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Knowledge management best practices: Out with the old, in with the new

Knowledge management best practices: Out with the old, in with the new

Product & Best Practices

A few years ago, Netflix debuted a show called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was an overnight hit. Why? […]

Category: Tag: Content library

Knowledge management best practices: Out with the old, in with the new

Knowledge management best practices: Out with the old, in with the new

Product & Best Practices

A few years ago, Netflix debuted a show called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was an overnight hit. Why? It might not surprise you to hear that Americans, Europeans, and presumably much of the world, sit on a lot of clutter.

Clutter in the home can lead to stress and anxiety. Clutter in the workplace isn’t any better. But what happens when what you need is hidden away in a basement or crawlspace—or inside a subject matter expert’s head?

When your household clutter is hidden and you can’t find the vinyl record you’re looking for, it’s annoying. When employees can’t find necessary information, the ramifications extend far beyond their immediate departments.

While Marie Kondo is not (at least that I know of) a content management expert, a well-curated and maintained knowledge management system breaks through the clutter to ensure that the right information gets into the right hands at the right time.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management, as defined by Slack, has four objectives:

  • Capture knowledge
  • Improve access to knowledge
  • Enhance the knowledge environment
  • Treat knowledge as an asset

Are organizations achieving their objectives?

  • Employees spend an average of 19% of their time searching and gathering information
  • Data professionals spend about 20% of their time rebuilding existing information assets
  • 87% of employees want transparency in the workplace, yet only 18% feel their workplace is transparent
  • Only about ⅓ of organizations leverage AI as part of their knowledge management strategy

A centralized knowledge management system is vital to an organization’s operations. A single source of truth, as opposed to scattered knowledge, provides:

  • Organizational resilience and agility
  • Faster and better-informed strategizing and decision making
  • A greater ability to confront challenges and solve problems
  • Faster and improved innovation
  • Improved employee engagement, productivity, and morale
  • Better sharing of subject matter expertise
  • Enhanced collaboration
  • De-siloed business processes
  • Competitive benchmarks
  • Improved security
  • Increased revenue and profits
  • A better customer experience

Creating and maintaining a content library

A content library is not a dumping ground for documents and data. Each entry into the content library should align with business goals and processes and help maintain legal and security compliance. All content should be up-to-date and relevant—a.k.a., used or at least usable.

Doing the content management heavy lifting

In the first of our two-part series, we discussed respecting your subject matter experts (SMEs), which means doing as much heavy lifting as possible.

With the end of the quarter approaching, this is a great time to audit existing content. Here’s how:

Be organized and keep track of your own work

I keep track of my work using an Excel spreadsheet. I list all the categories of content I will review, who my subject matter experts are, and how much content I have.

I also indicate how often to review the content. For example, a publicly traded company’s content requires quarterly review. The content might be owned by a content manager, someone in investor relations, or corporate communications.

If a company is privately-held, it might have some high-level information it provides on a quarterly basis, although many privately-held companies provide that information annually. If you don’t know how often to review your content, rely on your SMEs. They know the content the best.

Once the SME has provided a review schedule, you can track it on a spreadsheet or on a content management platform to establish review cycles.

Once you’ve established your review cycles, there are a few metrics you want to consider to show SMEs and leadership that your content is in the best possible condition, including:

  • Usage
  • Recency
  • Completeness

You should do a few things to show SMEs that you are organized and ready for them. Build out a plan, including:

  • Showing that you’ve removed unused content
  • Showing that you’re focused on the most-used content
  • Showing that you are organized
  • Showing that you know how to distribute the content to be reviewed
  • Testing your proposal automation and content management platform in multiple environments (office, home office, client’s site, hotel and airline wifi, etc.) to ensure stability
  • If you are using a content management platform, leverage the review and reporting functionality
  • Strategic tagging, especially if an SME has a lot of content to review (consult with your customer success manager before going into that level of detail)
  • Engaging leadership at both the proposal and SME sides, so they know what you’re doing, what the SMEs are doing, how much work there is, and when it’s expected to be completed
  • Recognizing contributors once the reviews are completed

Review most-used content first

The first step to an efficient content management system is pretty simple. However, you will need a lot of help from your subject matter experts to ensure accuracy. The key to maintaining a collaborative relationship with SMEs is to honor their time. Rather than hand them a mile-high virtual stack of content, sort by that which is used the most.

As a proposal manager, you know that RFxs aren’t exactly creative documents. Most questions are near duplicates of those you’ve seen 100s of times before.

So, if your organization doesn’t have content management software and you use SharePoint or Excel to track your content, you can still review the most-used content by seeing the Q&A pairs used on your last 2 or 3 proposals, or perhaps the previous 3-6 months.

You could even take your very first 2023 proposal, review every piece of content that goes into it, and call that your 2023 gold standard.

Review zero-times-used content

The next step is to approach content management from the other end of the spectrum—look at never-used content. It might be tempting to automatically archive or delete (I’m not a fan of deleting) all your never-used content, but that could be a mistake.

As with your most-used content, look at the last 3-6 months. Ask yourself this:

  • Is some of the content relevant, but you haven’t had the time or an opportunity to use it?
  • Is some of the content deal- or client-specific?
  • Is some of the content product- or service-specific and something you might only need to use every 2-3 years?
  • Was the content updated in the last year?

If any of your never-used content meets the above criteria, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on it during the upcoming year to see if it proves its value.

Keep your review/moderation queue current

Once you’ve completed your initial review, keep your review/moderation queue current by setting aside time each week and each month to work through your new and existing content.

Make sure you get content out the door and into the content library in its most accurate state as it is reviewed and updated through projects and SMEs.

Break down your content to achieve success

Now that you know which content is relevant or which might be relevant in the future, it’s time to think strategically about content and how to organize it. It might seem daunting, but it’s very manageable if you approach it in bite-sized pieces.

High-level groups of content

High-level groups of content might carry different names depending on your content management system. If you use RFPIO, those groups fall under “collections.” Others may refer to them as “folders.”

Regardless of names, collections or folders are great ways to begin to attack the content and look at its health as you enter a new quarter or year. You can organize the folders by solution, geography, language, product, etc.

If you added the information to your folders in the last 6 months, keep it. If the content was not used during that time, you can archive it. If you aren’t comfortable creating a periodical archive, you can create a holding tank (or parking lot) for content you want to make available to a limited number of people.

The holding tank will contain content that’s still relatively current but not locked down. Then you’ll be able to access that content and pull it back into the content library if used. If you haven’t used content in your holding tank or parking lot in 3, 6, or 9 months, depending on your review cycle, you can archive it.

Using the holding tank is a great way to strategically add content back without muddying your current content library.

If you have a way to export the content from a SharePoint site or existing non-RFPIO platform to an Excel spreadsheet, you can begin to run some pivot tables. Look for:

  • Number of Q&A pairs in each collection or folder
  • Number of times used
  • Date it was last used

You can also run a pivot table on the zero times used content to see what was added and not used over the last 6 months vs. what should be archived because it’s more than 6 months old.

Report, report, report

Most leaders aren’t particularly interested in the minutiae of a content management review cycle. Still, they want to see results and a demonstration of continuing value, beyond just time savings, in your proposal automation system. That’s where reporting comes in.

Most proposal management systems contain built-in reporting features. Look for them if you are about to deploy a new proposal management solution.

The goal is to show that you have demonstrable time savings and that you are getting into the strategic benefit of the platform by showing that you can keep your content current, accurate, and fresh.

Reporting metrics should include the following:

  • Time saved
  • Accuracy of answers
  • The number of people successfully using the system
  • The number of people who can successfully access content that they may not have had access to before

Let leadership determine reporting frequency

Reports are how you substantiate the strategic benefit you’re getting out of your content management platform, so let leadership determine the frequency.

Most likely, they’ll say quarterly, although it could be monthly at the beginning and then quarterly after your first review cycle. Think of these reports in much the same way you think of the reports your proposal team has to create.

Be consistent and strategic

Stick to your reporting schedule, metrics, and format. Show leadership usage, review schedules, and recently updated content reviewed by your SME and polished by your proposal team and content manager.

Show these for each group of content, line of business, collection, geography, language, or however you organize your content. Be consistent in your format by nailing down your template at the beginning of the year.

Get feedback from the proposal leadership, SME leadership, sales enablement leadership, or, if your company is small to mid-market, from your C-suite.

Ensure that you’re reporting in a way that is valuable to them. Use that format every time you report. Executives and leaders like consistency; they also like graphics. Instead of a lot of Excel spreadsheets, use graphics such as charts or screenshots.

If, for example, you’re an RFPIO user, show leaders used vs. unused content for the annum and then quarterly going forward. You can also show them content that has owners, no owners, has been reviewed, hasn’t been reviewed, etc.

Explain to them why these things matter, and make sure all your content managers, SMEs, and leadership teams are involved in the reporting conversations.

If you use RFPIO or another platform that includes reporting functionality, you can take screenshots of your system reports and include them in your slide decks. Having that consistent graphic will be helpful for leadership, and it will show you the incremental and cumulative progress you’re making.

Also, it will show you when you need to start archiving content and maybe gaps where you need to add new content. RFPIO users can take screenshots of your content library insights report at the beginning of the year, then monthly and quarterly.

At the end of the year, the screenshots will tell a powerful story. Halfway through the year, you might start seeing gaps and areas you may need to improve upon, so by the end of the year, you can show where you spotted that and where you can make adjustments.

