Beware the RFP Content Graveyard…

If you want to win your next RFP, there’s a place you dare not go: the RFP content graveyard—a place haunted by outdated documents, inaccurate sales knowledge, and confusing duplicate answers to questions.

The RFP content graveyard is no ghost story or campfire tale. It’s very real, as is the business risk it poses. You need to be vigilant or it’ll bury important sales information so it’s almost impossible to find and finally…forgotten—never to be reviewed, never to be refreshed. And when it’s finally uncovered, it’ll be inaccurate, untrustworthy, and unusable.

Lingering in the graveyard for any length of time is dangerous. It’ll drive your team mad. Hungry for accurate answers to RFP questions, they’ll mindlessly swarm internal subject matter experts with repetitive requests for information. It’ll cause significant delays in the sales cycle and leave little time for your team to craft high-quality responses.

The RFP content graveyard is a cursed place. It’ll put a hex on your RFP response, making it an ambling, monstrous thing. Prospects will flee from it in fear, finding safety with competitors who quickly responded to their RFP with appealing, up-to-date answers, dooming you to watch that closed deal you coveted disappear.

But don’t fret—the RFP content graveyard is an easy place to avoid. By following these key RFP content management best practices, you’ll keep your content safe so your RFP responses will always be the best they can be.

• Create a searchable, well-organized, centralized library that serves as a single source of truth for your best and most up-to-date sales knowledge.
• Maintain your RFP content library by having internal experts conduct regular reviews, and creating a process for feeding new and/or updated response content back into your library after every new RFP project.
• Optimize your library on an ongoing basis by regularly assessing content freshness, identifying and deleting duplicate content, and reviewing usage metrics so you know where to focus your maintenance efforts.

Remember: Be vigilant, protect your content and keep it from becoming an RFP content graveyard at all costs—because you want your prospects to pull out pens and contracts when they receive your RFP response, not pitchforks and torches.