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RFP management best practices

RFP management best practices

Product & Best Practices

“You have to have a plan, or else you’re just creating a recipe for chaos.” ~ David Brooks What is […]

Category: Tag: RFP automation

RFP management best practices

RFP management best practices

Product & Best Practices

“You have to have a plan, or else you’re just creating a recipe for chaos.” ~ David Brooks

What is your first instinct when an RFP lands on your desk? Do you push it aside in favor of more urgent matters? Do you dive right in, or do you already have a strategy in place?

New York Times columnist David Brooks might not have been talking about RFP management, but as with many things, having an RFP management plan, a strategy, can mean the difference between winning your bid and chaos.

What is RFP management?

At the highest level, RFP management is about managing the process of responding to proposal requests from start (even before receiving the RFP) to finish. Responsibilities vary from organization to organization, but the goals are the same, which is to win new business.

At their core, RFP response is about answering how you will address a prospect’s requirements, but a good response goes far beyond giving rote answers. Using carefully curated and fresh content, the response should tell a story demonstrating that you understand the customer’s needs and how to best address them.

RFP management includes leveraging company resources, such as subject matter experts (SMEs), existing data, and of course processes. If you consistently provide quality answers to RFPs, your win rate will increase. Below are the best practices we and our customers use to drive revenue and elevate win rates.

Bid for RFPs strategically

There’s strength in numbers, right? The more RFPs you answer, the more you’ll win, right? Probably not. Some of the RFPs you receive aren’t a good fit for your company, so why waste time and resources on those?

Tools such as the Responsive platform’s AI-powered content library, which answers up to 80% of an RFP’s questions, makes answering an RFP much faster and less resource-intensive. But if you know going in that you won’t win the bid, or you can’t service it, you’re still wasting valuable time and resources. Is the bid winnable? Follow these steps to make a bid or no-bid decision and narrow down which RFPs you should respond to.

  • Do you have a preexisting relationship with the customer? Did they specifically choose to send it to you, or are they using a buckshot approach? A previous relationship—or when the issuer has done their own research—will dramatically improve your win rate over the RFPs that are automatically sent to everyone in your industry.
  • Is your company a fit? If you can’t service the customer’s needs, there’s no reason to answer their RFP.
  • Can you address all of the challenges presented in the RFP? Or at the very least, the most important ones?
  • Is your pricing within the customer’s budget? No, money isn’t everything, and often, features and ability to meet the RFP’s challenges will win out. However, if your solution is far outside of the customer’s budget, it’s a tough hill to climb and efforts will be best spent elsewhere.
  • Can you meet the prospect’s timeline? Can you meet the submission deadline? What about each deliverable? Can your organization fulfill all of the requirements on time?
  • Do you know why the RFP was issued? This could help determine the customer’s pain points.

First you should identify and consult with your SMEs. If you haven’t won similar bids before, or if you’d have a difficult time fulfilling the requirements, you might be better off passing on that particular opportunity.

Have a clearly-defined RFP team

Regardless of whether your organization has a proposal management team or proposal management is the purview of the sales team or even a single person, there should always be a person who’s ultimately in charge.

From there, the team might vary depending on the customer’s needs and your company’s organizational structure. Titles are often used interchangeably and can mean different things to different organizations.

The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) membership roster includes more than 1,300 different job titles. You might have a dedicated proposal management team, but they may need to involve additional SMEs and stakeholders such as the executive team, legal, HR, information security, training and implementation, sales, customer success, account managers, IT, operations, finance, etc. Each organization is different, but proposal management team roles might include the following:

  • Bid (or project) manager — The bid manager leads the proposal management team and is involved in every stage of the bid process.
  • Proposal manager — The proposal manager works on a more granular level than the bid manager. Proposal managers oversee the entire process.
  • Proposal writer — The proposal writer is responsible for responding to the customer’s requirements in a persuasive style that includes relevant information such as case studies and other differentiators.
  • Proposal coordinator — The proposal coordinator is responsible for the administrative aspects of the response, including coordinating the internal flow, schedules, security and integrity, and directing submission of final documents.
  • Proposal editor — The proposal editor ensures that the writing is high quality, persuasive, and maintains a consistent voice. They also check grammar, spelling, punctuation, and format consistency.
  • Content manager — The content manager is responsible for adding to, maintaining, and periodically reviewing the content library.

In many organizations however, all of these roles are being filled by only a few individuals or even one, which means those individuals often wear a lot of hats. Be sure to have actionable deliverables to ensure that each person contributing to the response has clear expectations. This applies even if there’s a single contributor.

Fully understand the customer’s expectations

There’s no such thing as a cookie-cutter RFP or customer. It’s critical to fully understand a customer’s specific wants and expectations before attempting to answer their RFP. For example, don’t mention features that don’t matter to the customer, such as niche certifications that don’t apply.  Start with what interests the issuer and then tailor your responses to those interests.

Read between the lines in trying to understand customer pain points. For example, if a customer asks a software developer if they offer user-based pricing, rather than answer “yes” or “no,” ask yourself why a customer might ask that. Perhaps they’ve reached limitations with other systems, or there’s a competitor that offers a more appealing pricing structure.

Determine how you stand out from your competitors, which of course can include cost, but it can also include product or service quality, expertise, customer service, and overall reputation.

Manage and organize RFP content

As baseball icon Babe Ruth once said, “Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.” Similarly, yesterday’s answers don’t win today’s RFPs, even if you’ve won that exact same RFP for the exact same customer in the past. Why? Because as your business changes, so should the content.

When you search your content library, you might find hundreds or even thousands of relevant Q&A pairs. Weeding through them might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Managing and organizing your content library should be an ongoing process, but there are some things you can do right now to help whittle down your Q&A pairs. The key is to focus on quality rather than quantity. You should regularly audit your content library for:

Accuracy – If, for example, you inadvertently lowball the bid, you could be contractually obligated to honor that pricing. Additionally, if you erroneously claim regulatory compliance, your organization could be held responsible for data breaches, etc. In other words, accuracy is critical, as is regularly auditing your content library to archive outdated information and update as applicable.

Content availability – RFPs are bulky and time consuming, and most organizations are stretched thin. Finding the correct answer quickly is critical. An updated content library lets you easily find the right information without having to sift through thousands of documents and megabits of data.

Naming and tagging – Establish a standardized naming convention for each project. Not only does that make the content more accessible to each team member, it helps you find customer-specific content for future requests. You can further narrow down the content by tagging. How you want to tag is up to your company. Many choose tagging by industry or general requirements. This can help dramatically narrow down your content.

Keep content up-to-date

The best way to get around content bloat is to avoid it in the first place. Perform regular audits to keep your content fresh.

  • Is the content still current?
  • Is the content accurate?
  • Are the answers relevant to your customers?
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Does the content match your company’s voice and tone?
  • Is the content easily accessible?

Regularly scheduled audits might not be enough, though, especially if your company goes through pricing, service, or regulatory changes.

Responsive RFP software is a proven tool to increase RFP win rates and help you keep your content up to date. If you’d like to learn more about how you can win more by doing less, request a demo.

What is an RFP?

What is an RFP?

Selling & Enablement

RFP stands for request for proposal, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a plea for help, a clue to problems that need solved, and an opportunity to build pipeline. This article will take you from asking, “What is an RFP?” to knowing how to use RFPs to drive revenue in less than 1,500 words. Buckle up.

First, an assumption: If you came here because you want to know what an RFP is, then I’m guessing that a high-value target has decided to issue an RFP to find a solution to a problem you feel strongly about solving. When that target finally understands that you’re the answer to their problem, then you’ll pick up a sizable chunk of business. Now you just have to play the RFP game.

(Just in case you’re here because you want to know how to issue an RFP, check out this article instead.)

What is an RFP opportunity?

There are essentially two types of RFP opportunities: solicited and unsolicited. Solicited means that you’re invited to play the game. Unsolicited means you have to crash the game. You have a better chance to win when you’re invited.

