2026 Sales Proposal Automation: Process, Tools & Benefits

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Have you ever wanted to know how AI can answer RFPs? That's what I'm going to show you today using the power of AutoRFP.AI and how you can use AI to automate up to 80% of your RFPs. My name is Rob from AutoRFP.AI. Let's jump into it. AutoRFP.AI, we're a software product leveraging the latest models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to automate our customers, whether that's technology companies, finance companies, healthcare businesses in 44 plus countries across the globe automating their RFPs. But, our goal is not just to automate, but to help them win. So, let's look at the RFP response market in 2025. We have our legacy RFP software players.

That's your Responsive.AIs, your Loopios, Qvidians, have been around for, you know, 10 plus years and really brought software to the RFP process in managing your subject matter experts and team members, project management, in having a question and answer bank, and using keyword search to automatically copy and paste answers from your content. Then, you have a lot of really new Silicon Valley based AI RFP software. It seems like every week there's a new AI RFP software. Probably no surprise to you watching this video. AI is a great use case for RFPs. There's a lot of new startups in the space. AutoRFP, we're actually in a nice position having launched 3 years ago before chat GPT released and building

our product since then with hundreds of customers all across the globe from Fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley tech unicorns using our software every day to automate the mundane. That is what an RFP is, isn't it? It's a bit mundane. What kind of challenges do businesses and team members have when they search for an RFP software? You might be spending like Amanda here, who is one of our customers before she picked up Order RFP, spending a lot of time just answering RFPs. That raw horsepower needed to complete thousands of questions across these large documents, whether it's Word documents, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, supplier portals like SAP Ariba. Amanda, actually their COO at that company, would spend an entire weekend

just answering an RFP. We've all been there. I have as well. Or you might be like one of our customers, Jason, before he picked up Order RFP, using a lot of time to maintain his legacy RFP software. He had this big content library of questions and answers and constantly was having to spend time just maintaining that, where he was now spending more time stuck in content nightmare land than actually answering RFPs. It was really challenging. Or you might be like one of our customers, Katie, before she picked up Order RFP, was spending a lot of time just trying to version control, wrangle subject matter experts to answer questions, and just the speed of collaboration and project management deadlines was really tough.

So, what AI workflow then automates this entire RFP process? First, people would upload their requirements, those RFP tender documents that you receive from your prospects in any format they come, whether that's PDF, Word, Excel, zip file. Upload all that relevant information into the system, and then it'll begin answering with AI those different responses in 40 plus different languages, whether you receive an RFP in German but write answers in English and have it translate back. It uses your data lake of content and AI to find the relevant information to then automate an RFP response to every single requirement and every single question. Then, once that's done, you have that

highly automated AI first draft, you get your team in there, project manage deadlines, ensure that there's proper oversight on responses from legal, security, pricing, commercials, whoever it is, they're engaging in the product and using it to collaborate and get that winning RFP response. You don't want to just automate, you want to win. And that's where Auto RFP really shines, because as you're writing those winning responses, it just gets better and better over time, constantly learning from your work. Awesome. Let's jump into the product. This is AutoRFP.ai. You can see I have all my different projects. I'm going to create a project. And here is my blank RFP documents. I've got a zip folder that contains three different documents in here. Really interesting what's happening right now is we're using Gemini Flash

2.5 to automatically answer any questions in relation to that document. So for instance, I want to know if data needs to be stored in specific geography and provided my answer there. So it's doing an AI go no go analysis. Then here we have our document. It's got multiple tabs in Excel spreadsheet. Automatically the AI has scanned the entire document and picked up every functional and non-functional requirement, everything that's relevant for my cover letter that I'm going to produce in my PDF. And then this appendix B has some information as well. Then we have our data lake of content in AutoRFP.ai. That might be your web pages, your integrations, 15 plus integrations that AutoRFP can pull in and sync automatically. And the AI is going to use specialized re-ranker models to then ensure that there's the

most relevant answer for that specific question. It's much better than just creating something in ChatGPT. I'm not going to do a translation today, but here I would translate if needed and I create my project. This is where we see the magic really happen. So we have our data lake of information, which is all our content from our business, the context, past RFP responses, and then we have the AI sourcing the relevant information, then the AI from that information drafts relevant answers, and we have multiple LLMs that then ensure that answer is the best it can be for that response in the entire context of our business and the entire context of the RFP. You can see that it's quickly answering those different RFPs. We can jump to different sections and see cool, RFP workflow, it's answered. Oh, there's a

