Businesses face a growing need to respond to increasing volumes of information requests with accuracy and efficiency. Buyers are demanding faster, more thoughtful responses while managing tighter budgets, putting pressure on companies to adapt quickly.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Strategic Response Management (SRM) offer not only a compelling solution to these problems, but also represent a new “must-have” go-to-market technology to remain competitive and transform how organizations democratize knowledge.
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By combining AI’s ability to process large datasets, automate workflows, and generate accurate, high-quality responses with SRM’s approach to centralizing content, companies can elevate both customer and employee experiences. This marriage of AI and SRM not only improves response quality and speed but also empowers employees to focus on higher-value work, driving sustainable growth.
At Summit 24, Responsive’s annual conference on SRM, Responsive CEO Ganesh Shankar explained adopting AI-powered SRM enables businesses to fully leverage their organizational expertise, enhance efficiency, and achieve long-term success.
Editor’s note: This recap has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can watch the full, unedited Summit24 session below.
“Profitable growth” instead of “growth at all costs”
Let’s take a broader look at the market landscape. We live in a new reality. There has been a fundamental shift in buying behaviors and expectations. Buyers are working with tighter budgets and demanding faster response times. Additionally, they’re increasingly seeking platforms or multi-product solutions to address various use cases.
This has resulted in a more complex decision-making process involving numerous stakeholders. As a result, companies are shifting from “growth at all costs” to “profitable growth,” with an emphasis on efficiency and top-line revenue. This focus on efficiency, coupled with heightened competition and longer sales cycles, is putting pressure on organizations to adapt.
We are also experiencing a once-in-a-generation transformation with the rise of Generative AI (GenAI). In less than two years, GenAI has upended technologies, processes, and entire professions. AI is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a critical capability for teams.
Teams are already using AI to make sense of large datasets, summarize, create, rewrite content, and scale best practices across their companies. For these teams, AI has been a force multiplier that helps organizations meet buyer needs while achieving profitable growth.
AI empowers strategic response professionals
This shift has also significantly impacted response management. For example, in partnership with the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP), Responsive published the 2024 State of Strategic Response Management Report with insights that provide a better understanding of the response landscape today.
Key findings include:
- 77% of respondents reported an increase in the volume of information requests
- Nearly half of a company’s revenue (48%) is tied to strategic responses like RFPs, bids, tenders, and proposals
Proposal teams are playing a vital role in revenue generation, and leaders in the industry are investing in AI and actively experimenting. In fact, 89% of respondents said they are using AI in some capacity, from consumer-grade chatbots to SRM platforms with built-in AI capabilities.
And organizations of all sizes are already seeing results:
- Maintel uses Responsive AI to bid on 25% more tenders without adding headcount
- Microsoft saves $17M while supporting 18K sellers and experts with AI-powered content recommendations
- Saving 20-60 hours per project & reducing risk at Stibo Systems
- How Netsmart accelerates response time 10X with Responsive AI
SRM helps organizations stand out and succeed
SRM is more than just a technology. It’s a framework that combines people, processes, and tools to unlock organizational knowledge for profitable growth. It ensures every proposal and response is compelling, compliant, and leverages your organization’s best content.
The core of SRM is its ability to help response teams harness their company’s most trusted, compliant, and compelling content to win deals. There are three key areas where SRM is helping companies stand out:
- Realizing the potential of AI
- Driving top-line revenue
- Elevating the role of proposal teams
Organizations are no longer sitting on the sidelines when it comes to AI. Those who are the most successful have seen benefits such as improved decision-making and enhanced customer experiences.
Achieving double-digit win rates at JAGGAER
One such company is JAGGAER, which has reduced the time it takes to maintain their content library by 50% and achieved a double-digit increase in their win rate with the help of Responsive AI.
Here’s what JAGGAER has already achieved:
- Win rate increase worth roughly 15 times the investment they made with Responsive
- Realized ROI within three months of upgrading from their previous RFP software provider to the Responsive SRM Platform
- No-bid rate increased as a result of selecting opportunities to pursue based on Requirements Analysis results
“Strategic Response Management solutions save you time, money, and improve the quality and accuracy of your responses,” said Autumn Wenner, Content Proposal Specialist at JAGGAER. “Companies must guard against complacency and need to understand how quickly things are changing in the proposal world.”
