If you want to save money on your RFP responses, there’s a number of simple questions you should be asking. Read about them here.

Let’s be frank, no matter how great your team is, you aren’t going to win all the RFPs you reply to. But with the cost of replying to even a simple RFP costing upwards of £5k, 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. It eats into the hours that your staff can spend on live projects, and takes valuable resources away from fee-paying work. Even if the process is being well managed it can cause undue stress on those tasked with completing the RFP — and in the worst case it can lead to burn-out among the team.

If you want to save money on your RFP responses, there’s 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?

Improving the pre-qualification, bringing the appropriate experience to the team…all these can help raise your RFP success and bring down the cost per acquisition. **But 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.**

If you’re an SME it’s unlikely you can afford one of the large proposal management SaaS systems that demand an annual sign-up and ask prohibitive fees. Your staff are probably making do with an ad-hoc system that uses Excel spreadsheets, emails, Whatsapp messages and even face-to-face meetings in order to organise and prepare their response. This is simply not a workable solution.

The hours will disappear, processes become challenged and mistakes will, unfortunately, be made at this point. Sounds costly? It is. This is where the cost per acquisition rapidly mounts up and is rarely quantified.

If you’re trying to collate answers from across an organisation you’ll need a faster, smarter system than relying on shareable spreadsheets and messaging apps. 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. That’s because Qandai has been specifically developed 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.