Dear reader, what is that? Frustration? Or inspiration?
I mean, here you are.
Clicking on an article about automating your RFP responses with AI.
Stressed? Too many bids to manage, or simply not enough time to also respond to RFPs?
Or, new to the work and overwhelmed by the complexities and amount of work involved in responding to tenders, perhaps?
Gotcha.
Don’t you worry.
We’ve got you.
The delicious benefits of automating RFP responses with AI
First of all, what’s the point? Why automate RFP responses?
You may have guessed them already, but let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
⌛You save time.
The big one. Automation and AI undoubtedly speeds up your time to a first draft of your RFP response.
⬇️ You spend less time on simple questions.
Like those you’ve answered a million times, or that is about basic compliance and company information.
⬆️ You get more time for complex questions.
Instead of being bogged down by the basic questions, you get to focus on the ones that actually matter and can increase your chances of winning. Speaking of…
💵 You increase your odds of winning.
Reusing successful past proposal texts, getting more time for raising the quality of the bid, maybe even responding to more RFPs – it all increases your odds.
So, how do you do it?
Automate RFP responses – step by step
When you automate RFP responses, you obviously don’t want the AI to hallucinate some incorrect information in your RFP proposal. Therefore, you first need to…
1. Upload past RFP proposals and relevant information
Train the AI on past bids, your products and services, company information and other relevant texts. You do this by uploading to your RFP tool content library.
A perk to gathering your information in one place is that you also can use it. Quickly find that document you need to attach, look up that kickass bid response you wrote when you had had just a bit too much coffee. Very easy.
Your content library? A little gold mine.
2. Parse RFP documents for bid questions
With your content library in place, you’re ready to start automating your RFP proposals.
Upload the RFP to the RFP automation tool (or find it through the monitoring feature, if you’re using an all-in-one-solution like Tendium).
Either the tool now works its magic, identifying questions on its own. Or, you can also highlight sections to create questions, if you prefer keeping some sense of control.
3. Generate RFP responses with AI
Now by the magic of the button generate, the tool serves you with bid texts. Based on your content library and tailored for the question.
Not too shabby, huh?
4. Polish and work your magic
Now it’s your turn.
Hate to break it to you, but you still need to do some work.
You polish where needed and focus your effort on the RFP responses that actually need some love and attention. Like tailoring for the needs of the buyer.
5. Send it in
And win, hopefully!
How to choose the best RFP automation tool
Now, if you think this sounds very handy indeed and now definitely want to automate RFP responses, you might be wondering: how do I pick one?
There are plenty of RFP automation tools out there.
Here are some key features to look for:
- AI-generated responses
- Centralised knowledge management
- Collaboration features
- Task management
- Nice UX/UI
In general, make sure you prioritise:
- Good user experience.
- Efficient workflows.
Why prioritise these, you ask? Well, you’re using an RFP automation tool to make your RFP process more streamlined and efficient.
So, the tool needs to be efficient to use.
Consider all-in-one-solutions for RFP management
When you’re looking into RFP automation tools, consider if there’s more than just the proposal writing part of the process you can automate.
For example, how do you source RFPs? Could you improve the efficiency of your tender monitoring?
Tendium is both an RFP monitoring tool and a proposal writing tool. And we’ve built both tools with automation and AI at the core.
In our minds, the more of your process you can bring together under one roof, the better.
Would you agree?
Curious? Learn more with our ultimate guide to RFP tools.
Ready to take a look? Book a demo with us today.
