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Expand sales intelligence and personalize sales documents with RFP automation software

Expand sales intelligence and personalize sales documents with RFP automation software

Sales Enablement

When customers start using RFPIO’s RFP automation capabilities, most of them quickly expand response management to their overall sales intelligence […]

Category: Tag: Response management solution

Expand sales intelligence and personalize sales documents with RFP automation software

Expand sales intelligence and personalize sales documents with RFP automation software

Sales Enablement

When customers start using RFPIO’s RFP automation capabilities, most of them quickly expand response management to their overall sales intelligence program. They enable sales teams to generate personalized sales documents and proposals on a self-service basis. With easy access to a robust content library, sales representatives can (relatively) easily piece together pre-approved, pre-vetted content to create proactive selling documents.

In the spirit of transparency, we happened upon these added benefits somewhat by accident. We actually learned about them from our first enterprise customers, who had thousands of projects running in RFPIO. Upon evaluation of all the content they had accumulated in their Answer Libraries, they asked a seemingly simple question: With all this great content in RFPIO, how else can we use it?

Ever since, we’ve been fine-tuning features so that RFP automation software adds more value to the greater sales intelligence program for customers of all sizes.

How your sales representatives respond matters. For more conversions at higher price points, they need to respond quickly, with a personalized touch, and they need to do it efficiently so they spend more time on revenue-generating activities.

According to Forrester, there are three key elements to sales intelligence.

  1. Operational Intelligence: “What is happening and what has happened.” In other words, these are the KPIs that guide day-to-day activities (e.g., number of calls, proposals delivered, pipeline-to-quota coverage ratios, average deal size, etc.).
  2. Diagnostic Intelligence: Analyze the KPIs established in operational intelligence to gain a meaningful view of data and identify trends that may determine future performance.
  3. Interpretive Sales Intelligence: Use operational and diagnostic intelligence to guide and support revenue generation throughout the organization, from optimizing responses to prospects and customers to structuring compensation plans.

Based on this definition, RFP automation software can have a significant impact on sales intelligence. Here’s why.

Without data, nothing is driving your sales intelligence

Sales intelligence is all about identifying buyer signals and nailing the timing. Sounds simple, right? It’s not. Depending on your product or service and your market, the amount of analysis that goes into signal identification could range from hours to months, or even years.

Sales is like the rest of the intelligences that are all the rage right now. Artificial, business, military… you name it, if it’s intelligent, then it depends on data. Similarly, sales intelligence relies heavily on data collection, management, and insight.

Your CRM is the central nervous system of your sales intelligence. Let me throw some borrowed knowledge at you (source).

  • CRM is among the top three tools and technologies for creating personalized interactions with customers to foster loyalty and better marketing ROI. (Salesforce, 2017)
  • 73% of marketers with a CRM system use it for a shared customer view between their service and sales teams. (Salesforce, 2017)
  • High performers are happier with the level of collaboration between their marketing team and other departments and they’re also three times more likely than underperformers to extensively use CRM tools. (Salesforce, 2017)

Much of the client, opportunity, and product data that can be leveraged to personalize proposals already exists in CRMs. By integrating RFPIO and CRMs like Salesforce, sales reps can now generate personalized selling materials without leaving their CRM. RFPIO can link CRM data from client, industry, job title, product information, and opportunity fields to dynamic proposal templates that allow sales reps to hyper-efficiently generate proactive proposals.

A real-world use case is:

  1. Sales rep Alpha finishes their first phone call with a prospect. They enter what they’ve learned about the prospect, such as product interests or points of contact. These fields will be used to swap out the dynamic templates when the proposal is generated.
  2. The prospect has asked Alpha to send a solutions brochure to learn more about Alpha’s company and solutions. The sales rep will click on “create proposal” to get started.
  3. Alpha navigates their CRM (e.g., Salesforce) interface to select “Create Proposal in RFPIO” from a list of available document templates (NOTE: You’ll need to set up the document templates ahead of time, but once you do so, it’s just a matter of plug-and-play content!).
  4. Alpha completes the proposal builder without leaving the CRM to add content relevant to this particular prospect and include personalization variables. These can include contact fields such as name and title, relevant quotes and testimonials from companies in their industry, the specific solutions and prices that the prospect needs, implementation team, timeline, etc.
  5. Alpha clicks the “Generate” button.
  6. Voila! Alpha has a personalized, on-demand proposal to share, which will be much more effective than a boilerplate email or generic brochure. The generated proposal is then automatically published to the Salesforce page from which it was created. Now, it’s ready for the sales rep to download or share as needed.

