The High Impact of RFPs on your Subject Matter Experts’ Time
In this weekly series, we’re going in depth on the reasons you should take RFPs seriously in 2021. Starting off this series, we’re talking about the time investment in an RFP response.
RFPs are a huge time demand on your most expensive subject matter experts (SMEs)
Remember, you hire people for their skills but you pay them for their time.
Not only are you paying for your employees’ time, whenever you utilise an expert you’re paying a premium for that time. When you’re looking at the cost of producing an RFP response, are you calculating this time properly?
The real cost comes from the repetition in the RFP process. We already understand that our SMEs are an expensive resource but we have to fire the same legal compliance or security RFP questions out to them multiple times.
You probably know the type of question. It’s the same ones they answered last time and variations on it the time before.
82% of respondents in a recent survey said they were seeing an increase in RFPs and proposals in 2020. We’re going to respond to more RFPs and proposals in general if we receive more. So it does not make good business sense to ask SMEs to answer the same questions again and again. We’re paying experts for the same thing time and again. Not only is that a waste of resources, it frustrates the experts, too.
As a good example of this, think of the salespeople involved in the proposal process. Do you have the figures for the opportunity cost for answering a single RFP? The opportunity cost of not working on developing and closing winnable deals.
It’s difficult to get a handle on how much time is sunk into managing and answering RFPs. Measuring the true cost of an RFP is a massive eye-opener.
Dealing With Time Sink
Many companies segregate RFPs into those that are managed by a dedicated proposal team and those where the salesperson has to own the RFP process, maybe with support from the proposal team. This is one method of dealing with the time sink.
Salespeople can end up spending a lot of time first shredding, dividing up the questions, and then project managing answers from different SMEs. Finally, they have to assemble those responses and write the proposal’s executive summary and craft win themes.
Getting serious about RFPs means that you should be automating your RFP and compliance questionnaire process as much as you can, freeing up your salespeople and subject matter experts to do what you hired them to do in the first place: being brilliant!
Your salespeople and your subject matter experts are going to thank you, but you’re also going to see higher quality RFP responses from the team if you free up their thinking power for those parts of the RFP or questionnaire responses that matter most.
Read more about the parts of the RFP response that matter the most.
“proposals are judged on similar criteria every time.”
Don Carmichael & Melissa Peel
Avnio RFx handles the parts of the process that take up the most time. By removing the tedious tasks, your team can focus on the exec summary, the win themes, or moulding the response to perfectly fit the client.
Here at Avnio, we were sick of the time we had to waste doing those repetitive tasks. Avnio RFx is designed from the ground up to enable our team, and everyone else who uses the platform, to benefit from the giant strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning to win more of the right business.
Improve the Quality and Quantity of Your RFP Responses
We’re confident that our solution will not only improve your response rates — a recent review let us know that one customer was seeing up to 75% faster responses — but will also increase the quality of your response.
To help facilitate that, we’ve focused on what your bid writer spends a lot of time on, what your bid manager needs to effectively oversee the whole process, and what the C-suite of any given company needs to see reported.
Can you really afford to spend more and more money, month after month, on asking your experts to perform the same tasks over and again?
Jump on a call with one of our experts to discuss how Avnio can reduce the cost of spending too much time responding to RFPs and questionnaires today.
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