“We are massively shortening the time for us to get to a good version-one response. Using Responsive AI, it lessens the time that SMEs need to take with the bids, which frees up resources to do other things.”
— Hannah Cook, Head of Bids at Maintel
The gist
Driven by a new business function and regulatory changes in UK procurement processes, Maintel, a managed communications services provider based in London, was faced with a higher volume of more complex tenders (or RFPs). Maintel wanted to upgrade to Advanced Responsive AI to accelerate the response process and give teams more time to improve the quality of their bids (or proposals), a necessity in an increasingly competitive process.
Maintel cleaned up their Responsive Content Library to prepare their knowledge base for AI, updated their response process to tackle bids with AI first, and started using Responsive AI to automatically update content. The bids team now has more time to work with SMEs to refine proposals yet still manages to bid on 25% more tenders with the same level of resourcing. With win rates remaining steady — and with deals worth millions of pounds — Maintel’s bids team is making an outsized impact on the company’s bottom line.
The rundown
Maintel’s response challenge
- Increasing volume and complexity of tenders required more time and resources than were available on the bids team.
- UK Procurement Act (PA23) and procurement frameworks designed to ensure fair competition among suppliers forced Maintel — and all companies bidding on public sector tenders in the UK — to build stronger proposals to meet stringent scoring criteria.
- Maintel wanted the bids team to increase its response volume to boost the sales pipeline, without adding headcount.
Impact and results
- Submitted 25% more bids this year than last, and improved shortlist rate.
- “Massively” shortened the time to create first drafts of proposals with Responsive AI.
- Reduced how much time subject matter experts (SMEs) need to spend on bids.
- Win rate remains steady; combined with more bids submitted, the bids team boosted its contribution to Maintel’s bottom line by millions of pounds.
The need to move faster without adding headcount
In the United Kingdom, Maintel provides managed communications services — unified communications, secure connectivity, and customer experience (e.g., Teams integrations) — to businesses of all sizes and the public sector. When a public sector organization like the National Health Service (NHS) needs a new WAN, for example, it issues a tender that Maintel and their competitors bid on.
Maintel runs 90% of all their bids through Responsive, accounting for millions of pounds in revenue. Recent trends forced Maintel to investigate how Responsive AI could speed up the process of producing bids:
- UK Procurement Act (PA23): Effective as of February 24, 2025, PA23 is designed to level the playing field for public procurement and add transparency to public spending. As part of the build-up to PA23 going live, stringent scoring criteria have been devised to prioritize quality, social value, and public benefit over price.
- Increased competition: Partly as a result of PA23-driven changes, competition has stiffened significantly. Maintel has had to reconsider everything from pricing strategies to bid automation to define points of competitive differentiation.
- Mandate to build pipeline: With stiffer competition comes the need to fill the bid and tender pipeline with more opportunities. Buying cycles for the types of services Maintel provides average 9-12 months. Individual deals can represent millions of pounds.
Maintel was already using Responsive, but not its Advanced AI. The company recruited Hannah Cook as Head of Bids and charged her to set up the company’s content in the Responsive Platform to enable AI-supported processes.
Cook and her team of two senior bid managers, two bid managers, and one bid coordinator proceeded with one overarching goal in mind: “We needed to get a more efficient bid process so that we could respond to more tenders, which would increase our pipeline,” she said.
Upgrading to Advanced Responsive AI
Since Maintel had already been using Responsive prior to Cook’s arrival, the bids team knew about some Responsive AI capabilities, such as the ability to craft winning responses using smart recommendations. However, the team wanted to explore AI recommendations to speed up the response process, so they asked to trial the generative AI (GenAI) Responsive toolset, which is available as part of the Advanced Responsive AI package.
For their trial, Cook and Maintel’s Head of New Business ran previous bids through Responsive. First, they used the smart recommendations they were familiar with. Then, they tested Responsive AI to use GenAI to complete their “version one.” This AI assistant functionality drew from their content library to automatically respond to questions, edit responses, fine-tune answers with a broad range of built-in prompts, and create consistency with Maintel’s brand tone and voice.