Sales intelligence with RFP software integrated into your CRM enables more informed selling, allowing you to take advantage of the personas you’ve been developing and the hard-fought information you’ve been gathering on your prospects and customers.

5 sales intelligence advantages of RFP automation software

Let’s say you’ve integrated RFP software into your CRM. What benefits can you expect?

  1. Keep sales reps focused on selling: Are your salespeople spending less than 36% of their time selling? Sales VPs and directors want reps living in the CRM, focused on revenue-generating activities. By providing access to RFP content and automating its generation from the CRM, reps spend less time chasing down content or composing proposals.
  2. Gain leverage from content analytics: Track the content that’s being consumed, by whom, and how it’s being shared. Identify the most common and popular content to help inform future content development. Analyze trending queries, both internally and externally.
  3. Strengthen your account-based selling strategy: Make it easier for your sales team to collaborate on developing multiple contacts and relationships within a single account. Content analytics helps you track the buying signals throughout different levels of your most complex accounts.
  4. Personalize every response: With the data stored in your CRM combined with the high-quality content stored in RFPIO, proposal managers, marketing teams, or sales teams can create pre-approved content blocks that sales teams can piece together to create proactive selling documents. What would it mean to your team to send professional, personalized proposals with every response?
  5. Take a big lift off of proposal and marketing teams: No more one-off requests for content or proposal support from sales reps because they’ll be able to do it themselves. For example, Microsoft estimates that its RFPIO Content Library saves up to 5,000 hours per year.

A rising tide lifts all boats

Advanced sales intelligence will also contribute to greater success with RFP responses. For proposal managers, customer data points from the CRM will help automate the completion of a proposal and inform bid decisions.

Natural language processing and analytics will help decipher what kinds of questions will be asked in an RFP. RFPIO can estimate what type of proposal to expect, compare it to past RFP responses from similar client profiles, and analyze how you performed in the past to determine your likelihood of success and how long it will take to complete. The proposal manager can also estimate resources and identify contributors that will need to be allocated in order to win the RFP and determine if it’s worth it to the organization to proceed.

What’s it gonna take?

We’ll need to connect the systems, so there is some administrative setup. However, we’ve already synced up with multiple CRMs, so we know what to expect.

Schedule a demo today, and we can discuss whether it makes sense for you to integrate your CRM with RFPIO RFP automation software.

How ELMO Software boosts productivity and efficiency with RFPIO

How ELMO Software boosts productivity and efficiency with RFPIO

Customer Stories

Elmo Software is the fastest growing HR technology solution in Australia and New Zealand, offering a single, cloud-based platform for organizations to easily manage their HR and payroll processes.

For many of ELMO’s mid-market and enterprise-sized customers, a request for tender is often the first step in the sales cycle. As more organizations are looking to cloud-based technology to streamline processes, ELMO noticed a steady increase in the number of tenders received.

ELMO knew that the more tenders they responded to, the more revenue they could generate. They also knew that the right technology could help them respond to an increasing number of tenders, at the same high quality they were used.

So they kicked off the search for bid automation software.

ELMO Software’s bid management team was spending too much time on manual processes

Jay Kumar, the Senior Bid Manager at ELMO Software, explained that before RFPIO, “the response process was not nearly as efficient as it is now.”

“The most time-consuming part of this process would be following up with the stakeholders to remind them to respond to questions. This was especially frustrating because I already had so many other things on my plate,” Jay remembers. “And I know the stakeholders had their own priorities they needed to take care of. We all felt like we were spending more time than necessary.”

