Back in 2015, Ganesh Shankar discovered himself spending 20-30% of his time responding to RFPs, even though it turned into not part of his important process description. However, whilst seeking out a device to streamline the RFP response system, he could not find a unmarried solution on the market that matched his needs.
The other founders of RFPIO, Manish Bafna, AJ Sunder, and Sankar Lagudu, skilled similar frustrations whilst managing RFPs. And they came to the realisation that there need to be hundreds of others who're trapped in an inefficient RFP procedure. Out of this idea emerged RFPIO, based in 2015 with headquarters in Portland, Oregon inside the USA and an R&D Centre in Coimbatore.
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RFPIO’s number one challenge is to automate the RFP/smooth reaction method and provide sales groups full manage over the method.
“RFPIO’s cloud-based software is a response control platform that facilitates companies streamline their commercial enterprise concept efforts, offer excellent responses and create extra revenue possibilities,” emphasized Shankar.
RFPIO Solutions To Streamline Sales, Operations
One of the important thing advantages of RFPIO is the reality that it is able to be used across the entire sales and operations procedure. RFPIO manages onboarding, advertising, operational or income questionnaires and reaction proposals.
Onboarding: In addition to accelerating notion control, RFPIO also simplifies the onboarding system. With RFPIO, the human assets department can access the most current organisation facts and revise HR-associated content material therefore.
Proactive Proposals: RFPIO lets in sales groups to without problems gather proactive proposals, which can be frequently benched in prefer of better priority duties, supporting them win extra deals and generate new groups.
Marketing Content: Internally, RFPIO stores key records for the advertising and marketing branch, together with simple business enterprise/contact information, product/provider price propositions, and aggressive advantages, setting applicable statistics at the marketing group’s fingertips.
SOWs/Grants: Using RFPIO to complete statements of work or grants enables companies spend less time on files and spreadsheets. Rather than manually copying and pasting answers from one SOW/Grant to any other, RFPIO shall we customers shop all previous answers in a unmarried content material library for short and clean get right of entry to.
Security Questionnaires: On average, a protection questionnaire might also include masses of questions, sometimes, lots. RFPIO makes use of automobile-response and bulk answering to assist corporations reduce final touch time dramatically, for the reason that the solution does a majority of the responding upfront.
Compared to other RFP management systems, RFPIO gives several acute benefits:
Import RFPs from any source: A patented import system imports all codecs of RFPs (text documents, PDFs, spreadsheets). Users handiest want to train the system the difference between section kinds (i.E. Headings, questions, descriptor textual content, and many others.) and the software program will examine the rest of the document and sort all section sorts into categories.
Export RFPs, whilst staying on logo: After all questions have been responded, users can both export the RFP into the original record, or export questions into a personalized, branded template. This gives businesses a further edge in the face of competition.
Work with massive teams on more than one projects: All RFP-related communication can occur without leaving RFPIO. Outside participants and freelancers may be added into tasks to edit sure questions, even as RFPIO additionally integrates with Slack and Gmail for short and easy management of responsibilities and discussions. Teams can concurrently control more than one RFPs, making it less difficult for inspiration managers.
Find the proper solutions, rapid: RFPIO’s content material library is geared up with an AI-enabled recommendation engine that sifts through customers’ great content libraries to pull up the maximum relevant answers for the query the person is answering.
Furthermore, the corporation offers 18 integrations, with even extra integrations inside the pipeline.
RFPIO’s answers are priced based totally on the variety of modern projects, instead of the quantity of customers. This way that agencies pay for the range of initiatives they want to be operating on concurrently, and may add in as many users as they’d like, including freelancers and contractors — with out upgrading to a higher tier. This makes RFPIO well suited for companies of all sizes.
RFPIO’s tiered version is a hundred% subscription-based and the pricing is based totally on the volume of projects that clients system thru the platform. “The maximum famous supplying truely depends on a purchaser’s desires. While a Fortune 500 company can be dealing with numerous projects on the identical time across teams of fifty+, a modest tech startup would possibly most effective be working on three RFPs at a time, with a team of five. Different wishes require exclusive answers,” Cofounder Sunder added.
Leveraging Automation To Streamline RFPs
With automatic responses and proactive suggestion advent being highlights of RFPIO, it is based loads on synthetic intelligence and machine studying. For instance, being able to recognize questions that have been previously responded and reuse the content is a huge time saver. “Our device uses AI to help make guidelines on the precise response. And the machine gets higher and better at recognising questions over time and facilitates fill in RFPs with growing accuracy,” Bafna told Inc42.
One of RFPIO’s customers pronounced RFPs that used to take her 4 days to complete, now simply take her one hour with the assist RFPIO’s answer. “On average, we find that our clients file spending as a minimum 30% less time completing RFPs after enforcing RFPIO,” brought Lagudu.
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RFPIO’s API lets in customers to convey statistics into their homegrown CRM or different equipment that RFPIO doesn’t combine with. This means companions are capable of beautify the cost in their own product by bringing RFPIO capability into their first-party offerings. This has helped appeal to main customers which includes Microsoft, Siemens, and Adobe.
The Future For RFPIO
“We consider our reaction management system as a manner to help people worried inside the income system have all of the content material they need at their fingertips any time a question comes in from a prospect,” Sankar Lagudu, cofounder, RFPIO.
The call for from clients in India has been a fulfillment component for RFPIO as its Coimbatore-primarily based R&D centre helps the agency benefit high-quality perception into this market. Its most terrific customers encompass Indian businesses consisting of Freshworks, Automation Anywhere, and BrowserStack. “Having our studies crew lower back in India permits us to speak to nearby companies quite regularly, which is partially why we’ve been able to efficiently provide an answer that attracts and benefits Indian agencies,” stated Shankar.
The founders are running toward developing RFPIO into a comprehensive platform to respond to all queries in the course of the whole sales technique. For the cofounders, this represents a huge possibility.