How Tomia Improved Global Collaboration

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 Responsive, 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 Responsive’s AI-enabled RFP response solution.

Before Responsive:

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 Responsive:

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

Improving collaboration and increasing efficiency with Responsive

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

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

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.

“Responsive 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 Responsive

Since TOMIA implemented Responsive 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 Responsive 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 Responsive 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.

Overall, Responsive has significantly cut response time and improved the bid response process. With Responsive, 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 Responsive to anyone looking for a better way to manage proposals. With Responsive, we’re able to collaborate in real-time with team members all over the world. It has made a huge difference.”