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Deploy content governance that will take your breath away

Deploy content governance that will take your breath away

Content & Storytelling

I recently hosted a webinar called Building a Solid Content Foundation about how to set up a content review workflow. […]

Category: Tag: Content governance best practices

Deploy content governance that will take your breath away

Deploy content governance that will take your breath away

Content & Storytelling

I recently hosted a webinar called Building a Solid Content Foundation about how to set up a content review workflow. Since then, it has occurred to me that there can be no content review without content governance.

This short article will provide some brief background on content governance, why it’s important, and how proposal automation and knowledge management software can help.

What is content governance?

Content governance is the framework and processes you use to create, store, and maintain your content. But before we dive too deep, let’s start with a bad joke and a Top Gun analogy…

What do you call it when an entire population is satisfied with its gubernatorial leadership? Content governance. Ha! I know, it’s terrible.

How is content governance different from content management and content strategy? I could just tell you, but that would be boring. You can find all sorts of places on the Internet that can give you the glossary version. We’re going into the Danger Zone.

We’ve been in a Top Gun mood around here. Anticipation around the release of Top Gun: Maverick is ramping up faster than that titular character’s need for speed. In a Top Gun analogy, content governance would actually be the U.S. Navy. Content strategy is “Top Gun,” or the Navy Fighter Weapons School (I hear it’s frowned upon to use Top Gun terminology while at the school). Here’s how it breaks down:

  • Content governance = U.S. Navy. This is the universe in which all organizational content exists, from its creation, storage, and access, to its moderation, and, ultimately, to its archival. All content is subject to the laws of the content governance universe.
  • Content strategy = Top Gun. There has to be a framework in place to create world-class content. Everything from rules of engagement to battle tactics to overcoming pushback must be taken into consideration when determining what to create when and for which targeted audience.
  • Content creators = Pilots. In case you’re wondering who the best is…well, it doesn’t really matter. Like the real Navy Fighter Weapons School, there is no room for ego. Within the parameters established under content governance in your content strategy and style guide (see below), content creators are free to do what’s necessary to connect with their audience.
  • Content management system (CMS) = Aircraft carrier and crew. It’s a team effort, and effective content cannot exist in a vacuum. Any successful content endeavor needs technology and subject matter expertise in its earpiece. You can think of the CMS as the execution phase of content governance, where theory is put into practice when buyer-facing content is created, reviewed, stored, and accessed
  • Style guide = F/A-18C/D Hornet (aka, the jet). Content governance only works when creators have guidelines to follow. They need a cockpit from where they can work their magic, otherwise they end up in a flat spin out to sea with content that is off-brand, off-message, and possibly off-putting to the buyer.

Why do you need content governance?

While content governance is often associated with marketing content, it’s time to think bigger, like sales content bigger. According to the April 26, 2021, Forrester blog, From Monolithic to Modular: Kicking Your Sales Content Engine into High Gear, “Because marketers produce more monolithic than modular content, 70% of sales reps spend between one and 14 hours every week customizing content for their buyers.”

Sales reps understand that their competitive advantage comes from personalizing content to customize a solution around buyers’ specific pain points. Releasing these content creators into the wild without any content governance is a recipe for disaster, in accuracy and efficiency.

4 benefits of content governance

I’m still adding to the list. Seriously, content governance is a huge benefit to all of my clients. Here are the top four:

  1. Better content: It’s always created with accurate information and undergoes peer review (none of us are adept at proofing our own work).
  2. Efficient workflows: When everyone knows their roles and content governance is being driven by technology, then the content runs through its lifecycle with less friction.
  3. Greater productivity: Automation, accurate content building blocks, and the democratization of content creation makes it easier for creators and reviewers to move faster.
  4. Improved outcomes: Breaking down monolithic content into buyer-focused customized content improves the overall buying and customer experiences.

How to create a content governance workflow

As is the case with most new process implementations, the pain is frontloaded. Trust me, the long-term payoff for proposal managers, sales representatives, content editors, subject matter experts, and all content creators is well worth it.