few questions there that have a lower trust score. Let's jump into to understand why. So, that content there is relevant to the search query, but it's 7 months old. I want to make sure that a person reviews and actually submits a new answer for that. So, everything in my RFP workflow, I'm going to then assign George to be the editor for that response. George will be at receive a notification in Slack, in Microsoft Teams, or via email. George will be able to jump in, answer those, and then submit them for my review. So, that's how I collaborate seamlessly across OrderRFP.ai. Then, across my trust scores, I want to look down and find those that are still generating and any that are at lower trust scores, and again, further answer those questions and assign to different team members as relevant. We've got our drop-downs that are in the RFP were automatically assigned by the AI depending on the answer. Our

responses automatically generate and bring across tables, so I have my service level agreement, my SLA here, answered in a table and generated into the response. Images that you might have in your RFP response will also come through automatically with your content with the AI generating as well. I want to jump over to my project overview. I understand when this project is due, what the AI draft rate was, what my compliance levels are, who is involved in this RFP process, how many do they have to review, do I need to send any reminders? If I want to add any attachments to include in my submission. So, I'm going to uh include my ROI report, my integrating with Notion doc, and all the different information that I want to include in that submission, I can do so. Then I have my AI assistant. So, in

answering these responses, I can prompt and write custom prompts to improve that response. I can use my quick writing actions to fix up any spelling or grammar, check for inconsistencies, and so on. I can find and search with my AI semantic search to find any relevant content and use those answers as well. Then I can improve that response. Then in my comments, I can discuss with my team. Please review this specific part. So, then I can comment and collaborate with my team. Once I have my edited response from the AI, I can accept and see where those revisions are, and quickly accept that new response. I have a full audit trail of any AI actions as well as people actions over my responses. I can restore to previous versions. So, you never have a collaboration and versioning issue.

Everyone, multiple people at once, are working in OrderRFP. And then what I think's one of the coolest things is the AI assistant. With the relevant content and context, I can just chat to the AI regarding my business, regarding this RFP, regarding these requirements, and it can provide answers to help me improve my responses as I work through the RFP. Next, I'm going to approve all my responses because this one is ready to submit. So, now all I have to do is export that RFP. Now, all I have to do is export that RFP. So, I click export all and the power of AutoRFP and the AI involved here, I'm not fiddling around with those original source documents, inserting or copy and pasting answers. Instead, it is

automatically populating those answers in there. We've downloaded our files in those original format with AI having answered and automated our RFP process. I'm going to jump into We have two things here. We've got our customer files, which are the original documents that required answers, and we can jump in here and see all those answers and where they've gone. So, across my multiple tabs, we have all of my responses and the drop-down that's come through for every one of those responses with me not having to do a single thing, and then I'm ready to submit that Excel spreadsheet with those requirements. I've got my docx as well with the relevant information filled out, and one of the coolest thing is I have my cover letter or my proposal that I can include in that pro- process, and this includes all

relevant information and additional information on my RFP response. So, my export template that I created in Word doc and uploaded to AutoRFP as a template, the AI has then automatically generated answers and responses for my executive summary, for my transmittal letter, and for everything that I want to upload additionally, whether it's a solution overview, whether it's more information about our AI security and privacy, and all that information has come through, and the AI has filled this out. For instance, there's my SLA table that we saw the AI generate earlier, and it's filled that information out ready for me to then submit and add, includes any images like reviews across Gartner, and all that information has come through ready to export to the customer. And that's the end-to-end workflow of

AutoRFP.ai, from uploading my blank RFP, leveraging my data lake of organizational context and past RFP answers, for the AI then to automatically generate and respond to and automate the RFP process, to collaborating with team members across the entire RFP process, and then exporting to the original customer format and submitting my RFP. There's one really important thing I want to make sure to convey when you're thinking about AI and RFP software. And that is what might be the boring, but incredibly important security, privacy, and transparency. At AutoRFP.ai, we pride ourselves on getting security, privacy, and transparency right from day one.