That reminds me. There’s a fair bit of jargon in the RFP world. Here’s a short glossary of some common terms you’ll encounter often, including in this article:

  • RFP issuer: The organization that sends out the RFP. They have a problem, and they’re willing to pay someone to solve it, within certain parameters.
  • RFP responder: You.
  • RFP response: How you answer the RFP.
  • RFP proposal: Your response to the RFP.
  • RFP Q&As: Most RFPs present a number of questions that responders must answer. This section makes up the lion’s share of your proposal.
  • RFP win: You were selected by the issuer to solve their problem.
  • RFP loss: Happens to the best of us.

Back to more on “What is an RFP opportunity?”…While you can still win an RFP if you submit an unsolicited response, the odds are against you and you need to take an honest look at whether or not it’s worth it to respond.

RFP responses are not easy, even when you’re invited to partake. If you’re lucky enough to be alerted to an RFP on the day it’s issued, then you’re likely looking at a 3-6 week window to compose your response. Rarely are you so lucky. Sometimes it’s brought in with notice of a week or less, putting you on a tight deadline. The number of hours you’ll have to commit to building a proposal during that time will be determined by, among other things, team participation, content relevance and access, and how much you have to rely on manual processes to complete the response.

Now that you understand what an RFP is and the opportunity it presents, you need to put yourself on a path to respond only to those RFPs that you can realistically win. If this is one of your first RFP responses, then it could be a rabbit hole of unknown depths. Insert a go/no-go milestone before you go ask Alice. It involves asking yourself the following five questions:

  1. What was your level of involvement prior to the RFP being issued?
  2. Is your solution a fit (now, not at some squishy date in the future after you’ve had a chance to adapt it to what the problem calls for)?
  3. Does your price match the RFP issuer’s budget?
  4. Will winning the RFP be a strategic fit for your organization?
  5. Do you have bandwidth (to complete a competitive proposal, not to deliver your solution)?

As part of the RFP response process, you should have an opportunity to ask the questions necessary to fill in the gaps for your go/no-go milestone. Best-case scenario? Your sales team has already laid the groundwork for all of this with the issuer and it’s just a matter of taking their learnings and making them actionable.

It’s a “go.” Now what?

It’s a process deal. Doesn’t that take the pressure off?

I won’t get into the nitty gritty of the RFP process here (you can do so here if you’re ready to start now), but I will touch on the value of efficiency. Even if this is your first RFP, you’ll want to go into it as prepared as possible to save you and your team some pain and give your organization its best shot at winning.

Break down your efficiency goals into three main categories: project management, content management, and proposal quality. Before you start checking boxes under these categories, you need a team. Part of that team has likely already formed. The salesperson at the tip of the spear will be your subject matter expert (SME) for issuer-related questions and perspectives. The rest of the team will come together based on your review of the RFP. What questions need answered? Who has the answers? Who has the design and technical chops to build the proposal?

After you identify potential team members, dig into their availability and try to build a schedule to complete the response by deadline, preferably before deadline to give yourself some buffer. Then schedule a kickoff meeting with all team members to get their buy-in to process details for the following:

  • Project management: You’ll be the lead for collaboration, assigning tasks, and driving the schedule.
  • Content management: You’ll need content creators, content reviewers, and a storage system for a content library (if you’re gathering all this valuable info for an RFP, you’ll want to save it for repurposing; even if this will be your only RFP response of the year, the info will be useful for business proposals, answering prospect and customer questions, and training new hires).
  • Proposal quality: Answering RFP Q&As won’t be enough. You need to personalize the proposal to make it stand out.

Remember, the issuer is using the RFP process to identify its optimal vendor. They’re inciting competition, so you need to play to win. Second prize doesn’t even get a set of steak knives.

Beef up your sales pipeline

Now that you’ve discovered RFPs and the opportunities they can offer, you may want to evaluate how they can help you achieve your sales goals. 69% of B2B salespeople do not have enough leads in their pipeline to meet quota. Pursuing RFPs can build up pipelines fast: Globally, $11 trillion of revenue is won through competitive proposal processes (i.e., RFPs) every year.

Obviously, you’re not going to win every RFP. We found the average win rate to be 45%. However, RFP opportunities can cost as much as 5X more than traditional sales opportunities, which makes your process and your sales tech stack your best friends when it comes to response efficiency.

Automate to dominate

The optimized sales technology stack is a hot point of conversation these days. With so many RFP automation software solutions, it’s easy for sales teams to overspend on solutions they barely use. A recent Harvard Business Review article cites a survey where 62% of B2B companies were not satisfied with their sales technology return on investment. It also found that:

“The winning companies in our analysis were 1.4 times more likely to fully deploy sales technology tools and 1.9 times more likely to fully integrate them…By taking the time to embed these technologies properly into its sales processes, the [SaaS] company was able to increase revenue growth by 200 basis points within a few weeks.”

RFP automation offers a massive competitive advantage for responders. It saves time, improves proposal quality, and helps companies create their best work by activating their company knowledge. Companies with RFP-specific technology responded to 43% more RFPs in 2020 than those without a designated RFP tool. “With RFPIO, I would say we have increased our win rate by 15%,” said Grégory Saive, IBA global director of sales support and tender management,

But it has to be the right RFP software for your sales tech stack. It has to be able to manage your entire response process — from building proactive proposals to answering prospect and customer questions on the fly and responding to questionnaires — while integrating seamlessly with the other applications you rely on, such as your CRM, communication, and cloud storage solutions.

What’s next? Demo.

We started with “What is an RFP?” and made it all the way through to the value of RFP automation. Once you win one, you’re going to want to win more. Since I’m almost at my promised 1,500-word cap, I’ll wrap it up with a tip on your next step: Schedule a demo. It’s the fastest and easiest way to find out if RFP automation is right for you. Even if it’s not, you’ll get some valuable response tips from our process experts.

Data-driven strategies for increasing RFP win rate

Data-driven strategies for increasing RFP win rate

Selling & Enablement

There are two primary reasons why you should aggressively pursue requests for proposals (RFPs). One, they’re a great way to build pipeline. Which is key for the 69% of B2B salespeople who do not have enough leads in their pipeline to meet quota. Two, they can be a major revenue driver. You just have to make sure you’re pursuing the right RFPs and doing so as efficiently as possible. Take my word for it. Just kidding. I actually have data to back it up. I also did an entire webinar on this topic, if you’re ready for a deep dive.

RFPs: Opportunity and Risk

Globally, $11 trillion of revenue is won through competitive proposal processes (RFPs) every year. You may be asking, “What is a good proposal win rate?” RFPIO’s research puts the average RFP win rate at 45%. But that’s across all industries. It will vary according to your level of specialization. RFPs exist in multiple markets, including government, construction, supply chain, manufacturing, systems integration, healthcare, and technology.

$11 trillion of revenue is won through competitive proposal processes (RFPs) every year.

As a salesperson, I always wanted to include RFPs to help grow my pipeline. A healthy sales pipeline is 4-5x the close rate, and RFPs can represent deal sizes large enough to keep my pipeline super healthy. Since working in sales, I’ve led proposal teams and now have my own company, Patri, that helps qualify sales opportunities, including RFPs. I’ve also learned that too many salespeople and leaders are avoiding RFPs.

RFPs are not easy, and they can be labor-intensive. I’ve known many salespeople who find them too restrictive. In other words, there’s too much red tape to navigate to put together a response.

The fact is that only a little over half of all salespeople are hitting their quotas. There’s a lot of desperation out there. If you’re already in desperation mode, then the notion of allocating resources to an RFP proposal is tantamount to putting all your eggs in one basket. Proposal opportunities are more than 5x more expensive than traditional sales opportunities. As a result, companies are spending an estimated $200+ billion per year on lost bid opportunities alone.

Companies are spending an estimated $200+ billion per year on lost bid opportunities alone.

So if you boil it all down, objections to pursuing RFPs come down to time and finding the right opportunities. I’m going to unleash my inner salesperson and help you overcome those objections. Let’s look at the data.