Conduct a content audit
You need to rein in out-of-bounds content first. Get your house in order by ditching redundant, outdated, trivial (deal- or client-specific), and off-brand content.

Identify content gaps
Now that the content bin has been cleaned out, you should have full visibility into what you need. Break it down by buyer need, not product need. According to the December 16, 2020, Forrester blog, Happy B2B “Contentukkah”: Spinning the Editorial Dreidel, “We encourage content creators to join forces and push back on the company’s tendency to sing the praises of its portfolio when it should be waxing poetic about its audiences’ challenges.”

Create a style guide
Specify the writing and graphic standards for content. You can go high level and just cover fonts and color palettes, or you can get down to a level of detail where you provide standards for individual content types (e.g., videos, presentations, data sheets, blog articles, etc.). Also, consider creating templates to make it easier to create that content that always has to be personalized according to your style guide.

Implement a CMS
Unless you want to go the manual route of spreadsheets and checklists, you’ll need a CMS for automation, auditing, and reporting.

How can proposal automation and knowledge management help with content governance?

Creating content on the fly—which is the preferred method for sales representatives creating content—can be challenging in a content governance environment rife with bottleneck risk. Manual processes are the biggest culprit, but an ill-fitting CMS can be just as dangerous.

Proposal automation and knowledge management software such as RFPIO presents a huge advantage to sales teams and other content creators because it breaks content down to its lowest common denominator: questions and answers. These are the building blocks of all content. When these accurate, curated questions and answers are accessible from anywhere, then content can be created from anywhere.

Beyond the advantage of creating content within your content governance model, proposal automation and knowledge management helps in three primary areas:

  1. Let the system drive your workflow. Assign content owners, establish content moderation teams, and set up content review cycles from an intuitive dashboard.
  2. Govern from a single, closed-loop system. Ditch the spreadsheets, checklists, and risk of human error. Once the workflow is established, you have an audit trail for every entry in your Content Library. You can also keep all collaboration in the system so that even emails to external collaborators can be monitored within a project.
  3. Robust reporting out of the box. Being able to monitor the health and hygiene of your Content Library is essential to adhering to content governance. Monthly and quarterly reporting to leadership gives them a window into the value of content governance, its efficiencies, and its ability to guide content creators to better sales outcomes.

Ultimately, content governance gets you that single source of truth. RFPIO makes sure you can provide the right content (sales, marketing, corporate, financial, solutions, etc.) to the entire organization.

If you’re interested in having RFPIO as your wingman, schedule a demo today!

3 tips for organizing your RFP content library: tagging, custom fields, and collections

3 tips for organizing your RFP content library: tagging, custom fields, and collections

Content & Storytelling

Yay! You just added RFPIO and it’s time to start completing RFPs and security questionnaires (if you’re already an experienced user, stick with us; there’s something for everyone here). Pop the champagne cork! Cue the band. Repeatedly refresh email because congratulatory back-pats are sure to arrive soon from upper management, SMEs (subject matter experts), sales, security, and anyone else who participated in past RFPs.

Now what?

It’s time to build out your Content Library. Your Content Library consists of documents, question and answer (Q&A) pairs and templates that represent the backbone of your RFPIO instance. But tread lightly before proceeding. In a recent RFPIO survey, 50% of proposal managers said keeping response content up-to-date and accurate is their biggest challenge, but only 31% of responders audit their RFP content library as often as once a quarter.

So how can you set yourself up for success to build and maintain content in RFPIO? It starts with tagging, custom fields, and collections, which will also expedite access to relevant information for internal and external users alike.

Here’s how.

But first: You don’t have to go it alone

Start by defining your RFP team. Who is going to be the Champion of RFPIO? Typically, this falls on an executive sponsor or the proposal manager.

Are you the content champion? This is the decision-maker, someone who will own the process of building and maintaining content. If it’s not you, then make sure someone gets designated. No matter how organized you are, this is mandatory.

After you identify the content champion, bring in your content stakeholders. These are all the participants you’ve been working with on past RFPs. It’s likely that these encompass internal and external users. They may be SMEs in different locations, departments, and roles. Identifying their roles and responsibilities will determine how you set up workflows in RFPIO.