Our customers, as I mentioned, in over 44 plus countries, hundreds of businesses from Fortune 500 to Silicon Valley unicorns using AutoRFP daily, have global hosting options across the US, across Europe in Germany, and in Australia for APAC. Everywhere we have global offices, an office in Vancouver, in Stockholm in Sweden, in Brisbane, Australia, providing 24 six support across the globe. There is zero training, and I want to make sure this is absolutely clear, zero training on customer data for models. We are not sending any customer data back to the OpenAIs, the Anthropic's, or the Google's of the world. Your data, customer data, is your data. The outputs that the AI generates is clearly stated

in our service agreement that those are your outputs. You control this data. It's not AutoRFP. We're not secretly building some sort of AI model ourselves for based off customer data. We're not secretly trying to hurt our customers in the long term. We build for our customers. AutoRFP is a bootstrap company, profitable, growing 15% month-on-month, headcount doubling every six months across the demand we have for our solution, and we build it for you, for our for our customers. We don't build it for venture capital to one day uh try to sell the company. We don't build it for private equity that are trying to lay off and you know, squeeze every penny from the business. We do it for our customers. That's why we built. And you can find out all that

information in our trust center and our legal center as well. If you're interested in jumping on long and learning more about AutoRFP.ai, head over to our website. We've got a lot of information there about the business, uh the product, about our pricing as well. Uh you've got our annual plans across scale, accelerate, and enterprise. We have customers with as little as 24 projects a year, so 24 RFPs a year, to as much as over 1,000 RFPs done every year. The scale uh all the way in between. You can book a demo and spend time with our team, and they can provide a much more uh You can spend time with our team, and they can provide You can spend with time with our team, and they can provide a much more detailed breakdown and a customized demo for you and your business about AutoRFP. So, head over to AutoRFP.ai today and learn more about it. Thanks. See you.

So, head over to AutoRFP today. That I'm Rob from AutoRFP.ai, and we just covered off AI and how to automate your RFP process with AutoRFP.ai.

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Have you ever wanted to use Claude to create your own custom word documents for sales proposals, RFIs, or other documents that you want to send to your prospects? I want to show you exactly how you can achieve this using Claude's brand new Claude skills. We're going to be creating a proposal just like this, completely AI generated, formatted to how exactly we want it, all based on the prospect's customer insights, so in relation to what they've told you in the sales proposal, their website, your website, and everything else you may want to include in this custom proposal for your prospect using AI. Let's jump into it. First, you can download this prompt and find it from the link in the description below, but this prompt is what we're going to be putting into our Claude project instructions to then be the basis of our document. So, you can see in this document in this prompt it has

the purpose, provides Claude with a role, and then a workflow to identify things like data sources. Here, if you've plugged in various MCPs, which are model contact protocol, or effectively integrations for AI into your other software, you can then have it talk to those tools to get relevant data. So, we use Grain for all our call recordings internally, but if you use something like Gong or other call recording software like Fathom, if they have an MCP available, you can connect it to Claude and have it then talk to that software for relevant discussions you've already had with your prospect for the sales proposal. So, first it identifies data sources. It also could be information from your CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, and then it's going to research the prospect company. So, it might ask you for the prospect's website if it can't find it in the relevant information you've already provided, and it's going to look for relevant information about that prospect. It's then going to look at relevant case studies. A great proposal always talks about your customers and what they can achieve with your tool or

solution for the prospect that is relevant to that prospect. So, it's going to look for relevant case studies on your website. You can obviously provide it other information if you want if you It's not on your website, but it's going to look for case studies to understand your solution better. Then it'll look for current state information. So, this might be going through the call recordings and effectively looking for information about how the prospect currently works on there It's going to look for information on current state. So, that is how the prospect already solves the problem themselves. They might be an incumbent software or other solution they're using like an agency or something like that as well. Might be or they might be doing something a lot more manual. But effectively, hopefully through discovery and demonstrations and discussions you've had with the prospect, you would have a really solid understanding of their current state and that's what you're going to have here. So, that's step four. Step five, generate the proposal document. This is really cool. So, effectively skills you can either create your own custom skills or Anthropic have uploaded kind of base

