Responsive (formerly RFPIO) has announced the introduction of Proposal Builder as part of the Winter release of its Responsive Strategic Response Management (SRM) Platform. Targeted at sales teams, the proposal builder will enable users to rapidly build proposals using pre-defined templates. They will also be able to draw in additional pre-defined and approved content to customise the templates prior to sending the proposals to prospects.
The aim is to improve Sales rep efficiency while reducing the time taken to build proposals. It also helps organisations create consistent and better professional-looking proposals and reduces the sales cycle time.
AJ Sunder, Chief Product Officer at Responsive. “Several of our top customers have been asking us to add a proposal generation capability to our SRM platform. The addition of Proposal Builder enables entire sales organizations to quickly assemble compelling proposals for prospects on our Strategic Response Management Platform.”
Proposal Builder
The new proposal builders ensures a consistent quality of the proposal using verified content. The solution has several benefits.
The advantage of using templates is that the basic layout for every proposal is consistent. Meeting brand guidelines and should guide sales reps through the process of ensuring the relevant information is included while following best practices.
As sellers build up the proposal using the template, they can draw on existing, pre-approved content snippers for each element. Whether that is a product or service description or something else.
In combination, the content snippets and templates mean that sales leaders can ensure that the proposals created have the appropriate content for each market segment that they sell to. Administrators can define different templates for different market sectors, segments, customers or even specific contracts. They can also ensure that the proposals include the latest information about products and services. For rapidly changing products and services, say in the software industry. It means that content snippets can be centrally updated as new versions are released.
What Responsive hasn’t made clear is that if the content snippet relating to a product is updated, is that snippet in draft proposals also updated? Is the sales rep notified that there is updated information for them to change their proposal.
The new Proposal Builder has an intuitive user experience that enables sellers to build a new proposal in minutes. Whilst still being able to deliver a personalised proposal to the prospect. Organisations can apply branding and design standards to the templates to further enhance the professional look and feel of the finished proposal. Users are able to share proposals by email and track future engagement with them.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is the latest update to the Responsive SRM platform. The platform also includes Response Projects (RFP, RFI, Security Questionnaire, and DDQ automation), LookUp (AI-enabled knowledge sharing), Profile Center (Trust Center and private profile hosting), Request Projects (RFP issuing), and Requirements Analysis (AI-enabled RFP analysis for go/no-go decision making).
Without access to the release notes, Enterprise Times was unable to analyse how sophisticated the Proposal Builder is. But perhaps later versions will further improve the platform. Also, while this is only part of the Responsive Winter 2024 release, there were no details provided about what else the update provides.