Monetize the value of time spent

Leadership likes to see that you’re flexible, nimble, and always thinking about best practices. Additionally, as you save SMEs’ time by reducing the number of Q&A pairs they have to review, etc., leadership will be able to put a dollar value on time saved.

For example, it takes around 3-5 minutes to review a Q&A pair. 10 of those at 5-minutes-a-piece saves 50 minutes of an SME’s valuable time—time they can spend with clients, prospects, doing demos, or other vital aspects of their day job.

If your company has some newer SMEs, content review is a great way to engage the new SMEs and make the time they spend learning the new system and products valuable to the organization.

Think about the next thing coming

As you know, content evolves. As you acquire new knowledge and content, be strategic. Don’t just start loading content to your newly reviewed content management system. Spend time with the content before you load it. Make sure it’s the right content for your content library—it will be used again…it has been reviewed…and it’s current, accurate, and comprehensive.

When you import the new content, identify who owns it, whether you work from a content management platform, a spreadsheet, SharePoint, etc. You also want to set the content up for success.

Tag the content, organize it, and put it in collections, folders, or however your system works. Additionally, you want to work with your SMEs to identify when that content needs to be reviewed—quarterly, annually, every 18-24 months, or when there’s a new product release.

Then use the sweet spot of 10-12 Q&A pair reviews per week to spread the content out in a way that’s easily manageable for your SMEs. Be mindful of the review work they already have assigned to them.

Technology-enabled content review

Keep your content current, accurate, and fresh, and set your SMEs and content review process up for success with RFPIO’s review cycle reminders, advanced reporting, and project management features.

If you would like to learn more about how RFPIO, with the help of machine learning, helps ensure best practices throughout your content review processes, schedule a free demo.

How GEODIS is reducing SME review effort by 80% using response management software

How GEODIS is reducing SME review effort by 80% using response management software

Customer Stories

GEODIS is a leading global supply chain company, providing third-party logistics services to more than 150,000 clients in 168 countries around the world. Responding to Requests for Proposal (RFPs) is central to GEODIS business development, and is the main channel through which it attracts new clients, expands service offerings, and increases revenue.

GEODIS Americas maintains an in-depth RFPIO Content Library consisting of more than 2,000 Q&A pairs that proposal professionals use to respond to RFPs. In 2022, GEODIS Americas began an update project to refresh and consolidate information within the Content Library. The aim of this Content Library refresh project is to:

  • Reduce the effort required from GEODIS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to review and update Q&A pairs.
  • Ensure that the information contained in Q&A pairs is consistent, accurate, and up-to-date.
  • Win GEODIS more business through responding to RFPs with high-quality, comprehensive answers.

GEODIS Americas maintains its Content Library within the RFPIO response management tool. RFPIO has been central to the Content Library refresh project, and provides essential features and capabilities for finding information, updating answers, interacting with SMEs, and strengthening Q&A quality.

GEODIS has managed the Content Library refresh through six key steps.

1. Understand the need for a Content Library refresh

The GEODIS Content Library has become unwieldy over time. This is a natural result of incorporating information from diverse sources into a central repository. As multiple GEODIS SMEs write and respond to RFPs, their answers are copied into the Content Library to preserve their work and provide information for future responses.

This creates duplication in Q&A pairs. As SMEs create multiple responses on similar topics over a period of time, the Content Library captures each response as a separate Q&A pair, even if the answers are similar or identical. SMEs must regularly review every answer as part of an ongoing update process, including duplicates. Reducing duplication within the Content Library significantly reduces the associated SME’s time and effort.

The duplicate question overhead also exists for GEODIS proposal preparers who must decide on which of a number of possible Q&A responses is the “best” answer.

Multiple authors cause issues with the consistency and clarity of information in GEODIS Q&A pairs. Variations in writing style, depth of content, and other areas create differences in the style and tone of answers, which could be distracting when combined together into an RFP response document. This generates more rework to finesse final response documents before sending them to prospective clients.

These factors drove the need for the GEODIS Content Library refresh. GEODIS and RFPIO believe this is an excellent opportunity to use RFPIO features to find duplicates, engage with SMEs, rewrite content, and ensure consistency.

2. Use a strategic approach for a Content Library refresh

GEODIS decided to tackle the Content Library refresh as a self-contained, separate initiative to its operational proposal response work. The marketing team hired a consultant copywriter and project manager who could dedicate time and effort to lead the refresh project and work alongside the operational team.

The consultant reviewed the Content Library, using several RFPIO tool features to understand the scope and structure of GEODIS Q&A pairs:

  • The Answer Library Report for information on total questions, Q&A pair owners, review timelines, keywords, and other details.
  • Other RFPIO reports, including duplicate content, content search terms, and content usage reports.
  • Q&A tags for details of how each Q&A pair was categorized and to understand how tags could be rationalized for better future Q&A management.
  • Advanced and saved searches for filtering and drilling down into specific Q&A pairs.

This analysis led to a phased approach for the Content Library refresh, updating and consolidating individual Q&A pairs depending on how they were tagged in RFPIO. The consultant developed a project plan, style guide, SME communications, and a standard operating process for updating the Content Library.

“The GEODIS Content Library refresh would have been much more difficult and time-consuming without the RFPIO tool. RFPIO features have made it much faster and easier for us to identify duplicate content and develop a strong approach to enhance the Content Library.”

—Paul Maplesden, Consultant and Project Lead, GEODIS Content Library Refresh

3. Get SMEs and stakeholders on board

Refreshing the GEODIS Content library requires buy-in and support from SMEs and other stakeholders, as clear and effective communications are essential to a successful project. GEODIS decided on a multi-step approach to managing communications:

  • Sending out communications about the project scope and aims to manage expectations and prepare all SMEs and stakeholders within GEODIS Americas.
  • Targeting individual SMEs related to specific Q&A pair refreshes.
  • Using built-in RFPIO communication tools to provide updates, direction, and ownership for individual Q&A pairs.

GEODIS developed communications explaining the aims of the Content Library refresh, particularly reducing the time and effort required from SMEs through removing duplicate questions. In addition to emailing these communications, GEODIS took advantage of several RFPIO SME engagement features, including:

  • Investigating each Q&A pair impacted by that phase of the refresh, and emailing the owners and moderators of that pair as captured in RFPIO.
  • Using RFPIO comment and mention functions for each pair to keep everyone updated on its status.
  • Analyzing SME review cycles for each updated Q&A pair to ensure it meets company and SME needs.

This approach ensured that all SMEs knew when their Q&A pairs were being consolidated and rewritten, and let them know exactly what actions they needed to take. The consultant leading the project also provided regular weekly updates to the proposal team and marketing director to keep them informed on project progress.

4. Establish a repeatable process for updating Q&A pairs

GEODIS developed a step-by-step, repeatable process to ensure a consistent approach to consolidating and rewriting each Q&A pair. The key steps of this process are:

  1. Establish which areas of the Content Library refresh this phase should focus on. Prioritize key lines of business during a proof of concept to validate the process and secure stakeholder buy-in.
  2. Identify duplicate Q&A pairs for this phase, together with the relevant SMEs.
  3. Consolidate and rewrite information from multiple duplicate answers into a master answer.
  4. Archive old, duplicated questions out of the active Content Library.
  5. Promote and link together master answers.

GEODIS found the following RFPIO features particularly useful in developing a standard process:

  • Running duplicate content reports for an overview of identical questions and answers.
  • Reviewing content usage statistics to identify the most popular content and possible master answers.
  • Adding Q&A tags to mark and identify specific Q&A pairs for archival or promotion to master answers.
  • Carrying out phrase, advanced, and saved search queries to search and filter by multiple criteria.
  • Establishing URL links for each Q&A pair for definitive identification and tracking.

During the development of this repeatable process, GEODIS worked with RFPIO Customer Success to ensure that the process was following best practices. RFPIO offered multiple suggestions to enhance the process and to take full advantage of the platform’s tools.

“Responding to RFPs in a consistent, accurate, and comprehensive way is central to winning more business. The RFPIO tool, coupled with the Content Library refresh project, supports our growth ambitions.”

—Michelle Johnson, VP of Growth Marketing, GEODIS Americas

5. Carry out the Content Library refresh

The refresh project uses several techniques and approaches to review and then remove, update, or consolidate each Q&A pair within the library as part of a phased approach.

Identify all Q&A pairs related to the specific topics in each phase

Q&A pairs were reviewed and updated by area, as captured in RFPIO. These pairs were identified and analyzed through:

  • Tags assigned to each Q&A pair within RFPIO.
  • Advanced searches, filtering, and sorting within RFPIO.
  • Titles and content of each question and answer.
  • Owners and SMEs for each Q&A pair.

Update communications were sent to all relevant SMEs and stakeholders through this process.

Decide on removal, update, or consolidation of each Q&A pair

Once all Q&A pairs were identified for a specific topic, the project management lead consolidated answer information from each Q&A pair into a master document. This master document was updated based on several best practices:

  • Consolidates information from several duplicated or substantially similar Q&A pairs into one “master” Q&A pair.
  • Rewrites answers to ensure a consistent approach, style, and tone both within and across Q&A pairs.
  • Ensures that master answers comprehensively capture all of the relevant information from the original Q&A pairs.
  • Updates information back into RFPIO and marks that Q&A pair as a “master answer,” using tagging and titles.
  • Removes any related Q&A pairs so that only the master Q&A pair remains.

