How to Write Tender Responses to Win More Bids (Step-by-Step)
Write better tender responses and win more bids. AutoRFP.ai streamlines teamwork, ensures compliance, and generates quality drafts from content.
Robert Dickson
RevOps Manager, AutoRFP.ai··9 min read
A good tender response makes evaluators feel two things fast: you understand the problem, and you are a safe choice. A bad one forces them to dig for answers, guess at value, and question whether delivery will be messy.
Even strong teams can lose when the response does not read like a confident, customer-focused solution.
In this guide, we will walk through how to write tender responses that score well, including templates, examples of what to do, and what to avoid.
We will also cover how to track performance over time and where automation can speed up drafting and consistency, plus how to choose the right tender response automation tools.
What Is a Tender Response?
A tender response is a formal document a supplier submits to compete for a contract. It explains how the supplier will meet the buyer’s requirements, along with pricing, delivery details, qualifications, and compliance information.
It is usually written by bid managers, proposal managers, sales teams, subject matter experts, or operations and finance teams, depending on how complex the bid is.
You’ll usually see tender responses in sectors where buying is more structured and regulated, such as government procurement, construction, IT, marketing, managed investment funds, insurance firms, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and large enterprise purchasing.
Types of Tender Responses
There are several types of tender response, and they usually depend on what the buyer is asking for and how formal the procurement process is. Common types include:
| Type of tender response | When it’s used |
|---|---|
| RFP response | Used when the buyer wants more than a price. They want to understand your solution, methodology, experience, pricing, and overall value. |
| RFQ response | Used when the requirement is already clear and the buyer mainly wants pricing for a product or service. |
| ITT response | A formal invitation to bid, usually with strict instructions, compliance requirements, and supporting documents. |
How to Write a Winning Tender Response: Step by Step
Writing a strong tender response is easier when you break it into clear stages. Here’s how to approach it step by step:
Step 1: Qualify The Opportunity (Go/No-Go)
Winning starts with choosing the right bids, because volume without selectivity creates burnout and weak outcomes. AutoRFP.ai’s Proposal Win Rate Report 2026 found that 71% of high-win teams have a Go/No-Go qualification step, showing that strong bid selection is part of a more disciplined process.
Confirm fit: Scope, budget, timeline, delivery capability, and mandatory requirements.
Identify deal risks: Unclear specs, unrealistic timelines, contractual constraints, or weak access to stakeholders.
Define win conditions: What must be true for you to bid confidently.
You can also use an AI with go/no-go prompts to run the qualification, which can save plenty of time compared to doing it manually.
This video shows how to qualify tenders using a stronger Go/No-Go process, with AI helping teams assess fit, risks, win probability, and bid effort before deciding to proceed.
Video transcript
Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.
starting topic today, all about go, no go. So, yeah, we're both really keen to jump into it and as we go, if you're not aware, we're So, Jasper and I from AutoRFP.ai, as the name would suggest, we're an AI RFP software. I know we've got quite a lot of customers on the call today. We've also got some non-customers. Yeah, as it says on the housekeeping slide there, our goal today is really you walk away with something actionable. Yes, we'll be showing some AutoRFP near the end, but Jasper's going to dive really deep into a lot around calculating your Pwin, cost of an RFP, to incorporate that into your go, no go. Uh and then I'll be covering off quite a lot in regards to Claude and everything else, but I'll get to that in a sec. So, everything that we put in today, so whether it's like URLs, prompts that we're sharing, that will also be included in the email as well, as well as the recording. So, if you need to duck off early, no problem. Please do. We've all got work and so, you'll get an email probably like a couple of hours after the webinar today with the recording and all the materials.
