For most business functions today, there is a tool (in most cases, many!) to help enable faster output and outcomes.
When it comes to the matter of responding to a request for proposal (RFP), businesses still tend to spend way too many working hours creating and formalizing their documentation. Business proposals and RFPs are crucial to overall goals and sales. A better process and faster response time can actually help sales teams and companies win more deals and rise above competitors who are also engaged in the same request for proposal response.
RFP automation can actually reduce the time taken in this process and also enable customer facing teams to create business response proposals that stand out and create a mark viz a viz competitors.
Automation is meant to take away the problems that occur with too many repetitive or manual tasks and allows teams to focus more on actual strategy and decisions that affect true ROI.
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Besides this, automating most of the aspects of your RFP processes can actually provide a lot of other intra team and inter team benefits too. What are some of them?
A Better Sense of Transparency
In order for any RFP to be handled well, it requires a tight knit effort and coordination between multiple stakeholders and team members. A business owner may have a general idea of how they want to respond or how they want their executive summary crafted.
But for every part of the documentation to meet standard requirements, different areas of the typical RFP process have to be delegated to the relevant team members.
Most RFP automation systems will allow teams to centrally put this system in place and assign the relevant tasks and responsibilities to the right people in the company, even allowing stakeholders to then know about the status of each of those tasks.
With the choice of platforms available today, it is important to make your own assessment before honing in onto a tool but in general, most RFP automation systems will allow users to; have central access to a dashboard, assign deliverables as per requirements to relevant team members, provide timelines and updates in a central place, keep all documentation and communication about each RFP in a proper project wise format, prevent bottlenecks and a lot more.
This sense of transparency is crucial especially when a business has a deadline before which to submit their RFP because it will allow the business and team to know what is pending or needs special focus well in time in order to reassign responsibilities as required.
Enabling a Stronger, more Collaborative Executive Summary
No business can function at the hands of just one person, everything needs to be set in place with the aim of building well-oiled systems that have strong, reliable team members that take care of each of their tasks so as not to affect the overall workflow or output.
For businesses who struggle with their executive summary when building out RFP responses, a more collaborative, centralized system can help a.) build a better summary on the whole b.) ensure that the right stakeholders have access to it to enable changes or modifications to strengthen it
The executive summary plays a crucial role in any RFP response. It is meant to summarize key areas and aspects about the company with the aim of providing a strong narrative on what they company has done and can do. An important document such as this should ideally be the responsibility of one key stakeholder or decision-maker but it should always be a collaborative effort.
Centralizing the process within an all in one RFP automation not only allows relevant team members to view and provide suggestions on other documents related to the process, it will also teams to establish a strong executive summary when they work on it together.
The executive summary for RFP responses should in most cases be the prerogative of the customer facing team because it is these teams that know what customers want, these teams understand or can predict customer behaviour and responses based on their time interacting with them and it is therefore easier for them to craft executive summaries of this kind that are built to suit current customer trends or triggers.
At the end of the day, the business that wins a RFP, is the one that has been able to submit documents that are clear, concise, provide an enriched narrative of what the brand is capable of: in short: good content. The right centralized process and automation can actually help enable this.
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Crucial to Enterprise / Larger Sales Teams
In sales, RFPs are issued by businesses when they are looking for a particular product or service. Companies that provide that particular product or service then have the door open to them to respond to that RFP and try to bag the deal. In most cases, RFPs are issued by enterprise or larger businesses.
RFP automation is crucial to teams that are distributed or enterprise sales teams that have a multi-tier hierarchy. It can enable to a more seamless enterprise sales process and RFP response management system that allows teams to have a strict step wise and task wise system in place that is easy to execute and manage despite locational differences.
RFP automation can be useful to sales teams especially those teams who tend to have too many RFP responses to work on within the same quarter or same year. It helps centralize documents related to the process and allows them to easily compare and repurpose earlier versions of company response documents to suit new RFP standards.
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