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The volume of Requests for Proposal (RFPs) is surging in many industries, yet most evenue teams are still running their response process on sheer willpower and manual effort. This gap between demand and efficiency is costing you more than just time: it's eroding win rates, stretching Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) thin, and tanking team morale.
While leadership recognizes the value of dedicated response professionals, they are often reluctant to invest in the repeatable, automated processes and software that drive efficiency, faster response times, and higher win rates.
Creating a quality, on-time response to an RFP requires a repeatable process, regardless of your team size. Here is the process, best practice, and an AI-powered RFP tool to help you do it.
What is an RFP?
When an organization plans a major purchase or project, they issue a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to potential vendors. This procurement document outlines their needs, goals, and budget.
A typical RFP is comprehensive, detailing:
- The project's goals and budget.
- The most important evaluation factors.
- The submission due date.
- Common deal-breakers, such as insufficient security protocols, unsatisfactory audit findings, or an inability to meet the buyer's timeline.
The prospect may also include separate documents, such as a security questionnaire or a due diligence questionnaire. However, RFPs are more alike than they are different. Approximately 80% of an RFP's questions get repetitive after you've seen a few in your industry or vertical. The best way to constantly produce a winning bid is to have an optimized RFP process in place and use AI to automate what you can.
8-step RFP response process that wins deals
An efficient RFP process is the engine of a high-performing revenue team. It transforms a chaotic scramble into a predictable, repeatable workflow. Follow these eight steps to improve your RFP response process and maximize both your capacity and win rate.
1. The strategic go/no-go decision
As RFP volume and complexity surge, the first step is triage. Instead of responding to every request, you must strategically select those that best align with your business and offer the highest probability of a win. This is the Go/No-Go decision. To support this critical step, you can leverage an AI tool, such as Realm's RFP Qualification AI Agent, to analyze the document, evaluate compliance, and provide a summary to inform your decision.
2. Define roles and objectives with a kickoff
A formal kickoff meeting is essential for defining the project's scope, team roles, individual responsibilities, and objectives. While it may lack cake, this meeting ensures every stakeholder (from the project manager to writers and editors) is aligned on the timeline and deliverables. Crucially, confirm the availability of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and other stakeholders.
3. Generate the first drafts with AI
This is where automation delivers its greatest leverage. Since 80% of the questions are repetitive, deploy an AI-powered RFP software like Realm to generate the first draft instantly. By drawing on your centralized knowledge base, Realm automates the bulk of the response, allowing your team to immediately focus on validation and the unique 20% of questions.
4. Engage SMEs for validation
After the automated draft is complete, engage your SMEs and other stakeholders. Their expertise is required to address the remaining 20% of unique or highly technical questions, and to validate the accuracy of the AI-generated answers. An efficient process respects their time by only involving them when their specialized knowledge is truly needed.
5. Review and refine the proposal
The review phase is non-negotiable. A thorough review ensures the proposal is accurate, complete, and polished. Check that:
- All questions were answered accurately and completely.
- All objectives and conditions were met.
- The language is well-written, free of typos, and adheres to readability standards (e.g., no more than a 10th-grade level).
- All required documents are attached.
6. Submit and confirm receipt
Once the proposal is finalized, submit it well ahead of the deadline. Always confirm receipt and communicate the submission status to the entire team.
7. Centralize your knowledge base
Every approved answer is a valuable asset. Save all responses in a central, easily accessible repository: your single source of truth (SSOT). Realm does this for you automatically.
8. Conduct a post-mortem for continuous improvement
Whether you win or lose the bid, the post-mortem is a vital learning opportunity. Analyze what worked well and identify areas for improvement in both the process and the content. This feedback loop is the foundation of continuous process optimization.
3 RFP best practices to improve your response process
To transform your RFP response process from a cost center into a high-velocity revenue engine, you need more than just a checklist. You need hard-won RFP best practices.
