Proposal Management is a woefully manual process.

It can feel like going from point A to point B in the most complicated way imaginable. Even for sales teams who deal with a moderate or low volume of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) the process can become overwhelming.

For most organizations, that process looks something like this:

It’s time-consuming. It’s tedious. There are lots of moving parts.

You might even need to manage multiple schedules and teammates.

Every business is different. But in our experience the common proposal response process looks something like this:

  1. Receive a request for proposal (RFP)
    An RFP can be as short as a few paragraphs in a Word Doc or as long as a 1,000-row Excel questionnaire. You might be surprised to learn that most teams do not have a formal workflow for proposal management. And those that do still have a tough time.
  2. Pre-qualify the proposal
    Some teams call this a go/no-go phase where requirements are assessed and a decision is made. At this stage some companies will opt out of the process for any number of reasons (poor fit, low deal confidence, etc.). One common issue here is that businesses might reject an opportunity because they just don’t have the resources available to respond.
  3. Identify key stakeholders
    Rarely can a single person fill out an entire RFP – especially when a proposal involves cross-functional knowledge. This is where you start seeing subject matter experts (SMEs) from other departments get looped in to help with the process.
  4. Gather knowledge and search for information
    Ah, yes…this is where it can get exceptionally painful. Hopefully, your company/product knowledge is well-structured and easy to find 😅😅
  5. Manually write your responses
    The longest and most tedious part of any questionnaire response is the writing part. This can take anywhere from hours to days, even weeks depending your workload. The time is compounded by how many teammates are needed to help.
  6. Chase teammates for review
    Remember those SMEs? Time to call them for help. Good luck getting them all to respond in a timely manner.
  7. Proofread the RFP
    Proposals are a way to put your best foot forward. As painful as it sounds, reviewing your answers for proper language, grammar, spelling, and accuracy is a necessary step.
  8. Submit
    Finally, the hard part is done. Now you just need to hope the customer actually reviews your submission and responds in a timely manner.
Waiting for RFP Proposal Meme

Obviously, there’s something wrong with this process.

It’s too manual. It takes too long. There are too many moving parts. This is the 21st century. Clearly, there’s room for automation.

Unlocking Fast Proposal Automation With LLMs

So what we have is a repetitive manual process with predictable inputs and outputs, and a need to generate large amounts of text.

If only there were a technology that can help accelerate this this exact use case… 🤔

Large Language Models (LLMs) present an opportunity for automating the proposal response process. Chances are you’ve already tried to leverage AI to help with proposal responses. Perhaps you’ve discovered that text generation is just one piece of the bigger puzzle.

An automated proposal response workflow involves much more than content creation. You need to be able to:

  • Ensure your responses are truthful and use trusted data sources
  • Allow answers to be improved by humans
  • Make responses open to collaboration across teammates and organizations
  • Keep sensitive company data private at all times
  • Assign owners and collaborators

Using 1up to auto-generate RFP responses, your new workflow looks more like this:

  1. Receive a questionnaire
    The pressure to have a “go/no-go” decision is greatly reduced. With an automated workflow you no longer need to debate wether or not a proposal request is worth responding to. 1up significantly increases your capacity to take on more opportunities.
  2. Upload to 1up
    This is the biggest change from your current workflow. Over the next few minutes, 1up will search for the right documents and generate answers using accurate sources you trust. You’ll receive a notification as soon as your completed proposal is ready for review.
  3. Tag teammates for review
    Need help with a response? Assign it to your teammates for review. Your colleague will get a notification asking for their help in reviewing the response. You’ll be notified when they’re done. This significantly reduces the need to chase after your co-workers for help writing responses.
  4. Submit your Proposal
    Spelling, grammar, punctuation are already handled for you. At this point, you’ll want to review the final product to adjust answers and make any edits you see fit. Your polished proposal is ready for submission.

The immediate benefits are speed and predictability. The less obvious impact is on your ability to take on more opportunities and increase your odds of winning more deals. The reduced strain on your team as a whole is less measurable, but is felt far and wide.

Throughput has definitely increased. When we were responding to RFPs manually, we would say no to opportunities because we didn’t have the capacity. Now we’re saying yes to every questionnaire. The volume of inbound RFPs is no longer a blocker.

Matt Hathcock, FusionAuth Sales Engineering Manager 

How to Transition to an Automated RFP Workflow

1up makes this transition straightforward. First, sign up for a free trial.

1. Connect your knowledge base
This is the foundation of your new proposal workflow. 1up is only allowed to answer questions based on your knowledge base. To get the best answers, you should connect multiple documents in Word, PDF, and Excel format. 1up also ingests your company’s webpages so you can incorporate both internal documents and external URLs as sources of truth.

We recommend starting with 5-10 key documents that you would use to respond to an RFP/questionnaire. These should include:

  • Security policy documents
  • Previously completed questionnaires
  • Product/service documentation
  • Sales and marketing assets
  • Website content (a full domain or specific URLs)
Proposal Knowledge Base

2. Assign an administrator and collaborators

We recommend inviting teammates who are involved in your sales and security questionnaire process. During the evaluation phase, we recommend exposing 1up to collaborators from your sales, operations, IT, security, and compliance departments. 1up allows you to delegate permissions to different users. For example, collaborators can review and edit answers, but cannot see or modify your knowledge base:

3. Automate your Proposals

Got 200 questions that you need 1up to answer? Upload your document. Over the next few minutes, 1up will generate answers and populate them on the screen as they arrive. Short questions should only take a few seconds. Longer, complex questions can take up to a minute to generate a complete answer for.

You’ll receive an email notification as soon as 1up is ready for you to review the generated responses. Here’s what the end-to-end process looks like:

Automate Proposal Responses in Minutes with AI