Use RFPIO tools to manage the consolidation, archival, and promotion of Q&A pairs

GEODIS used several RFPIO tools to manage Q&A updates:

  • Tagging Q&A pairs for promotion to master answers or for removal and to ensure correct and consistent tag usage for master Q&A pairs.
  • Archiving of duplicate or similar Q&A pairs into an archive collection to remove Q&A pairs from the active library while preserving them for historic reference purposes.
  • Updating the “Alert Text” associated with each Q&A pair to notify SMEs of its status as an archived or master answer.
  • Adding in alternate questions for better searchability for proposal preparers.
  • Including URL links within each answer for cross-references between related Q&A pairs within the RFPIO tool.
  • Linking related answers together through the RFPIO “Related Answers” function.
  • Reviewing content owners and moderators for the master Q&A pairs.

Complete the Q&A pair rewrite for that phase of the Content Library refresh

Following the update of Q&A pairs in each phase, GEODIS closed out that part of the Content Library refresh through some final steps:

  • Updating the SME review cycle for the new, master Q&A pairs.
  • Mentioning SMEs within the RFPIO comments for each master Q&A pair and requesting they carry out an initial review for the updated and rewritten content.
  • Understanding any lessons learned from that part of the project.
  • Finalizing any communications with SMEs and stakeholders.
  • Moving on to the next phase of the Content Library refresh.

6. Show the value of the Content Library refresh

GEODIS has primarily tracked the effectiveness of the Content Library refresh through the reduction in the number of Q&A pairs that SMEs need to review. Due to the number of duplicate Q&A pairs, SME review cycles, and the content in each answer, reducing the number of pairs directly correlates with reducing the time, effort, and cost of SMEs reviewing those pairs.

To date, GEODIS has reduced the number of Q&A pairs in RFPIO by almost 80%.

Subjects with the Highest Percentage of Q&A Pair Reduction
55% 80% 82% 85%
Safety and materials handling CSR and sustainability Employee training and inclusion Business continuity

GEODIS expects to maintain a Q&A pair reduction rate of between 70% and 80% over the life of the Content Library refresh project. At the lower end of this estimate, this means it’s likely that the current Q&A library would be reduced from 2,000+ pairs to around 600. On average, it’s common for RFPIO customers to reduce Q&A pairs by 50-70% after their initial review of all Q&A pairs in their libraries.

Anecdotal feedback from SMEs and proposal preparers has also been very positive, with comments on the quality and comprehensiveness of the master Q&A answers within the RFPIO tool.

“Our team of 200 subject matter experts has a full-time job on top of supporting content in our answer library of 2,000 question/answer pairs. Both of these jobs are important to maintain and grow our business. Minimizing the content assigned to them for review is a top priority. The library refresh project, supported by the RFPIO tool,  minimizes their content reviews, enabling them to spend that time creating quality updates. Its’ a ‘win’ for them and GEODIS.”

—Penny Lane, Senior Proposal Manager, GEODIS Americas

On track for a best-in-class Content Library

GEODIS originally selected RFPIO as its RFP response tool for several reasons:

  • Ease of use and administration, particularly for SMEs across multiple business areas.
  • Robust integration with existing tools, operations, collaboration, and review processes.
  • Quality and range of features, documentation, and support.
  • Content management, search, and reporting capabilities.

These same qualities and features have proven central to the Content Library refresh, as shown in the table below.

Before RFPIO and Content Library Refresh After RFPIO and Content Library Refresh
Difficult to administer and prepare RFP responses due to inconsistent information and variations in tone and content of RFP answers. RFP answers have a consistent approach and style, with each containing comprehensive information on specific areas.
Duplicate or similar answers to questions make it challenging to choose a “best” answer for an RFP response. Consolidation of duplicate answers creates a single master answer for each area that reduces the effort required to prepare RFP responses.
SMEs must spend considerable time and effort reviewing substantially similar content across multiple, duplicated RFP answers. Reduction in the number of answers on specific topics has radically reduced the time and effort required as part of the SME review cycle.
The quality of RFP responses was based on substantially varying input from multiple sources and authors RFP response quality has improved due to stronger tagging, searching, filtering, and other RFPIO features.

GEODIS continues to work alongside the RFPIO business to continue building its Content Library into a best-in-class resource.

To learn more about how RFPIO can power content governance for your sales processes through intuitive collaboration and intelligent deduplications features, schedule a demo at www.RFPIO.com.

Win more bids by scaling your response management process – part 2

Win more bids by scaling your response management process – part 2

Selling & Enablement

In part 1, we discussed the best practices to scale your response management process from your end. This week we will look at how RFPIO’s toolbox can help you standardize your operations, improve communication, and trim response time, so your team can spend more time driving revenue. 

The RFPIO features that can help manage your response time

The RFPIO platform includes several features to help with your bid/no-bid decision-making. 

Intake

We designed the intake feature to help teams submit their project requests as intakes to the proposal team. The intake submits project requests to the designated user(s), who will approve or reject them. In addition, you can create an intake form with custom fields that will help you decide whether or not to pursue a project.

CRM integration

Another way to increase transparency and automate processes around the bid/no-bid decision is through one of our CRM integrations. For example, if sales is tracking information used in a bid decision, you can pull those fields into RFPIO. Your sales team will only ever have to enter the information once. Some of RFPIO’s CRM integrations even allow teams to fill out the intake form without ever leaving the CRM.

Reporting/custom fields

Lastly, you can use custom reporting on any fields you create in the intake form to analyze your win/loss rates and how they may be affected by certain factors in the opportunities you choose to pursue. This enables your team to evaluate your strategy and determine if you use your resources wisely when responding to RFPs.

What is your proposal management process?

You’ve decided which RFPs are worthy of responses. The next step in auditing your RFP process is evaluating how you’re managing the proposals. 

Are you having kickoff meetings?

A kickoff meeting is one of the most critical parts of the response process. At the end of a successful kickoff meeting, each team member will leave armed with clear roles and responsibilities – all designed with one clear goal, winning the bid! 

  • Are roles and responsibilities crystal clear? – Following a kickoff meeting, each team member should have an action plan. Follow up in your project management software.
  • Do you have a specific schedule? – Create hard deadlines for each team member and each response phase. 

Are you following the proposal’s progress?

Proposal managers should perform daily progress evaluations to ensure that they can address issues and lags before causing delays or inaccuracies.

How are you managing your team?

Proposal response has a lot of moving pieces. A proposal manager’s role is to follow those pieces, even if the responsibilities are outside the team’s immediate control. For example:

  • How are you tracking and managing tasks outside of the RFPIO platform?
  • How are subcontractors managed? 
  • How do your teams juggle multiple proposals?
  • Is there a shared calendar?

Task templates

How many of you have several tasks for every project? And how many of those tasks have nothing to do with the work in RFPIO? I’m referring to things like responding to an intent to bid or prepping shipping labels. Task templates can help you track those tasks automatically. Suppose you’re the manager of a team of proposal managers. In that case, you can even automate the tracking of tasks or stages across a shared calendar for a team, giving you better insight into the team’s workload on a given date or week. 

These are great ways to automate task creation. You can create a template for standard tasks under your organization settings and have it appear in each project upon creation. If there are tasks that you track as a team in a shared calendar, you can create a user in RFPIO that is assigned to these tasks automatically when you set them up in your organization settings. You can then sync that user’s calendar to a shared calendar in Outlook or Google to see all tasks across your team.

Clarifications 

Clarifications, often overlooked, is a great tool to help you compile any questions that you and your team need to send back to the issuer of your project. Then, you can export the questions, send them to the issuer, and import the responses back into the system.

Calendars 

RFPIO’s calendar view provides at-a-glance project management for you and your team.

Integrations 

Adding on our integrations for Teams or Slack can help increase transparency. I’ve also known clients to take advantage of our API integrations in their project management tools.

Discussions tab/comments

The discussions tab in the project is a great way to not get behind on potential issues. From this tab, you can quickly sort through open comments within the task. When managing multiple projects at a time, I made it a habit to open the discussions tab of each project every day to help reassign questions and resolve issues as they appeared.

Content Library

RFPIO’s Content Library uses AI to intuitively auto-populate and answer all of the most common and not-so-common questions. In addition, the Content Library offers several filtering tools, options, rules, and tags to help ensure that you’ll receive the most appropriate answer, even with simple one or two-keyword searches. Furthermore, your AI-driven library will update as you input data. 

Look inside your content management lifecycle

When did you last audit your content?

I’m going to let you all in on a bit of a secret. Every time I perform an audit of a customer’s Content Library, I start with the Content Library Insights Report.

This report is also available for any filters you apply in the Content Library. So, for example, if you have an Archive collection set up, you can filter it out and look at the Insights report without skewing your data. 

You can also use RFPIO to create an internal knowledge base, perfect for training new hires. Here at RFPIO, all of our sales enablement content and sessions are easily accessible from our company-wide instance of RFPIO. It’s easy for me to remember a session from a month ago, and I can simply use the search to find a Q&A pair that directs me to the video.

Other customers have found increased collaboration between their proposal team and their marketing and security teams but are saving the most recent versions of client-facing documents in the Content Library. Using RFPIO as an internal knowledge base and a single source of truth also provides a level of self-service to your organization that can boost morale.

Lastly, especially for small companies and startups, using RFPIO to track crucial information related to delivery can help create an excellent database for client references in the future.

Are your Q&A pairs going unused?

RFPIO’s Q&A pairs is one of the most exciting features on the platform. Users can upload any type of document and customize it to suit their needs. In addition, you can edit and store content in almost 20 languages. In other words, the majority of what you need to respond to an RFP is right there, at your fingertips, and best of all, RFPIO is consistently learning.

How often do you manually respond to RFPs?

Sometimes, old habits die hard. Perhaps response managers feel they need to manually respond to justify their worth. RFPIO doesn’t want anyone to lose their job; we want to help them be more productive and respond to the RFPs they might not have had time for before automation.

How often do you automatically respond to RFPs?

RFPIO makes the RFP response process easy through near-total automation. Sure, some questions require at least partially manual responses to push the RFP over the finish line, but RFPIO will take you as much as 80 percent of the way toward full automation. 

If you aren’t automatically responding to every RFP that is worth a bid, we would love to hear from you and see how RFPIO will make the response process faster, less expensive, and, dare I say, enjoyable. 

How do you utilize your Content Library?

I’ll bet you that you’ve answered most questions on each RFP multiple times – perhaps for other customers. Utilize the Content Library to let RFPIO take care of the redundant and tedious aspects of response management. 

Is your Content Library content relevant and up to date?

Perhaps the most common feedback we get, especially from companies that aren’t fully utilizing RFPIO, is that they’re hesitant to use the Content Library because they haven’t audited it. Hence, their content isn’t up to date. I get that. It seems daunting to audit and update answers, but it’s not, and you can’t beat the long-term benefits.

Here at RFPIO, we refer to auditing the Content Library as getting rid of the ROT (redundant, outdated, or trivial content). Here is a simple guideline to take you through the process. 

I get it if you’re worried about deleting information you’ll need one day. Who hasn’t thrown something away in a fit of cleaning, only to need it the next day? Instead of deleting that information, you can warehouse it in case you might need it again in the future.

Are you utilizing your subject matter experts?

Subject Matter Experts (SME), which we sometimes pronounce “smee,” are, as the name implies, experts in proposals, sales, marketing, etc. Your SMEs might be experts on your organization or in their fields in general. They’re the people you turn to when you don’t know how to answer a particular question.

Do you have a moderation process?

Do you have a moderation process? Is the moderation process documented? When was the last time you checked the moderation’s organization settings? Does the content have owners and review cycles? How do you ensure your library is free of redundant, outdated, and trivial content?

The RFPIO features that help keep your content organized and current

Content Library Insights Report

Here’s a tip: Every time I perform an audit of a customer’s Content Library, I start with the Content Library Insights Report.

This report is also available for any filters you apply in the Content Library. So, for example, if you have an Archive collection set up, you can filter it out and look at the Insights report without skewing your data. 

This report is an excellent way to see what can be easily archived: Q&A pairs that you don’t use or pairs with a star rating of less than 3. This report can also help see if Owners are becoming inundated with reviews. Maybe you can reassign Q&A pairs to another SME.

I recommend customers look at the Content Library Insights Report and the Executive Dashboard routinely. Use them both to guide your content strategy and look for improvements.

Additionally, you may want to evaluate where you can use merge tags more. While a lot of our customers are familiar with the use of merge tags to replace a client or a company name in a proposal, did you know you can use merge tags for content that gets updated frequently? For example, track the number of employees in your organization or clients who use a specific product version. Updating that number once in the organization settings will reflect wherever the merge tag is used in your library and carry over into the project.

Lastly, many of our customers add on custom reporting to help guide their strategy. It allows for more in-depth reporting of custom fields and usage. I have seen customers use this feature to determine areas where they may need more content developed in their library.

Executive Dashboard

You never want to leave your response management team guessing. The Executive Dashboard provides your team insights at-a-glance. The dashboard tracks the lifecycle of your RFP from the time it’s received until it’s archived.

The Executive Dashboard lets users create reports, such as RFP viability, based on similar bids from the past. In addition, managers can pull win/loss analysis, average completion time, and identify the top contributors. 

If this blog post inspired you and you want to dive deeper into your workflow or content management strategy, RFPIO’s Professional Services Team can help! As an RFPIO customer, you can purchase bundles of Professional Services hours for specific projects and initiatives. You’ll work alongside a Professional Services consultant like myself for the entirety of your engagement. Reach out to your customer success manager or account manager, and they’ll connect you with a member of my team who can scope your project.

 

How TOMIA improved global collaboration with bid response software

How TOMIA improved global collaboration with bid response software

Customer Stories

As a company that creates solutions for the world’s leading service providers, including some of the telecommunication industry’s largest groups, TOMIA defines its mission as enabling their customers to drive the future of connectivity through new technologies.

They’re also a company that takes compliance extremely seriously, which is why requests for bids are such an important part of their business model. Bids and tenders are their opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, professionalism, and commitment to security in the fullest detail—and clearly showcase why they’d be the best fit.

John Marcow, the Bid Response Manager at TOMIA—and a veteran of the industry, who’s responded to 700+ bid requests in his lifetime—knows better than most how important bids are to the sales cycle. “It doesn’t matter how good your relationship is. Sometimes you need to respond to an RFP if you want to win the deal.”

Before RFPIO, the TOMIA bid response process was highly manual. After receiving a bid request, John would paste the following table underneath each question:

He would then ask subject matter experts (SMEs) to search for their name and respond to all their assigned questions.

As one can imagine, this process not only left plenty of room for human error, it also lacked visibility John needed to keep RFPs on track. Since everything was answered in static documents on personal computers, John would constantly send emails to assignees, requesting status updates or reminding them of the due date.

Once John received all answered questions (often in the eleventh hour), he would proofread and polish each of the answers, and compile the responses into a single, cohesive document.

This process was tedious, time-consuming, and inefficient. The TOMIA bid response team knew there had to be a better way to respond to RFPs. So they turned to RFPIO’s AI-enabled RFP response solution.

Bid proposal software: Before and after
Before RFPIO:

  • Assigned questions to SMEs by adding a table to the Word or Excel document that includes assignee name, compliance status (y/n), and a place to write supporting information.
  • After receiving completed questions from SMEs, the documents would need to be compiled into a single cohesive document.
  • The bid manager constantly reminded SMEs to finish their assigned questions.
  • The bid manager had no visibility into project status. He had to manually reach out to SMEs via email to ask whether they had started working on their questions.
  • SMEs who wanted a question reassigned to someone else would ask thebid manager (John) to do so.

After RFPIO:

  • Questions are assigned in just a few clicks.
  • RFPIO automatically sends reminders.
  • The bid manager has full visibility into question status from the project dashboard.
  • Questions are reassigned by the SME in RFPIO.
  • Completed, cohesive responses are exported into the source file in a few clicks.

Improving collaboration and increasing efficiency with RFPIO

When the TOMIA team responded to their first RFP using RFPIO, it was hard to believe how much of a difference it made.

With RFPIO, John uploads an RFP to the platform and assigns questions or sections to subject matter experts. After that, the process is relatively hands-off—RFPIO will automatically send reminders to everyone who hasn’t answered their questions.

seamlessly collaborate by assigning tasks to collaborators in-app

John also has full visibility into project status from the project dashboard. He uses that information to send out periodic project updates to keep everyone informed and keep projects on track.

Identify project scope before starting any RFP

“RFPIO gives me full visibility into the entire process. And I’m able to easily collaborate with team members across the organization, from product to finance to legal.”

Getting stakeholders across the organization up and running in RFPIO

Since TOMIA implemented RFPIO in 2018, they’ve created user accounts for 25% of the company, even though most of them only use it for a few questions. But since RFPIO has an unlimited user license, they’re able to maintain their accounts for those moments when they do need to support RFPs.

“One of the best things about RFPIO is that it’s really intuitive. You don’t need much instruction to use it. Our SMEs are able to easily answer any questions they’ve been assigned with little to no training.”

When an SME has been assigned a question, they’ll receive a notification in their inbox letting them know their expertise is needed. They can either respond directly from their email, or open up the platform to respond there.

When they log into the platform, the first thing they see is the list of questions they’ve been assigned. They can click into the question to respond. Or, if they don’t know the answer, they can assign the question to someone else—or simply @mention them for help.@-mentioning makes it easy to collaborate on RFP projects

Overall, RFPIO has significantly cut response time and improved the bid response process. With RFPIO, the TOMIA team—with regional headquarters in the US, Israel, Luxembourg, and India—is able to collaborate with team members all over the world to craft compelling bids that win more business.

“I would absolutely recommend RFPIO to anyone looking for a better way to manage proposals. With RFPIO, we’re able to collaborate in real-time with team members all over the world. It has made a huge difference.”

Ready to streamline collaboration on bids and tenders?

See how RFPIO can help your team uplevel your bid response process and make global collaboration a breeze. Schedule a demo to get started.

Where’s the answer? Ask Slack!

Where’s the answer? Ask Slack!

Integrations

“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If I were writing the poem, The Rime of the 21st Century Proposal Manager, it might include the lines:

Data, data everywhere, Not a clue to find
As silos rise, I lose my mind.
I chase my tail. I chase your tail.
My efforts always seem to fail.
Chaos abounds.
My head spins round.
Where, oh where, does my answer lie?
In the depths of our silos, it seems to hide.

I’m no poet, wouldn’t you know it?