Any questions, please do put through the chat Q&A. I'll try to figure out to hopefully get the chat working. I'd love to chat to everyone as we go, but of course, feel free to throw it in the Q&A and I'll get to touch on those as we go or we'll have a dedicated space at the end to to go through the Q&A as well. Awesome. Today's agenda. I'll be going a little bit in regards to definitions and learning starting from the basics of go, no go or bid, no bid or all the different names it may go under. Jasper's going to go into, like I mentioned, really talking about calculating the cost of an RFP and taking that into account with regards to your go, no go. Really solid stuff there. Have an example framework which will he'll share and everything else. I'll be using some AI tools, so Gemini and Claude. So, effectively how you can use AI for go, no go without AutoRFP. Or if you do use AutoRFP and you want to go that little bit further as well, although there's obviously a lot you can do with our platform. You know how to use those as well. So then Jasper will be covering
auto RFP, how to use project analyzer feature and go no go there. We've made some recent changes, that's really cool. And then at the end we'll have that Q&A as well for everything that we may not get to as we go through. Awesome. All righty. Hey, so one of the cool things that we did recently was the proposal win rate report. We did that with the Stargazy community which is an online bid community run by Chris Carter who I think might be on the call today. Um, if you're bid management, I recommend joining. It's a cool it's a good community. Lots of really helpful stuff there. Jasper and I are both active as well. But what we did together with the Stargazy community is we surveyed over a hundred proposal managers, bid writers, RFP teams and crunched the numbers about some of the things that winning bid teams or bid teams in general do. And of course some of the questions were about go no go. What we found interesting is 71% of all teams have a go no go qualification.
They're actually between the a high win team, so a team that won more than 50% of their bids, and team that won less than like 10% of their bids, both had go no gos. So there's actually no difference in who you did no go. A lot of it came down to review and governance and automation. So 65% of high win teams have a formal review and governance with regards to their process including go no go. So what we're going to go show today is yes, it's kind of like different tiers to go no go that you can incorporate in your workflows in relation to your complexity of bids, uh the cost of bids and everything else as well. Probably no surprise to everyone is something else the data showed was that teams with a high bid workload win less. So there's actually this great graph within the report and of course I'll share the report as soon as I get the chat working. but you'll get an email afterwards as well with it. But effectively, so less FTE to bid ratio, winning less. And then, high win teams yeah, consistently at higher automation,
systematic customer insight, and a strong governance and go no go with that as well. So, we're going to be covering one part of that. But, I'll throw it to Jasper to cover the next kind of portion. >> Cool. So, I guess yeah, an interesting thing is like AI was built for go no go. Someone say even more than RFP response, like AI has this ability to summarize at extremely high performance levels across insane amounts of documents. Probably as everyone knows, right? But, I think AI allows you to finally say no to more because of a few things, right? So, not only can it do that analysis, but it can do it so quickly that when someone runs to you with a bid and goes, "No, this is due in a week." You don't have to start going, "Oh, we need to do the go no go process first, and that takes 2 days, and we need to go through all 247 pages." You can actually run one in minutes and find red flags immediately, so you don't even need to have the conversation in the first place. So, that's a pretty big game changer, just reducing it from 2 days to have an initial result in a few minutes. Really sad one, but we've found it to be true
is that the results come from a third party. God forbid the bid manager knows what the win rate might be, or that this is a serious red flag we've seen a hundred times. But, just the fact that it's generated by AI has this third party, "It's not me, it's the AI." effect and halo around it, which makes it easier for some people that want to say yes and donate their nights and weekends. It makes it easier for you to say no. And then, the experience of having better than human performance as well, right? So, it can find needles in haystacks and do rationalization and do things that only SMEs could pick out really if they were doing the go no go. From really niche security or environmental governance requirements that you might not fully understand on first glance, it's able to pull those things out immediately without having your SMEs go through every single bid that you look at, and it's able to pull that red flag up for you. So, it finally lets you say no, and then that's of course good. To make it clear for everyone, no is a very good thing. It saves organizations tens, hundreds,
millions of dollars in costs. It protects your team's morale and culture as well. It's There's nothing worse than having a low win rate and going back to back on lost bids and oh, sorry, and hey, can we jump on a call to debrief? No one wants that. You just want to be winning back to back. That this process helps shield your team from that morale that can cause a negative spiral. And then of course, the time that you're investing in those opportunities that you should have said no to, that actually degrades your ability to win the ones that you said go to. So, yeah. Highlight for anyone that's not currently having this process to definitely invest in it. But, I wanted to jump into go no go from the CFO seats. So, a lot of the time we just think about it as a softer framework where hey, let's fill out this form, let's get some numbers, and let's do it that way. But, I thought let's pull it all the way back to first principles as an investment as an organization even. What makes sense to bid on? What doesn't make sense to bid on if we're just talking numbers? So, there's a few numbers here that are super important to understand going into an RFP. One is the
