Talented people like yourself should spend your brainpower on strategizing, creating, and solving problems. Instead, many of us are spending too much time on tasks that can easily be automated.
As a subject matter expert (SME), your knowledge is forever in demand for your primary job responsibilities and the many other document requests that come from your team—like RFPs, DDQs, sales proposals, and security questionnaires.
You’re doing the best job that you can, but you have an inkling that there is a better way to do that job. If you investigate your RFP response process, two not-so-subtle clues will tell you when it’s time to take action and fix it:
- Clue #1: You collaborate with proposal managers via back-and-forth emails and in-person meetings.
- Clue #2: Your response content is lost inside a dark maze of document folders and spreadsheets.
Proposal automation tools are a packaged deal that includes project management and content management capabilities. To fix your response process, you need to automate it.
All the response management tasks you can automate
You may be thinking…doesn’t automation primarily affect low-skill, low-wage roles? Research shows that even the highest-paid occupations have a substantial amount of tasks that can be automated.
It turns out that 45% of the activities individuals perform every day can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies—like, ahem…RFP automation software. This is how RFPIO automates your process to save you precious minutes and hours that add up over time.
1. Receive email notifications for assigned questions.
When it’s time for you to be involved in a new RFP project, RFPIO ships off an automated email as soon as your project manager assigns questions for you to answer. No more guesswork means you know what your involvement is from the beginning.
2. Use the auto-response feature when you respond.
The auto-response feature is a crowd favorite for SMEs. Since content is already on-hand in your Content Library, use auto-response to quickly fill in relevant content from past responses.
3. Send notifications when questions are completed.
As soon as you mark a question completed, RFPIO sends an automatic notification to your project manager or a predetermined reviewer. Now you don’t need to send all of those manual updates and your project manager easily tracks your progress.
4. Raise clarifications within the appropriate question or section.
From time to time, you request clarifications from the issuer or your project manager. When the clarifications are received, these requests are imported and automatically reflected within the appropriate question.
5. Collaborate easily with your colleagues.
You don’t always have the answer, but you know a colleague who does. Simply post a comment within a question and the collaborator receives a notification. The collaborator’s response auto-populates right into RFPIO.
6. Collaborate seamlessly with third-party vendors.
All collaborators are welcome inside RFPIO, even when they are third-party vendors. Assign a guest user to collaborate on a question or section. Their response from an email portal automatically syncs within RFPIO.
7. Find content that lives in your Content Library.
Where’s the content? Right at your fingertips in a searchable content repository. RFPIO’s recommendation engine searches through the Content Library and provides recommended content within the project/question view.
8. Receive notifications to review questions.
Since your expertise is so valuable in the response process, you review content all the time—yet another task you need to automate. As soon as an assigned author finishes their response, you are automatically notified when the content is ready for review.
9. Send notifications when you’re finished reviewing.
After you review the response content, other team members are next in line for review and approval. As soon as you’re finished reviewing, the next reviewer receives an automatic notification. No need to “play telephone” anymore.
10. Keep track of content ownership responsibilities.
Specific content in the Content Library will fall under your area of expertise, making you the proud owner of these responses. As soon as a project manager assigns you as an owner, you get an automatic alert.
11. Receive cyclical content audit reminders.
Whether you audit your content monthly, quarterly, or annually, being prompted by an email reminder is much easier than manual reminders. Set up a content audit schedule of your choosing. RFPIO automatically resets the review cycle from that point forward at your chosen schedule.
12. Import new content into the Content Library quickly.
When new, updated content surfaces, you need to add it into the Content Library quickly so you and your team have immediate access. RFPIO’s import functionality adds new content, with little configuration on your part.
13. Manage duplicates effectively with reporting.
You’re ready to cull your Content Library and all you need to do is run the duplicate report. RFPIO automatically manages content duplicates so you clean up your response content with minimal effort.
14. Analyze your content with dynamic reporting.
The Content Library report is a dynamic report that allows you to analyze your content. Instead of remembering data or drilling down to look at your data, click on this dynamic report and dive right into your content data. Now you have everything you need to be proactive with responses that fall under your domain.