But I am a Senior Proposal Manager at Illuminate Education, Inc., and I am charged with taming our data sprawl problems using RFPIO. I started by creating a data map. By assigning collections, tags, and subtags, I can migrate from data everywhere, including…

  • Google Drive
  • Confluence
  • Drop Box
  • HubSpot
  • Website
  • Client Library
  • Resource Center
  • Individual PCs

…to a consolidated Content Library in RFPIO. At that point, a new $64K question pops up: Can I make it accessible to everyone in the company? I could add as many RFPIO users as I wanted at no extra cost. But introducing another new software platform to the team is a challenge. Not because I doubt the value; but because some people resist change—even if it helps. It’s a lot easier to call me than to learn a new process!

Enter RFPIO® LookUp, which makes the RFPIO Content Library accessible from Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, and, most importantly for Illuminate, Slack. The LookUp for Slack is the wrecking ball I need to break down all of the data silos used across my organization.

All teams use Slack. We talk, ask questions, and collaborate with Slack. Now we can extend this engagement to include RFPIO proposal projects. Log into Slack, ask a question, and BOOM! There’s the answer. Using @mentions or inserting a tag using #hashtags, users find their answers. They can even do it from their phone! All activity is captured by RFPIO for tracking usage and uncovering retraining opportunities.

Slack questions are easy to add to our knowledge base. We simply grab the conversation from Slack and create a new Q&A pair. Our workflow delivers the new content to moderation for edits and enhancements. Once moderation is done, the content is available in the library.

Slack evolves into an on-demand knowledge base. Through Slack Bot, we eliminate the “I need an answer and I need it now” dilemma. As a self-service tool, management teams, sales, SMEs, customer support, and all Illuminators can get answers or content quickly. Fast answers. Quick responses. Improved quality. What more can you want?

While RFPIO® LookUp for Slack is a huge help for all your users, your sales team will be doing happy dances! To just type in a question on their phone or laptop while sitting with a customer, and get a trusted answer—well, that is huge.

Sales is your biggest challenge. They’re busy, short on patience, rely on others, and hate change. Training this team is a challenge. LookUp for Slack simplifies integrating sales into the RFPIO proposal process and exposes them to an Content Library knowledge base.

If you’re looking for more information about how I am implementing RFPIO® LookUp at IlluminateEducation, check out my RISE UP session! If you like detailed anecdotes, data maps, and user adoption hacks, you’ll probably get a kick out of it. Although, admittedly, I may be biased.

Building a portal to your company knowledge base from Slack is just the beginning of what RFPIO® LookUp can do. LookUp is also compatible with Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and more! Learn more here.

How Genpact transformed proposal quality with an access-anywhere knowledge base

How Genpact transformed proposal quality with an access-anywhere knowledge base

Customer Stories

Genpact (NYSE: G) is a global professional services firm that makes business transformation real. The company drives digital-led innovation and digitally-enabled intelligent operations for its clients, guided by its experience of running thousands of processes primarily for Global Fortune 500 companies across more than 30 countries.

One of the recent examples is the transformation of the BidPro (the bid and proposal team) team. The team was spending 80% of time on deals that represented just 20% of revenue. As is common across the industry, bids turned into fire drills and deal managers provided stock-standard responses rather than focusing on winning messaging.

The result? Poorly articulated value propositions. Inconsistent messaging. Low team morale. And disappointing conversion rates on deals they knew they should be winning.

There was no doubt that the bid-pro team was ready for a transformation. And one of the key catalysts of this transformation was content.

Here’s the story of how they did it.

Chapter 1: Building a strong content backbone

Content is at the heart of any strong proposal. While there were already different types of collateral available, proposal-specific content is a different ball game. It needs a differentiated approach. In addition to content “breadth and depth”, content also needs to be of the right quality.

By simultaneously broadening and deepening leadership-approved content, they were able to give bid managers the valuable content they needed to build out a standard proposal and could customize from there — improving the quality of the final submission, the way they always hoped to do.

The next big thing was ensuring content was available in multiple formats. 80% of their submissions were made in Microsoft PowerPoint, which meant the RFPIO library needed to be compatible with PowerPoint.

The Genpact team partnered with the RFPIO team to find a solution that could serve their unique needs. After multiple discussions and iterations, an optimum solution was agreed upon and the new capability was launched. With this, the proposal library became comprehensive, full of Q&A pairs, templates, boilerplates, infographics, and images.

Chapter 2: Making content easily accessible

Before RFPIO, the Genpact team was managing content on a different cloud-based system. Since this content catered to different use cases, finding the right content was not easy. They kept hearing the same feedback over and over again — nobody could find relevant content, content was dated, and searching for content was a pain.

RFPIO met their needs on both content management and search.

However, change is never easy. To simplify the process and provide a seamless user experience, the Genpact team implemented the RFPIO® LookUp subscription, giving the BidPro team direct access to the RFPIO Content Library via Microsoft 365 programs like Word and PowerPoint.

In addition, people outside the BidPro team can download template slide decks directly from the library. Then, they can create the storyline using boilerplate content (also stored in the Content Library) and customize it to the client’s specific use case.

Using RFPIO® LookUp, the Genpact bid-pro team can now download template slide decks directly from the Content Library. Then, they can create the storyline using boilerplate content (also stored in the Content Library) and customize it to the client’s specific use case.

By strengthening content quality and creating easy access to the Content Library via RFPIO® LookUp, bid managers now have immediate access to pre-approved content they can easily add to their proposals. As a result, proposal quality has improved dramatically.

Chapter 3: Increasing efficiency by 30% by empowering a team of high-achievers

Before RFPIO, the bid-pro team would repeatedly answer factual questions such as “What’s your address” and “What’s your D&B number”. As such, talented proposal professionals weren’t able to seize opportunities to advance their career.

“Since implementing RFPIO, we’ve been able to do so much more with the same headcount. We’ve increased efficiency by at least 30-35%. We’ve diverted the effort and time to more value-added activities, creating a win-win both for the organization and the team members”.
-Shashi K, Assistant VP of Content at Genpact

Bid-pro team members are no longer grinding to complete repetitive tasks. Instead, they’ve been able to grow into content professionals who are experts in the subject areas they’ve helped build-out. “Not only are they creating real value for deal managers, but they’re developing important skills to advance their careers,” Shashi said.

Another key benefit of RFPIO for a fast-paced organization such as Genpact is accelerating onboarding. With a rich repository of high-quality, pre-vetted content, new team members across the organization are able to create strong proposals without relying on their more-senior counterparts.

And like they say, the proof of the pudding lies in eating. The team is witnessing early success —over 90% of the content they’ve created is being used. Their content strategy is working. Going forward, they’re going to continue to use RFPIO’s built-in analytics to track how their team is using RFPIO® LookUp for Microsoft Office to gain more insight into how their content is being leveraged.

Epilogue: And the journey of excellence continues

In addition to the outcomes envisaged, this transformation has also been recognized by the industry. In 2020, they were recognized by the Association for Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) as “Best Team of the Year.”

And they’re not finished yet. As Sanjay Singh, Vice President, BidPro says, “And the journey has just about begun. The BidPro team is now planning to empower the entire sales team to create proactive proposals using standard content from the RFPIO Content Library. A new phase begins.”

And they’re not alone. According to the 2021 Benchmark Report on Proposal Management, of organizations planning to respond to more RFPs in 2021, 82% will also complete more proactive proposals.

Powered with strong content and a drive to succeed, the Genpact BidPro team is perfectly poised for the next phase of its transformation. At Genpact, the future is bright.

Get instant access to your company knowledge base with RFPIO® LookUp

Get instant access to your company knowledge base with RFPIO® LookUp

Products/Features/Solutions

Blast! Just as I’m about to write this article about RFPIO® LookUp—a search portal that transforms your RFPIO Content Library into an instantly accessible company knowledge base—the discovery of a new portal to a 5th dimension tries to steal my thunder. Lucky for me, I can confirm that the RFPIO® LookUp portal is real. No need to fire up the Large Hadron Collider.

RFPIO® LookUp is a game-changer for organizational knowledge base integration. The subscription unlocks subject matter expertise from your RFPIO Content Library and makes it available to everyone in your organization, from almost anywhere they work. This knowledge base solution includes compatibility with all of the following:

  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Microsoft Outlook
  • Chromium Edge
  • Google Chrome
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Slack
  • Google Hangouts

With all of these applications, as soon as your RFPIO® LookUp subscription is live you’ll see a search bar and results pane where you can immediately access content without having to switch between applications. There are no limits on user licenses—the LookUp subscription can be added to your RFPIO package without worrying about a per-user cost.

Until now, RFPIO® LookUp has only been available as a Chrome extension. Now that it’s available to use almost anywhere, your entire organization can take advantage of the curated, brand-approved expertise that you’ve amassed for use on requests for proposal (RFPs), security questionnaires, due diligence questionnaires (DDQs), requests for information (RFIs), and requests for quote (RFQs).

Spread the content wealth across teams

For proposal managers and teams, RFPIO® LookUp eliminates you being the bottleneck between proposal-ready content and the sales, support, and marketing teams that rely on you to provide it. It also enables you to:

  • Consolidate, organize, and moderate company knowledge, and make it easily accessible for teams across your organization
  • Complete online questionnaires faster
  • Quickly respond to short questionnaires (e.g. RFIs, requirements questionnaires) in Microsoft Word or Excel
  • Leverage knowledge stored in the RFPIO Content Library to create sales proposals, SOWs, and presentations in Microsoft Office

We found that 81% of proposal managers with RFP software agree that dynamic content libraries save time, and RFPIO® LookUp definitely makes any Content Library dynamic.