1. Foster collaboration
An efficient process doesn't exist without effective collaboration. Creating RFP responses is inherently cross-functional, requiring input for example from Sales, Product, and Legal. In today's remote and hybrid environment, smart processes and tools must actively foster collaboration: RFP software like Realm, centralize company knowledge and provide a shared workspace to streamline collaboration from drafting to reviews and approvals.
2. Elevate your proposal with storytelling
While an RFP is a technical document, it is also a sales opportunity. Strategic storytelling makes your response memorable and builds trust with the reader. Your narrative should go beyond feature lists to explain why your founders created the solution, how it directly addresses the customer's specific needs, and the values that underpin your partnership. Incorporating testimonials from customers with similar challenges is a powerful way to provide social proof.
3. Automate the 80% to focus on the 20%
The data is clear: most companies want to boost RFP response capacity, but few are willing to increase staffing. Automation is the only viable path to scale. By leveraging machine learning to instantly match and retrieve answers for the 80% of repetitive questions, you save hours, days, or even weeks of manual effort. This strategic time recovery allows your team to dedicate their cognitive resources to the 20% of unique, high-value questions that truly differentiate your bid.
How to automate RFP response process with AI
Realm provides a centralized, intelligent AI platform for managing the entire RFP response process, turning a multi-day effort into a rapid review cycle.
1. Upload the questionnaire
The process begins simply: upload the unfilled RFP document directly to the Realm platform. Realm is flexible, supporting common formats like Excel, PDF, and Word, ensuring you can start automating regardless of the file type.
2. Analysis and parsing
Realm’s AI immediately goes to work, analyzing the document’s structure. It intelligently recognizes which questions, columns, or tables require a response, breaking down the complex RFP into a structured, manageable project.
3. Choose your AI Agent
You can create and select specialized agents for various use cases, such as different types of RFXs and security questionnaires, or distinct product lines and market segments. You can ground each agent with the right subset of your company's knowledge base or even tailor the language the agent uses when it drafts the responses to ensure not only accuracy, but also relevance.
4. Automated drafting
This is where Realm delivers massive efficiency gains. The chosen agent drafts comprehensive, accurate, and compelling responses instantly, grounded in your company’s knowledge base. Realm also cites the exact sources it referenced for every generated answer, making verification and compliance review simple.
You can connect past proposals, product documentation, price sheets, and more to Realm from where they already live using our out-of-the-box connectors for more than 20 popular workplace applications. This means you don't need to build and maintain a separate content library of Q&A pairs for RFPs.
5. Review and collaborate
The AI-generated draft responses are ready in minutes, and your team can take over for high-value review. Realm provides a centralized workspace to streamline collaboration: You can easily review every answer, prompt the AI for further edits or polish them yourself, and assign specific questions or sections to SMEs for sign-off or approval. Realm automates 80% of responses.
6. Export and submit
When the review is complete, exporting is seamless. Realm generates the finalized document, maintaining the exact structure and formatting of the original RFP spreadsheet or document. This ensures a professional, submission-ready file every time.
7. Repurpose responses
The automation doesn't stop at submission. Once the RFP is finalized and approved, the responses are automatically indexed and added back into your knowledge base. This ensures that in the future, the AI agents will automatically draw on your latest, most successful answers, continually improving the quality and consistency of every subsequent response.
Final thoughts on RFP response process
The RFP response process isn't just administrative plumbing. It's a strategic capability that can separate 4% win rates from 47% win rates. The steps laid out here work because they forces discipline at every stage, but frameworks alone won't save you. Execution is everything.
The teams that win consistently have moved from chaos to choreography, using AI to eliminate grunt work and freeing their best minds for what actually differentiates: storytelling, customization, and proving you understand the buyer's world better than anyone else. If you're still wrestling with version control nightmares and last-minute panic platforms like Realm can handle the heavy lifting so your team focuses on strategy instead of boilerplate.
Start with one improvement this week, because progress compounds, and eventually your win rate will prove it.