How to Identify and Fix Bottlenecks in Your RFP Process for Faster, Streamlined Responses

Most organizations consider the Request for Proposal (RFP) process lengthy and time-consuming. 

So, if your sales teams are constantly battling to find the right information to fill an RFP or struggling to meet deadlines, that’s a clear signal to spot and fix potential bottlenecks in your RFP workflow. 

This article introduces you to strategies for identifying and fixing bottlenecks in your RFP process and turning it into a streamlined operation.  

Common bottlenecks in the RFP process and their impact

Here are some common pitfalls in an RFP process and their lasting business impact that you must be aware of:

1. Lack of effective content management 

Sales teams who manually perform RFP-related tasks often find it difficult to locate and reuse past content. Finding relevant content well within deadlines leads to further delays in responses and poor-quality proposals. 

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Business impact: Delays and inconsistent responses to leads due to inadequate content management can strain brand reputation and cause high-intent leads to back out, resulting in significant revenue loss. Also, last-minute deal failures can weaken sales reps’ morale.

2. Slow internal approvals 

Mid to large-sized teams have many stakeholders or a multi-level RFP review system. Often, RFPs can get stuck between approvals due to an unstructured review process and delayed communication. This is even more problematic when stakeholders are outside the sales team, for example, the product marketing or finance teams.

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Business impact: Long approval times or a lack of an efficient RFP review system can affect lead response rates. This perpetual slowness in RFP completion can increase employee and client frustration. 

3. Lack of collaboration between teams 

A typical RFP process is a joint effort from SMEs in teams like sales, engineering, marketing, or legal. Irregular communication and collaboration between these teams can further delay RFP edits and reviews. 

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Collaboration with SMEs is the top RFP challenge reported, followed by finding accurate answers:

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Business impact: Poor collaboration can cause task redundancy, thus wasting critical business hours. RFPs can also be prone to misaligned or missing information and put sales teams at risk of sharing inconsistent information with the prospects. 

4. Resource or task overload 

Key resources in charge of RFPs are often overwhelmed with other priority tasks, leading to further delays in RFP completion. This is especially true when RFP completion needs multiple stakeholder inputs from across teams. 

Business impact: Stakeholders who have other primary responsibilities may fail to recognize the importance of a particular RFP and rush through their inputs or reviews. Such rushed responses could increase the risk of errors and misaligned information, leading to lost opportunities. 

How to find bottlenecks in your RFP process

Diagnose bottlenecks in your RFP workflow with this three-step process:

1. Conduct an RFP workflow analysis 

Identify and map out each and every step in your RFP process and the time it takes to complete them. Visualization helps in exposing where delays may be occurring so you can prioritize optimizing those particular steps.

Suppose gathering SME inputs takes around seven working days due to multiple hand-offs between cross-teams. As a precaution, you can schedule their time in advance so there’s minimal delay in responses. 

A thorough workflow analysis should involve inter-team dependencies, hand-off points, revisions, and approval stages. 

2. Collect data on RFP timelines to identify patterns

Collect and analyze historical RFP data to identify delay or failure patterns. Compare your previous response times and match them against your industry’s average to identify areas where you may be lagging, thus clearly pointing towards a bottleneck that needs rectification.

3. Engage and collaborate with team members 

Historical data or workflow analysis alone may not expose potential roadblocks in an RFP workflow. It’s best to involve your team members to learn their first-hand experience in the whole process.

Interview them or run a survey to gather feedback. Encourage transparent conversations where the team can openly discuss their friction points or inefficiencies that need improvement. 

How to address and resolve RFP bottlenecks 

We saw what causes the most bottlenecks and how to diagnose the exact friction points. And now, here are the best ways to resolve these bottlenecks and turn your process into a streamlined operation:

1. Prioritize your bottlenecks based on their business impact 

Focus on bottlenecks that have the biggest impact on your bottom lines, such as win rates, response times, and quality. These could be lying in areas like multiple hand-offs or approval stages.

Fixing these on priority lets you tackle the hardest bottlenecks first and ensures your efforts go into addressing the ones that make the most difference to your objectives.

2. Create shortcuts to reduce response times 

Look for some quick fixes and shortcuts that could reduce your RFP response times. 

For example:

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• Implement response templates where company or project details are pre-filled 
• Schedule SME slots in advance so approvals or reviews happen without any delays
• Set up a centralized content library with past RFPs for reference
• Create in-depth guides that sales teams can access anytime

3. Implement AI and automation to streamline RFP functions 

Advanced technologies like AI help with RFP automation by streamlining various tasks like RFP evaluation, curating responses, tracking proposal progress, providing up-to-date information, and more.

AI tools like Docket - a one-of-its-kind digital sales assistant use advanced natural language processing (NLP) to automatically retrieve relevant RFP information so you cut down the average response rate. 

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Suppose your biggest RFP bottleneck is slow internal SME inputs and a lack of team collaboration. 

Docket AI helps clear this friction with its human verification and collaboration functionality where SMEs can quickly inspect auto-generated RFP responses to ensure accuracy and offer teams to collaborate within the platform and add comments or updates to the RFP drafts before the final submission. 

4. Long-term RFP process redesign 

If you’re encountering more complex RFP bottlenecks or are seeing response rates well beyond your industry average, consider redesigning your RFP workflows with a complete workaround. 

This step can involve introducing AI or RFP automation tools as discussed in the previous step or an RFP management software. These can help streamline and refresh the end-to-end process so you no longer lag behind final submissions and ultimately increase win rates. 

Wrapping up

Diagnosing and fixing bottlenecks in the RFP process is essential in maintaining a competitive advantage. 

Even the smallest of RFP improvements can have a positive impact on your win rate. Analyze your data, conduct a thorough workflow analysis, and bring your team on board to streamline your end-to-end RFP process by fixing one bottleneck at a time.

For a quicker and more efficient way to tackle RFP bottlenecks, use AI.

Docket AI’s RFP automation empowers your team to respond to RFPs confidently and close deals faster.

Book a demo today!