total contract value, right? This should be somewhere in the document. You should be able to calculate the price. They should maybe have the terms that they're open to. Maybe it's 3 years, 5,000 users, great. Then you can use that to forecast what the pricing range might be. The gross margin. So, actually how much profit there would be in this particular contract. A lot of that it can be assumed. So, you might talk to your finance team and say, "Hey, what is the average gross margin on an opportunity like these that we've worked on? Can you give me a ballpark to start?" But, different things will impact the gross margin. Maybe you offer implementation or professional services for free. Those have a real cost, but if you're going to have to provide those for some customers and not for others, that is going to impact the gross margin and how profitable one RFP would be should you win it versus another. So, those are the two things that may sit a little bit outside of the bid function, not something you necessarily have control over, but something is really good to understand you'll need in your calculations if you want to put
your CFO hat on and do the go no-go process. The next ones are purely owned by the proposal team in my mind, which is that probability of win. So, how likely you to actually win this opportunity with a non-biased approach, how accurate can you get that percentage of win, what elements fall into that, what have you learned over time. It's a hard thing to nail. You start in ballparks and then start to optimize that over time to get more and more accurate. Uh and then the cost of the bid as well. I think even a high-level idea of how much you spend on a bid is an insane tool for leverage in saying no to something. But, if you can start to understand the cost of one bid versus another because they are very different a lot of the time. Sometimes orders of magnitude for double the contract price or sometimes the smaller contracts take way more time than than even some of the largest. So, have that cost of bid and have a methodology for that is is really useful as well. So, those are the four numbers. And
basically a CFO would ask themselves, will this bid make me more money than the other things I could do with that same investment? To talk really macro, they could just spend that money on ads, right? And get a certain amount of leads to the business. That might be a way to do it. They might be able to buy a certain amount of sales development reps to hammer the phones and look for opportunities that way. There's a lot of different ways to spend money in the business. So, being an effective use of that money is awesome. It's going to be awesome for your career. It's going to be awesome for your team. It's going to give you the reinvestment and the resources you need to go far and basically be a winner. And the calculation is, let's take the contract value, great, so we've got that, it's a big contract, amazing. Then what is the actual margin? Like how much money we're actually going to make on that contract as far as the margin, the profitability, and what is our actual probability of winning that? So we take that together and that gives us kind of the expected value of that. And then we take away what it actually costs to bid on that and then we get our expected value. So this is a calculation that the CFOs might run all the time for different things, but basically, yeah, is this a worthwhile investment at all?
It's like a mini business case nearly for that particular bid. So there's a classic one here as an example, like a million-dollar trap, right? Which is salesperson runs over, oh my god, we have a $2 million contract opportunity, it's crazy, the CRO's excited, everyone's super excited, and we do have a chance, we do have a real chance. Even if it's 15% it's worth bidding on. Um and it would be a great logo, blah blah blah. But here, looking at the math, we've got a $2 million contract, we've only got a 40% profit margin, and we have a 15% opportunity to win. It's going to cost us $120,000 once we factor all of the labor from the implementation team, through our SMEs, through our security review, our external lawyers, and the process of answering 800 of their different requirements and customizing the solution for them in that proposal to even have a chance to have that 15%. And we can effectively see that the expected value of this particular contract is actually $0. So there's no
point in doing this $2 million opportunity, but as like crazy as that sounds, that's the math, right? Whereas at the same time that someone's bringing that to your desk, you might have something else, like a $400,000 contract with a 55% margin, so only slightly more, and only a slightly higher win rate at 20%. But the big difference here being that you may have already completed an RFP like this in the past. It's very similar. You can expect a high automation rate maybe from the tool that you use because of that. You've done a very one that's recent. This is amazing because your expected value is huge now because your cost of actually going into that bid is so much lower. So, you find really weird opportunities where it's actually because of that number, the gross margin being high or the probability of win being very high or maybe the cost being pretty high as well. You get these interesting combinations where the expected value is actually higher than you think or you get the exact opposite where the expected value is actually lower than you think. So, to think in these terms is very interesting in a go no go and
