Very few company’s client-facing staff have access to one of your most valuable assets, your RFP answer catalogue

In this weekly series, we’re going in-depth on the reasons you should take RFPs seriously in 2021. Last week, we were talking about the right fit, today it’s Knowledge & Access.

Did you know your RFP knowledge repository is probably one of the highest value assets you have? 

And if knowledge is one of your most valuable assets, another has to be access to that knowledge. 

Imagine you’re an account executive in front of a client (virtually at the moment of course)

You’re getting near to closing and you get one last deep question about your cloud security compliance. If you can just get the right answer to this you can ‘ask for the order’. Of course, you don’t know the answer yourself to such a detailed question. Normally you might need to ask for a pause and try to get hold of your cloud security team. Slack / Teams might help here but what if you can’t get hold of the right person?

“Let me get back to you on that” 

Deals can live and die in these moments. The phrase “Let me get back to you on that” is all too often a barrier to closing the deal. So what’s the issue here? Well if you have a robust knowledge repository it isn’t that. It’s all about having access to knowledge when you need it the most.

Imagine instead you have an AI-driven conversational assistant that can interrogate your RFP answer catalogue in real-time. You don’t need access to the team and you know the answer will be consistent with how you answer an RFP. 

If you’re going to get serious about RFPs then you need your client-facing staff to have access to the expert body of knowledge you’ve assembled to answer RFPs.