3 Steps for Transforming Your Response Management

What is Response Management?

Response management is the process of a prospective customer sending out a questionnaire or list of requirements to a few prospective vendors in the late stages of a sales cycle. The four main types of requests are Requests for Information, Requests for Quotation, Requests for Proposal, and Security Assessments.

These questionnaires or “requests” require two parties: the prospect and the vendor. The prospect is the group or company wanting to purchase an offering. They are the ones creating and evaluating the request. The vendor is the company selling the offering. They will respond to this request, and typically, there will be at least two vendors competing for the prospect’s business.

Responding to these questionnaires can require a lot of manual work across an organization. Questionnaires can be hundreds of questions long and turnaround times are getting shorter and shorter. 

Common problems organizations run into include: 

• Time Consuming: Without best practices in place, responding to RFPs, DDQs, SOWs, and other customer questionnaires can take days and even weeks to complete.
• Context Preservation: Content is copied around over and over, which makes it lose its original context. 
• Compliance Issues: When information is stored in random places across an organization, it can often become stale and out of date. 

Transform Your Response Management in 3 Steps

1. Step One: Curate Your Revenue Team’s Expertise

Curate and centrally house all the critical knowledge across your entire sales and revenue organization in one, searchable, live, location. Cutting-edge advanced language processing technology ensures the right answers find users every time, and your content is constantly up to date.

2. Step Two: Speed Up Proposal Response Time 

Get a headstart on content creation with Ombud’s machine learning technology. Automatic curation continually improves your content library and reference documents speed up writing time for users. This enables the platform to automatically answer questions in RFPs and other questionnaires, so you don’t have to spend your time searching and pasting.

3. Step Three: Collaborate  Across Your Organization  

Ombud is uniquely built to support collaboration within the key teams that contribute to sales cycles. Ombud makes it easy for subject matter experts to contribute their expertise and keep track of complex responses with automated tracking and assigning specific individuals to tasks. 

Ombud can help your organization transform sales content into expertise

• Content creation often includes repetitive tasks that Ombud can automate to save our customers valuable time. Ombud’s machine learning technology takes the first pass on every document to decrease response time. 
• Collaborate seamlessly while never losing version history or precious time. We scale content creation for your entire revenue team by pooling their knowledge and making it easy for everyone to contribute their expertise. 
• Utilize customizable document templates to drive brand consistency and professional deliverables. 

Master response management with Ombud’s RFP automation software. Customers rely on Ombud to automate the content-centric activities in their sales processes. Our platform combines content collaboration, project management, and machine learning to streamline the creation of sales documents like RFP responses, security questionnaires, sales proposals, statements of work, and much more. Interested in learning more? Visit our website or request a demo here.