Investing in SRM isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about transforming business outcomes. According to the 2024 State of Strategic Response Management Report, organizations that have implemented AI-led SRM are three times more likely to see significant revenue growth compared to those that haven’t.
Elevating proposal teams to strategic partners
AI and SRM have also been crucial in elevating proposal teams, which have historically been seen as cost centers to strategic partners driving business outcomes.
As Responsive and APMP uncovered in the 2024 State of SRM Report, about 48% of company revenue is tied to RFPs, bids, tenders, and proposals. Additionally, 70% of companies reported an annual increase in revenue generated through RFPs and other strategic responses.
However, only 65% of respondents reported feeling like they are business partners who are well-known across their organization. It’s easy to see why bid and proposal teams across the industry feel like they’re both undervalued and unable to keep up with the rising volume of incoming proposals with dwindling budgets.
That trend is slowly being corrected as leaders at companies like Sodexo are transforming their proposal teams into strategic response teams, resulting in increased win rates, higher stakeholder satisfaction, and significant business impact.
Elevating the proposal profession to a critical function at Sodexo
Danelle Morrow, North America VP of the Proposal Development Center at Sodexo, presented at Summit24 where she highlighted how SRM has elevated the proposal profession, turning it into a critical function that supports company growth.
“The reality is that proposal teams are strategic response teams that align cross-functional stakeholders, processes, and systems to deliver winning responses to information requests by harnessing a company’s knowledge,” Danelle said. “It’s time to recognize proposal teams for their vital role in making the revenue engine hum.”
When these valuable employees are recognized, the teams function better, employees are happier, and there’s greater topline revenue. We previously did a full recap of Danelle’s strategic response playbook which you can read to learn more about how proposal teams can reframe perceptions and play a central role in driving organizational success at the highest levels.
Putting your organization’s knowledge to work
Beyond responding to RFPs, leading response teams are using their SRM platforms to address a wide range of information requests across the enterprise. These platforms house a company’s most important knowledge, which can be leveraged for use cases like security questionnaires, ad hoc information requests, and more.
At Responsive, we continue to innovate and deliver value with solutions like Responsive Ask, giving sales teams fingertip access to their organization’s most compelling information. AI tools like Ask and a well-managed Content Library empower proposal teams to contribute to revenue growth while improving employee and customer experiences.
In fact, the International Data Corporation (IDC) — a global provider of market intelligence — found that a typical knowledge worker spends “about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30 percent of the workday, searching for information.”
Much of the value of SRM software is delivered through knowledge management functionality designed to make work easier. The practice of knowledge management focuses on saving, centralizing, organizing, and democratizing an organization’s most compelling, current, customer-facing information.
GEODIS creates a more efficient review process and content library
Maintaining best practices for content management is a challenge, but SRM software makes the process much easier. The Responsive Platform is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of strategic response teams. This includes content importing, integrations, knowledge management extensions, tags, permissions, account hierarchy management, and more.
At one point, GEODIS Americas maintained an in-depth Responsive Content Library of more than 2,000 Q&A pairs that proposal professionals use to respond to RFPs. GEODIS Americas used Responsive to refresh and consolidate information within the Content Library, which helped them:
- Reduce the effort required from GEODIS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to review and update Q&A pairs.
- Ensure that the information contained in Q&A pairs is consistent, accurate, and up-to-date.
- Win more business through responding to RFPs with high-quality, comprehensive answers.
“The GEODIS Content Library refresh would have been much more difficult and time-consuming without Responsive,” said Paul Maplesden, Consultant and Project Lead at GEODIS. “Responsive features have made it much faster and easier for us to identify duplicate content and develop a strong approach to enhance the Content Library.”
To date, GEODIS has reduced the number of Q&A pairs in Responsive by almost 80%, down from 2,000 pairs to around 600, making it both significantly easier to search for information in the library and keep the library up-to-date with the most relevant content.
Key takeaways in winning more with AI-powered SRM
An AI-powered SRM platform is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. Companies that embrace AI and SRM can fully leverage their organizational knowledge to address information requests quickly and accurately, enhance both customer and employee experiences, elevate their employees, and achieve profitable and sustainable growth in the years to come.
SRM is rightfully taking its place as a the must-have solution in the go-to-market tech stack, alongside CRMs, marketing automation, and sales enablement tools.
Ready to learn more about Responsive’s approach to AI and SRM, or interested in seeing how both can help you make more of an impact?Request a demo.