5 smart moves to increase your RFP win rate

5 smart moves to increase your RFP win rate

  1. Pursue RFPs you have the highest probability of winning: Qualifying RFP opportunities before you respond helps reduce your loss rate and increase your win rate. Patri clients have saved $26 million and 27,000 hours by focusing efforts only on opportunities they can realistically win.
  2. Increase RFP response volume: Teams with dedicated proposal professionals submitted 3.5x more responses in 2020.
  3. Increase sales efficiency: Teams using RFP software submit an average of 46% more responses every year.
  4. Improve RFP response quality: Medical device manufacturer IBA re-invested time saved from RFP software into improving response quality and increased win rate by 15% in the first year.
  5. Streamline collaboration: 38% of responders cite collaborating with subject matter experts (SMEs) to create and review content as their biggest headache.

So that gives you an idea of what you can do. Now, how can you win more RFPs? Qualify opportunities and implement RFP response software.

How to win more RFPs in 3 steps

Step 1: Qualify based on data

I remember early in my proposal response days, I was the salesperson and proposal manager. Wearing both hats, anything I wanted to pursue I had to make sure was winnable. Some of those early parameters were relationship status, incumbency, solution fit, and requirement fit. I grew this exercise in qualification into my company, Patri.

Patri sits between RFP identification and response, at that pivotal qualification point. We analyze data to provide clients a fit score and call out their strengths and weaknesses that will play into their pursuit of an opportunity. So far, we have helped qualify more than $40 billion of opportunities and helped win $84.6 million worth of business.

Step 2: Save and re-invest time

When clients agree that an opportunity is fit enough to pursue, we recommend that they use RFP software to craft the best response possible. Solutions such as RFPIO automate manual processes and improve collaboration, freeing up your time for other things. The more time you have to fine-tune your proposal, the better your proposal will be, and the higher your win rate.

RFP software helps proposal and sales teams save time (and achieve higher win rates) by:

  • Cutting response time by an average of 40%: Automatically respond to commonly-seen questions with Auto Respond, automation functionality powered by machine learning.
  • Managing and moderating content and projects: Organize RFP content, import projects, assign tasks, respond to questions, set up review cycles, and export into the source file or custom template.
  • Streamlining cross-functional collaboration: Easily collaborate across teams using in-app @mentioning and integration with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and Jira.
  • Making data-driven decisions: Gain insight into time spent, deals won, and resources used with built-in business intelligence and analytics.
  • Integrating into your existing tech stack: RFPIO integrates with more platforms than anyone, including popular CRM, SSO, cloud storage, and communication platforms.

The primary indicator for RFP software, like any other automation software, is that it saves time. It’s what you do with that time that will determine your level of success with increasing RFP win rate.

Re-invest time into responding to more RFPs with higher quality proposals. Also, like a pure shooter who moves well off the ball (a la Craig Hodges for 90s-era Bulls fans or Klay Thompson for current Warriors fans), you can work on your process outside of active projects. In other words, re-invest time into improving your content. So when that next RFP comes in you not only have content that’s locked and loaded, it’s high quality, too, which will improve your odds of getting shortlisted.

Step 3: Designate an owner of the response process

While RFP software delivers efficiency, you will get more value out of it if you have a dedicated proposal manager administering the software and the processes around it. This de-facto leader of the proposal team will also be responsible for:

  • Building relationships with other company stakeholders, including sales, product, legal, and marketing teams.
  • Driving user adoption, knowledge management, and other essential functions associated with RFP software.
  • Enabling sales to have a streamlined, unfettered user experience to minimize objections and elevate the value of RFPs in pipeline management.

Finally, it’s important to note that you don’t have to make double-digit gains in your RFP win rate to realize impressive results. For example, if a company’s average RFP is worth $570,000 and they submit 415 RFPs annually, with a win rate of 32%, the business value of their RFP process is $75,696,000. Improving the win rate just 2% would represent a nearly $5 million dollar increase.

ROI of increasing your RFP win rate

Pursuing RFPs doesn’t have to be a black box experience. Be transparent within the company. Know your costs and win rate probability. Go and embrace them. By properly qualifying opportunities and using RFP software, you can improve your own odds.

To learn more about how Patri can help you qualify opportunities, schedule a demo. To see if your RFP management process is ready for automation by RFPIO, schedule a demo.

How TOMIA improved global collaboration with bid response software

How TOMIA improved global collaboration with bid response software

Customer Stories

As a company that creates solutions for the world’s leading service providers, including some of the telecommunication industry’s largest groups, TOMIA defines its mission as enabling their customers to drive the future of connectivity through new technologies.

They’re also a company that takes compliance extremely seriously, which is why requests for bids are such an important part of their business model. Bids and tenders are their opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, professionalism, and commitment to security in the fullest detail—and clearly showcase why they’d be the best fit.

John Marcow, the Bid Response Manager at TOMIA—and a veteran of the industry, who’s responded to 700+ bid requests in his lifetime—knows better than most how important bids are to the sales cycle. “It doesn’t matter how good your relationship is. Sometimes you need to respond to an RFP if you want to win the deal.”

Before RFPIO, the TOMIA bid response process was highly manual. After receiving a bid request, John would paste the following table underneath each question:

He would then ask subject matter experts (SMEs) to search for their name and respond to all their assigned questions.

As one can imagine, this process not only left plenty of room for human error, it also lacked visibility John needed to keep RFPs on track. Since everything was answered in static documents on personal computers, John would constantly send emails to assignees, requesting status updates or reminding them of the due date.

Once John received all answered questions (often in the eleventh hour), he would proofread and polish each of the answers, and compile the responses into a single, cohesive document.

This process was tedious, time-consuming, and inefficient. The TOMIA bid response team knew there had to be a better way to respond to RFPs. So they turned to RFPIO’s AI-enabled RFP response solution.

Bid proposal software: Before and after
Before RFPIO:

  • Assigned questions to SMEs by adding a table to the Word or Excel document that includes assignee name, compliance status (y/n), and a place to write supporting information.
  • After receiving completed questions from SMEs, the documents would need to be compiled into a single cohesive document.
  • The bid manager constantly reminded SMEs to finish their assigned questions.
  • The bid manager had no visibility into project status. He had to manually reach out to SMEs via email to ask whether they had started working on their questions.
  • SMEs who wanted a question reassigned to someone else would ask thebid manager (John) to do so.

After RFPIO:

  • Questions are assigned in just a few clicks.
  • RFPIO automatically sends reminders.
  • The bid manager has full visibility into question status from the project dashboard.
  • Questions are reassigned by the SME in RFPIO.
  • Completed, cohesive responses are exported into the source file in a few clicks.

Improving collaboration and increasing efficiency with RFPIO

When the TOMIA team responded to their first RFP using RFPIO, it was hard to believe how much of a difference it made.

With RFPIO, John uploads an RFP to the platform and assigns questions or sections to subject matter experts. After that, the process is relatively hands-off—RFPIO will automatically send reminders to everyone who hasn’t answered their questions.

seamlessly collaborate by assigning tasks to collaborators in-app

John also has full visibility into project status from the project dashboard. He uses that information to send out periodic project updates to keep everyone informed and keep projects on track.

Identify project scope before starting any RFP

“RFPIO gives me full visibility into the entire process. And I’m able to easily collaborate with team members across the organization, from product to finance to legal.”

Getting stakeholders across the organization up and running in RFPIO

Since TOMIA implemented RFPIO in 2018, they’ve created user accounts for 25% of the company, even though most of them only use it for a few questions. But since RFPIO has an unlimited user license, they’re able to maintain their accounts for those moments when they do need to support RFPs.

“One of the best things about RFPIO is that it’s really intuitive. You don’t need much instruction to use it. Our SMEs are able to easily answer any questions they’ve been assigned with little to no training.”

When an SME has been assigned a question, they’ll receive a notification in their inbox letting them know their expertise is needed. They can either respond directly from their email, or open up the platform to respond there.

