Articles
Expert insights for sales, operations, capture, proposal, and marketing pros.
Expert insights for sales, operations, capture, proposal, and marketing pros.
Finding, qualifying, responding to, and debriefing RFP opportunities can be overwhelming. For many companies, the natural instinct is to bootstrap each element of the RFP response cycle, conserving company resources and asking team members to do more with less. While we understand this approach, we believe smart technology investments can help optimize your processes, maximize your efficiency, and help win your company more revenue. Below, we list the best RFP software tools on the market that are helping companies optimize their resources and win more business.
To find opportunities in your target market, you’ll often want to purchase a subscription to an Opportunity Aggregator. Opportunity Aggregators scrape the web to consolidate all open bid and proposal opportunities in your target market in one central, searchable location.
Our recommendations:
Aggregators gather information from every state, local, and education government agency and display it in a single place that is easy to search. Companies like GovWin, Periscope S2G, GovSpend, and GovTech Navigator all offer compelling products in this space.
Well-designed, data-backed qualification processes are essential for succeeding in bids and proposals. Find technology that will analyze the relative fit of each potential opportunity, give pursuit recommendations, and help structure your go/no-go decision process in one central location.
Our recommendation: Patri Score is an AI-powered tool to help you understand the quality of your opportunities, make go/no-go decisions in one central platform, and communicate pursuit decisions to the team. With Patri’s intelligent opportunity qualification tool, your company will streamline its pursuit decisions, improve response quality, increase its win rate, and save time and resources by wisely avoiding low-probability opportunities.
Expedite the arduous proposal response process by implementing a content management tool that saves all the existing content for proposals your company has written and allows you to easily search through it to use on future proposals. RFP automation software helps improve RFP response management and makes it easier for subject matter experts to add and save answers.
Our recommendation: RFPio and Loopio are two of the many cloud-based RFP repository software tools that empower companies to centralize, search, and iterate on proposal content, saving time on proposal responses and producing more high-quality responses.
The only way to improve is to reflect. But too often, companies finish one response and jump into the next, without taking the time to understand why they won or lost the opportunity. Professional Debrief Services provide outside expertise to help companies dig deep into their past opportunities, concretizing actionable insights for future opportunities.
Our recommendation: Patri Opportunity Debrief is a tech-enabled service that leverages Patri’s experienced team of business development, proposal, and sales professionals to help you understand the strengths and weaknesses in your RFP process. Patri Opportunity Debrief helps companies build institutional knowledge, refine response processes, and improve their win percentage.
The RFP software that we’ve discussed above is all focused on assisting companies responding to RFPs. But what about companies or agencies that are looking to issue RFPs to find the right vendors with which to partner?
Issuing an RFP can be an exhausting business. Agencies and companies can spend months, sometimes years, gathering information to design requirements, soliciting vendors, and evaluating their responses. Request Management Software helps organizations more efficiently write, evaluate, assign, and report on the RFPs they are issuing. For organizations that issue many RFPs a year, this software can be incredibly valuable.
Our recommendation: RFP360 offers powerful request management software that simplifies the RFx lifecycle. Use saved templates to expedite the RFP creation process. Invite collaborators onto the platform for easy collaboration. Solicit responses and evaluate respondents directly in the platform. RFP360 offers one central platform to create, collaborate on, evaluate, and report on the RFPs your organization is issuing.
Download Proposals 101: How to Start (and Win) Proposals from the Ground Up to Learn More
Want to learn how to transform bid and proposal responses from a liability into an organizational strength?
For companies in complex industries, proposals, bids, and competitive solicitations are essential tools to capture revenue and promote growth. But they are also costly and time-consuming.
Many companies either avoid proposals altogether, losing out on valuable revenue, or respond to far too many proposals without the proper processes in place to be successful, sapping energy and company resources.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This eBook is a high-level overview of how to find, qualify, and respond to RFPs, RFIs, and RFQs. Intended for companies launching a proposal response function or seeking to understand why they aren’t winning more competitive solicitations, this eBook covers everything you need to know to establish a successful proposal function and win government contracts.
Download Proposals 101: How to Start (and Win) with Proposals from the Ground Up to learn the following: