Investing in Strategic Response Management as a Growth Imperative

Responding to prospect and customer inquiries is a critical element of the revenue lifecycle. Often, revenue is not possible without first tackling the request for proposal/request for information (RFP/RFI) process. These inquiries can occur as more traditional RFPs, but companies also need to respond to customer inquiries across various stages, as well as offer self-service options for customers wanting fast and accurate information. Responding to sales inquiries regardless of format traditionally has been an arduous process, one that requires the creation of up to hundreds of in-depth responses to important questions about product, the company, and so forth. This means revenue teams need to dig deep, across various repositories of data and internal subject matter experts spanning multiple departments. Those completing RFP/RFIs must offer not only the most up-to-date, validated information, but also cast that response in a way to differentiate the company and product.

AI can speed the completion of RFP/RFIs and help aggregate and govern trusted organizational knowledge so future responses are optimized. There are various approaches to leveraging AI in the RFP and sales workflow. However, deploying a strategic response management (SRM) platform as part of a blended overarching AI strategy offers the most benefits and lowest complexity and assumes the least risk versus using a stand-alone point solution or a cobbled-together homegrown approach using generic AI tools. This report outlines why revenue teams need to adopt SRM platforms to win more deals faster and create a repository of trusted, winning answers to key sales inquiries across the revenue lifecycle.