At this point, artificial intelligence (AI) has touched every industry and department across the business world in some shape or form. There are countless examples of business solutions artificial intelligence has been behind for sales and marketing; content creation, lead forecasting, chatbots, price optimization, lead generation and many more.
Of course, before all these revolutionary AI-based solutions, there was a need. As sales professionals know as much as anybody, winning business and securing contracts is not easy. So, companies have been turning to artificial intelligence to ease the intense tender process and drive effective bid management through bid automation. AI-powered systems have helped enterprises automate bid management in three key areas, ultimately saving bid managers valuable time while not impacting their productivity and quality of work.
Here is a look at the three key areas:
Research and Planning
Numerous people and departments within a company have involvement in the tender process. If the people don’t, their data does. Bid managers must start by ensuring they are a good fit for the tender in the first place. Figuring out if your company is a good fit includes accessing information from management, administration, security, operations, audit experts, and more.
In most enterprises, this information is scattered and sitting in many different data stores and data silos. Artificial intelligence allows bid managers to access all this information in a single application for ultimate productivity. It is no longer necessary to spend hours looking for knowledge that you can access in milliseconds.
Writing the Winning Bid
Often a single tender will have multiple questionnaires with upwards of 100 questions. Information insight does not only provide facts, it also provides answers for questions by leveraging NLP and partly also NLG. The main driver is access to your company knowledge and data. Linking your bid writing process to an AI-based solution will also factor in competitive analysis, giving you insights into your competition and gap analysis to identify potential showstoppers.
An essential part of writing a high-quality bid is analyzing previous Requests for Information (RFI) and Requests for Proposals (RFP). Artificial intelligence can help paint a picture of which responses worked well in the past and which did not, saving the writer even more valuable time by eliminating the need to search endlessly through years of proposals.
Whether you need the answer to one question or an entire document of questions, artificial intelligence provides it all with a simple copy and paste into a search box or uploading an excel sheet carrying the complete questionnaire.
Tracking the Process from Start to Finish
As with all projects, tracking your steps and being organized is a necessity. The bid submission and the tender process are very deadline-oriented, and you wouldn’t want all the help AI gave you during the research and writing stages to go to waste. Artificial intelligence can help with this too!
Companies, large and small, often have multiple tenders running at one time. The ability to see your steps and where you stand on each tender in a detailed overview provides effective use to ensure nothing goes undone.
Many enterprises are beginning to see the benefits of digitizing this intense process, as it allows them to optimize their resources while boosting revenue for their business.
Although AI has tremendous value in this space, it does not need to replace your talented sales professionals. AI can free up time for your sales team to chase more leads and close other deals. There is no need to waste their talents and efforts looking for answers that are already there.
AI-Powered insight engines turn bid management into bid automation by putting knowledge at employees’ fingertips they never had before.
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