When they log into the platform, the first thing they see is the list of questions they’ve been assigned. They can click into the question to respond. Or, if they don’t know the answer, they can assign the question to someone else—or simply @mention them for help.@-mentioning makes it easy to collaborate on RFP projects

Overall, RFPIO has significantly cut response time and improved the bid response process. With RFPIO, the TOMIA team—with regional headquarters in the US, Israel, Luxembourg, and India—is able to collaborate with team members all over the world to craft compelling bids that win more business.

“I would absolutely recommend RFPIO to anyone looking for a better way to manage proposals. With RFPIO, we’re able to collaborate in real-time with team members all over the world. It has made a huge difference.”

Ready to streamline collaboration on bids and tenders?

See how RFPIO can help your team uplevel your bid response process and make global collaboration a breeze. Schedule a demo to get started.

RFP automation: What it is, how it works and best practices

RFP automation: What it is, how it works and best practices

Products/Features/Solutions

If you’ve ever responded to a request for proposal (RFP), you know they tend to be about 80-85% boilerplate content. The remaining 15-20% is where you really have the freedom to adapt your proposal to a client’s specific needs. Unfortunately, if you use a manual response process, you likely invest more time finding previous responses than you do creating valuable, customized content. It’s a challenge that proposal teams are increasingly solving with RFP software that enables RFP automation.

Without RFP automation, valuable time is spent on repetitive tasks. Indeed, subject matter experts (SMEs) could spend up to 30% of time they didn’t have to spare responding to RFPs. In addition, information and departmental silos keep teams from reaching their fullest revenue-generating potential as a collaborative unit.

Fortunately, automating the RFP response process means less repetitive labor, more time for other high-priority tasks—and the chance to make each RFP you submit pack a bigger punch.

In this blog, we’ll cover:

What is RFP automation?

RFP automation is a cloud-based B2B sales technology that helps teams maximize resources and time being spent on RFPs. As a result of these time savings, team members are able to return to other high-priority tasks.

But let’s take a step back.

Billions of years ago (in the late 2000s), marketing automation caused an important shift in email marketing. Automation allowed marketers to achieve more as a team and make a bigger impact on revenue.

Over the past few years, the proposal management industry experienced the same transformative effect with RFP automation.

It’s a collective effort to respond to an RFP, with involvement from multiple departments—sales, marketing, legal, finance, product, compliance, IT—and the list goes on. Often (but not always) there is a dedicated proposal manager directing these projects to keep everyone moving toward the same target…a timely, quality RFP response.

In the olden days, an RFP would come in. The proposal manager would “shred” it and assign questions to an SME—the all too familiar questions the SME had answered many times before on other proposals.

The SME then would spend too much time looking through folders and documents to copy and paste previous responses. There would be little time to ensure quality control.

With RFP automation, an SME only has to answer a question once, and then it’s captured in a content library. The proposal manager can then reference the Content Library to populate the responses with relevant content. SME involvement consists only of oversight, making sure the content is accurate and optimized.

Automation helps teams maximize resources and time being spent on RFPs. Time savings allow team members to return to other high-priority tasks. Some of your most valuable and costly resources are involved in RFP responses. If you respond to 100 RFPs in a year, this really adds up. To calculate your RFP automation cost savings, check out our ROI calculator.

How do you automate an RFP response?

Automating an RFP response comes down to two main things: Artificial intelligence and content. AI-enabled RFP automation technology uses AI to match existing content with new incoming RFP questions. The more content you have, the more accurate the result.

When we set out to build a consolidated (and better) solution for RFP response management back in 2015, over and over we heard that responders wanted a platform that would help them improve collaboration and automate workflows.

A few RFP automation solutions existed, but they weren’t easy to use. And these solutions didn’t integrate with systems that teams were already using across an organization, including CRMs like Salesforce, communication tools like Slack, or cloud storage like Google Drive. With more than 8,000 solutions in the marketing technology landscape, the last thing an organization needs is a solution that doesn’t play nice with other technology its stack. 

marketing technology landscape

To make sure we built a solution for proper RFP automation, we focused on three aspects:

  • Artificial intelligence: (AI) is changing the way we all work, including how proposal management teams “shred” their RFPs. It’s easier to break up relevant sections, auto-identify response content, and assign questions to subject matter experts.
  • Integrations: Our integrations keep all team members working in their preferred tools. Salespeople don’t want to leave their CRM to respond to RFPs and they no longer have to. SMEs are unreachable by email, but they’ll engage through Slack.
  • Content management: The Content Library is the content management hub — not only for RFPs, but for all company information. Anyone has access to the latest and greatest content, which can be easily searched, selected, and inserted into a variety of business documents … even emails.

Benefits of RFP and proposal automation

Achieving more with RFP automation also means responding to more RFPs. Organizations that use RFP software respond to 43% more RFPs per year, on average. Because the time-savings realized from automation can be re-invested to maintain or improve response quality, imagine what this scenario, based on data from our research, would do to your revenue forecast:

  • Prior to RFP automation, let’s say you responded to an average of about 50 RFPs every year.
  • Each RFP win equals, on average, $1-3 million.
  • Add 43% more responses per year with RFP software.
  • At an industry average of 45% win rate, that equates to 22.5 more wins per year.

In this scenario, your revenue forecast from RFPs could increase upwards of $22.5 million to $67.5 million in a year!

Without automation, response management teams can only dream of increasing RFP responses, let alone revenue forecasts. They respond to RFPs in a reactive state, which, of course, is not the way to produce a quality deliverable for the prospect.

Saving time through efficient processes turns into extra hours to consider viable business opportunities—perhaps even breaking into new markets. RFP automation gives your team the space to establish a proactive process, where technology handles much of the heavy lifting. Team members are brought in to use their strengths to strengthen the content—and the chances of winning the deal.

Responding to RFPs: Is it a good AI use case?

Someone has to say it. Doc Brown of Back to the Future fame wasn’t a scientist. He was a tinkerer who built Rube Goldberg machines. Everything from his dog Einstein’s automatic feeder to the Delorean’s lightning rod was an overly complex chain-reaction contraption. Until he invented the Flux Capacitor. That was the real science that made time travel possible.

How is Doc Brown’s evolution from tinkerer to scientist relevant to automation? In the case of responding to RFPs, you cannot simply automate all of the manual tasks that go into a response. If you do that, then you’ll end up with an RFP Rube Goldberg machine that may not be as reliable as the manual processes you’re trying to eliminate. But in situations where AI is appropriate? That’s the real science that makes automation possible.

As promising as AI is, it’s still just plain hard. Projects are costly, unwieldy, and difficult to complete. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 53 percent of AI projects make it into production. And, according to Venture Beat, those that do are only profitable about 60 percent of the time.

RFP automation best practices

For example, within the Responsive platform automation works to:

  1. Populate the “first pass” of a response for an entire project or section of a project.
  2. Reference content library records in conjunction with a series of filters and the ranking of metadata
  3. Use a recommendation algorithm to prioritize and rank the results
  4. Preview results so users can decide whether or not to use the answers

To do this, AI operations factor in, among other things:

  • Access to the Content Library content by user
  • Similar questions or alternate questions in the Content Library
  • Answer Type/Compatibility
  • Content-to-search match percentage
  • Star rating (content quality)
  • Used count (how often the content is used)
  • Last used date
  • Last updated date
  • Exact word/phrase match

When effectively executed, AI enables RFP automation because the solution has been built by qualified data scientists, extensively tested, based on accurate data models, and designed to scale. It’s also important to note that AI isn’t meant to be used to replace humans; it’s intended to enhance us.

The secret to RFP automation success: Organized content

Even artificial intelligence needs a brain. Don’t worry. This isn’t a Skynet scenario. For RFP automation, the brain is your content library. More specifically, in Responsive this is known as the content library.

With a robust, well-maintained content library as a resource, your AI can grow in sophistication from machine learning. Users will be able to filter at higher levels, access the cleanest Q&A pairs, and move faster through the response process. Additionally, time saved from RFP automation can be re-invested into developing better content and curating existing content to improve its quality.

A long-term benefit of RFP automation is increased visibility into which content is most popular and where you have gaps. Data from these insights will be valuable in your content strategy moving forward.

