to a customized template or the customer’s preferred format

    Scalability

    Today’s workload is going to look very different from tomorrow’s, next month’s, next quarter’s, or next year’s. RFPIO scales with you and provides actionable insights to help your company intelligently respond to changing demands.

    Tracking – Track how long projects are taking to help determine when you need to rev up or cut back on resources.
    Pricing – Licensed-based pricing models limit you during busy times and are a waste when things slow down. RFPIO allows for unlimited users on each project and only charges for the number of projects you have going at any given time.

    Reporting

    Response teams are at the forefront of market trends and advanced analytics helps companies address competitive weaknesses and make informed decisions to shape the future. RFPIO provides annual, quarterly, monthly, and project-level reporting with just a few keystrokes. Built-in reporting metrics include:

    • Project type – How many of your projects are RFPs? How about DDQs?
    • Project stage – How many requests have you received? Where are you on each one?
    • Time to completion – How long is it taking you to complete projects?
    • Content Library usage – How often is your Content Library being used? How is it being used?
    • Auto respond usage – How many total questions? How many did the Content Library identify and how many were automatically responded to?
    • Win/loss analysis – How many and what kinds of bids do you win? What areas need improvement?
    • Near limitless customization options – Create your own reports in your desired layout.

    *Next Action*

    You’ll respond to more RFXs in less time and improve your win rate with RFPIO. However, RFPIO is more than a response project management tool; it’s a sales enablement platform, a company knowledge repository, a virtual librarian that points any user to relevant content, and a 24/7 on- and off-site statistician and data analyst.

    Talk to one of our specialists. Take a free ride to show you how RFPIO is a turbo-charged revenue-generating machine.

    13 top blogs for response professionals

    13 top blogs for response professionals

    Templates & guides

    I like to think of RFP response managers as the unsung heroes of their organizations. In a typical company, around fourty-five percent of revenue begins with an RFP, and response is becoming more and more competitive every day.

    In addition to having a range of titles — proposal manager, bid manager, capture manager, or RFP manager — response managers wear a lot of hats. They’re part researcher, part writer, part salesperson, and part ringleader, although they may claim that they’re more than part ringleader. Keeping up with that evolving skill set can be exhausting!

    You could go back to school, I suppose, or you can hone your skills through blogs. Every morning, I read a handful of curated blog posts to help up my game. They’re quick, convenient, and easy to come back to when interrupted, and the great ones make me feel a little bit smarter.

    In this post, I will share some of my favorite blogs. Some are about RFPs and response management and others dust off and refine all those other hats you wear.

    1. Gartner
    2. McKinsey
    3. Learning Hub from G2
    4. Insight Partners Blog
    5. Hubspot
    6. Seth’s Blog
    7. Martech Blog
    8. Proposal Pro
    9. Presentation Zen
    10. RFPIO
    11. Winning the Business from APMP
    12. Grammarly
    13. Business Writing

    Best blogs for general business trends

    1. Gartner

    Gartner is a fantastic resource for all things tech. They offer business consulting and some of the most thorough statistical research out there. The blog contextualizes their research and offers invaluable actionable insights to increase revenue and navigate a dynamic business environment.

    Post you should start with: Is now the time to stand up or invest in sales enablement?

    Generating revenue is the single most important business goal. As a writer, I like to feel as though I am part of the revenue generation process, although not directly. My colleagues in the marketing department and I are responsible for creating brand awareness and helping our sales department sell. Does that make marketing “sales enablement?” Is RFPIO a sales enablement platform? Doug Bushée with Gartner thinks so.

    “(Sales enablement is) an opportunity to help your sales force be more effective, not just through technology or training but with a complete package that includes content, technology, communications, sales process, and training to enable your sales teams to drive revenue.” – Doug Bushée

     

    2. McKinsey & Company

    McKinsey & Company is an OG in the management consulting world. While their blog isn’t specifically geared toward RFP response, they offer insights and best practices for all verticals and organizational structures. Many in the response industry look to McKinsey for inspiration or statistics for their own blogs. McKinsey’s blog covers a wide range of topics including mergers and acquisitions, analytics, risk management, sales operations, and more.

    Post you should start with: Better forecasting for large capital projects

    You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry with more variables, at least when it comes to proposals, than construction. The larger the project, the more difficult the bidding process. Most (we hope) companies don’t want to underbid, but all too often, it happens. This blog post explores the psychological factors behind underbidding.

    “Why do project planners, on average, fail to forecast their effect on the costs of complex projects? We’ve covered this territory before but continue to see companies making strategic decisions based on inaccurate data. Deliberately or not, costs are systematically underestimated and benefits are overestimated during project preparation—because of delusions or honest mistakes on one hand and deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes on the other.” – McKinsey & Company

    3. Learning Hub from G2

    I am sort of obsessed with reviews. I refuse to try a new hair stylist, dog groomer, or restaurant without first checking their online reviews. I’m that annoying person who scans QR codes in the aisles of Costco or Target to make sure I’m making the best buying decisions.

