The financial services industry comes with plenty of rules and regulations your sales team must follow to the T. Managing your content effectively throughout the Finserv sales cycle requires a balance between process and technology—and, of course, staying compliant and cutting-edge in a crowded market.
According to the 2019 State of Financial Services report by Oliver Wyman: “Financial services firms are operating in a tough environment. New capabilities and approaches are required to grow businesses in the digital economy. At the same time, the performance and productivity of the core business need to be optimized.”
RFP software is a solution that supports your revenue and productivity goals. Keep reading if you’re committed to refining sales operations at your Finserv organization.
1. RFP Content Library
The critical foundation of any RFP software implementation is your Content Library. To extract as much value as possible from an investment in a response management platform like RFPIO, you need to get it right. Here are a few RFP Content Library recommendations:
- Find the right people to both administer your Content Library and manage content.
- Before you bring any content into RFPIO, a content writer and/or group of subject matter experts should refine your content.
- Pull in content from a variety of different sources, then organize and assemble the most relevant (and compliant) content.
- Spend the first 3-6 months building out your Content Library with brand new content using the organizational parameters you put in place.
2. Import & Export
RFPIO supports typical file formats your team encounters in the RFP response process—docs, spreadsheets, and even PDFs. To start an RFP project, import the document provided by your issuer in one click.
Once the file lands in the application, users follow a straightforward workflow for mapping out the initial sections, questions, tables and other components that make up the document. RFPIO has patented AI-enabled import functionality that assists users with mapping out the rest of the document.
Exporting is a simple process as well, with options to export back into the source document or a custom template. Your finished project should always be tailored to each individual customer. By design, customization options in this final stage of your workflow ensure you have the flexibility to personalize content for your prospects.
“The high point for me in using the solution is the purely magical import feature, which allows us to import complex—positively labyrinthine—proposals into RFPIO and easily identify sections, subsections, questions, subquestions, descriptions, tables, etc. It’s impressive.” – Gail M.
3. Project Management and Executive Dashboard
The project management dashboard allows different stakeholders to have full visibility into an individual RFP project. Stakeholders understand the project status as well as what a team member’s current workload is…without having to ask.
The executive dashboard shows the big picture. Your sales leadership team reviews historical data to see what’s working, or where to make course corrections. By reviewing performance metrics inside this dashboard, sales leaders figure out which resources are needed to improve the RFP response process.
4. Content Library
The Content Library is where supporting attachments or collateral—such as standard cover letters or pricing models—live inside RFPIO. Similar to the flexibility of the RFP Content Library, this feature helps your team streamline content management, making it easier to share documents across an entire sales organization while maintaining content integrity.
5. Content Library Reporting
Is too much content assigned to one subject matter expert? That SME might experience burn-out and move on to another job opportunity. Or they might stay and allow the content to decay because they don’t have the bandwidth to manage the content. Managing risk within your financial services RFP response process is made possible by Content Library reporting capabilities within RFPIO.
Answer library reporting also helps drive better RFP project performance. The system helps you recognize when you have built out enough content and when you have exceeded the amount to keep the recommendation engine working optimally. Since the RFP Content Library is your bread and butter, analyzing reports is essential for improvement and staying compliant in the evolving financial services industry.
“RFPIO takes the hours I used to spend researching multiple documents and resources to find an ‘okay’ answer into turning my time into focusing on answer strategy. This has allowed our company, in a really short time frame, to get quality responses from SMEs and be more customer centrist in a very competitive market.” – Max G.
6. RFPIO Lookup
RFPIO Lookup is a chrome extension you and your team can use to tap into the Content Library content straight from your browser—without jumping into the solution and flipping back and forth between screens.
We primarily designed this RFPIO Lookup to help you overcome the challenge of responding to locked portal-based RFPs and other security questionnaires. However, any individual contributor within a sales organization who needs to respond to customer inquiries during the sales process benefits from using this tool to access Content Library content.
I like to nickname this feature “RFPIO Light” because you highlight the question text you’re working on outside RFPIO, then instantly view the top ten matching responses from your Content Library. RFPIO Lookup puts sales information right in your hands, whether you are responding to a request for information (RFI), a vendor due diligence form, or a quick prospect email.