Once your team has been identified, it’s time to discuss workflows and organization methods. Remember that you’re only one person, so it’s important to not forget about the rest of the team that will help you achieve RFPIO success. Create and document a plan to communicate content workflows. Make sure all contributors can easily find what they need to complete their assigned tasks. Have the whole team of stakeholders sign-on.

OK, now this is how: Tagging

Segment your content with tags. Tags are simple, general categories to help group your content together and are the first step to take when organizing your content. Every document should have at least one tag. Examples include “onboarding,” “implementation,” and “contracts.”

At this point, you may be wondering how to get started. It’s a common hurdle, especially for companies that have never used tags or any other structured content organization strategies. Within RFPs and security questionnaires that you’ve received, there are sections about company information and other content that you may have just been copy and pasting from document to document. Harvest your initial tagging schema from these generic sections that appear in most of the RFPs you have already submitted.

RFPIO Best Practice: All content needs to have at least one tag. That includes all documents and all question and answer (Q&A) pairs. We recommend no more than three, though, so as to avoid search conflicts within the system.

Is that field “custom”? Sweet!

Every company is unique, which means every company’s content has unique characteristics. For categories that are organizationally unique and allow for flexibility and adaptability in search, our clients leverage Custom Fields. Custom Fields may apply to a product, service, geographic region, or whatever best fits your business. But they do have to make sense. It’s easy to bog the process down with too many custom fields.

RFPIO Client Example: Here’s an example of how custom fields helped a client exponentially improve search of their more than 15,000 Q&A pairs. First, we started with the generic tag of “support,” which whittled 15,000 options down to 800 or so. Already an improvement. But then we tagged all applicable Q&A pairs with a client product name. That drilled down results from 800 to 115. Within two clicks—about 30 seconds—we were able to identify a small subset of applicable content.

Restrict content with collections

Within RFPIO, collections allow you to restrict sensitive content visibility. You create siloed walls around sensitive content based on content that should be restricted to specific users. Good examples of Collections are legal/security data or even geographic data. For example, sales may not need access to legal or high-level proprietary information that legal or security teams need to access. Or a North American team may not need access to some content that is necessary for a European team to access for GDPR compliance.

Why waste users’ time sorting through content they can’t even use? With collections, search is much more efficient.

But what about maintaining content?

Great question. First, always feel free to work with your RFPIO customer success managers to set up demos of specific features. Second, check out the webinar I presented on building and maintaining content in RFPIO for more (below), including live Q&A with participants on:

  • Optimizing Q&A editing
  • Setting up custom fields and collections
  • Conducting bulk updates on multiple pieces of content
  • Using filters for moderation
  • Setting up multiple responses for a single question—one for US-based teams and another for those based in the UK, for example.

If you’re just getting started, then you have a lot to look forward to. 82% of proposal managers said RFPIO helps them manage response content all in one place.

Interested in automating your RFP processes with RFPIO? Schedule a demo to learn more.

Why you need the ultimate library for your RFP responses

Why you need the ultimate library for your RFP responses

Content & Storytelling

People from unique business units respond to RFPs, and only a select few have “RFP management” listed in their job descriptions. Because various content contributors must band together to create quality responses, this content must be centralized and accessible.

In reality, response content is scattered across spreadsheets, Google Drive folders, or perhaps a content management system. The result of a disjointed RFP response process is apparent in these survey responses about top challenges:

  • 43% of SMEs are spending too much time on RFP responses.
  • 50% of proposal managers can’t keep content up-to-date and accurate.
  • 43% of marketers are wearing too many hats and don’t have time for RFPs.
  • 68% of salespeople struggle with focusing on sales-related activities.

So, what is the secret to more efficient RFP content management? You need the ultimate Content Library for your RFP responses.

It’s time to address your RFP content production cycle

With the high number of RFPs you’re responding to, you know you don’t want to start from scratch with each response. It will only be more time lost when you don’t have any to spare.

Perhaps your response management team has already recognized the importance of having an Content Library, but the best they could come up with is a workaround. Keeping up with a spreadsheet database is practically a job on its own and searchability isn’t the best. And, how can you begin to keep graphics or supporting attachments organized?