So through RFP automation using a reliable content library you get to create better content and find time to continuously organize content, all while responding to more RFPs. That sounds like a profitable use case for AI.

Are you ready to see if RFP automation is right for you? Request a demo to find out.

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

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

Integrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you get it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you can expect 

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

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

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

Benchmarks and future-proofing for RFP teams

Benchmarks and future-proofing for RFP teams

Products/Features/Solutions

How is technology aiding the request for proposal (RFP) response process? To find out, we surveyed members of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) to gain insight into current and future trends in proposal management processes across 10 industries.

The resulting data has been compiled and analyzed for you in our Benchmark Report: Proposal Management.

The clash of trend and reality

For any proposal to have a chance, it has to illustrate how your solution solves the issuer’s specific problem, and it has to speak to proposal reviewers and decision-makers alike. This requires your organization to focus on responding only to the requests that you think you can win. It also helps to have dedicated proposal writers experienced in developing content that appeals to your target audience.

Both of these considerations clash with two trends identified by our research:

  • The need to respond to more RFPs
  • A resistance to increasing headcount

The research shows that many organizations understand that they need to respond to more RFPs in order to play the odds and generate revenue. With RFP opportunities averaging between $1M and $3M (according to RFPIO data), each one has the potential to make a significant impact.

But how can you respond to more requests, while simultaneously focusing only on the requests you have the best shot at winning?

Scale your team’s win rate with less

RFP technology enables organizations to efficiently invest time in the RFPs they go after, increasing the rate at which organizations can generate proposals. Some RFP software, like RFPIO, even enables data-driven analyses of the characteristics common to all the deals you win, helping you focus your time where you have the greatest possibility of success.

With proposal team headcount expected to remain at its status quo through the projected future, proposal managers will have to learn to do more with less. It also means that unless you already have proposal writers on staff, you’re less likely to hire more. You may want to buck that trend because our research also found that organizations with dedicated proposal professionals lap competitors by 3.5x.

Survey says: RFP software is an advantage

“With RFP competition predicted to increase, and teams already being challenged to do more with less, proposal teams will need to invest in technology and automation to scale their responses, enhance efficiency and maximize output.”

Fewer than half of the respondents to our survey currently use RFP software. This is surprising, considering the fact that survey respondents who use RFP software were able to submit 43 percent more proposals. Technology is transforming the proposal management landscape, making it easier for organizations to efficiently create their first proposal draft, thus giving them back the time they need to personalize responses to win effectively.

The cost of outdated proposal management

We also discovered that organizations not using RFP software instead used, on average, nine solutions to compose their RFPs, compared to only five for those with a dedicated RFP tool. For the sake of productivity, efficiency, personalization, as well as to help keep up with steeper competition for each request, organizations that want to take advantage of more revenue-generating opportunities will need to streamline their technology and automation to be effective in the coming days and beyond.

Stay in the know with RFPIO

Check out the full report to learn more about the state of proposal management, including our four recommendations for future success. If you’re one of those organizations trying to keep up without RFP technology, schedule a demo of RFPIO today. If you are already an RFPIO user looking to streamline your tech stack to increase efficiency, fill out this form to schedule time with your account manager.

20 stats proposal managers need before making that next big decision (new data)

20 stats proposal managers need before making that next big decision (new data)

Products/Features/Solutions

The legendary Ted Lasso once said, “Takin’ on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse. If you’re comfortable while you’re doin’ it, you’re probably doin’ it wrong.” Proposal managers can relate, especially staring down the end of a pandemic-induced paradigm shift in collaboration, automation, and workflow.

Digital transformation in response management has replaced proposal managers’ old challenges with new ones. Gone are the days of stalking cubicles of salespeople and subject matter experts (SMEs) to keep a proposal on track, manually completing questionnaires, and storing content in file cabinets or on shared drives. Enter the challenges of working remotely, videoconferencing fatigue, and high expectations for personalized proposal content.

What can you as a proposal manager do to stay on top of a dynamic response management industry? Before you consider your next automation solution, team addition or subtraction, or learning opportunity, make a decision based on some facts. We took the liberty of gathering 20 of them for you here.

RFP project management

  • “Only 43% of respondents report using RFP-specific technology today.” Organizations not using RFP-specific technology rely more on email, spreadsheets, content storage, and e-signature tools” – 2021 Benchmark Report: Proposal Management
  • “57% of proposal managers said their primary goal is to improve the proposal management process over time.” – 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey
  • “44% of project managers use no software, even though PWC found that the use of commercially available PM software increases performance and satisfaction.” – PricewaterhouseCoopers
  • “75% of senior executives said investing in technology to better enable project success was a high priority in their organization.” – Project Management Institute

As we see it, the trend for proposal teams is to break even on headcount while relying on automation and collaboration to increase productivity. Doing more with less is nothing new to proposal managers, and RFP software can help accelerate response time, centralize content management, and unify collaboration. In one case, it helped to triple RFP volume and reduce turnaround time by 40%.

RFP project collaboration

  • “Distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.” – Harvard Business Review
  • “78% of survey respondents expect the amount of remote work to increase post-pandemic from its pre-pandemic levels.” – Verizon
  • “Organizations with dedicated proposal professionals submitted 3.5X more responses in 2020.” – Salesforce
  • “Today’s average proposal management team consists of: 1 person (6%), 2-5 people (33%), 6-10 people (24%), 11-20 people (16.5%), 21-50 people (12%), more than 50 people (8.5%).” – APMP

The way we work is changed forever. Whether you’re back in an office or embedded as a remote worker, you’ll be designating responsibilities that team members can accomplish onsite, on the road, or at home. We’ve all grown more familiar with remote work tools and have our respective cheers (e.g., accessibility) and jeers (e.g., too accessible). The upside is that your team will be able to adapt quickly to RFPIO’s @-mentioning functionality and its integrations with Slack, Salesforce, and more.

RFP response knowledge sharing

  • “The latest edition of Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends study ranks ‘knowledge management’ as one of the top three issues influencing company success, yet only 9 percent of surveyed organizations feel ready to address it.” – Deloitte
  • “40% of survey responders use RFPIO to manage company knowledge.” – 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey
  • “44% of employees are ‘poor or very poor’ at transferring knowledge.” – Ernst & Young
  • “Workers spend nearly 20% of their time looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.” – Mckinsey Global Institute

Whether the proposal is being proactively generated by sales to get their foot in the door or reactively created for an RFP, you want the brand, expectation-setting, and peace-of-mind benefits of knowledge sharing from the RFPIO Content Library. Make this dynamic warehouse of Q&A pairs and content available to everyone in the organization through our unlimited license model. Even as a small team, you can respond to multiple RFPs simultaneously, scaling with the personalization necessary to merit serious consideration.

RFP content management

  • “Companies with a designated RFP solution are 32% more likely to have strong content moderation procedures in place, with 90% reporting this being a priority for them.” – 2021 Benchmark Report: Proposal Management
  • “The most frequently cited typical approach taken by content creators in their business (43%) was project-focused – content is created in response to internal requests.” – Content Marketing Institute
  • “If searching is difficult and the results are not highly valued, workers lose trust in the knowledge systems. This, in turn, makes them less willing to share personal knowledge in those systems, which reduces the quality of the content.” – Deloitte
  • “50% of proposal managers said keeping response content up-to-date and accurate is their biggest challenge.” – 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey

Second only to win rate, content carries the most weight when judging whether a proposal manager is a hero or a villain. How it’s created, maintained, stored, and accessed has a direct or indirect impact on almost everyone in the organization. Sales wants accurate, innovative content yesterday. Support wants content that accurately reflects service level agreements. Marketing wants content to be on-brand.

If you’re using RFP software, then you’ve gone to great lengths to curate the content library used to automatically populate proposals. Why not make that content available to the whole organization? With RFPIO Lookup, you can add a portal into your RFPIO Content Library from everywhere your users work.