skills to everyone's desktop instances. This is going to use the create skill that would already be in your instance especially on a paid plan. And then it's going to use that to create a which you can see here I've uploaded to Google Docs the finished thing, but you can upload it to Microsoft Word or any other kind of document editor as you see fit. It's going to look for consistent styling. Now, of course, you can go in and customize this prompt and or get AI I customize this prompt and have the styling be more specific to how you might do proposals. I've done it to how which is where I'm from does proposals. Then it's going to break that down and kind of present the finished document all AI generated to me that is really relevant to my company and relevant to the prospect and our solution for the prospect in the proposal. Then it will ask you additional questions have that if it can't find that information through the tooling and it will ask itself those questions to help kind of base it off of the document. Now, this is really cool. So, what kind of document is it actually going to create? So, we've looked at the steps that Claude will do to create the

document, but what is the document? And here, of course, you can go through and customize this prompt to make them all relevant for your proposals, but I've done something where it creates a cover page with relevant information, so that's what you can see here. I prepared by Where Software. It then does an executive summary. It creates a more information about understanding the prospect's business. You can see here, I've done Meridian Infrastructure Partners, which is just a made-up company for the example, but of course, this would be relevant for your prospect. Then it looks at current challenges. So, this is really cool. So, this would look at, for instance, call recordings or notes in your CRM or anything that you provided about the prospect's current challenges, and will weave that into the proposal to make it really relevant to the prospect. So, proposal cycle times and all these other kind of things that are relevant for this prospect in terms of their current challenges. And then here, you can see it's mentioned a number of stakeholders. So, Claude also then identifies and I've So, then Claude identifies some decision-makers and

mentions them in the proposal because they're who could be decision-maker, champion, economic buyer, exact sponsor, kind of different people in the sales process that you've talked to, and it's going to mention from those discussions and make that proposal very personalized and relevant for that prospect and whoever might be reading it. We also use in the prompt a good prompting technique, which is kind of Also, in our prompt, we use some prompt engineering skills. For instance, examples of good and bad, which the LM then understands better context around what kind of output it's trying to produce. So, here we have example of some bad framing, which might come across as like condescending to the prospect. You want to avoid that in our sales proposal. And then what good framing is. So, you can again update this prompt to make more relevant for your company, but it's a really good kind of starting point. Then you have challenge. Now we go to solution overview. So this is really cool. Based on your company and what Claude understands from your business and your solution, of course you can provide it more details, it's going to build out a solution overview and how your solution

is addressing those challenges for the prospect. And then finally kind of finish off with why why your company. What it's going to do there in the why company is it's going to look at kind of what your what the prospect is currently doing verse your solution and where the difference is and where the benefits are. Really powerful stuff. Then any relevant success stories and then look at implementation methodology, timeline, the team that'll be working with them. Then you kind of see it goes through and generates all these things in again in really nice formatting to my brand voice, colors, tone, and then generates that and provides a final output as well with the commercials and pricing. Of course you can provide things like a uh Notion or Google Drive link or PDF in your project that includes your pricing table and then kind of stand better in pricing. Or you can ask it to skip pricing and leave that for the rep to fill out. And then you can see there ROI and further information. So next step from here is you grab the prompt

then go to Claude desktop and this this is web browser we can do it in Claude desktop. Jump into your instructions and then paste the prompt in there. Also make any changes to the prompt that you would like. I've called out a couple of different things that you can make different I've called out a couple of ways you can customize this to make it more relevant for your business. First, you can add additional files. So I called out a pricing schedule. You could upload your case studies here as a PDF if you want and just add additional files as you would like that are relevant to what you would expect an AI to use to generate proposals. Could be a solution overview. It could be common pain points. Could be information about personas, industry analysis on the certain prospects industries that you sell to. So that's all going to be in your files. Then in your instructions, you can have Claude edit this prompt for you or you can edit it yourself and say, "Hey, when looking at case studies, look at this file." And so that way when the LLM goes to use these project instructions, it's going to know exactly what context it has to use from your project files for the relevant parts of

