5 Tips to Improve Your RFP Response Process

Maybe you've noticed a few inefficiencies creeping into your request for proposal response process over time. It happens to the best of us. As you tackle multiple requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for information (RFIs) while juggling tight deadlines, it’s easy to adopt habits that help you get through the workload but slow you down in the long run.

Now’s the perfect time to take a step back and streamline those RFP response processes. By shedding outdated, time-consuming methods and refreshing your approach, your team can become efficiency experts, allowing you to focus more on winning contracts and less on getting bogged down in the details. 

Taking the time to streamline your RFP management process means more time to deliver high-quality results, maximizing the functionality of everyone involved in your pursuit process.  

So here are 5 tips you can use to streamline your RFP response process:

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1. Utilize templates early and often

Proposals can quickly become massive, complex documents with dozens of sections, subsections, and even sub-subsections. Managing these without a structured approach can lead to wasted time and frustration. That’s why templates are gold in proposal management. They’re the key to saving time and operating more efficiently, especially in government contracting and enterprise RFP response.

Effective RFP templates streamline your workflow, allowing you to focus on areas that need your expertise rather than reinventing the wheel and exhausting your creative energy for every RFP response. Think of a template as the foundation for your proposal—it gives you a reliable structure, ensuring that your document covers all the essential elements required in the RFP. By relying on a well-designed template, your team reduces the likelihood of overlooking important sections and then can use their creativity and attention to detail where they matter most—on the unique aspects of each proposal.

A solid proposal management strategy should incorporate templates for different parts of your response, including cover letters, pricing, executive summaries, and even subject matter expert (SME) input. By establishing this system, you can automate repetitive tasks and free up your team members to focus on tailoring the proposal to the client’s specific needs. And giving everyone a chance to proofread, because everyone knows you don’t catch every typo when you’re frantically reading through it on the due date. 

Templates also help maintain consistency across your proposals, ensuring that you optimize brand voice and your messaging remains strong. They allow your team to work more collaboratively, as SMEs and other contributors can easily plug their expertise into predefined sections without derailing the overall structure. Using templates allows you to be strategic in your proposal efforts, putting more time into refining the critical details that will make your proposal stand out while the template handles the basic framework.

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2. Proposal management software is your MVP

No matter how effective your templates are, they can only take you so far without the right tools to manage the entire proposal response process. An effective template will operate most effectively if you’re using the best proposal management software. It helps to streamline your workflow, ensures consistency across responses, and provides invaluable automation features that can significantly increase your win rate.

“Best” can mean different things depending on the needs of your business, but investing some time in finding the right software for your business can be an absolute game changer. The right software allows your response team to collaborate seamlessly, track progress, and stay organized across multiple proposals.

Here are seven questions to help you do your due diligence when choosing software that’s right for you:

• Who is your client base? If you’re responding to government RFPs, be prepared for importing a lot of documents from PDF. You’ll need to find tools that can work with PDFs well. If you’re in the tech industry you’re likely responding to complex security questionnaires regularly and need tools that easily import Excel spreadsheets built by the devil. Understanding your client base will help you select software that aligns with the complexity and scale of the RFPs you’re responding to.
• What are your key objectives? Knowing what metrics you want from the tool is going to help you narrow down your options. Just need a proposal library? Or are you looking to get all your SMEs collaborating in the same tool? 
• What’s your target budget? Proposal management software varies widely in cost. Look at how they charge—by user? by size of library? by number of projects?— and how many people you want in the tool regularly.  
• How IT savvy are your users? Building proposal responses already have a lot of elements of herding cats. Trying to get SMEs, sales teams, and other proposal team members to learn a complex new tool may just add an element of complexity to your response process that no one on the team is ready for. 
• How will you leverage a solution? Sure the so-called magical AI auto-populating responses sounds like a life-saving time saver. But are you really going to be able to keep up with meticulously tagging each and every potential answer so that it actually works? Or do you just need something that gets close enough when you search keywords? Do you need it to manage your library of proposal attachments? Are the integrations going to work with your current workflows?
• Will AI really save the day? Everyone is selling AI as the best thing since sliced bread, and everyone knows it’s not quite as amazing as that yet. Does your company need AI support in your tool and do you think it will impact your next RFP AND your future ability to scale responses? 

Investing time in finding the right RFP response software can be a game changer for future RFPs. These tools have the power to make your team far more efficient and put relevant answers from past responses at your fingertips. But make sure you go in knowing what you want the tool to do and how you plan to leverage it; that will ensure you find the tool that is right for your company and don’t get waylaid by features that you may not ever be able to leverage. 

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3. Streamline your go/no-go process

Depending on your company culture, the go/no-go process can sometimes feel like either a “go/go” process—where nearly every opportunity is pursued—or a frustrating bottleneck, where promising opportunities seem to hit a dead end. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The go/no-go process can be an incredibly effective tool to ensure the work of your response team is laser-focused on the best, most impactful projects for your business and an excellent candidate for a streamlined overhaul.