82% of our customers said managing response content all in one place is the primary way RFPIO helps them achieve success. Global organizations can take further advantage of separate content collections relevant to their region, which is especially beneficial for multilingual content.

RFP response efficiency

  • “On average, organizations with a designated RFP technology submit 306 proposals a year, while those without submit only 210 — a difference of nearly 43%.” – 2021 Benchmark Report: Proposal Management
  • “86% of salespeople are looking for opportunities to shorten the sales cycle to close more deals. 79% of marketers are focused on using automated technology to execute more with less resource strain. 65% of subject matter experts aspire to increase efficiency through better processes.” – 2019 RFPIO Responder Survey
  • “85% of proposal managers work over 40 hours a week, with 11% working over 50.” – APMP
  • “Solutions based on natural language processing/generation and robotic process automation can help reduce the time it takes to draft requests for proposals (RFPs) by up to two-thirds and eliminate human error.”- McKinsey & Company

Efficiency is the numero uno KPI for RFP software. The benefit you realize depends on how you re-invest time saved through efficiencies achieved by state-of-the-art automation, knowledge management, and collaboration capabilities. For example, Lauren Daitz, Senior Manager of the Proposal Department at HALO Recognition, said about RFPIO, “We’re up 25% over our average volume for the last six years and our staffing is down 50% at the same time. And we were still able to deliver every RFP on time or early and with 100% accuracy.”

Proposal managers can never be satisfied with the status quo. Always look for new opportunities for learning and growth. As competition increases and digital transformation continues, it’s either move forward or fall behind.

Like Ted Lasso says, the happiest animal in the world is a goldfish because it only has a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish. His wit and wisdom know no bounds.

If you’re ready to learn how RFPIO can help make you a more effective proposal manager, schedule a demo today.

2020 proposal software features to prepare you for the year of “access anywhere”

2020 proposal software features to prepare you for the year of “access anywhere”

Products/Features/Solutions

It’s rare that you hear this, but 2020 was awesome. When it came to implementing new proposal software features in RFPIO, that is. And most of the awesome ideas came from you, our customers! 

Of the 1,855 submissions to our Idea Portal in 2020, we have already implemented almost half (769). Another 66 are planned or under development. 989 are still under consideration or waiting for other feature dependencies. Your feedback is integral to a better performing product. Keep ’em coming!

The following describes some of our favorite proposal software features of 2020. At the end of the article, you’ll see why 2021 is shaping up to be the year of “access anywhere” at RFPIO.

Proposal software features part 1: Project management

Automate Transfer of Intake Team to Project Team

“Intake” creates a staging area for RFP/Proposal requests where they can be evaluated in one place to make a bid/no-bid decision without using active project bandwidth. Now, the team you assign at intake will automatically carry over if the project goes active. No more re-assigning team members!

Automatically transfer intake team to project team, simplifying proposal management

Choose from More Translation Options

  • Translate entire projects or source files on-demand as they’re imported. Previously, this was only available within Content Library or individual Q&A pairs.
  • Bulk translate content in Content Library.
  • Retain images and formatting in translated content.
  • Enjoy a better translation review experience to verify translation quality, whether you rely on automated translation or a translation service outside your organization.
  • Try the new translation engine: DeepL now available in addition to AWS, Google, and Microsoft. You can choose your preference.
  • Experience the RFPIO user interface (e.g., menus, modals, etc.) in Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Gather E-Signatures Without Leaving RFPIO

Instead of exporting or printing out for signing, you can now collect signatures and place signature related fields on documents right from RFPIO! What’s really cool about this is that you can set a sequential signing order, on both the team and the individual level. 

After you’ve collected all your signatures (including guests), all that information flows directly into RFPIO—so you can easily check audit logs for signing activity history, including name of signer, time of activity, location, and type of activity. 

Gather e-signatures right in your proposal software

Import Markup Tracking in Microsoft Word Files 

When you’re importing long and complex proposals in Microsoft Word, RFPIO automatically generates a table of contents, so you can easily navigate up to 5 levels of sections and subsections. 

Also, we know that when you’re confronted with… let’s just call them “creatively styled” RFPs, maintaining the formatting during import can be challenging. This new enhancement makes that process a lot easier.

Easily import tables into your proposal software

Flexible Review Process at the Question or Section Level

With our new enhancements, we’ve strengthened our review functionality… which means you can get even more granular when setting up your review process.

Now, you have three options when setting up review cycles. 

  1. All — Just as it sounds. In order for this question to be marked as “reviewed”, all assigned reviewers need to sign off. 
  2. Any — Let’s say you have a go-to team of reviewers, any of whom you would trust to give the final sign-off on your content. By selecting “any”, if any one of those reviewers signs off on that content, the question is marked “review”
  3. Sequential — Need to get your immediate manager’s sign-off, before sending it up the ladder? No problem. All you have to do is set up sequential reviews, and you’re all set!

Set up advanced review cycles when managing proposals

Proposal software features part 2: Content management

Streamline Content Access Through Linked Companies

If you have reseller partners that need access to your content — or if you’re a parent company of multiple brands that need to access — then the new linked companies functionality is for you. 

It gives you the ability to grant access to your Content Library and specific collections in a completely separate RFPIO instance. That content will also be updated when you update the source file. You can enable (or disable) comments and discussions around specific content between linked companies.

Give different departments or reseller partners access to your RFP content library using the linked companies feature

Access Variable Answers Faster with Linked Content

Linked content allows similar content — variable answers to a single question or translated versions of the same answer — to be linked together and grouped for streamlined searchability and review management. You can even subscribe to specific content in the library to get notified any time there’s a change to that content.

Set 1 Source of Truth with Document Linking

This is something our customers have been asking for a long time. 

Let’s say you’re responding to an RFP, and are asked to  “please provide an example of when you’ve solved problem X.” This is a standard RFP request where you’ll want to use the same document — perhaps a case study — as your answer. 

Now, you can attach documents (e.g. docx, islx, pdf) to question-answer pairs in the Content Library. And anytime you update the document, it automatically updates the corresponding linked attachment, establishing a single source of truth across the board.

Improve content management for your proposal content with document linking

Access Multiple Versions of a Document

Upload up to 20 versions of the same document. View the different versions of a current document as well as revert to any previous versions, a la Google Docs.

Get Help Choosing SMEs 

The SME recommendation dictionary helps you choose experts and reviewers. RFPIO will auto suggest users when assigning individual questions within a project. Assign topics or keywords to users or groups of users. This is especially helpful for larger organizations with a lot of SMEs from which to choose. It makes it easier to find the right author to own the content. 

Proposal software features part 3: Integrations

Access More Slack Functionality

We made a lot of Slack integration enhancements this year. Collaborators were already able to receive and reply to RFPIO project notifications and tasks within Slack–without having to log in to RFPIO. Now you can also:

  • Add Slack conversation content into the RFPIO Content Library as new Q&A pairs.
  • Search the RFPIO Content Library for answers to questions from Slack (this will help increase engagement with users who don’t use RFPIO often but are heavy Slack users).
  • Search questions, answers, and fields such as tags, collections, language, custom fields, and more.
  • Perform combination search using Boolean operators, range search, wildcard, and fuzzy search.
  • Admins can customize the number and type of results shown when others execute a Slack search.

Experience Full-Circle Project Creation and Retrieval in Salesforce

Upload files directly from Salesforce and create a project request in RFPIO. View the status of in-flight projects and retrieve completed response packets back in Salesforce. Auto-publish completed response packets to Salesforce pages. Add team members while creating projects from CRMs such as Hubspot, Pipeline, Pipedrive, MS Dynamics, and Salesforce. If you have any task assignments in your CRM, then this is a great way to add that project team while it’s being created.

Get a Head Start on the Sales Cycle with the Salesforce Proposal Builder

The new Salesforce Proposal Builder allows sales reps working Salesforce opportunities to generate proactive proposals on a self-service basis using all of the dialed-in content and templates you already have in RFPIO. This feature is included in the RFPIO Salesforce integration. Generate proactive proposals in Salesforce, using content stored in your proposal software

Try the New Google Hangouts Integration

RFPIO for Google Hangouts allows you to receive @mentioned comments as direct messages. Search the Content Library and view contents with a simple click. 

