Response Intelligence™️: The Next Evolution of RFP Response Technology

Today, Loopio unveiled a vision for the future of our platform and the future of RFP response technology, with the introduction of Response Intelligence™️.

What is Response Intelligence? It’s the new way our platform is enabling response professionals to work smarter, with artificial intelligence (AI) fuelled insights and recommendations that will guide you in taking the best, most impactful actions within your response process.

We’re taking what our data has taught us about what sets winning response content apart from average response content, and building it into our platform. It’s how we’re offering our customers a new competitive advantage.

We’re excited to share how Response Intelligence will be expanding the value that Loopio’s RFP response software is able to offer its users. But first, we need to explain why now, and why Loopio is uniquely capable of unlocking this value for response professionals.

The Evolution of RFP Response Technology

Loopio has been exploring Response Intelligence for some time now. With more than 1,000 customers and 100,000 projects completed in the Loopio platform, we have an unmatched set of (anonymized) data to power our efforts in this area.

The answer for what to do with all of this information came from asking ourselves: what big problems can we solve for RFP responders with our insights?

We’ve heard common themes in the reasons that companies seek out RFP response software. At the most fundamental level, response professionals want a tool to assist with Response Management. They’re looking to build the foundation for an effective response function by defining processes, centralizing their content, and making it easier to leverage that content when answering a proposal. RFP response technology has a lot to offer in this area.

Once that foundation has been laid, Response Automation comes in to help streamline the manual, time-consuming aspects of the response process. This is where companies often find incredible time savings that help them to scale their response process—and many teams stop here.

But there was a third, growing group of proposal managers and sales professionals who had squeezed every last drop of efficiency out of response automation. They were hungry for solutions that could further help their organization consistently create the highest quality proposals. They wanted RFP response technology that could not only save them time with repetitive, low value tasks, but a tool that would truly help them work smarter.

That’s how the idea of Response Intelligence was born: to help ambitious companies—and people—fuel growth by tapping into insights that would help them deliver winning RFPs.

Building the Future of Response Intelligence

Imagine if your RFP response platform could tell you how strong your proposal is, and where you should focus your efforts to improve your odds of delivering a winning proposal. That’s the future we’re building here at Loopio.

As Justin Dilley, Loopio’s SVP of Product and Design, puts it: “Our customers tell us that understanding the quality of an overall response, and the individual questions and answers, is one of the biggest opportunities for Loopio to help them win more business.”

Loopio is currently working on an initiative focused on analyzing and improving response content quality. We’ve analyzed the attributes that winning RFPs share, and have used that data to begin building recommendations into the Loopio platform.

We plan to surface these insights, highlighting opportunities to further strengthen answers by improving readability, introducing further customization, and implementing other recommendations.

This is how Response Intelligence will help companies more consistently create winning responses.

Another challenge we hear from customers is that it can be difficult to know which subject matter experts to engage in their organization to assist in the response process. For new employees, it takes time to learn which subject matter experts (SMEs) should be assigned which types of questions. For infrequent participants in the RFP response process, such as salespeople, identifying those SMEs and assigning questions correctly can be a persistent challenge.

Although those individual employees may not know who to turn to, Loopio often does. Response Intelligence will help connect you to the right expert with the right answer faster, by recommending experts based on previous responses provided within the platform. Not only can this reduce the time response professionals spend on project management, but it can also improve their internal reputation by avoiding incorrect assignments and last-minute scrambles.

Better Information = Better Decisions

Here’s what it comes down to: you and your company deserve to have the best information available at your fingertips, so you can always put your best foot forward. By using machine learning to surface actionable insights, Response Intelligence will make it easy for your team to move together effectively—and win more.

These features will be made available to Loopio customers in the coming months. If you’re a current customer, speak to your Customer Success Manager about joining Loopio Labs to get early access and help us build the future of RFP response technology.

Not yet a Loopio customer? Response Intelligence is all about making it possible for teams like yours to respond smarter, grow faster, and be even more impactful in your role. If that’s something you’re interested in, contact our team.