Because each tender required so much time and effort—and they were responding to so many tenders—the bid management team would often work nights and weekends to get everything done on time.

They knew it wasn’t sustainable to keep working overtime to complete responses. They had to make a change. They started to look for a solution that could help them organize their content, simplify cross-team collaboration, and automate their process. Ultimately, ELMO decided on RFPIO.

By automating the response process, ELMO Software can respond to more tenders than ever before

Sameer Longi, the Consulting Solution Manager at ELMO Software, says that despite having a small team, RFPIO has enabled ELMO to submit more tenders per month than ever before—without the need for extra headcount or working overtime.

Not only is ELMO’s bid management team able to respond to more tenders, key stakeholders are also spending significantly less time responding to questions.

As the bid manager, Jay would often ask different stakeholders for help on questions. However, because answers were all stored in old tenders, rather than a central repository, it wasn’t easy to track down answers. As a result, he often inadvertently asked stakeholders questions they had already answered.

This has all changed since implementing RFPIO. Now, previous question-answer pairs are nicely stored in Jay’s Content Library. Any time he needs an answer, a quick keyword search is all he needs to find what he’s looking for. Any answer he can’t find in the Content Library, he assigns to key stakeholders using RFPIO’s robust suite of project management tools. Each new answer he collects is automatically stored to the Content Library—ready for the next time he needs it.

RFPIO is a place for the entire team to find answers

The ELMO Software team isn’t just using RFPIO as a tool to respond to bid requests. The team can also use RFPIO as a place to find answers.

Solution consultants will often take advantage of the rich Content Library in RFPIO to prepare for their demos. Oftentimes, their prospects will send over a few questions they would like to see answered—and the solution engineers can easily find the answers they need with a quick keyword search in RFPIO.

Over the next six months, ELMO Software will be using RFPIO in more areas of the organization, so more people can quickly find information and resources. Sameer explains, “We’ll often be contacted by people from different parts of the business for additional information. If we can close the loop by giving them direct access to the platform, we can make our process even more efficient.”

“RFPIO makes it really easy to give everyone on our team access to the platform, since we can issue as many user licenses as we’d like at no extra cost”, Sameer added.

“Tenders are a critical part of ELMO’s growth journey. With RFPIO, we’re able to respond to every bid request that comes our way—significantly increasing the potential revenue we can generate.”

Sameer Longi
Consulting Solution Manager at ELMO Software

Refine your RFP process to keep your multilingual team connected

Refine your RFP process to keep your multilingual team connected

People & Teams, Product & Best Practices

This is the third post in our series #StayConnected, introducing tips, tricks, tools, and features that help teams complete proposals quickly and efficiently, even when they’re not sharing a physical space. Read part 1 here: Keep Your Proposal Team Focused With These 5 Project Management Features. And part 2 here: How an Effective Content Management System Keeps Your Remote Team Productive.

You just got promoted to lead your company’s international proposal team—congratulations!

Now that you’re managing an international team, you’re responsible for bridging gaps between time zones, languages, and cultures—while finding ways to bring your team closer together, despite the physical distance.

To help you take the first steps, we compiled everything we know about how leaders of successful international proposal teams use technology to submit compelling proposals across languages. Read on for insider tips and best practices for keeping international teams connected.

Maintain brand consistency across languages with proposal automation software

Your brand should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers. This means every interaction customers have with your brand—including bids, tenders, and RFPs—should embody the brand promises and values dependably and understandably.

Many successful proposal managers rely on proposal automation software to ensure their bids, tenders, and RFPs are consistent. This is especially true for proposal managers that serve a multilingual customer base.

David Rynne, the Presales Global Content Specialist at Basware, uses RFPIO to manage and moderate his organization’s multilingual content. Each time a new question-and-answer pair comes in, David uses the built-in Google Translate tool to translate the content into English and check it for accuracy, before approving it to be added to the library. Anytime an answer doesn’t seem quite right, he can easily @-mention the pre-sales rep for clarification.