By integrating proposal software with Google Hangouts, you can receive @mentioned comments as direct messages.

Get Chat Endpoint API Enhancement

For those concerned with compliance, you can now pull all of your RFPIO chat conversation data into whatever 3rd-party location you prefer, from security to archival systems.

Proposal software features part 4: Business intelligence/reporting

Create Custom Reports & Dashboards

Improve how you analyze your data and make informed decisions. New reporting features include charts, tables, grouping, and aggregate functions. The dashboard provides an effective way of organizing reports in a single page with a combination of charts and tables. New improvements include date field calculations, daily/weekly/monthly scheduling, auto-delivery of reports, and more! 

Use proposal software to create custom reports and dashboards

Visualize Data on Your Platform of Choice

If you use Tableau or other data visualization solution, you can now pull RFPIO custom configure paths for metadata between RFPIO and 3rd-party or homegrown reporting tools or BI systems.

2021: Introducing the year of “access anywhere”

If you thought 2020 features were good… wait until you see what we have in store for 2021!

2021 will be the year of “access anywhere”. In short, that means we’re going to be releasing features that makes it easy to work on projects and search for RFPIO content… from wherever you might be. This includes things like offline mode, a new-and-improved RFPIO Lookup, and more!

Contact us to learn more about these new proposal software features, and find out how you can take advantage of them.

How TeamDynamix managed an increase in RFP volume with proposal automation software

How TeamDynamix managed an increase in RFP volume with proposal automation software

Customer Stories

TeamDynamix is a cloud-based IT Service Management and Project Portfolio Management platform that helps organizations improve efficiency around how IT teams handle service incidents, change management, and project planning.

While their customers span a broad spectrum of sectors, there has been an increase in demand within state and local government, which has in turn caused RFP volume to triple over the past three years.

Public-facing RFPs tend to come with a high level of competition as the bidding process is open, so it is critical that each response is complete, follows any specified guidelines, and stands above the others. It is not unusual for more than 30 companies to respond to a single public-sector RFP. In order to meet this demand, TeamDynamix needed to scale their RFP team.

Scaling up to meet RFP demand

“When I first joined TeamDynamix, RFP volume was increasing rapidly,” explains Erica Schneider, RFP Manager. “We needed a way to not only handle the increase in RFPs while ensuring consistency and accuracy, but also reduce turnaround times. We started to look at various RFP platforms to help us manage these challenges.

Erica recognized that the two main issues—scalability and inefficiency—could easily be solved with the right software. It was just a matter of finding a solution that would grow along with their team.

When you’re looking for the right RFP software, you need to keep an open mind 

Erica has been in the proposal industry for nearly 20 years and has worked with almost every RFP software in the market. Her approach to the evaluation process was to create a set of requirements, then systematically review each solution.

When evaluating different vendors, Erica wanted to make sure the platform they chose wasn’t just something her team could use, but something they wanted to use—and simple enough so that anyone could use it with minimal training. 

From the ease-of-use and administration standpoint, RFPIO was the clear winner. Whenever her team needs help on an RFP question, the SMEs can answer it directly from their email, without logging into the application. “We’ve gotten so much positive feedback from the SMEs about how easy RFPIO is to use”, Erica added. 

Maintaining response consistency while scaling

When asked why consistency is important for RFPs, Erica responded, “one of the worst things for RFP issuers is they can tell an RFP was written by multiple authors.”

With RFPIO, they’re able to ensure that each response tells a coherent story, from beginning to end—and that their responses are consistent, regardless of which organization is asking the question. 

The RFPIO Content Library is the main reason they can create such consistent responses. As RFPIO Super Admin, Erica has full control over what is stored in the Content Library and can copy-edit everything that goes in there—ensuring all 1,600 question-answer pairs in the TeamDynamix library are accurate and consistent.

Their commitment to crafting consistent responses has paid off. Since they’ve started using RFPIO to respond to RFPs, “we get so much positive feedback on our RFPs”, Erica said. “Things like, ‘This is the best RFP I’ve ever seen’ or ‘We were really impressed with your RFP’. It’s so rare to get positive feedback—which is really a testament to our ability to deliver a consistent result.”

Responding to more RFPs in less time

“Over the past few years, we have tripled our RFP volume and increased the size of the RFP team as well,” Erica said. “Our goal is to finalize each response ahead of schedule so that we can do a full review — including peer reviews and with the sales team before submission. With RFPIO, we have reduced turnaround time by around 40%. By reducing the turnaround time by such a significant percentage, we can spend more time being consultative and strategic”

“We very much view our responses as a core differentiator. We closely track our down-selection rates, and are tracking twice as high as best practice benchmarks,” explains Erica.

Now that Erica has streamlined the response process at TeamDynamix, she’s focusing her attention on finding new ways to use RFPIO at her organization. Specifically, she’s making sure everyone who is client-facing can use the RFPIO Content Library as a resource for finding company information and answering any client questions.

It helps that RFPIO is so easy to use. “It takes about 10-30 minutes to train the client-facing teams on how to search for information in RFPIO,” Erica explained.

“I’m excited for the future of RFPIO at TeamDynamix. RFPIO has so many features that I know there are more ways we can be using the tool”, Erica went on. “I can’t wait to see what else we can do with it.”

Are you ready to take your response process to the next level?

Is RFPIO right for your team? Schedule a customized demo with our sales team to see how RFP software could transform your process.

9 of the best RFP resources we’ve seen this year

9 of the best RFP resources we’ve seen this year

Sales Enablement

At RFPIO, it’s our goal to give you all the tools you need to do your best work. But that doesn’t just mean developing software to streamline the response process… it also means providing educational resources that make you a better proposal manager.

We’re always surprised at how tricky it is to find fantastic RFP response resources. There are countless how-to articles circling the internet for everything under the sun — from “How to Cook Asparagus” to “How to High Five” (I couldn’t believe that last one was a real article, either).

With that in mind, we thought we’d do the heavy lifting of scouring the internet for great content and pull together a beautifully curated list of quality resources about RFP response 

Whether you’re just kicking off your career in RFP response, or are an RFP response old-timer, there’s bound to be something in this list that tickles your fancy.

9 of the best RFP response resources for proposal teams

#1

The Ultimate Guide to RFPs

By Jami Oettig

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Hubspot’s Ultimate Guide to RFPs on a list of RFP response resources. It answers questions like, “What is an RFP”, “What is an RFP Process?”, and “What’s the difference between an RFP and RFQ”? 

Whether you have no idea what an RFP is, or haven’t written one for a while, their guide can help you out.

#2

Simple Words, Easy Fixes

Laura Yribia

I love this list of simple but easy-to-miss editing issues to look for before producing a final proposal document! Be sure to keep this open in your browser as you do the final check of your RFP.

“These words may seem small or insignificant, but when your readers see them again and again in a proposal, they can make an enormous difference in their willingness to read.”

#3

How Starting Earlier Will Improve Your Win Rate

Ashley Kayes, CP APMP

If you want to improve your overall win rates, Ashley Kayes has several tactics that can help you succeed. Check out this article to dive into one of the most important tactics: starting earlier. 

“There simply isn’t enough time to develop a winning strategy and winning proposal when you’re short on time.”

#4

The Case for Empathetic Proposals 

Kevin Switaj

If you’re someone who already knows you’re way around an RFP response, check out this article for a different perspective on how you should be approaching your writing.

“To be truly successful… we need to make a deeper emotional connection with our evaluators. This goes beyond the client-centered approach to develop empathetic proposals.”

#5 

If Necessity is the Mother of Invention, Consistency is the Father of Success

Tony Birch

In this article, Tony Birch — founder and Chairman of Shipley Limited in the UK — shares tips and best practices for maintaining consistency in your RFP responses. starts this article with a punch: 

“Having worked with a large number of organizations (both ones that are successful and ones that are not), I have become convinced that consistency is one of the key attributes of successful business writing organizations.”