For sales, RFPIO® LookUp acts as an on-demand, real-time SME that lifts the burden of chasing down answers to prospect and customer inquiries. It enables all sales team members to:

  • Quickly access the most up-to-date and accurate company information from where you’re already working, including Salesforce, SalesLoft, Google Docs, and any web-based software.
  • Respond to prospect and customer questions directly from Outlook, Gmail, or any web-based email platform
  • Streamline sales proposal and slide deck creation in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Sales representatives can improve response time, which will lead to faster conversions and more revenue. They can then also spend less time wandering around the company wiki and more time nurturing relationships with prospects and clients.

For customer service and technical support teams, RFPIO® LookUp enables real-time access into corporate expertise so they can seamlessly respond to support requests.

For marketing and other content creators, RFPIO® LookUp provides access to the most up-to-date product, solution, pricing, and other company information that’s been curated by SMEs. This allows marketing teams to focus on efficiently creating content and running campaigns instead of conducting research and monopolizing time and resources of other teams.

Watch proposal quality rise

We’re still in the early days of this new RFPIO® LookUp portal, but we’re already hearing some positive feedback from organizations using it as a shortcut to their company knowledge base. Vicki Griesinger—Director of Business Strategy, Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft—said, “We were able to retire a Business Applications chatbot we built for the field. RFPIO® LookUp is available right from Microsoft Teams and surfaces content from all of our content collections without the maintenance overhead.”

“We were able to retire a Business Applications chatbot we built for the field. RFPIO® LookUp is available right from Microsoft Teams and surfaces content from all of our content collections without the maintenance overhead.”

-Vicki Griesinger, Director of Business Strategy, Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft

And Assistant VP of Content at Genpact, Shashi Kumar, said, “With RFPIO® LookUp, bid managers have immediate access to pre-approved content they can easily add to their proposals. As a result, proposal quality has increased dramatically.”

If you already use RFPIO as your response management platform, then it’s extremely simple to add RFPIO® LookUp as a knowledge management solution. Simply reach out to Tina (tina@rfpio.com), and she’ll connect you with your account manager to get the ball rolling. If RFPIO® LookUp is the knowledge base integration portal you’ve been looking for to put you over the hump on your RFP software decision, then schedule a demo today.

If the portal to a 5th dimension is what you’ve been looking for, then maybe RFPIO® LookUp can help you manage your research on dark matter and gravitational waves. We’re always happy to help develop a deeper understanding of cosmological history!

Still need more information? Learn more about RFPIO® LookUp here.

RFPIO saved Microsoft $4.2M this year while streamlining RFx processes

RFPIO saved Microsoft $4.2M this year while streamlining RFx processes

Customer Stories

Microsoft is a company dedicated to empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. True to its mission, Microsoft is committed to helping customers modernize processes and achieve digital transformations at scale. This commitment applies internally, as well: Microsoft encourages all employees to use a growth mindset across all efforts and requires everyone to ask questions and continually improve their processes, tools, and workflows.

In 2019, proposal professionals at Microsoft saw an opportunity to improve the efficiency of proposal response management with AI-based tools and enhanced collaboration across teams. By augmenting Microsoft’s proposal response process with the right solution, it was clear they could save their sales teams valuable time that could be otherwise spent with customers — and propel their proposals to a new level of excellence.

Microsoft needed a scalable and flexible response management platform that supported multiple teams, languages, and content types, while smoothly integrating into its tech stack. And it needed the right solution partner to help. Through a partnership with RFPIO, Microsoft reimagined its proposal process — significantly improving efficiency and productivity with five key principles.

1. Unleash the power of knowledge

According to a McKinsey report, employees spend nearly 20% of their time looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.

Democratizing knowledge is essential to working effectively and Microsoft believes in giving its teams the tools they need to thrive. For sales teams, that means spending less time searching for answers, and more time listening to customers, creating solutions, and managing pipelines. With RFPIO’s integration with Azure Active Directory (AAD), thousands of users across the company have securely activated their accounts using their existing Microsoft corporate credentials.

The response from the Field has been overwhelmingly positive. Eric Fink, Dynamics & Business Applications Specialist, said, “The first time I logged into RFPIO, it took me about 10 minutes to get comfortable with the platform. After that, I quickly found responses to all of my open questions — seeing 100% value from the very beginning.”

According to Brice Baro, Account Tech Strategist Global, “This site (RFPIO) is very intuitive, and this library really accelerates our work on RFxs.”

As exposure to RFPIO increases, so does user adoption and overall value. For example, after the legal team learned about RFPIO they realized that it could help them stem repeated requests for the same one-off questions.

“Our collaboration is helping us scale legal support to a different level, achieving better deal velocity and helping legal professionals focus on more complex deal negotiations.”
-Nadia Guarino, Sr. Paralegal

In the first 18 months after implementing RFPIO in 2019, more than 7,000 Microsoft users accessed the platform to find 36,200 ready-to-go RFx responses from the managed RFPIO Content Library. With a conservative estimate of 20 minutes saved per response, Microsoft estimated $2.4M in savings during those 18 months.

By 2022—after 3 years of utilizing RFPIO—Microsoft had accumulated more than 13,000 RFPIO users who search a Content Library of more than 18,000 Q&A pairs spread out across 9 collections. In fiscal year 2022 alone, Microsoft estimates that its savings nearly doubled compared to savings during those first 18 months, from $2.4M up to $4.2M. They also saved more than 21,000 hours while using more than 63,000 answers.

FY2022 RFPIO Value

13K+

users

21K+

hours saved

63K+

responses used

$4.2M

estimated savings

“Based on the estimated time team members saved looking for content using RFPIO, we saved $4.2M in FY22 in the self-serve libraries alone.”
-Rhonda Nicholson, Sr. Business Program Manager

2. Stay secure and connected

Strong privacy and security are critical to Microsoft’s mission and essential to customer trust. The standard practices captured in its Supplier Security and Privacy Assurance (SSPA) reflect company values and extend to suppliers who handle Microsoft data on their behalf.

RFPIO’s proposal automation solution meets the privacy and security policies and integrates nicely into Microsoft’s existing tech stack. Microsoft’s RFPIO platform is hosted securely on Azure with AAD authentication and integrates with Microsoft Translator to support its multi-lingual customer base. In addition to the standard browser experience, RFPIO fosters adoption by meeting employees right where they are, including:

  • Microsoft Teams,
  • Microsoft Office, and
  • Microsoft Outlook

By giving everyone access through familiar platforms, RFPIO has improved collaboration and enables proposal managers, contributors, and Field users to search faster—and find the information they need to work effectively.

“RFPIO’s impact on our pursuits has been incredible: It’s simplified and streamlined finding relevant content and improving it; it’s centralized and minimized burdensome administrative tasks. In short, the time it saves pursuit teams enables those teams to focus more on what will win.”
-Mitchell Galloway-Edgar, Senior Business Program Manager

3. Simplify content curation

According to 2019 research from Richardson Sales Performance, the top two biggest challenges when pursuing new opportunities are demonstrating competitive differentiation and creating a case for change.

When sales and proposal teams have ready access to pre-approved content, they’re able to spend more time showing how their solution addresses their customers’ specific problems.

That’s where content governance steps in. At Microsoft, content governance goes beyond organizing and presenting online content. It’s a craft. Content managers shape compliant, compelling, and customer-focused information by proactively seeking out information from subject matter experts, harvesting answers from proposals, and storing content in a shared database for future users.

RFPIO simplifies this process. Advanced content organization, moderation, and review features mean content managers are able to keep content relevant, fresh, and working in harmony with RFPIO’s AI engine.

As a result, proposal professionals can use the AI engine to automatically respond to commonly-seen questions—SIG security questionnaires (documents many corporations use to understand risk from potential bidders) that used to take several days to complete, can now be completed in less than an hour.

“Without access to the reusable content in RFPIO, it would have been nearly impossible to meet the customer’s RFP deadline.”
-Joe Straining, Strategic Client Technology Lead

With trusted content at their fingertips, Microsoft’s proposal professionals have time to focus on crafting compelling win messaging tailored to each customer’s needs. With more time to spend polishing each proposal, the stronger their proposals are—and the more likely they are to win.

4. Enhance communication and collaboration

Teams stay collaborative and aligned when all members are working in sync and communicating constantly to accomplish a common goal.

When communication is dispersed across email, chat, and in-person meetings, keeping track of moving parts is complicated and time-consuming, and it’s easy for teams to fall out of alignment.

Microsoft focused its attention on keeping everyone connected and communicating by rethinking their proposal processes. With RFPIO, all communication happens within the application in a single place, using in-app commenting and @-mentioning. Proposal contributors and proposal managers use in-app collaboration features for their projects. SMEs, proposal managers and content owners all communicate within each question-answer pairing, which helps keep content fresh and improves deadline commitments.

Communication around project status has also been simplified to a few clicks. Rather than reaching out to proposal managers for a status update, anyone can check RFPIO project status right from the dashboard in Microsoft Teams. By tracking status in real time, project teams are able to prevent roadblocks before they happen.

“RFPIO’s enterprise-level capabilities enable multiple business units, including partners, to collaborate on a single platform. It also reduces communication channels during the proposal development process.”
-Page Snider, Director of Business Program Management, Microsoft Consulting Services

5. Stay flexible and keep evolving

According to the Adobe State of Create Report, 78% of respondents agreed organizations that invest in creativity increase employee productivity. When each problem or inefficiency becomes an opportunity to think creatively about finding a solution, the lines defining limitations become blurred.

When the team at Microsoft set off to reimagine the proposal process, they knew it would be a continual journey, a persistent state of questioning the status quo—constantly making tweaks, adjustments, and changes as they go along.