In doing so, David has full visibility into how Basware is being represented to the world and can make sure the messaging remains consistent—and accurate—across languages.

Break down language barriers with a multilingual content management system

When you’re working with multilingual sales teams who are interacting with non-English speaking prospects, you need to make sure your content management system has the capacity to store content in other languages.

Let’s say your sales rep in Germany receives an RFP from their prospect, with all the questions in German. If you only have content available in English, you’re creating an extra step for your sales reps, who will need to find the answers they need (in English) and translate those answers into German.

It stands to reason that the less time your team has to spend translating answers, the more time they’ll have to focus on revenue-generating activities.

That’s why successful international proposal teams have a content management system that can store content in multiple languages. With this in place, all your German sales rep would need to do is find the question (in German) and immediately use the provided German answer—giving them more time to spend refining their proposal or working on other projects.

“One of our pre-sales reps from Paris told us just recently that he received an RFP on a Monday night that needed to be submitted by that Wednesday morning. We helped him get up and running in RFPIO and he made the deadline.”

David Rynne, Presales Global Content Specialist
Basware

Simplify collaboration by bringing everyone on the same platform

According to a recent report from Slack, people around the world agreed that “ability to easily communicate with colleagues” was one of the most vital components of effective collaboration.

One of the best ways to enable your team to “easily communicate” is bringing them all together on the same platform.

Many proposal managers set their entire proposal team up in proposal automation software that’s equipped with both project management features and in-app collaboration tools.

In doing so, they can assign tasks to team members, gain visibility into project status and team bandwidth, and use @-mentioning to ask SMEs and other team members for help.

Bringing everyone into the same tool streamlines communication and brings clarity into roles and responsibilities—which work together to increase efficiency and even reduce stress.

“Shortly after implementing RFPIO, a sales engineer in Australia—who had recently started at the company—was able to collaborate with sales engineers in Bulgaria and product managers in the United States to complete an RFP in just a few days.”


Gary Clink, Head of Global Technical Enablement
Progress
Read full case study here.

Build camaraderie by giving your international team space to be themselves

“When interactions between co-workers are high, there is a greater ability to develop trust and shared vision among international co-workers,” wrote Tsedal Neely—author of the book The Language of Global Success—in a recent Harvard Business Review article.

When you’re managing an international team, you need to give members a chance to get to know each other as people.

Here at RFPIO, we take this advice to heart.

Our team is split between our headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon and Coimbatore, India—and we’ve devised a number of ways to build relationships between team members that have never met another face-to-face.

For example, the international marketing team gets together for standups twice a week, where the team is free to talk about whatever comes to mind—be it movies and shows we’re watching, new recipes we’re trying, or weekend plans.

India- and US-based team members are also responsible for arranging 15-minute one-on-one video chats with another, giving team members a chance to get to know each other in a non-work capacity.

We’ve found that when we’re able to see each other as people, rather than faceless email addresses or Slack handles, working together isn’t just easier—it’s also more fun.

When you’re managing an international team, you are able to benefit from the diverse insights of individuals with different cultures, opinions, and backgrounds—the only trick is figuring out how to bring your team closer together.

At RFPIO, we’re helping international teams break down language barriers, simplify collaboration, and build camaraderie.

Click here to find out more about how RFPIO can help you optimize the opportunity of working with an international team—and find ways to keep your team connected.

Navigate RFP response software implementation with these tactics

Navigate RFP response software implementation with these tactics

Products/Features/Solutions

By now, you realize the best approach to managing RFPs is to treat them like a project. You know the challenges of the RFP response process backward and forward—the import/export formatting issues, collaborative bottlenecks, and information silos. Now it’s time for a better framework.

RFP response software is the answer. But how will you implement this transformative change?

With any big change, an organization will experience growing pains. You know the change is worth it. But you need a strategy to get everyone on board, along with a roadmap for continued success. Let’s explore several tactics for navigating RFP response software implementation.

Start smart: Early implementation and your Content Library

Implementing new technology is tough. Platform functionality is intricate, the learning curve is steep, and many team members are change-resistant. The goal is to protect time and resources, so RFP response software implementation is a positive experience from day one.

