kaneyoukickit

VP of Sales

Do you use RFP response software?

What systems and processes have you had success with with RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires? As my company goes more upmarket, we are starting to receive RFPs more often and I'd like to find the base way to:

1) reduce the time it takes to collate a response

2) improve the quality and consistence of each response

3) build a library of best responses

4) share learnings across the team over time

How do you manage your RFP reponses?

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6 comments

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salesnerd

WR Officer

Head of Growth

I’ve tried them in the past but never with very much luck. The questions are usually so specific that I have to reword the answers to fit. It’s been 5+ years since I used one though, so maybe they’re better now.

kaneyoukickit

VP of Sales

So do you use Google docs/sheets or something else as your internal repository? I want to make sure everyone can access the info, but that only certain users have edit rights to our knowledge base.

ARRisLife

Politicker

Account Executive

We've used a product called ombud. It's decent... you upload the RFP- and go through it line by line, you can search words or phrases and it'll populate options for pre-scripted answers. Then you can download it in a templated branded response.

It's good but there's a decent effort to get all the types of responses in there and they're going to have to be maintained so it took some time and enough people inputting the content to make it smooth now.

kaneyoukickit

VP of Sales

Do you think the process of getting the data input would have been less painful if you implemented the solution earlier on? We're just starting to receive complex RFPs due to a recent product update, so we've only completed five or six thus far.

ARRisLife

Politicker

Account Executive

Yeah for sure. Also, our product is a bit technical, so many of our solution engineers have to play a big role in the responses ect.

As you grow you're going to need a solution, manually responding to the same questions over and over is crazy, and we've found over time the need to really customize our answers over time has gone down because we've built up such a bank of great responses.

As an org- somebody needs to 'own' the RFP solution, be in charge of ensuring answers are correct, updating proposal templates ect. If you don't have a great person for that its going to fall apart.
Let me know if you have any other questions

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

At the end of the day you are the best resource to respond to the RFP. One word buried 3 pages 6 paragraphs deep can disqualify you (I'm looking at you government peeps) so I'd need to have full control over my response.

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kaneyoukickit

Do you use RFP response software?

How do you manage your RFP reponses?

6 comments

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