That’s why a solution that was flexible enough to grow alongside their process was a necessity.

“The content management capabilities allow our team of content managers to effectively manage more than 18k pieces of collateral. The moderation and review workflows allow our team to work directly with SMEs and control the flow of information to our more than 13k users around the globe.”
-Amanda Heather, Business Program Manager, Content Lead

The customer success team at RFPIO has worked closely with Microsoft to continuously evolve to meet its changing needs. Diane Holt, business program manager at Microsoft, added, “RFPIO is a rare gem in that the company delivers a mature product with the agility of a startup. This tool continually improves with capability and usability.”

RFPIO and Microsoft continue to work together to find new ways to improve efficiency and advance productivity. Rather than staying ensconced in familiar workflows, Microsoft is a company that welcomes the hard work and creative thinking required to push the status quo.

In the end, both Microsoft and RFPIO believe that when teams are willing and encouraged to think outside the box, processes become more efficient, nimble, and agile… and that’s when results start snowballing.

Improve sales contract management with RFP software

Improve sales contract management with RFP software

Sales Enablement

If sales is the rock and legal is the hard place, then you’ll often find sales contract management stuck right in the middle. The constant dilemma of the sales contract manager is, “How can we propose redlines that make legal happy and mitigate business risk, but still get sales contracts done efficiently?” There are two common approaches to dealing with this dilemma.

One, you can manually execute contract management through a hodgepodge of emails, spreadsheets, document versions, and pleas for responses ASAP. This exposes your process to a host of issues, including:

  • Lack of continuity or redundancy in the contract review process.
  • Significant differences in the redlines proposed by contract management staff.
  • Disparate systems and processes to manage sales contract terms between departments.
  • Too many contracts at different stages to effectively track.
  • Missed renewal opportunities.
  • Misfiled or lost versions.
  • Reused contract language that is no longer accurate or is out of date.
  • Easily lost tribal knowledge about preferred redline responses.
  • Lost time waiting on SME feedback for specific clauses or Exhibits.
  • Inflexibility in negotiations due to fear of swamping a deal in the contract morass.

Two, you can use RFP software that will bring together the parties involved in contract review and will create consistency in redlining through a knowledge repository of legal-approved contract language. This certainly shuts down the issues that arise from the standard email process, but it opens you up to the expense of a new platform. Small to midsize businesses will need to evaluate whether they create enough contracts to justify the ROI. Organizations that derive their revenue predominantly from requests for proposals (RFPs) may want to consider another option: Using RFP software to augment contract management.

How can RFP software improve sales contract management?

Throughout my contract management career, I’ve learned that there’s a wide variance in how companies structure their contract management departments. Some are embedded in legal, some in sales or business operations. Others oversee multiple functions such as procurement, sales and RFP responses. And then there are the lone wolf departments — sometimes operated by a team of one — that focus only on contracts but depend on all other departments to contribute.

In any one of those situations, the contract management process can benefit from knowledge management capabilities in RFP software. At RFPIO, my team uses our Content Library to manage contract content and various redlining playbook language. It gives us access to pre-approved content that my team needs to complete sales contracts without having to unduly burden any other departments. We utilize a private collection in the system as a contract language repository. It increases efficiency for legal, sales, contracts, and other subject matter experts (SMEs) whom we rely on for contract management. It also helps me train new team members in a consistent review process and helps reduce the likelihood of brain drain if a member of the team leaves.

A simple process

Your RFPIO Content Library can serve the same function for contract language management as it does for RFP responses. But instead of using it as a hub for Q&A pairs you need for an RFP, use it as a hub for contract clauses that have been approved by legal or any applicable content from an SME. Other than that, just like for RFPs, you can use it for interdepartmental communication, and it will all be enhanced by an intelligent recommendation engine.

Start by approaching legal with the clauses that get the most pushback from customers. These are the clauses that require more customization. The same ones you have to email over and over again to legal and wait too long for a response. After these clauses are in the Content Library, contract management staff can reduce the content that legal needs to review (and in an iterative process, new language provided by legal can be added to the Content Library to minimize the back and forth even further!).

Create a collection that’s only accessible to the contracts and legal teams. Cordon it off so only your team can see it and maintain version control. For example, you may want to set up a “change to governing law” section. Then you can have the legally approved clause applicable to Delaware or Idaho or California or Alpha Centauri. Do the same for clauses relating to payment terms, auto renewal, notice periods, limitation of liability, warranties, and indemnification; the same applies for certificates of insurance (COIs) exhibits, data privacy agreements (DPAs), SLA response times, or whatever else appears in your contracts.

Preserve lawyers’ more expensive time

Debate value of different positions all you like. The fact is that the average lawyer will be more expensive for your company than the average salesperson, contract administrator, or proposal manager.

Also, legal likely has many other priorities that require their time, which means that addressing sales contracts will not be as important as it is to sales. With your Content Library in place, you can retain up-to-date, legal-approved content that is easily accessible by the entire contracting team, minimizing the sales contract review time for lawyers. Showing legal that you respect their time will also go a long way toward getting faster turnarounds for non-standard contract language.

Make sales look good

One of the most frustrating responses you have to provide to a salesperson is, “We’re still waiting on legal.” It impacts that person’s commission, endangers their deal, and causes unnecessary interdepartmental friction.

Avoid the big time suck of sending every contract to a lawyer by using the approved clauses in your Content Library. Sales can work faster, and they can also work smarter. Eliminating the fear of avoidance frees them up to be more flexible in their negotiations. It’s easier for salespeople to cater to prospect and customer needs if they know their contract changes won’t bog down negotiations.

Increase value of your contracts team

With an Content Library chock full of legally approved clauses and communication features that help track a project, the contracts team now has the ability to view an entire project and see what has already been answered. This can be a blind spot for many contract managers, especially if the contract team is separate from a proposal team. Now a contract administrator who can see what’s already been answered in a questionnaire or pre-RFP response doesn’t have to search around in the project’s history or shared file or email chain.

Contract teams deal with subject-matter-experts other than legal, too. Procurement may need to add customers as additional insureds to the COI. IT and/ or IS will need to weigh in on the DPA and SLA information, and Operations may be needed for product information, quantity commitments and timeline obligations. Have the pre-approved contract language set aside for access only by your contracts team and a system where SMEs can quickly review instead of create. “Is this the right clause?” requires a “yes” or “no,” whereas, “Please provide the most recent insurance verbiage,” requires more of a time commitment.

Finally, with a knowledge management system in place, you can focus contract team training on how to use discretion within the system and how to chase down only the non-standard answers.

Emerge from between the rock and hard place

Knowledge management with a solution such as the RFPIO Content Library alleviates pressure between departments in the contract review process and allows each department to specialize: sales on generating revenue; legal on compliance; and contracts on contracts.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about RFPIO Content Library.

3 strategies for a consistent and on-brand content library

3 strategies for a consistent and on-brand content library

Content & Storytelling

What do marketing and proposal teams have in common? They both want to demonstrate their company’s strengths in a way that is compelling and impactful. Despite this, proposal and marketing teams tend to manage their respective content in silos, with little collaboration between the two.

When you break content along team lines, messaging becomes inconsistent—or worse, inaccurate. That’s why the proposal team needs a champion who can bridge marketing and proposal teams to keep people aligned and content up-to-date. Who is that person at your organization? Maybe it’s you.

The good news is that aligning proposal and marketing teams isn’t as complicated as you might think. And I’ve already outlined a few simple strategies to get you started.

Replace walls with bridges

When teams become too focused on their tasks and deadlines, they inadvertently build walls around themselves. The higher these walls grow, the more difficult it is to stay aligned. As the self-appointed bridge between your organization’s marketing and proposal teams, it’s your responsibility to tear those walls down.

Kick off the collaboration by gathering the right brains in the same room, and setting up recurring cross-team meetings. Make sure everyone, on both sides, is clear about their responsibilities.

Next, make cross-team communication as easy as possible by setting up a designated channel in your communication platform of choice—be in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangouts—where team members can go when they’re stuck or have a question.

Once you’ve established regular contact between marketing and proposal teams, they’ll be able to stay aligned on content guidelines and be ready for any changes coming down the line.

Your challenge is maintaining communication between the two sides. Keep collaboration simple. Ensure regular meetings keep happening. The more often the two sides are in contact, the easier it will be to communicate important deadlines, updates, or changes in content strategy.

Set regular review cycles

I like to think of brands as people. When you’re interacting with someone, it goes without saying that we expect them to sound and look the same throughout the conversation.

When customers are interacting with your brand, they expect a similarly uniform experience. Your company should look and sound the same, whenever your prospects are interacting with you, be it on your website, advertisements—or, yes, even proposals.

Proposals inconsistent with the rest of your organization’s content leaves customers with a tangled idea of what your company represents. And when you’re trying to demonstrate your value proposition, the last thing you want is to confuse your customers.

Luckily, we can fix this problem in just three words: Regular review cycles.

Beyond establishing an extended content plan, there is absolutely nothing more important to the long-term success of your content library than setting review cycles, content audits, and careful moderation practices.

Unsurprisingly, both of these elements also play a critical role in bridging the gap between marketing and the proposal management team.

Establishing a healthy review cadence allows your content experts to take a look at volatile or brand-centric content regularly, and creates the space to make any necessary edits before you submit your proposal.

Working Tip: If you’ve already set up review cycles in RFPIO, consider creating a separate cycle for marketing content, and add users from your team who will be plugged into the organization’s brand copy guidelines and priorities.