its output, its response, in this case the sales proposal. Then you can see here in instructions we can add tools. So I mentioned your MCP integrations or other integrations you might have with Claude. You can click here and add additional connectors. You can see we have a lot in our account, but you can add additional connectors here or have it to you can use recent web web search. I always use extended thinking. It uses more tokens, but it's very valuable. And then you can click there and say and turn on other tools. So if you use Gong for your sales recordings and transcriptions and you have the MCP enabled in Claude and you want it to use the relevant calls that you have with that prospect to generate the proposal, great. Connect the MCP tool, talk call it out in the prompt, use to do this X and Y, and then it's going to use that really efficiently and productively. So when you go into then create a Word doc, I've I've done one here and you really don't have to use too much. You can be like, "Hey, can you create me a sales proposal for this custom for this prospect?" That might be if you if you have Claude connected to your CRM, it could be of the deal opportunity. It could be an email if it

has connections to your calendar or emails and figure out those people or you can provide a longer prompt with a lot more information. And then effectively goes through, uses the project instruction prompt, uses the relevant skill for creating the document, and then it's going to output and present you with a file that you can then download or add or open in Google Drive. And that will download as you can see it's a file and this is what you're going to have left. So I just covered off how you can use Claude desktop or Claude to create a sales proposal with a lot of different ways you can do this. If not just for your sales proposals, but if you're constantly doing RFIs that are pretty stock standard, you could use it to help with that. It really thrives where either you're expecting a lot of the same responses and you can give it past context or you want really customized proposals or RFIs where you have the data available to give it to Claude. It's not going to do well if you can't give it any context, it's going to be very bland, a very basic proposal. Whereas if you can give it

information that is relevant to that prospect, then that will make the proposal just that much better. And of course, you can go through in a Word Doc or Google Google Doc and update it as you see fit. Thing I will mention, I've of course spoken about how you can use MTPs. Make sure you're on a paid plan with Claude and make sure you you have training turned off. Make sure you're working in line with your IT governance, that you're not accidentally sharing a bunch of prospect information and your customer data with an LLM and it's going into the model for training. So make sure that's all turned off and you're talking to your IT team if you have any questions about your specific use case. Awesome. Thanks. That's how you can use Claude skills to create sales proposals.

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Hey, I'm Rob from autoRFP.ai. What is autoRFP.ai? Well, autoRFP.ai is an AI software as a service or SaaS application that does AI for proposal or RFP responses. That includes RFIs, like request for informations, includes due diligence questionnaires or DDQs, and includes security questionnaires. So, you can find all about us at autoRFP.ai. So, we're a technology company. We have offices all across the globe including Brisbane, Australia, Vancouver as well. And effectively, our tool allows, whether it be bid managers, sales people, proposal writers, RevOps team members, sales leadership, answer complicated request for proposals. So, what is a request for proposal? You can see one of our other videos below in the description. But effectively, our system

looks something like this. And it lets team members, and you can have unlimited number of people log in to autoRFP.ai, good product, allows people to go in, create projects, which would be for instance an RFP. I can go in here, create my information from my zip file, and that includes, you know, like an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc. We can run an AI go no go project analysis on the RFP. And then effectively from that, we can bring in all the information in terms of what are the questions, where our AI automatically scans the documents and figures out what is being asked of the RFP, whether it's multiple tabs in an Excel spreadsheet and everything else, whether it's drop-downs. And that all happens automatically through the power of AI. Then, we generate our response, and we can do it in in 40 plus different languages and adding languages all the time. Once you've imported your RFP into order rfp.ai,

you can collaborate with your team members assigning different people to answer the questions, review the questions, looking at an overview of the entire project and project managing due dates. Now AI effectively starts automatically answering those different questions based on your knowledge documentation. So that might be your website, your help docs, your technical documentation, your past RFP answers or security questionnaires, your security policies. But effectively all that different company information you import into order RFP and then our AI leverages that to create an AI first draft of an RFP response. Once we're happy with all those requests, we can approve it. That goes into the model to learn from and add to. So your current responses are automatically used for new responses and then you can export that as well. And then the final cool thing about order RFP is you have a lot of different

integrations that you can pull in, whether it's knowledge documentation from places like Notion, Google Drive and so on. So that's order RFP. We're an AI SaaS app. Uh you can host globally. We do not use customer data for training purposes or to send it back to LLMs. So we're secure and private. We have our ISO 2701 certificate and our SOC 2 certificate and then you can find up-to-date pricing and information on our website. Or if you came to learn more, you can book a demo and schedule time with our team. Thanks.