During the trial, the Maintel team easily recognized that Responsive AI would give them the extra speed they needed to get documents from intake to first draft quickly. There were no hiccups with security as Maintel did its due diligence on using Responsive AI. Ethically, they were also on solid ground because AI is only used to generate content for the first draft, in collaboration with human proposal managers. Additionally, a gauntlet of human reviewers (e.g., SMEs, salespeople, content managers, etc.) revises, polishes, and personalizes that first draft proposal into an approved final draft.
This human-in-the-loop approach echoes Responsive’s own commitment to ethical AI. Responsive AI is not meant to replace humans; it’s designed to augment the potential of the revenue teams who use it for profitable growth.
Setting up the content library for AI success
Before Cook arrived, Maintel’s content library was not ready for AI. After the initial effort to consolidate content in the library, there had been sporadic organization and governance initiatives. To capitalize on Responsive AI’s efficiency benefits, the content library had to be set up as a single source of truth. “Having AI pull entirely from your library is very important, especially from a security, privacy, and GDPR standpoint,” Cook said.
“Responsive AI is only going to pull through the information that you have in your library, so the AI’s only going to be as good as your library.”
— Hannah Cook, Head of Bids at Maintel
The bids team deduplicated content, established a tagging strategy, properly tagged all content, assigned SME owners of every content item, and scheduled regular content reviews — all with the help of Responsive AI guidance within the platform. This helped automate the process of tagging content accurately and efficiently, ensuring that the content would be easily searchable and retrievable within the content library.
With Content Library knowledge management best practices in place, Responsive AI can also help identify outdated content. Here’s how it works at Maintel: During bid reviews, if an SME or bids team member sees something that is outdated, they go into the source cited by Responsive AI. Without leaving the platform, the team member can update the source content and then save it into the content library.
Cleaning up the Content Library also improved the accuracy of Responsive LookUp search results for Maintel. LookUp gives you access to your Responsive Content Library from everyday productivity applications where you’re already working. The bids team uses LookUp to work on bids through portals hosted on the web. “LookUp is great for those times when you can’t work directly in the Responsive Platform,” Cook said.
Responsive AI increases bid submission rate by 25%
With Responsive AI and an optimized Content Library, Maintel runs 90% of its bids through Responsive. The bids team adds each bid as a project in Responsive. After completing as many of the questions as possible with smart recommendations from the content library, the team uses Responsive AI to generate and refine answers until version one is complete. Refinement is only a matter of clicking prebuilt prompts (e.g., “Passive to active,” “Make it plain,” “Make more readable,” “Concise,” “Elaborate,” and “Rewrite”) and providing any specific instructions like “write for an enterprise audience” or “limit answer to 150 words.”
“We are massively shortening the time for us to get to a good version-one response. Using Responsive AI, it lessens the time that SMEs need to take with the bids, which frees up resources to do other things.”
— Hannah Cook, Head of Bids at Maintel
Maintel has improved efficiency so much that they increased the bid submission rate by 25% in the first year of the new process, without adding headcount. Maintel sales opportunities can be worth millions of pounds, so by maintaining a consistent win rate and by getting shortlisted more frequently, the bids team has amplified its impact on Maintel’s bottom line.
Remember the scoring criteria that’s such a factor in the public sector buying process, partly as a result of PA23? According to Cook, “Using Responsive AI to speed up version one gives us time to review in depth to make sure we’re meeting that scoring criteria. That has improved our quality scoring.”
One of the areas where Maintel has doubled down on quality is social value, which includes everything from well-being and diversity to carbon reduction and environmental impact. Responsive AI gives them more time to delve deep into projects on social value, ensuring they have the content, resources, and processes in place to accurately discuss their social value strategy.
Raising expectations for win rate and growth
By integrating Responsive AI into their bid and tender process, Maintel is not just keeping pace with the demands of a rapidly changing market — they are setting a new standard for Strategic Response Management in their industry.
As Responsive AI and new knowledge management best practices gain momentum, Cook expects to build on this year’s 25% increase in bids submitted.
Find out how you can tackle increased proposal volume and complexity with Responsive AI. Request a demo. |