A request for proposal (RFP) is an important part of the procurement process for both vendors and clients alike. On the client side, an RFP helps them find the best vendor for their business requirements; for the vendor, RFPs provide a valuable opportunity to demonstrate how they can solve clients’ problems and why their team is the better fit over competitors.
Responding to an RFP—and winning the bid—requires planning and a high level of attention to detail. Indeed, preparing a proposal can be challenging; the process is often complex, requiring extensive collaboration between teams and subject matter experts (SMEs) and involving myriad formatting issues and time-consuming content searches and error-checking.
By choosing the best generative AI RFP software to scale and automate the response process, you can quickly generate a draft response; instead of starting every RFP from scratch, you’ll be able to spend your valuable time refining and personalizing content based on individual client needs—and increasing your chances of winning new client business.
But with so many vendors out there with different niches and specializations, how do you know which vendor has the best RFP software to drive your response process? In this post, we provide a detailed analysis of the 10 factors you need to pay close attention to when selecting generative AI RFP software for your business. Which features should you look for? What are the important questions to ask? How should you conduct your search? Let’s find out.
What are the benefits of generative AI RFP software?
Generative AI RFP software is a gamechanger when it comes to boosting efficiency and productivity for content creators. AI-powered RFP proposal software dramatically reduces the time spent responding to RFPs and helps identify the strongest content to help bid and proposal teams increase their chances of closing the deal.
Choosing the best generative AI RFP software is essential if you want to scale your response processes and improve collaboration across teams. Having the right AI-powered RFP automation software helps your teams whittle their RFP response time down from days to hours (and create proposals in minutes vs. hours!)—giving you time to take on more RFPs and create more revenue opportunities for the business.
On the other hand, choosing the wrong type of RFP software can be potentially disastrous, leading to lost time, inefficiencies, and frustration for your bid and proposal teams. To avoid these issues, ensure you start your search for the best generative AI RFP software on the right foot by creating an extensive list of pain points and business needs for consideration.
How to choose the best generative AI RFP software
While choosing the best AI-powered RFP software seems challenging at first, it’s actually straightforward if you follow this simple roadmap. Here are the 10 steps you should consider in your search:
- Find the gaps: Meet with your bid, proposal, and sales teams to understand what pain points they’re currently experiencing with the RFP response process. They’ve likely already identified the gaps that can improve workflow and reduce the time spent responding to RFPs.
- Understand your business needs: After you’ve met with your teams to understand the gaps in your company’s RFP response process, take some time to outline what is most important to your business. Are you missing insights into how content is performing? What integrations do you need? Who are the stakeholders that need to be involved in the decision-making process?
- Content library: Past proposals should be stored in a centralized place (aka RFP repository or content library) available to be leveraged when any new opportunity arises. The best generative AI RFP software should enable you to search for specific content within your content library and insert it quickly and seamlessly into the proposal or RFx response document, increasing the efficiency of the response process.
- Collaboration: The best RFP software should enable collaboration between your team, SMEs, and other key stakeholders. For example, being able to assign portions of a single document to specific people within the organization will speed up the process by eliminating dependencies that can slow down or stall the response process.
- Easy export and integration: The best generative AI RFP software should enable you to work from within the platforms you're already used to working with—and where most of the relevant data is available—such as Microsoft Office applications (Microsoft Word is a bid and proposal team favorite) and your CRM.
- Generative AI: The best RFP software leverages artificial intelligence to help your team be more efficient. In addition to features like QorusDocs’ Auto Answer that utilizes machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to accelerate question-and-answer tasks, recent breakthroughs in generative AI not only save time when generating content but shift the focus towards more strategic aspects of content creation. Content writers can now concentrate on strategy, thought development, and thematic alignment while generative AI handles the research, analysis, and baseline writing.
- Performance metrics: The RFP process doesn’t end when the proposal is submitted to the client. The best AI-powered RFP software will enable you to see performance metrics for your response documents, e.g., what sections have been viewed the most by clients, how many minutes users spent on specific pages, and what content is being shared with other stakeholders in the organization.
- See it in action: Seeing the solution live can help accelerate the decision-making process, as it helps answer key questions, gives you a feel for the technology, and helps define the final features your business needs.
- Consider ROI: Generative AI RFP software can deliver a swift ROI, streamlining and accelerating your response process to save time, resources, and labor costs. Early data suggests organizations can experience 30%-50% improvements in productivity through automated content generation and elimination of time-consuming manual tasks.
- Compare Vendors: Software marketplaces, like G2 or Capterra, feature the most highly-reputed vendor solutions available in the market and offer the possibility to compare them side-by-side, based on reviews made by thousands of users. Did you know QorusDocs was ranked #1 in the proposal management software category by SoftwareReviews in 2023?
Final thoughts on choosing the best RFP proposal software
With the vast amounts of information readily available online, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff to find an AI-powered RFP and proposal management solution that best meets your organization's needs can seem daunting or overwhelming—but it doesn't need to be.
Take the time to conduct an honest assessment of your company’s processes and specific needs as outlined in the 10 steps above. You'll be able to navigate the process like a pro and select the best generative AI RFP software for your business to help boost your win rate and keep the revenue funnel flowing.
Watch our recent APMP demo outlining the QorusDocs generative AI roadmap to learn more about how QorusDocs AI-powered proposal management software can help you deliver higher-quality RFP responses to accelerate deal cycles and win more business. And for more food for thought in your quest to select the best generative AI RFP software, check out 11 Essential Questions to Ask When Choosing Generative AI Proposal Software.