Stay aligned on content strategy

The cherry on top of excellent content is bringing everyone on the same page. Making sure both proposal and marketing teams are tuned-in to the overarching content strategy reduces miscommunication, misunderstandings, and inconsistencies.

Is there a rebrand on the horizon? Do taglines or other key pieces of brand copy change on a rolling basis? Are new products going to be released that will require additional content?

Understand your organization’s long-term content plan and be aware of any forthcoming copy and branding updates, so you can align proposal content with any changes coming down the pike.

Keeping a pulse on changes will ensure proposals are always aligned with your company’s mission and voice.

“Great things in business are never done by one person”. I’ll have to agree with Steve Jobs on this one. When proposal and marketing teams collaborate on content, messaging is consistent across channels. Proposals are more compelling. And everyone wins.

If you want to learn how RFPIO can help you keep your content organized, up-to-date, and on-brand, schedule a demo today.

3 tips for organizing your RFP content library: tagging, custom fields, and collections

3 tips for organizing your RFP content library: tagging, custom fields, and collections

Content & Storytelling

Yay! You just added RFPIO and it’s time to start completing RFPs and security questionnaires (if you’re already an experienced user, stick with us; there’s something for everyone here). Pop the champagne cork! Cue the band. Repeatedly refresh email because congratulatory back-pats are sure to arrive soon from upper management, SMEs (subject matter experts), sales, security, and anyone else who participated in past RFPs.

Now what?

It’s time to build out your Content Library. Your Content Library consists of documents, question and answer (Q&A) pairs and templates that represent the backbone of your RFPIO instance. But tread lightly before proceeding. In a recent RFPIO survey, 50% of proposal managers said keeping response content up-to-date and accurate is their biggest challenge, but only 31% of responders audit their RFP content library as often as once a quarter.

So how can you set yourself up for success to build and maintain content in RFPIO? It starts with tagging, custom fields, and collections, which will also expedite access to relevant information for internal and external users alike.

Here’s how.

But first: You don’t have to go it alone

Start by defining your RFP team. Who is going to be the Champion of RFPIO? Typically, this falls on an executive sponsor or the proposal manager.

Are you the content champion? This is the decision-maker, someone who will own the process of building and maintaining content. If it’s not you, then make sure someone gets designated. No matter how organized you are, this is mandatory.

After you identify the content champion, bring in your content stakeholders. These are all the participants you’ve been working with on past RFPs. It’s likely that these encompass internal and external users. They may be SMEs in different locations, departments, and roles. Identifying their roles and responsibilities will determine how you set up workflows in RFPIO.

Once your team has been identified, it’s time to discuss workflows and organization methods. Remember that you’re only one person, so it’s important to not forget about the rest of the team that will help you achieve RFPIO success. Create and document a plan to communicate content workflows. Make sure all contributors can easily find what they need to complete their assigned tasks. Have the whole team of stakeholders sign-on.

OK, now this is how: Tagging

Segment your content with tags. Tags are simple, general categories to help group your content together and are the first step to take when organizing your content. Every document should have at least one tag. Examples include “onboarding,” “implementation,” and “contracts.”

At this point, you may be wondering how to get started. It’s a common hurdle, especially for companies that have never used tags or any other structured content organization strategies. Within RFPs and security questionnaires that you’ve received, there are sections about company information and other content that you may have just been copy and pasting from document to document. Harvest your initial tagging schema from these generic sections that appear in most of the RFPs you have already submitted.

RFPIO Best Practice: All content needs to have at least one tag. That includes all documents and all question and answer (Q&A) pairs. We recommend no more than three, though, so as to avoid search conflicts within the system.

Is that field “custom”? Sweet!

Every company is unique, which means every company’s content has unique characteristics. For categories that are organizationally unique and allow for flexibility and adaptability in search, our clients leverage Custom Fields. Custom Fields may apply to a product, service, geographic region, or whatever best fits your business. But they do have to make sense. It’s easy to bog the process down with too many custom fields.

RFPIO Client Example: Here’s an example of how custom fields helped a client exponentially improve search of their more than 15,000 Q&A pairs. First, we started with the generic tag of “support,” which whittled 15,000 options down to 800 or so. Already an improvement. But then we tagged all applicable Q&A pairs with a client product name. That drilled down results from 800 to 115. Within two clicks—about 30 seconds—we were able to identify a small subset of applicable content.

Restrict content with collections

Within RFPIO, collections allow you to restrict sensitive content visibility. You create siloed walls around sensitive content based on content that should be restricted to specific users. Good examples of Collections are legal/security data or even geographic data. For example, sales may not need access to legal or high-level proprietary information that legal or security teams need to access. Or a North American team may not need access to some content that is necessary for a European team to access for GDPR compliance.

Why waste users’ time sorting through content they can’t even use? With collections, search is much more efficient.

But what about maintaining content?

Great question. First, always feel free to work with your RFPIO customer success managers to set up demos of specific features. Second, check out the webinar I presented on building and maintaining content in RFPIO for more (below), including live Q&A with participants on:

  • Optimizing Q&A editing
  • Setting up custom fields and collections
  • Conducting bulk updates on multiple pieces of content
  • Using filters for moderation
  • Setting up multiple responses for a single question—one for US-based teams and another for those based in the UK, for example.

If you’re just getting started, then you have a lot to look forward to. 82% of proposal managers said RFPIO helps them manage response content all in one place.

Interested in automating your RFP processes with RFPIO? Schedule a demo to learn more.

Why you need the ultimate library for your RFP responses

Why you need the ultimate library for your RFP responses

Content & Storytelling

People from unique business units respond to RFPs, and only a select few have “RFP management” listed in their job descriptions. Because various content contributors must band together to create quality responses, this content must be centralized and accessible.

In reality, response content is scattered across spreadsheets, Google Drive folders, or perhaps a content management system. The result of a disjointed RFP response process is apparent in these survey responses about top challenges:

  • 43% of SMEs are spending too much time on RFP responses.
  • 50% of proposal managers can’t keep content up-to-date and accurate.
  • 43% of marketers are wearing too many hats and don’t have time for RFPs.
  • 68% of salespeople struggle with focusing on sales-related activities.

So, what is the secret to more efficient RFP content management? You need the ultimate Content Library for your RFP responses.

It’s time to address your RFP content production cycle

With the high number of RFPs you’re responding to, you know you don’t want to start from scratch with each response. It will only be more time lost when you don’t have any to spare.

Perhaps your response management team has already recognized the importance of having an Content Library, but the best they could come up with is a workaround. Keeping up with a spreadsheet database is practically a job on its own and searchability isn’t the best. And, how can you begin to keep graphics or supporting attachments organized?

38% of content marketers said the production of content was by far their biggest challenge. Even if you are not a marketer, you are undeniably a content creator if you respond to RFPs. The same content creation challenges ring true in the response process.

Your RFP content production cycle should include an easy way to:

  • Find content.
  • Create content.
  • Customize content.
  • Review content.
  • Format content.
  • Audit content.

RFP software is a dedicated solution that provides a robust, collaborative Content Library to meet all of your RFP response needs. Best of all? It’s easy to use.

What to expect from the ultimate RFP Content Library

We’ll admit…the word “ultimate” gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But, when you modernize your RFP response process with RFP software, you truly have the ultimate RFP Content Library at your disposal.

Because you are working within a dedicated solution for responders—rather than a system of workarounds—you’ll enjoy many benefits that positively impact your RFP content lifecycle.

Store marketing-approved content in one place

Most marketing departments are in charge of approving content for RFP responses. Your Content Library serves as a centralized location for marketing approved content to keep the RFP process moving forward smoothly. When approved content is sitting in an email or Excel, it can easily slip through the cracks and delay progress.

Stitch quality content together quickly

An RFP software Content Library gives you an option to browse various responses for a similar question in historical RFPs. Quickly stitch together high-quality responses to customize your response for a better chance of closing the deal. It’s never one-size-fits-all for RFP responses, so it’s important to have that level of control over your content.

Organize your Content Library to easily find content

The key to an organized Content Library is using tags—something you would be hard-pressed to pull off in a spreadsheet. Tags might include: security, architecture, pricing, customer references, terms and conditions. Narrowing down your response content hunt with effective tagging makes searching highly targeted and efficient for your team.

Automate response content and customize

How great would it be if an answer was already generated for you in your Content Library? Going the extra mile, a recommendation engine takes searching out of the equation entirely—a lot like the auto-suggest features you’re familiar with in other search platforms or email solutions. And you’re never stuck with the recommended answer, because you have the power to customize it.

Optimize responses with content audits

Your Content Library is a living breathing resource, and there are times when it needs a cleanup or refresh. Having a workflow option where the system periodically sends out a friendly content audit reminder to content owners will help everyone stay on top of RFP responses, so they are always relevant and optimized.

89% love having a centralized Content Library

Whenever we ask responders about their favorite RFPIO feature, the Content Library is consistently the top choice. 89% of responders love having a centralized Content Library, because they have unmatched abilities when it comes to storing, organizing, and accessing responses—especially when compared to a previous manual process.

As the Manager of Sales Solution Architects at LexisNexis, Jeff Skott achieved content management mastery and reduced his response time by 25-30%. Watch the video to learn how Jeff gained these superpowers after transforming his Content Library.

See how it feels to respond with confidence

Why do 250,000+ users streamline their response process with RFPIO? Schedule a demo to find out.