Hey proposal professionals! Having a little trouble sleeping? You’re not alone. In our latest industry report, we polled professionals in proposal, IT, business development and C-suite roles, who are involved in creating proposals or responding to RFPs to take the pulse of the industry. (The cohort encompassed companies of varying sizes; the majority with 1000 or more employees and revenue greater than $100M across multiple industries.)
The good news? The volume of RFP and pitch opportunities is increasing. A full 54% of survey respondents saw an increase over 2023.
The bad news? Win rates are down over 2023, and it’s taking longer to complete an RFP, with an average of 9 days in 2024 and 2023, increased from 6 days in 2022 and 7 days in 2021.
Why is this happening? Proposal professionals are wrestling with many of the same old challenges they’ve faced for years: getting SMEs onboard to answer, finding and creating content and measuring the response rate/RFP effectiveness all while working with limited human resources.
What can be done about it? Generative AI tools—especially AI-powered proposal software—really can really streamline the response process, and in turn, boost productivity and revenue.
Let’s explore what our survey revealed and how Generative AI can help overcome these pressing issues.
Top 5 RFP Challenges
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Herding Cats SMEs
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can include lawyers, IT leaders, project managers, engineers and any other people with specialized knowledge and expertise. Sixty-two percent of our survey respondents said that getting SMEs to stick to the schedule was their #1 challenge.
Any proposal manager knows how hard it is to corral their SMEs into providing the timely info needed to complete the bid documentation. To steal a line from Spiderman, “this is my gift, my curse.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever given your SME a fake deadline.) Sometimes geography plays a role in delays and other times it’s simply because of competing deadlines and gathering the data is perceived as too time-consuming.
GenAI to the Rescue: The trick is to make it as seamless and easy as possible for your SMEs, so their existential dread doesn’t kick in when they see your request. That’s where proposal management software that is differentiated with AI can be a lifesaver.
For instance, if you have a new question that has never been answered before, typically it’s flipped over to the SME. AI-powered RFP tools expedite the gathering of necessary information, and can compose an answer, so you just have to send it to the SME to be reviewed and approved. A solution like our QPilot can also put everything into a ready-made branded template, removing even more effort. And, to ensure compliance, our solution was purpose-built for geographically dispersed workforces and uses Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI to ensure the highest level of security for all your proposal content.
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Time Spent Wrangling Content
Disparate systems, siloed departments, and content hidden away on someone’s desktop. These are just a few of the hurdles proposal managers face when hunting down the needed documents and content. According to McKinsey, workers spend 1.8 hours every day searching for information, and IDC clocks it slightly higher at 2.5 hours. Our benchmark survey reveals that time spent locating, organizing or updating content was the second major RFP challenge, cited by 58% of our survey takers.
GenAI to the Rescue: Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, get AI to look for you. QorusDocs AI Assistant combines datapoints from CRM records, sales documents, previous RFPs and your own organization’s data to help compose winning answers. Integrated with Microsoft 365, there’s no limits on the number of files and content sources that the QorusDocs’ AI Assistant can access to provide you with the best content for your pitches, proposals and RFP responses. And, no worries, you can also lock up and restrict content, so that nothing that is confidential is used.
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Creating Content
We’ve all been there… agonizing over words, rewriting sentences and red-lining whole paragraphs to either meet a word count or improve the flow. Content creation is time-consuming to say the least. However, it’s a necessary evil. In today’s highly competitive business environment, producing winning responses to RFPs is mission critical. Creating content checks in at Number 3 in the top challenges, mentioned by 56% of survey respondents.
GenAI to the Rescue: When your proposal management software is fueled by GenAI, you can easily generate a response to an RFP question in a few minutes using knowledge from a validated content library. It can offer up the best answers to questions and intelligently insert the answers into your response document. Better yet, for full transparency, you can also see a list of clickable sources that were used as references for the content that was generated. With GenAI at your fingertips you can also compose an executive summary based on the content of your proposal. Need to write a bio for one of the project leads? No problem, let QPilot, our AI-powered software, do it for you using the person’s resume. In short, GenAI helps everyone involved reclaim their time from the tedious work to focus on the higher-value work that matters.
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Evaluating RFP Effectiveness
Should we put the hours into this RFP or take a pass? Is every opportunity a good opportunity? If we go ahead with the RFP, how can we be sure to improve our odds? Metrics matter. Yet it can be a toss of the coin knowing if you have the potential to be in the running or, how your submission is faring.
GenAI to the Rescue: Not every RFP will make sense for your organization, and you need to be sure you can meet all the requirements of the prospective client. With QorusDocs’ AI-driven proposal management solution, it takes mere seconds to extract the main win themes for a given RFP to quickly evaluate your chances of landing the deal. You can ask QPilot to analyze a bid for a bid/no bid recommendation
And did you know that with QorusDocs, you can get a hyper-detailed view of your proposal performance to gain a competitive advantage? Use QorusDocs dashboards to see how clients and prospects are engaging with your content including how long readers stay on each page, what they click on, and what they share. Use these valuable insights to tailor targeted follow-up communications and make your next proposal even better!
More and more, proposal management software is recognized as an effective tool to increase win rates. In fact, the majority of survey respondents (80%) reported using proposal management software to power their response process—up from 61% in 2023—vs. 14% without and 4% considering bringing proposal automation software onboard.
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Lack of Resources
Understaffed and overwhelmed. That’s often the state for anyone working on an RFP. Our benchmark survey showed that 36% of respondents felt they had too few resources to handle requests—a serious stumbling block for generating winning response documents to fuel the deal cycle. In our current economy, many organizations are trying to do more with less, and the trickle-down effect is that it’s slowing down RFP response times, risking leaving money on the table.
GenAI to the Rescue: The solution to a finite number of resources is to drive up productivity. When you can get people out of the weeds of the day-in, day-out churn of repetitive and manual work, they have the power to clear their head and really hone in on the tasks and activities that move the needle and generate revenue. (In fact, 56% of respondents cited “Better use of staff time” as one of the top anticipated benefits of GenAI.) It’s widely accepted that GenAI can improve deal velocity as much as 50-70%, allowing proposal managers to get more RFPs out the door without raising headcount.
Interested in learning more about the state of the RFP landscape? Download the full report here.
GenAI Helps You Sleep at Night
Organizations across all industries have realized the value of AI-powered proposal management software to drive their response process, helping to increase win rates, scale response production, and gather actionable insights into client engagement. To learn more about the role of generative AI in proposal management and how you can leverage AI RFP software to optimize your response workflow, request a demo and let us show you how you can crank up the revenue engine.