#6

How to Get a Customer Excited

Geoffrey James

While this article doesn’t talk about RFP responses specifically, it’s chock full of nuggets of wisdom useful for anyone trying to sell a product.

“For a sales claim to be effective, the customer must believe it, remember it, and want to take action based on it.”

#7

Make Your Mark as a New Proposal Manager

Miriam Ganem-Rosem

Just starting out in the world of RFP Response? This article is for you. In it, Miriam shares five actionable tips new proposal managers can use to make their mark.

My favorite tip? Ask good questions. 

“The questions you pose to your team can strengthen their proposal and make it more likely to win. In addition to checking for compliance, you should be asking ‘so what?’ and ‘says who?’ New proposal managers are perfectly placed to play devil’s advocate and ask these questions, because they themselves may not know the answers.”

#8 

Five Tips for Clearer Writing

Ashely Kayes, CP APMP

As a writer myself, I loved this piece. Full of great tips (and reminders) about how to be a better writer. Everyone — both veterans and newbies — has something to learn from this one. 

“In proposals, clear writing is critical to ensuring the evaluators understand the message you are trying to communicate. Even if you have the most valuable solution, if you can’t clearly articulate the features and benefits, you won’t have a high chance of winning.”

#9

A Complete Guide to Making Smart Bid/No-Bid Decisions

Emily Arnold, CF APMP

The title doesn’t lie. This really is a comprehensive guide for making smart bid/no-bid decisions — and an excellent resource for RFP responders everywhere.

“The proposal development process draws heavily on a company’s resources, so it is best to focus on opportunities that you have a good chance of winning.”

Did we miss an RFP resource from 2020? Let us know and we’ll add it to the list! 

How small proposal teams can provide enterprise-level support to sales

How small proposal teams can provide enterprise-level support to sales

People & Teams, Sales Enablement

Few people know this, but the working title for “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens was actually “A Tale of Two Teams.” The opening line was supposed to be: “It was the best of times (with RFPIO), it was the worst of times (without RFPIO), it was the age of wisdom (for sales teams supported by RFPIO-powered proposal teams)…” and so on. Alas, Dickens’ publisher suggested changing from “Teams” to “Cities” at the last minute. True story.

What I believe to be Dickens’ original intent was to point out that there’s a huge disconnect between what the optimal proposal team structure should be and the reality of resources available. The idea of having a team of dedicated capture specialists, writers, and SMEs that exist to support proposals is more myth than reality.

If you’re a proposal team of one or two—or none if proposal responsibilities fall under a duty bullet point in your sales or marketing leadership job description—then how can you do more with less?

More specifically, how can you support sales as if you had a roster full of star proposal free agents responsible for RFP capture, contract management, proposal production and management, subject matter expertise, pricing, and writing?

In “A Tale of Two Teams,” your team without RFPIO spends time:

  • Chasing down subject matter experts (SMEs) for responses
  • Badgering with constant reminders
  • Manually segmenting large RFP documents
  • Searching for previous content
  • Gathering RFP requirements
  • Tracking down supporting documentation

Your small team with RFPIO spends time:

  • Aligning with sales and marketing on positioning
  • Improving formatting and design templates
  • Developing persuasive language
  • Defining strategy
  • Gathering more information and context on clients, products, and previous conversations
  • Building graphics and visual aids
  • Personalizing messaging
  • Managing content

With RFPIO, your team focuses on developing more effective proposals while sales spends more time on revenue-generating activities. Using the features described below, I’ve worked with small proposal teams that can answer at least 40% of a proposal with auto-response capabilities, gain back 20% more time overall, and deliver proposals 1.4 days ahead of deadline, on average.

Set up your project dashboard immediately

When an RFP takes flight, you don’t want it flying blind into a fog bank with no instrument rating. Visualize early-stage projects with Analytics for better resource planning and forecasting. Light up your dashboard with insight into:

  • How many sections are there?
  • How many questions need answers?
  • How many authors will you need?
  • Answers to questions like these help make a project feel “real.” You can get a toehold and see what progress is going to look like.

Make an initial pass at the questions using a combination of auto-response and intelligent search. Then go back and refine content. Leave questions marked as unanswered so sales or SMEs can review and confirm, but start tracking sections you’ve started. Even if the proposal team is not running the show—because we all know that sales is—you can gain a sense of control by using the Analytics that RFPIO provides.

Keep the Content Library fresh

I’ve said it before and I will probably never stop not-saying it, there’s never any real great time to organize content because we are all always busy. But to ensure that auto-responding and intelligent search zero in on only the most relevant targets, library management is a must. We don’t have a dedicated manager, so we lean heavily on Tags.

As you work on projects, start importing content. Start standardizing it, adding tags, and defining owners as it’s imported. We have a standard set of tags—we block users from adding tags to try to limit tag sprawl—that we use to classify content as it’s imported for each project. This makes it easier for me when I’m wearing my library manager hat to update content when I have the time (I aim for once a week). We also use Collections and Custom Fields capabilities to help with library management.

Let the system be your cat-herding ranch hand

I use the phrase “herding cats” too often, but it’s a shared feeling among proposal managers. System-generated notifications help with cat herding because you don’t have to be the one cracking the whip all the time. Let the system chase them down. In RFPIO, system-generated notifications chase sales, SMEs, or whomever down automatically without me having to do anything.

Often, the reason content hasn’t been submitted or reviewed is because the owner simply forgot to click the blue “Submit” button. In other words, they might not even know that they’re still on the hook for the content because they believe they already submitted it! System reminders from a non-judgmental AI help preserve my relationships with colleagues. I don’t want them thinking that they sent content and I lost it, doubling up their work. This way, the system says that if it’s not in RFPIO, then it didn’t happen!

@-mentions improve #collaboration

RFPIO isn’t social media, but it does incorporate a standard social media feature to streamline collaboration: @-mentions. @-mentions allow SMEs, sales, and senior management to be notified via their communication platform of choice (e.g., email, Slack, Microsoft Teams) and then reply in-line without having to log into RFPIO, saving time and making it more likely that you’ll get an answer.

This is especially valuable when you need input from multiple contributors. With @-mentions, you keep the conversation going without constantly having to reset for each contributor. The challenge here is to get non-RFP team members to use @-mention. They can be slow to adopt.

I love flags!

Color-coded flagging may sound simple, but it’s one of my favorite features of RFPIO. I customize flags to help visualize strategic content. They help us quickly identify key things that need to happen for an RFP, and then make it easier to navigate those items across sections. Perhaps the best part is that there’s a lot of satisfaction in watching those flags disappear as items are completed. One step closer to project completion!

4 ways small proposal teams can support sales

  1. Make a habit of getting every RFP/Security Questionnaire/RFI into RFPIO immediately (light up that dashboard!).
  2. Assign a team member to be the “first-pass” SME before assigning outside authors and reviewers (utilize auto-response and intelligent search).
  3. Assign an owner to each piece of content and enable regular reviews. The more you can organize at the outset, the less time you have to spend squeezing an SME for details on major changes to a new product you just learned about before they go on vacation.
  4. Dedicate someone (maybe it’s you, lucky!) who engages with sales and SMEs on a regular basis. The consistency will help build relationships and trust with go-to collaborators. Proper care and feeding of SMEs will keep your projects running smoothly.

Add more value to sales and the organization as a whole

RFPIO has converted our organization from reactive to proactive when it comes to sales support and RFP responses. A short anecdote…

During a week in which we had three RFPs in-flight, one of which was a three-day turnaround, two sales management team members and our two-member proposal team were able to spend an hour on the phone to discuss some critical changes to the way we wanted to communicate our overall organizational capabilities based on trends we were seeing in the marketplace. There is no way that conversation would have happened if we hadn’t already been ahead of schedule thanks to RFPIO.

If empowering your proposal team to do more with less is a priority, then check out my webinar below for more details on how we use RFPIO. Ready to add some girth to your small team with RFPIO? Schedule a demo today!

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.