38% of content marketers said the production of content was by far their biggest challenge. Even if you are not a marketer, you are undeniably a content creator if you respond to RFPs. The same content creation challenges ring true in the response process.

Your RFP content production cycle should include an easy way to:

  • Find content.
  • Create content.
  • Customize content.
  • Review content.
  • Format content.
  • Audit content.

RFP software is a dedicated solution that provides a robust, collaborative Content Library to meet all of your RFP response needs. Best of all? It’s easy to use.

What to expect from the ultimate RFP Content Library

We’ll admit…the word “ultimate” gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But, when you modernize your RFP response process with RFP software, you truly have the ultimate RFP Content Library at your disposal.

Because you are working within a dedicated solution for responders—rather than a system of workarounds—you’ll enjoy many benefits that positively impact your RFP content lifecycle.

Store marketing-approved content in one place

Most marketing departments are in charge of approving content for RFP responses. Your Content Library serves as a centralized location for marketing approved content to keep the RFP process moving forward smoothly. When approved content is sitting in an email or Excel, it can easily slip through the cracks and delay progress.

Stitch quality content together quickly

An RFP software Content Library gives you an option to browse various responses for a similar question in historical RFPs. Quickly stitch together high-quality responses to customize your response for a better chance of closing the deal. It’s never one-size-fits-all for RFP responses, so it’s important to have that level of control over your content.

Organize your Content Library to easily find content

The key to an organized Content Library is using tags—something you would be hard-pressed to pull off in a spreadsheet. Tags might include: security, architecture, pricing, customer references, terms and conditions. Narrowing down your response content hunt with effective tagging makes searching highly targeted and efficient for your team.

Automate response content and customize

How great would it be if an answer was already generated for you in your Content Library? Going the extra mile, a recommendation engine takes searching out of the equation entirely—a lot like the auto-suggest features you’re familiar with in other search platforms or email solutions. And you’re never stuck with the recommended answer, because you have the power to customize it.

Optimize responses with content audits

Your Content Library is a living breathing resource, and there are times when it needs a cleanup or refresh. Having a workflow option where the system periodically sends out a friendly content audit reminder to content owners will help everyone stay on top of RFP responses, so they are always relevant and optimized.

89% love having a centralized Content Library

Whenever we ask responders about their favorite RFPIO feature, the Content Library is consistently the top choice. 89% of responders love having a centralized Content Library, because they have unmatched abilities when it comes to storing, organizing, and accessing responses—especially when compared to a previous manual process.

As the Manager of Sales Solution Architects at LexisNexis, Jeff Skott achieved content management mastery and reduced his response time by 25-30%. Watch the video to learn how Jeff gained these superpowers after transforming his Content Library.

How a recognition company doubled their win rate with excellent content management

How a recognition company doubled their win rate with excellent content management

Customer Stories

When the content manager at a global recognition company was asked about the most important part of a smooth-running RFP response process, they replied, “ensuring the most up-to-date and accurate content is never more than a few clicks away.”

Thanks to their well-organized content library, their response process is now a well-organized machine—but it wasn’t always this way.

Before implementing RFPIO, the proposal team spent the vast majority of their time searching for answers to questions they had already answered dozens of times before. This left minimal time to focus on the part that actually mattered: crafting compelling content tailored to each client’s specific needs.

They knew there had to be a better way. After a comprehensive market scan of RFP software, the team decided on RFPIO to help them catapult their response process to the next level. Since moving forward with RFPIO, they’ve noticed three key improvements to their response process:

Higher quality RFP responses with a content library that improves over time

Before using RFPIO, one of the RFP writers remembers that “there was this one answer in our library that had a typo. Each time I used that answer in my responses, I would manually correct the typo in the RFP, rather than in the main system.”

Because their previous content library was so difficult to update, it would quickly become obsolete—and writers couldn’t rely on it to find the information they needed.

When the RFP response team first saw RFPIO in action—and saw that updating an answer was simply a matter of clicking ‘edit’, typing, and clicking ‘save’—they knew RFPIO would make a huge difference in their process.

