“Responsive is how we collaborate. It lets a relatively small bid team support hundreds of salespeople and solution consultants without everything becoming a bottleneck.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
The gist
Five9 faced rising RFP volume, fragmented content, and slow, consultant-driven responses. By standardizing on Responsive, Five9 centralized more than 6,500 approved Q&A pairs, enabled AI-powered self-service for sales, technical teams, and partners across questionnaires, proposals, and buyer questions, and improved collaboration across teams. Responsive helped Five9 deliver more consistent responses, improve global execution, and meet tight deadlines with greater confidence. That made it easier to compete in complex deals without burning out the people doing the work.
The rundown
The Five9 response challenge
- RFPs were originally handled by solutions consultants, who traveled for demos and customer meetings while juggling 10+ in-flight RFPs.
- Content lived in personal files, emails, and legacy documents, making it hard to find, trust, or reuse.
- Collaboration relied heavily on email and SharePoint, creating version control issues, inconsistent formatting, and slow turnarounds.
- As market demand exploded, the small Bid Management Team needed to support hundreds of sellers and consultants without becoming a bottleneck.
Impact and results
- Responsive centralized more than 6,500 approved Q&A pairs, giving teams greater confidence in approved responses while supporting consistency in content governance.
- 380+ users, including sales, solution consultants, and partners, access Responsive to find answers independently.
- Responsive Ask helps technical teams generate draft responses to multi-part questions using approved internal sources.
- The Bid Management Team completed 104% more RFIs and RFPs in 2025 compared to 2018, the year before Responsive was onboarded.
- The US-based Bid Management Team works in English and then uses Responsive to export global proposals in Spanish, Portuguese, Canadian French, German, and more.
From scattered answers to a single source of truth
The Bid Management Team at Five9, a leading provider of intelligent cloud contact center solutions, supports a fast-growing global sales organization. As deal volume surged in 2020 amid pandemic-driven demand, RFPs, security questionnaires, and ad hoc customer questions increasingly clogged the sales process.
“Before Responsive, the solution consultants were answering RFPs on top of everything else they were doing. RFPs were the least favorite part of their jobs, so they spent as little time as possible answering them.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
Response management was decentralized, and solutions consultants carried most of the workload. Even after Katie O’Sullivan, Director, Bid Management Team at Five9, joined to improve proposal quality, limited capacity remained a challenge. When volume spiked, the bottleneck intensified.
“We need to be in it to win it.” Katie explained. “RFPs increasingly have more questions and shorter deadlines, in part because customers are testing us and our competitors to see how much we really want their business.”
Governed knowledge Five9 can trust every time
With Responsive, Five9 strategically consolidated proposal, compliance, and corporate information into a single, trusted knowledge base to reduce process friction.
“We needed one place where we could trust the answers. If it’s in Responsive, we know the content has been reviewed, approved, and is technically correct.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
All content now flows through a centralized moderation process, with only two designated reviewers authorized to approve new or updated material. Responsive makes it easy to see where content originated, how it has changed over time, and whether it’s ready for use. A custom source field clearly documents content origins, reinforcing accountability and confidence for everyone using the system.
Ownership and maintenance are clearly defined. Technical solutions consultants own their respective areas of content, while Sharon Strong, Content Manager at Five9, coordinates collaboration and reviews through Responsive. Each answer is reviewed twice per year, creating a predictable cadence that keeps the knowledge base accurate and reliable.
That structure is balanced with flexibility. When products change or new offerings launch, Five9 runs on-demand reviews to update content immediately. This disciplined yet adaptable approach helps keep knowledge current and supports controlled self-service through approved content.
Unlocking self-service with Responsive AI
To reduce reliance on the Bid Management Team for routine and highly technical questions, Five9 expanded self-service with Responsive AI.
“AI Assistant is especially helpful when you get long, multi-part questions that pull from different parts of the organization. It creates a coherent response instead of stitching answers together manually.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
Technical teams use Responsive Ask to generate faster draft answers grounded in approved content. TRACE Score™, a 1–100 confidence rating, helps users quickly assess answer quality. At Five9, responses with a higher TRACE Score often require less manual revision before use. Lower scores signal where solutions consultants should review and refine the draft, which is still much more efficient than starting from scratch.
Sales teams search the Responsive knowledge base directly to find quick answers such as tax ID numbers, data center addresses, and other details buyers frequently request. Responsive Smart Search uses natural language queries to surface relevant, approved content. This self-service access eliminates wait time and removes friction by reducing reliance on the Bid Management Team for routine questions.
Five9 also maintains a dedicated partner collection in its Responsive Content Library with curated Q&A pairs. Partner RFP teams can self-serve accurate answers without routing every request through the Bid Management Team.
Teams can work more independently with fewer interruptions, letting the Bid Management Team focus on strategy and reviews while Five9 moves faster on deals.
Scaling collaboration across sales and technical teams
Responsive serves as the shared workspace for bid managers, solution consultants, sales teams, and partners. Projects are uploaded directly into the platform, sections are assigned clearly, and everyone works from the same live view.
Responsive’s integrations with email, Slack, and Teams reduce context switching, while comments and assignments replace long email threads. Ownership is clear, version control is maintained, and teams spend less time chasing updates and more time improving responses.
“Responsive makes it easy to collaborate across teams to create effective proposals. We’re able to work together more efficiently and meet the tighter deadlines that seem to be the new normal.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
Supporting global responses with translation
As a global business, Five9 regularly responds to RFPs and questionnaires issued in multiple languages. Five9 uses Responsive to translate RFPs from regions such as LATAM and Europe into English so the Bid Management Team can work efficiently in a single language. Once responses are complete, content is exported back into the original language for submission, with local solution consultants validating accuracy.
This approach gives international teams access to the expertise of the Bid Management Team as well as the improved proposal efficiency and quality benefits of Responsive. It also provides relief to local solutions consultants who have been attempting to manage increasing volumes of RFPs on their own. Instead of feeling isolated and left to fend for themselves, they feel supported and ready to take on more opportunities in their region.
Meeting higher stakes with speed, confidence, and consistency
Today, Responsive is central to how Five9 responds to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires. A small, experienced Bid Management Team supports a global go-to-market organization by enabling others to self-serve, collaborate effectively, and work from a centralized knowledge base.
“Responsive helps us create professional-looking proposals and consistent answers to common questions so we can focus on our competitive differentiators: our people and our willingness to work with each customer.”
Katie O’Sullivan
Director, Bid Management Team at Five9
With Responsive, Five9 has scaled response capacity while managing growing volume, tighter deadlines, and increased scrutiny. A single source of truth, AI-powered self-service, and real-time collaboration allow teams across sales, solutions consulting, and partners to move faster without sacrificing accuracy or quality.
