What can we expect in terms of RFP trends this year?
Let’s get to what I have my eyes on, along with some tangible tips you can take away and apply today.
1. Continued High RFP Volumes
As organizations prioritize business development and sales enablement efforts and face more complex demands, RFP volumes are expected to rise. With expanding markets, changing legislations and policies, increasingly intricate proposal requirements, companies will respond to more RFPs that require greater customization and are more complex in nature. The rising demand to participate in and win RFPs will put additional pressure on proposal stakeholders (not just proposal teams!) to manage the higher workload while maintaining quality.
TIP: Select only the best RFP opportunity. Not every opportunity is a good opportunity. You want to protect your teams and have them complete proposals for the most important projects.
2. Resourcing Challenges are Here to Stay
With a growing RFP volume and complexity, companies face tight budgets and overstretched proposal teams, l with potential burnout and resource constraints. And many proposal teams in various industries will run lean. A result: organizations will rely on generating the first draft through AI or repurpose their completed proposals to new proposals.
TIP: Have your proposal team focus on high value output, such as customizing content within the first draft generated by your AI tool that is specific to the prospect and the opportunity at hand. Involve other stakeholders as necessary to add value to your customized content and enhance the overall submission.
3. Increased AI Usage in RFPs
No surprise here – AI will increasingly automate tasks in the RFP process, thereby reducing the time it takes to create a first draft or support with other proposal tasks (i.e. DDQs). By using AI tools like Loopio or Microsoft CoPilot, teams will be able to generate initial proposal drafts, quickly assess the quality of responses, summarize responses where those dreaded word/character limitations are imposed, and predict the likelihood of success based on past data
The speed of AI will enable teams to spend more time customizing responses, streamline workflows, reduce human error, and improve the speed and accuracy of proposals. AI also helps summarize important client/prospect data, which can be used to customize responses or simply give teams insights into the opportunity.
TIP: Use ChatGPT to find relevant details about the prospective RFP that has not been covered in the RFP introductory document, such as their ESG/sustainability stance and 5-year business growth strategy. This effort shows you’ve done your homework, and you are making the prospect your priority. Reference this information in your executive summary and show your understanding of the prospect and how your organization aligns to the prospect.
4. Keeping up with Content Management Responsibilities
Managing and reusing proposal content remains a challenge for many teams, especially without dedicated content management systems or staff who are skilled in reviewing, updating and validating RFP content. In fact, this has been one of the consistent challenges we’ve seen with proposal teams across various industries.
Without effective repositories or tools to update content, teams often waste time creating new materials or struggle with inconsistent messaging. Other times, teams reference previously completed proposals to find answers, which can be counterproductive. Making time to review and update content regularly sets proposal teams up for success, ensuring consistency in messaging, tone and style, while leveraging user friendly technology to handle the administrative heavy tasks.
TIP: Outsource your content management challenges to an experienced proposal consultant who knows how to review and update content while managing SME relationships. Or invest in a tool like Loopio to centralize and manage your content that is user friendly, dynamic and interactive.
In short, 2025 will bring about challenges that will require businesses and their people to adapt through automation, external support, and improved processes. Yet 2025 offers opportunities to these challenges, so teams will need to determine how to best approach them.
One size does not fit all, and the best decisions need collaboration with all internal RFP stakeholders – including sales, subject matter experts and the ones who bring it to the finish line. Proposal teams, in conjunction with RFP consultants, are the solution to winning contracts.