How Generative AI Can Help You Win More RFPs

How does generative AI work?

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), also referred to as GenAI, can create text, images, videos, or other types of content in response to prompts. Generative AI differs from traditional AI in that instead of analyzing previous data in order to make predictions, it produces new content. It does this by learning patterns and outputting data with similar qualities. 

Generative AI is often used to complete more complex or business-oriented tasks, such as scheduling appointments, managing inventory, and answering detailed questions. Increasingly, generative AI is being used to help contractors draft RFPs as it can quickly generate compliant draft responses and help alleviate the huge amount of time and energy needed to craft a winning proposal.

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What are the key pain points of writing an RFP proposal?

Requests for proposals are notoriously time consuming and labor intensive to complete. If you have ever written a request for proposal you’ll know how much effort goes into a compelling bid. 

These are just some of the key pain points that make proposals so challenging:

1. Tight deadlines and cost implications

Navigating a tight deadline for writing a proposal can be a stressful experience. Trying to write an RFP while balancing all your other existing tasks can sometimes be overwhelming. On average, the RFP process can last between two and six weeks. This of course depends on multiple factors, such as how much regular work you have to juggle, how complex the proposed project is, if you’ve written a proposal before or not, and many other considerations. 

One of the biggest challenges with writing a good proposal is that it’s essentially a full-time job but companies rarely have a dedicated employee just to write proposals. The time it takes to write a good proposal is time taken away from the rest of your business, which places a financial burden on your bottom line. And if your bid isn’t successful, you’ll have essentially lost income. This can have an unfortunate ripple effect and even cost you customers and business down the road.

The sophistication required to write a compelling RFP is not to be underestimated. Unless you have someone who is a decent writer or subject matter expert who understands the process and what it entails, many RFPs just can’t be written. 

There are so many mundane and repetitive tasks associated with writing an RFP that it can also be frustrating on top of being stressful. Not to mention the time you wasted if you unintentionally responded to an irrelevant RFP! 

2. Coordinating with teams across the organization 

Even if you’re the owner of your company you may not necessarily have all the details you need to write an RFP. That means you’ll have to chase down bits of information from various employees, subject matter experts, subcontractors, and other parties. Waiting for people to respond to your requests can easily slow down your momentum and drag out the entire process.

3. Understanding the needs of each RFP

Not every RFP you consider answering is laid out in the most clear and easy to understand way. Sometimes just trying to figure out what the organization is asking for can be so frustrating you won’t even want to write your proposal. The reality is that poorly phrased RFPs are common. It’s also not uncommon for organizations to issue RFPs without clarifying their solution expectations, which makes it even more challenging to know how to draft a successful bid. 

4. Finding answers to the RFP questions

Sometimes finding the right content you need in order to write a section of the proposal is hard to find within your own content management system. You may have a great answer but when you search for it you can’t seem to find it. Most organizations don’t have a dedicated content manager and end up spending hours spinning in circles trying to find pieces of data. 

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How generative AI improves the RFP writing process

With AI — specifically generative AI — the RFP process becomes much less arduous. GenAI can help you quickly review the requirements of an RFP, generate a draft copy, prioritize and assign tasks, and pull current data from your sources. Leveraging the power of AI not only helps speed up the process of writing proposals, it also helps ensure accuracy and reliability. 

Generative AI takes over those repetitive and mundane tasks that we looked at above. Here are some of the key benefits of using AI-driven RFP automation:

Faster and more compliant RFP drafts 

Generative AI can dramatically reduce the time to draft RFP response and help you be compliant. The ability to analyze large quantities of data very quickly is invaluable for putting together accurate proposals. GenAI can easily help you research information about your competitors, as well as identify industry trends, thus making sure your proposal is targeted, tailored, and relevant. 

Many of the automatic response tools that are on the market right now are often big bulk updates which can be very hit or miss. But generative AI has the potential to be much more focused and can therefore answer a lot of the specific questions asked in a proposal. 

Reduced dependency on SMEs (subject matter experts)

Typically, writing a proposal not only takes up an enormous amount of time but it also pulls in multiple team members. Generative AI can analyze what’s being asked in an RFP, pluck out the salient details, and create draft responses. By removing much of the burden of writing a proposal, the number of employees who need to participate in the proposal is greatly reduced so they can focus on other, more impactful activities.

Expedited RFP process

Not only can GenAI help you complete a proposal much more quickly than if you did it all manually, it can also help you write a greater volume of proposals, thereby increasing your chances at winning a bid. 

Automatically shredding and parsing requirement documents substantially speeds up the process by:

• Identifying the most relevant content 
• Highlighting gaps and areas to reinforce key messages
• Managing subject matter expert review cycles
• Ensuring consistent tone across all generated text 
• Faster turnaround time

The sooner you submit a bid, the more quickly the organization is likely to get back to you. Even if you aren’t successful on a particular bid it’s still incredibly helpful to know that you weren’t selected so you can turn your attention to the next one.