    Before accepting my job with RFPIO, I made sure it was a cultural fit for me and I checked G2 to see what their customers had to say about the platform. G2 is more than a software review site. Its blog is a phenomenal source of information for nearly every vertical and every skill set.

    Post you should start with: What is accountability in the workplace? 12 ways to foster it

    Most RFP responses require several stakeholders, which is where that unofficial role of ringmaster comes in. Guest blogger Susmita Sarma has several very helpful tips to create accountability in the workplace, which is sure to help you spend less time chasing stakeholders down and more time doing the rest of your jobs.

    “In reality, accountability at work is all of the above, which runs like a machine. But if the employees keep no accountability mechanism in place, things quickly fall apart. To avoid this, every employee should be accountable for their own actions at work. It builds confidence within teams and organizations because people know they can depend on one another.” – Susmita Sarma

    4. Insight Partners Blog

    Do you follow economic or industry news? If not, I completely get it. Sometimes our plates are so full that it’s difficult to see the world outside. Few know more about business trends than venture capitalists, which is why my go-to blog for all things business is Insight Partners.

    Post you should start with: SaaS pricing tactics for a high-inflation environment

    Pricing is one of the key components of an RFP, and the ultimate component of an RFQ (request for quote). Should you offer the same pricing structure today as a quarter ago? Should you raise prices to cover inflation or lower them to gain a competitive advantage?

    “Properly setting prices is an untapped opportunity for SaaS providers to squeeze more value out of what they offer. We often see companies who haven’t touched their pricing for three years or more — which might explain the lack of inflationary growth in the sector. Usually this means companies have built up a significant amount of pricing power through market growth and product improvement which they haven’t yet monetized. While this was also the case well before the current inflationary environment, now the opportunities are even greater — while the risks of not adapting your pricing are more severe.” – James Wood

    Best marketing blogs

    5. Hubspot Blog

    Hubspot is one of the top CRM platforms and it has a strong focus on marketing. Their blog could have gone under the “general trends” category, but I read Hubspot for their marketing tips. In their blog, industry experts discuss everything from a product’s life cycle to how to be more productive.

    Post you should start with: 12 free personality tests you can take online today

    Aren’t online personality tests so early 2000s? In most cases, I’d agree, but there is value in learning how you tick. By understanding your personality and triggers, you can help establish a more harmonious and productive work environment. And because more data is almost always better, have your teammates take the tests.

    These tests are great conversation starters, especially among groups of people who don’t know each other very well. They can help create connections and establish common ground at work. Learning about your colleagues’ personality traits can reveal how each team member prefers to receive feedback and criticism. This can help your team avoid unnecessary miscommunication down the road, as well as lead to more productive projects and meetings.” – Caroline Forsey

    6. Seth’s Blog

    I guess you could call Seth Godin a marketing guru. He’s a Stanford Business grad, a published author, and a dot com alumnus. Now he blogs. Some of his posts read like streams of consciousness and others like social media posts. I call them bursts of marketing wisdom.

    Post you should start with: Contracts and Power

    Proposals aren’t technically contracts but many contain the same terms. Who has the power? Would it surprise you to know that the power shifts depending on where you are in the sales cycle? Can you control the shifts?

    “In the moment before a contract is signed, the lower-powered party momentarily has more power. That’s because the other entity wants what you have. But as soon as they have it, it’s only the contract that offers concrete protection against future events.” — Seth Godin

    7. Martech Blog

    The content-rich Martech blog is the leading resource for tech marketers. Their team of marketing professionals blogs about diverse topics such as content strategy, World Cup marketing, and how to survive the death of cookies. They have a robust search engine, so if you have a marketing, or marketing-adjacent, question, just plug your query in to get expert tips. Check the site often as they typically post three or more blogs per day.

    Post you should start with: Only 28% of B2B content marketers report having the technology they need

    This post caught my attention because it’s one of the many areas where marketers and proposal professionals share common ground. Twenty-eight percent of B2B marketers have the technology they need. Proposal management is somewhat better; 43% say they have the technology they need to perform their jobs.

    “The technology issues are likely the results of two things. First, too many B2B companies are letting features and functions determine what’s in their stacks, when it should be determined by their own strategy. Second, they may not understand the level of complexity and amount of resources needed to manage and maintain their martech tools.”

    Best proposal blogs

    8. Proposal PRO

    I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t spend as much time talking about nonprofit grant proposals as we should. Even when taking profit out of the equation, as with any for-profit company, nonprofits still need to create a compelling case for organizations to untie their purse strings. Competing for an organization’s budgeted grant money is challenging. Because you have to demonstrate that your nonprofit meets a donor’s values, a captivating and clear narrative is perhaps even more important than with for-profit industries.

    Jodie Eisenberg, the founder of Proposal PRO, specializes in government grants and has more than $500 million in federal grants and contracts under her belt. In her blogs, she shares the tips and tricks to win those super-competitive federal grants.

    Post you should start with: 4 ways that grant-writing can ruin your personality

    Confession time: one of my closest friends is a grant writer. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard more polite variations on #4, “Don’t talk to me—I’m on a deadline!” Proposal writers of all kinds are arguably some of the busiest in their organizations. Jodie empathizes and offers advice that might help save grant writers from themselves.