By cutting your go/no-go process down to five key decision areas, you can simplify the process when you get a new RFP while still making well-informed choices about which opportunities to pursue. These are:

1. Do we know all the decision-makers, and do they know us? If you know the decision-makers and whether they are familiar with your company, it will help you assess your positioning and relationships, which can significantly influence the outcome. Seems like a strong go if they do know you. If they don’t, you’ll have a lot of work to do. It might still be worth pursuing, but you must ensure your response will help you stand out. 
2. Do we know what’s keeping our client up at night? Even if the vendors don’t already know us, if we know their challenges and can really clarify how our solution addresses them, this bid will still be worth our time. 
3. Do we have a realistic chance of winning? Bids are a time to be realistic. Even if the bid may represent a Big Hairy Goal, you need to understand the cost of wasted effort on low-probability opportunities. That doesn’t mean all opps should be a no if you have a low chance of winning. Sometimes going through the process helps clarify internal strategic goals and wording and can give you an opportunity to evaluate how well your plans hit the market. But remember each bid takes significant resources to prepare. 
4. Do we have the resources to pursue this opportunity? Sometimes you might win these big contracts, but it means you may have to sacrifice everything else to support it. Carefully evaluate what will happen if you win, and ensure the contract won’t stop future progress on other business opportunities or long-term goals. 
5. Does this opportunity align with our long-term strategy? Make sure the opportunity supports your company’s broader business goals. If it is a chance to move your company significantly down the path of your big goals, the bid will be a valuable investment of time and resources.

Using this filter will help you confidently choose the projects you want to pursue without wasting time second-guessing your decision. 

For a more in-depth guide on maximizing the effectiveness of your go/no-go process, you can check out our previous blog post, where we dive deeper into strategies for refining your approach and making the most of every decision.

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4. Implement a proposal response library

Like with using templates, having a proposal response library means you don’t need to produce Hemingway-level creative writing for every section of your proposals. Instead, you can work smarter by building a detailed content library filled with high-quality, reusable content that can be easily customized and inserted into any proposal.

A well-organized content library not only saves time but also ensures consistency across all of your submissions. It allows your response team to pull from a collection of pre-approved, polished content, reducing the need for last-minute scrambling or rewriting from scratch. This approach streamlines the proposal process and enables your team to focus on tailoring the more specific sections that require creative and strategic input.

To build your content library, start by identifying the content areas that frequently appear in your RFP responses. These might include standard sections such as company overviews, qualifications, past performance writeups, testimonials, and key resumes. For each content area, create boilerplate content that can serve as a solid starting point for your proposals. The goal is to develop a comprehensive library that your team can easily access and customize based on the needs of each specific RFP, then you’ll have content ready to plug into your proposal when and where you need it.

Your content library could include:

• Company Overview: A general summary of your company, its mission, and capabilities.
• Differentiators: What qualities, features, or characteristics that set your company apart from competitors.
• Qualifications and Experience: Standard descriptions of your team’s experience and expertise in various sectors.
• Case Studies/Past Performance: Ready-to-go case studies that demonstrate your company’s ability to deliver successful projects similar to the one being proposed.
• Technical Solutions: Boilerplate descriptions of the technologies, methodologies, and processes you use in your projects.
• Implementation plan or project plan: Build a shell of an implementation plan that can be customized with key milestones, deliverables, and steps for each proposal. Detail the project management aspects of onboarding your new client and how you’ll make the transition as seamless as possible.
• Common question and response pairs: RFP writers don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time either, so often questions can be similar across RFPs from the same agency or in the same industry. Know which questions are regularly asked and have polished responses ready to drop in. 

Once you’ve compiled this content, you can continually update the library as your business grows and takes on new projects. Keeping your content library fresh ensures that the material is always relevant and reflects your latest capabilities and successes. Your content library will often live in your RFP response software, but it can also be in something as simple as a Microsoft Word document. Make sure it’s in a format your team knows how to use efficiently and can easily update regularly. 

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5. Assign one person to focus on persuasive writing

Your proposal team is likely made up of a variety of team members, each bringing different strengths and expertise to the table. Among them, you may have subject matter experts (SMEs) who are highly skilled in their areas of focus. 

So why would you ask one of these SMEs to craft your persuasive writing?

Lots of people have the ability to write well (or well enough) just like lots of people have the ability to properly smoke ribs or photograph a landscape. That does not mean they are the best candidate to execute those tasks—especially on a contract that could be worth millions to your company. Your best option is to have your experts complete the work where they are experts, and that includes the persuasive writing for your proposal.

While your SMEs are invaluable for contributing detailed, specialized knowledge, they are not always the best candidates for crafting the persuasive, client-facing content in your proposal.

Persuasive writing is a specialized skill that requires the ability to connect with stakeholders, present a compelling argument, and clearly communicate the value your company brings to the table. Not everyone can effectively persuade an audience through their writing.

By assigning one person—whether it’s an internal team member or an external contractor—to focus on the persuasive writing, you ensure your proposal maintains a single, consistent voice and message throughout. This allows your proposal to flow naturally, engaging the reader and clearly communicating why your company is the best choice for the project. A dedicated writer will be able to take the technical details provided by your SMEs and transform them into clear, persuasive language that resonates with the stakeholders reviewing your proposal—and sounds like it’s all been written by one person, instead of 17.

Assigning a single person to this role helps your proposal stay focused on the client’s needs. This approach also keeps your SMEs free to focus on what they do best: providing expert knowledge and ensuring the technical accuracy of the proposal.

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Slim Down Your Proposal Process with Summit Strategy

Whether it’s government or private contracts, Summit Strategy has the resources you need to make your proposal process more efficient and more effective. Let us help you define your RFP response strategy. From the kickoff meeting to connecting with GovCon procurement officers, we know how to overcome the typical pain points of the RFP response process. Our experienced and expert team can guide you through creating proposals that best reflect your company’s capabilities, showcase your strengths, are done before the due date, and ultimately win new business. 

Ready to elevate to the extraordinary with Summit Strategy? Schedule an exploratory call today.