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How to use generative AI to write your RFP

In order to leverage the benefits of GenAI, it’s necessary to first connect all your systems so they can share data with each other. You’ll have a much more robust proposal if the platform has access to all the information possible. Having an organized RFP content library or content database is your first step. If you’re answering the majority of RFP questions using content from your library then you're saving yourself a lot of time. In fact, content management is probably the biggest timesaver that you can have. 

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Once your data is organized you can get started using generative AI to help draft your RFP. 

Step 1: Shredding the proposal

Just as if you were going to manually write a proposal, start by going through the RFP so you know it inside and out. The more you can front load the planning phase the more time you’ll save yourself down the road. 

Known as “shredding,” this task provides both an inventory checklist of everything you need to cover in an RFP response as well as clarity on all the variables that need alignment from multiple cross-functional subject matter experts contributing pieces of the proposal. It underpins the entire RFP response process.

Becoming very familiar with the RFP before you being to integrate generative AI to your process includes knowing the answers to these questions:

• Are there any specific requirements (such as software that needs to be created)?
• Are any request for proposal templates required?
• What are the compliance components?
• How many subject matter experts or stakeholders will you need?

Step 2: Get first drafts written more quickly 

Since you’ve already organized your content library, you can now plug in the generative AI program to access and analyze your data. GenAI will tag each piece of content in order to create a proposal that is accurate and representative of your company and what it can do.

Here are some ways that generative AI uses your data to help draft your proposal:

• Write responses to common questions
• Analyze previous proposals to identify relevant details
• Create biographies and resumes
• Illustrate what your company can do (and what it’s done in the past)
• Document previous relevant experience

Step 3: Analyze the competition

Using outside data, generative AI can also produce a competitive analysis. GenAI searches publicly available information in order to review your competitors’ websites, news releases, and industry reports in order to list their strengths and weaknesses. AI can then compile insights that can help you strategically position yourself to have a better chance of winning the bid. 

Having access to what your competitors are up to can give you the upper hand in creating an informed and tailored proposal. It’s always recommended, of course, to confirm that the data being used is accurate and appropriate to the proposal at hand.

Step 4: Personalize the proposal with automated research

Besides leveraging your company’s content library as well as analyzing your competitors, generative AI can use public data to help customize your proposal. By looking at sources online, like social media and websites, GenAI can get details about what your clients like and don’t like and what problems they want to solve, thereby helping you to tailor your proposal to those needs. 

This will help show the organization to which you're submitting a bid that you understand their values and how committed you are to addressing their goals. 

Step 5: Research current rates to set a competitive price and budget

The budget you present in your RFP is often the most crucial part of your bid. Organizations look very closely at how much you say you can complete a project for and use this to help make their choice. Generative AI can access data from various sources to help provide a benchmark of current rates being provided by your competitors. Of course, the reliability of this benchmark depends heavily on the public availability of the data. 

GenAI can also help you transfer information from conversations you have with the organization to your team, as well as review clauses in previous contracts to identify what’s been done in the past. Given all this collation of data, AI is then able to recommend pricing details for your proposal. 

Step 6: Easily manage review cycles 

Generative AI can also be used to manage the process of creating the RFP. Project management tools can be leveraged to help automate the flow of who needs to complete which task by what date. These tools are sophisticated enough to send a completed task to the next stakeholder for feedback or review. The administrative burden on your team is therefore greatly alleviated as you go through the approval process. 

Note: it’s important to review the review. That is, while generative AI can do a lot of the hard work it’s still very important to read all the answers to make sure everything is accurate, honest, and up to date. 

Step 7: Assist with editorial and design

AI can also assist with any graphic design or visual elements you may want to include in your proposal. GenAI can save you from hiring a designer to add charts or images by itself building assets and templates. It can also review language to make it more active, restructure sentences that may be poorly written, and clean up grammar and spelling. 

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How AI is changing the RFP industry

The amount of heavy lifting that can be done by generative AI in helping you submit bids is not to be underestimated. AI is rapidly transforming how proposals are created and analyzed by offering solutions for increased accuracy and efficiency. Streamlining a traditionally arduous task greatly helps companies both large and small when they complete an RFP. 

After a bid is accepted, AI can also help with creating contracts — another complicated and time-consuming process. AI can use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to look at existing contracts and legal documents to suggest clauses that can be used in new contracts. AI can also review proposed contracts to find key statements and potential red flags. This can be extremely useful to have before you sign on to a project. 

In general, AI helps to ease the overall burden of researching, vetting, writing, managing, and polishing proposals. It helps you automate reminders and track key performance metrics, as well as makes sure that all your contractual obligations are met. 

Looking forward, generative AI is more than just a tool for automation. It’s actually springboarding innovation and creative thinking. By reducing the burden of manual, repetitive tasks, GenAI gives your company the freedom to focus on strategic planning, market analysis, and developing your industry in more innovative ways. This in turn will allow companies to develop more unique and compelling proposals that will end up solving more problems.

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