    “Let’s face it, deadline pressure is a thing, and if you’re still waiting for people to sign documents, provide a final budget item, or just call you back with an OK to submit, things can get tense.” – Jodie Eisenberg

    9. Presentation Zen

    The first thing that caught my eye with Presentation Zen was, well, the name. I’m willing to bet that your job, like mine, is fast-paced and requires you to turn on a dime. Presentations, where perfection is expected, only add to the stress. Presentation Zen is all about bringing confidence to your presentations by featuring the best advice from presentation experts.

    Post you should start with: Pixar Studios *still* offers free storytelling lessons online

    You may wonder why I recommended a post about the largest animation studio in the world. I’m not suggesting you include cartoon characters and fantasy in your responses, but proposal writing, like most writing, should offer strong narratives and follow a similar arc to your favorite Pixar movies.

    Pixar may be the best at the technical side of animation, but what really made them successful is their understanding of story and storytelling. In an old interview regarding Pixar’s success, Steve Jobs said this: “Even though Pixar is the most technologically advanced studio in the world, John Lasseter has a saying which has really stuck: No amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story.”

    10. RFPIO Blog

    I know how it sounds to recommend our own blog, but we’re truly passionate about improving the full-circle RFP process with response management software. That means that within our blog we cover procurement in addition to proposal themes. This broad range of topics helps deepen understanding and collaboration between buyers and sellers. Not only that, but many of the posts in our blog are inspired directly by recent conversations with our customers.

    Post you should start with: RFPIO CEO sees opportunity in the changing economy

    This post from Ganesh Shankar, CEO at RFPIO, offers a vision of how response teams can help their companies navigate economic uncertainty. Currently, for many, RFPs are manual, time-consuming, painful, and downright annoying — but they don’t have to be. In addition to identifying challenges faced by organizations, the post explores how technology, transparency, and collaboration can drive significant revenue.

    “In the grand scheme of things, this is a time when companies are looking for ways to be more efficient. Technologies tend to help companies become more efficient.
    Better efficiency doesn’t mean that automation will take people’s jobs. I strongly feel that technology will allow companies to produce more and deliver better outputs with less infrastructure.” – Ganesh Shankar

    11. Winning the business

    APMP (the Association of Proposal Management Professionals) is the resource for proposal managers and stakeholders. Their blog, not surprisingly, is a wealth of information. Some of it is serious and some is rather tongue-in-cheek although most posts focus on best practices and industry news.

    Post you should start with: Is a business proposal different from a marriage proposal?

    If you google “proposal,” you’ll find that most dictionaries offer two definitions. One is a written proposal and the other involves a ring and a knee. Is it a reach to compare the two? Winning the Business makes the case that the two types of proposals have a lot more in common than we think.

    “This article considers the logical progression of the capture methodology by comparing it with (the) universal experience of personal courtship. Couples go through a multi-stepped process that is remarkably like the four-step capture methodology. Both scenarios have several similarities including a common means to prompt a positive response during the proposal stage.” – Alan L. Lewis, CP APMP

    Best writing blogs

    12. Grammarly

    What do proposal managers and college students have in common? In a word, writing. And in both cases, grammar matters. sixty-two percent of procurement departments say that they regularly receive error-riddled RFP responses. Sadly, grammatical and spelling errors can take a bidder right out of the running, which is understandable since most customers want to see attention to detail throughout an RFP response.

    There are several writing and grammar tools online, but I love Grammarly because it covers many of the confusing basics like when to use accept vs. except.

    Post you should start with: How to write a great business proposal

    Grammarly is far more than just an online grammar checker. Its blog offers real-world advice and business writing tips. Grammarly can help boost your win rate by showcasing your company in its best light. Rachel Meltzer offers guidelines for creating a business proposal, whether solicited through an RFP or unsolicited.

    “A business proposal is a document that presents one company’s products or services to another company in detail. Business proposals are often customized for the potential client. It’s a way for the company to market its product and get on the same page as its potential client before they agree to work together.” – Rachel Meltzer

    13. Business Writing

    While I love Grammarly, its reach is broad. There are tips and tools for students, fiction writers, and writing hobbyists. If you’re looking for something that’s specifically focused on business writing, there’s the Business Writing blog. Like Grammarly, they write entire blog posts covering confusing words like “council vs. counsel,” but their posts all have business angles.

    Post you should start with: Is “data” singular or plural? Does it matter?

    A tech copywriter, technical writer, and data scientist walked into a bar to ponder the word “data.” Okay, I’m open to suggestions as to a punchline, but a debate over whether “data” is singular or plural could get a little raucous, especially if one of the writers is, shall we say, traditional. Business Writing’s Ryan Fisher tackles that surprisingly controversial issue just to conclude that we’re all right.

    “A look at Google’s Ngram graph shows that in American English, while the plural form (the data are) has been predominantly more common, the singular form (the data is) has been rising and is now on par with the plural form.” – Ryan Fisher

     

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