Now, the team has a specialized content manager, who manages the content library with an eagle eye. They carefully moderate each question-and-answer pair before approving it to the library, only approving answers that will create value for the entire team.

As a result, the recognition company’s content management system improves with each RFP they respond to—and they’ve found that when the entire team has access to the best content available, everyone is better off.

“When my team saw that RFPIO automatically suggests answers while you’re responding to an RFP, we were so excited. We weren’t doing anything like that—and we all knew, right away, that RFPIO would make a huge difference.”

Consistent, high-quality answers, in every RFP

Because their previous content management system was so difficult to update, content stored in the library was often out-of-date and inaccurate—and RFP writers couldn’t rely on it to respond to their RFPs.

Instead, they would put the four most recent RFPs they’d completed on one screen and the current RFP they’re responding to on another. If they couldn’t find the answers they needed in their previous RFPs, they might ask their neighbor. If that didn’t work, they might email an SME.

With this inefficient process, finding an answer to a single question could take days.

Now, the RFP team knows that the content stored in the library is the most accurate and up-to-date content there is.

Furthermore, the team can upload an RFP into RFPIO and respond to it without leaving the software. As they’re responding to each question, the library automatically suggests the most relevant answer.

Easy access to a reliable single source of truth, combined with the AI-enabled search engine and recommendation tool, has empowered the RFP response team to quickly respond to commonly seen questions—giving them more time to focus on what really matters.

RFP software helped tailor RFP responses to each client’s specific needs

The content manager on the team has a philosophy about RFPs: 80-85% of a given RFP is boilerplate content. The remaining 15-20% is where you really have the freedom to make something new or write something adapted to a client’s specific needs.

But before implementing RFPIO, the RFP response team felt like they were spending most of their time hunting down answers to repeat content—leaving minimal time to focus on compelling win messages.

Because they were spending so much time looking for information, the proposal team often wouldn’t be able to submit each RFP until right before the deadline.

This all changed after they started using RFPIO. In the last year, they submitted RFPs an average of 1-2 days early. Added together, that equaled an extra 114 days for the year—time the team could spend crafting messages tailored to each client or working on other projects.

Over the last year, they also increased the number of projects they worked on by 10 percent—and doubled their premier client win rate (win rate for clients over a certain dollar amount).

RFPIO has empowered the proposal team to knock out the repeat questions and empower their team to do what they do best—craft compelling messages that help their organization win more deals.

“RFPIO has given us more time to craft compelling win messages and work on other projects. In the year after implementing RFPIO, we’ve doubled our premier win rate, while also increasing the number of projects we worked on by 10%.”

Streamlining the response process meant winning more deals

One of the writers on the team remembers that it used to feel “like every project we were working on would just be down to the wire.” With RFPIO, the RFP response team is able to approach each RFP with purpose—resulting in more compelling proposals and less stress.

And in the RFP world—defined by tight deadlines and high stakes—a less stressful process can really make all the difference.

Schedule a demo to see how RFP software like RFPIO can remove the stress from your process and help you win more deals.

Tried-and-true RFP content management tips for finserv marketers

Tried-and-true RFP content management tips for finserv marketers

Content & Storytelling

As a marketer at a financial services organization, you solve unique challenges every day. You make shrinking budgets work to attract and retain clients. You create a heavy stream of content to build consumer trust. You work within the tight constraints of compliance and regulations. And, you swim against the current in a mature industry that is slow to adopt automated technologies.

Responding to RFPs is one of the many ancillary functions of your marketing role. Yet another multiple hat situation, the RFP response process is where you serve as the facilitator, editor, creator, and decision-maker.

Just like any other content you produce, RFP response involves content management. For your content to be impactful, you need to organize, review, and improve constantly. Below, a proposal manager at a financial institution offers several RFP content management best practices to help you succeed.

43% of marketers said controlling RFP content quality was their top challenge in a recent RFPIO survey. How is your organization overcoming that challenge today?