Plan implementation carefully

Make implementation a priority and stick to the schedule. Consider every detail and construct a sensible timeline. After you have devised a roll-out plan, begin implementation as soon as possible. You want to give your team plenty of time to feel comfortable and confident before using RFP response software on a pressing RFP project.

Prepare your content foundation

A well-constructed Content Library is the foundation of successful RFP software implementation. Quick access to accurate information saves time and enhances collaboration. Focus your energy on the RFP Content Library set up before the official roll-out. Ensure optimum quantity and quality of responses, and use an effective tagging strategy.

Let technology do the heavy lifting

You’ll gain tons of efficiency within the first few months of implementation…as long as you let RFP response software do the heavy lifting. Import long-winded RFPs and complex security questionnaires to populate your Content Library. Allow the system to load and automate your response content. All you have to do is organize and refine after that.

Collaborate: Team buy-in, training, and mentorship

Make RFP response software integral to your team’s process. Get team buy-in early so everyone is collaborating happily on the new platform. Encourage salespeople to communicate with marketing through this great new tool.

Keep people accountable and assess any training needs. Have the sales team, for example, complete a short check-box form to answer these questions:

  • Is this RFP, RFI, or security questionnaire in the platform?
  • Have you been trained on the tool?

Getting your team trained—and consistently using a solution like RFPIO for responding to all business queries—is the name of the game.

Onboard newer, less-experienced team members early. They’ll be the most receptive to using a new solution that makes their job easier, so this is a great strategy for promoting change throughout your organization.

Implement a mentorship process to phase your response management team into using the tool independently. With RFPIO’s unlimited licensing model, you can create a “test” account for your team to practice in before going live. Consider requiring “certification” before granting live access to ensure quality control once people are unleashed in the solution.

Stay the course: Ongoing success with RFP response software

Once everyone is using RFP response software consistently, you’ll need to keep the ball rolling. Make the effort to continue getting buy-in from your team and win over anyone resistant to change.

Share team success stories

The best way to sell the solution is by showing how it works. Publish a weekly newsletter with real-world success stories everyone can relate to. Highlight time-savings, increased sales, and collaborative efficiencies.

Hold monthly user groups

Help your team circumvent any issues that arise, and stay proactive about content. A great way to build this collaborative spirit is to hold monthly user groups. This can be a Q&A session focused on troubleshooting. It’s also a great time to find out what kind of response content your team needs.

Leverage and create resources

Learning never ends when you’re improving your response process, even with technology lending a helping hand. Be sure everyone is familiar with your RFP response software provider’s help center. Design customized internal user guides based on roles and scenarios as needed. Webinars and brief videos are especially useful.

Continue learning and growing

Keep informed about RFP software functionality and feature updates so you stay on top of your game. RFPIO offers customer success webinars (which you can also watch on-demand on our YouTube channel). Additionally, we hold annual user conferences that better equip our customers and help them build a community with their peers.

Change is never easy, but it’s absolutely necessary for improvement. Get your team on the road to greater RFP success with RFPIO.

Unify your revenue team with a response management platform

Unify your revenue team with a response management platform

Products/Features/Solutions

The rise of the revenue team continues and mid-size organizations are leading the charge. When it comes to revenue responsibilities, the lines have become blurred between marketing and sales departments. Now, the rest of the organization is responsible for contributing to revenue as well.

The response management process is a key revenue-generating initiative for growing companies. To succeed, all of these teams need to work effectively together. A response management platform is here to unify your revenue team and position your organization for growth.

Response management opportunities for mid-size companies

Responders at mid-size companies are team members who respond to business queries like RFPs (Requests for Proposal), security questionnaires, and DDQs (Due Diligence Questionnaires). They both contribute and manage this process, often in addition to their primary job responsibilities.

