With the cost of replying to even a simple RFP costing upwards of £5,000k, the first question to ask yourself is — how can we reduce our internal hidden costs and inefficiencies whilst ensuring we’re in the best place to win?
Responding to an RFP is a time-consuming and laborious task, eating into the hours that your staff can spend on fee-paying work. Even if the RFP process is being well managed, it can cause undue stress, and often burn-out among the team.
If you want to save money on your RFP responses, there are a number of simple questions you should be asking:
— is the team correctly qualifying the RFPs that come in and avoiding unsuitable projects?
— are they asking the issuer the right questions before responding?
— is the project manager and team running your RFP responses the best it can be?
— if an RPF is lost, are they asking for feedback and constantly improving?
These are all likely to be marginal gains if you aren’t changing the one thing that is having the most impact on your resources — the process of actually filling in an RFP.
It’s this task that costs your organisation the most money, simply because it takes the most time.
Your staff are probably making do with an ad-hoc system that uses spreadsheets, emails, messaging Apps and even face-to-face meetings in order to organise and prepare their response. This is simply not a workable solution, but if you’re an SME it’s unlikely you can afford one of the large proposal management SaaS systems that demands an annual sign-up and asks prohibitive fees.
If you’re trying to collate answers from across an organisation you’ll need a solution with a dedicated, accessible answer bank, one that instinctively knows the answers to questions that have been asked before — even if that question is phrased differently.
That’s where Qandai comes into its own. It’s not costly to implement, it doesn’t demand a minimum yearly contract, and it doesn’t take days to onboard your team. We developed Qandai specifically to tackle the one part of any RFP that’s costing your business money — the process of answering the questionnaire. And what’s more, the more you use Qandai, the smarter it gets, freeing your team up to get on with the real business of running your company…and saving you money.
