4 Proven Ways to Improve the Quality of Your RFP Responses

Successful RFP responses are the lifeline of most organizations across a wide range of industries. They capture how organized, capable, and competitive your team and services can be. However, with most organizations grappling to meet deadlines, whether for launching new products or fulfilling customer requests, ensuring the quality of proposals ends up on the back burner. As a result, businesses end up reducing their chances of winning deals.
 
While there’s no substitute for refining your proposals over years of leveraging analytics and real-world win/loss results, there are a few things you can change now to enhance the quality of your RFP responses.

Mistakes such as misspelling the company’s name can be detrimental to your proposal’s success. Likewise, typos, grammatical errors, and style inconsistencies can be distracting for the readers. Needless to say, do not skip the editing and proofreading steps.
 
Ideally, the person who writes the draft should be different from the proofreader. This is to ensure that errors and omissions missed in the writer’s initial self-editing phase are caught by the second person. You can ask another qualified member in your organization or hire a professional proofreader if you have the resources.

Avoid recycling phrases and generic proposal answers from your old RFP responses. Instead, draft proposals that speak to your prospect’s unique goals and objectives. Remember, organizations have several proposals to review, so it’s important to catch their attention with the executive summary.

You can visit their website and take note of words, phrases, writing styles, and technical terms that their company uses regularly. Adopting some of these elements into your RFP response can make it feel more familiar and stand out from the competition.

Proper style and formatting can make reading your proposal a breeze for your potential clients. It also gives prospects the impression that you are professional, organized, and exciting to work with.
 
When drafting your RFP response, break up your content into chapters, paragraphs, and bulleted lists when applicable. Include a table of contents at the beginning of the proposal, and use headings and subheadings to highlight key sections and ideas.

Drafting RFP responses from scratch each time is inefficient and keeps you from doing other, more important organizational tasks. Get a headstart on each proposal by storing templates from successful bids in a single interface such as RFP Response Builder. Keep only content that has been vetted and reviewed by subject matter experts and regularly updated to meet the evolving needs of your prospective clients.

RFP Response Builder eliminates manual entry, thus protecting organizations from costly RFP errors. We automate the mundane RFP response tasks and make it easy to access a library of response content so that you can focus on personalizing the response to speak the client’s unique needs. Data is also store in a central, cloud-synchronized location, allowing users to work both on or offline.

If you spend at least 5 hours a month finding content, cutting/pasting, and reformatting your RFP responses, RFP Response Builder may be the right fit for you. Discover how an automated RFP response software solution can dramatically reduce the time and effort required to respond to RFPs, producing polished, mistake-free response documents that help you win more RFPs in less time, hence increasing your win rate!