With response management at mid-size organizations, roadblocks fall into two distinct buckets…

1. They lack X – Commitment, knowledge, an internal champion, support outside the organization

2. The cost of X – Services, resources, operations

Knowledge is a powerful asset for any organization, especially a mid-size organization where you have a combination of specialists and generalists with a multitude of experiences and backgrounds. These resources are valuable and cost the organization.

If a subject matter expert (SME) moves on from your organization, they take a wealth of company knowledge with them. This leaves your response team at a great disadvantage as they lose an important resource that contributed to the process.

Once these internal roadblocks are recognized, they become opportunities for improvement. A response management solution like RFPIO offers a collaborative atmosphere, turning teams into tribes.

Mid-size revenue teams keep the ship afloat

Revenue teams operating under a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) are becoming increasingly common within B2B organizations. Rapidly growing mid-size companies have set the standard for modern revenue teams. All other companies, from startups to enterprise, are playing by the rules set by revenue teams at mid-sized organizations.

A revenue team involves anybody who is contributing to the revenue of the company. This seems like a broad definition, because it is. It doesn’t go as granular as negative revenue, even revenue, or positive revenue—it’s revenue in general.

Revenue teams might include managers in customer success or accounts working side-by-side with executives like a CFO or CRO. In mid-size organizations, marketing teams and sales teams (including sales ops and sales enablement) are considered part of the revenue team as well.

Similar to keeping a ship afloat in the sea, revenue takes contributions and effort from everyone. To bring in revenue and maintain revenue, it’s essentially an “all hands on deck” situation. Being that responding to RFPs and security questionnaires is a predictable step in the sales cycle, this process needs to be rock-solid for mid-size companies to achieve their revenue goals.

How a response management platform offers support

Let’s reinforce the two challenge buckets for responders at mid-size companies for a second. You’re experiencing a lack of commitment, knowledge, an internal champion, and/or support outside the organization. On top of that, you’re dealing with the cost of services, resources, and/or operations.

Other revenue teams have been in your shoes too. But, they saw those challenges in their response management process as opportunities and made that process easier with RFPIO.

Uniformity and accuracy

RFPIO’s Content Library is the bread and butter for response teams. This knowledge repository brings uniformity and accuracy to how a company represents itself in any business query response.

Teams across the organization will benefit from a centralized access point to company information. It goes beyond sales enablement, enabling anyone who needs to efficiently find up-to-date content to get the job done. The use cases are pretty endless.

Edit and enhance

RFPIO Lookup takes the strength and capabilities of the Content Library a step further. Rather than being inside the platform, you quickly search for the response with a Chrome extension.

Let’s say you call in a field person to answer a security questionnaire, who doesn’t work inside the response management platform. They use RFPIO Lookup to access the knowledge repository from their browser to select accurate, technical responses. Instead of creating content from scratch or hunting down previous responses, now that person has extra time to edit and enhance the response.

Ease and visibility

RFPIO’s integrations are well-loved by revenue teams. Store all of your content inside the response management platform, using cloud storage integrations with your favorite cloud storage solutions (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Sharepoint). Collaboration is necessary for any response management team—Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations simplify communication.

Salespeople operate business as usual with RFPIO’s CRM integrations (Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, PipelineDeals). If you’re a sales operations manager, you need to provide visibility into how you’re winning RFPs and DDQs to the C-level team from time to time. Within Salesforce, you can easily run these reports.

Alexandra Maddux

“At Smarsh, we believe our proposals set the stage for an ongoing partnership and raise the bar on what it means for a vendor to exceed expectations. In 2018, the sales enablement team submitted nearly 30 more RFPs/RFIs compared to 2017 and is expecting the same trajectory for 2019. RFPIO allows our team to juggle upwards of 10 projects at a time, in tandem with maintaining the required level of organization to be successful and quality we demand, all while collaborating within the platform across 5 different time zones.”- Alexandra Maddux, RFP/Sales Support Coordinator

When you have a group of responders working together to achieve the same revenue vision, not only is this less stressful, this positive mentality impacts the company’s overall success. Your revenue team will become more unified in achieving that vision with a response management platform. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So…what are you waiting for? Book a demo of RFPIO to unify your revenue team.

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