RFP content quality will always be a challenge, especially in the banking technology environment where things change every day. The first thing we did to overcome that challenge was to change software vendors and start using RFPIO. This solution has taken the middleman out of a lot of what we do to make our RFP response process more manageable.

Having unlimited users makes it much easier for us to bring in subject matter experts (SMEs) from across the bank to answer technical questions about our products and services—without worrying about additional licenses. Through automated email reminders, I’m able to keep track of stale content and the SME responsible for updating content.

Tell us about your experience with maintaining RFP content in the financial services world.

Our product management team is responsible for updating any questions relevant to their particular products. Team availability is a primary challenge with updating RFP content. However, it’s not enough to just have a product expert—you need to have people who know how to write well and review content.

The financial services industry is a moving target. Technology changes so rapidly and sometimes laws and regulations don’t keep up the pace. Your RFP contributors must have legal expertise or compliance and regulatory expertise to make sure you’re not talking out of turn in any of those areas.

How do you use tagging in RFPIO’s Content Library to organize your RFP content?

Tagging within RFPIO’s Content Library works so much better than organizing questions and answers with folders. We had a folder system with our old RFP software—when I needed to find a question a year later, I never knew where it went.

With banking proposals, the bulk of the questions and answers will fall under a certain product or product set. So you tag your RFP content in the Content Library with the name of the product, in addition to its larger product group.

Tagging makes it easier to delegate questions to subject matter experts as well. When an ACH question comes in, I search for the ACH tag and assign these responses to the ACH product manager so she can review the content for accuracy.

Overall, tagging allows you to connect the dots with all of your RFP content. You find RFP responses quicker and keep your content up-to-date. It’s the difference between Outlook and Gmail when you’re organizing thousands of emails.

RFP response management teams tend to have different internal styles with tagging. Describe yours.

Generally, the tags you choose for your RFP content are pretty obvious. There will always be a few outliers, but the majority of the responses clearly fall in a particular product bucket or problem bucket. Even then, usually there will be a product that’s an answer to that problem, like fraud prevention or ACH positive pay.

When I first imported all of our existing RFP response content into RFPIO’s Content Library, I did the majority of the tagging. Now that our product managers update their content within the tool, I give them access to change those tags or add content as they see fit. Occasionally, I review the RFP content library to clean up any tags that look wonky.

In the same survey, managing company branding and positioning with RFP content was another challenge for 14% of RFP responders. What are some ways your team is maintaining brand consistency with RFPs?

Our RFP response team does a very good job getting eyes on everything that goes out the door, making sure the correct font size and logos are there. RFPIO has robust formatting tools that help you automatically export your documents into a consistently branded deliverable. This exporting feature has made the formatting step much faster for our team.

Can you tell us about your current RFP content audit process?

Our RFP content audit process is a precedent that has been set for a while that we’re continuing to improve with RFPIO.

At a minimum, content should be looked at once a year. Certain content requires a quarterly answer, or a service changes out of the blue. In RFPIO, you set your preferred audit cycle, put expiration dates on the content, then trigger automated emails to alert the content manager.

There are different RFP content auditing techniques. Your subject matter experts audit the content to make sure it is factually correct. Your RFP writers audit the language and change the way a response is worded when necessary. Your compliance and legal teams also need to audit and approve the content.

We have roughly 1,400 Q&A pairs—that’s a lot of content for one or two people on each team to handle. Right now we’re taking a risk-based approach and having our compliance team members do spot checks on higher risk areas. I recommend picking your battles and focusing on specific initiatives as you audit your RFP content.

What was RFP content management like before you used RFPIO?

RFP content management was a nightmare before RFPIO. Because of the license restrictions we had with our previous RFP software, I ended up being the choke point. All of the RFP content writers and SMEs provided content that had to filter through me, because I was the one uploading everything into the tool.

Having the freedom to allow all of our RFP contributors to work within the platform—without allocating more budget for licenses—is a huge improvement. This collaborative focus puts the value on what is valuable to our managers, which is getting good proposals out the door.

Enjoy freedom in a collaborative platform where you produce quality responses and manage RFP content effectively. Give RFPIO a spin.

See how it feels to respond with confidence

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