it's the type of language that people can understand as well outside of like our softer like we're in the debating club. Oh, but they have this requirement. Oh, but they have this and we don't have that and last time we did why? This really brings the conversation down to the math level and they can start to see the factors at play. So, I think that's really powerful. Now, you know, a lot of people in in in AI is about doing like is doing about doing it faster which means you can do more and that is great. That is like a fundamental piece of this maths, but if your probability of win is not great, if the gross margins on the contracts you're going after is not good, if the contract value doesn't make sense and your cost of bid is still super high, that is going to be bad and much like closing a lot of bad deals, that's actually bad for your business, right? So, not all it's you get the right to increase the number of bids once you have a solid process down and a good expected value on those bids. And basically, your total return as maybe a bid team as an RFP team is the total expected value
that you can put out in a month, in a year, in a quarter and how you can grow that over time. So, really you want to think about how can we decrease the cost of bids? Sometimes there's really easy solves there. We'll talk about go no go today. Maybe that can save you a bunch of time and therefore resources that you can reinvest and then you can reinvest that maybe in your probability to win. What are the things you could be doing that you're not now that you know would increase it further customer research and insights and other things from the win rate report. And then, great. Once we've got that nailed down, then yeah, how can you increase the number of bids, right? You've got a machine that works, then scale it. And that's what I see as a lot of the fundamental values that a great bid team knows and can drive to drive their total expected value and that's how we turn the bid and RFP proposal function from what is seen as a cost basis big cost generator because yeah, you're basically just like spending a bunch of money and then trying for stuff to oh, this is how revenue generation works. I can invest in this maybe like I invest in ads. Oh, and you can tell that ads get get a ton
of investment, right? And that's because there's just certainty is built around the metrics and the numbers that go into it. Let's talk about probability of win. A lot of people will already know about this, but just to kind of recap different example criteria you might consider when building a probability of win model is one of the big things is strategic fit, right? What are the key pain points of that customer? What are they actually looking to solve and how do you map against those? Do they have a certain geography, industry, size and how do you fit in there? Do you not work with German customers at all because of some data laws? Do you specifically do very well in California because you've got your office space there? These are all high-level considerations that are super important, sometimes complete critical do no go elements. Legal fit is a lesser one I would say, but in certain areas you want to look at things like the required warranties, the caps that are required. There are a lot of times what people leave to the very end is the legal stuff and that's really the kicker. There is some stuff that they're solid on that they say you do
one thing wrong in this contract and we will send your company insolvent with a lawsuit that will send you after that and that just can't be done by most companies. So, those are things to to look into immediately. Compliance, right? Do you meet the regulations, mandatory internal policies, the service fit, service levels, professional services required, the commercials, of course, making sure that the expected margins are good enough to warrant your bid and they're working on the desired pricing model that you can operate on against your competitors effectively. And then the technical fit, of course, is there integrations, is there certifications that are mandatory. Now, this is a lot of stuff. Like this can This is a lot of work to do properly. We see people have very simple don't know go frameworks, which are a great foundation. You need one, for sure. Five questions gives you a high-level thing, gets you if like 80/20 for some, they're able to get a lot of the value. But for those that are rock solid, they really are going into all of these different areas, qualified across them all, and finding the red flag maybe just in one of these sub areas, and being able to drag that right up to the front of the
procurement and go, "Hey, wait to bid on this interested party, we would need this legal thing to be changed. Great, we're not even starting the RFP process until that can be confirmed from your legal team." Saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars in bid time per year. And then the types of criteria that that we generally think about is like the binary, so the non-negotiables. What are just the things you cannot and will not do under any circumstance. So, that's one class, and the other class would be the weighted uh category, which is where you're maybe doing something like assigning a percentage, or what I like more so is like raw scores to things and saying, "Great, for opportunities above 90% fit or above an 80% fit, we're going to go ahead with those." Or what I prefer, which is things above 1,000 score to 256 score, whatever that range is out to, to know that you proceed. So, basically, cool, does it pass all the non-negotiables? Great, then we can even consider moving along. And then on top of that, does our score add up to
something that is above our threshold in order to proceed? So, that's our probability of win. And not only we're not just doing the go no go there, right? We're just working towards are we doing this at all or is it an absolute no based on the binary or the very low score? So, even on probability of win in general, like it's just too low to even consider the opportunity. If we're above that threshold, then we're actually trying to calculate the probability of win. So, we can go 60% great, that's awesome. Or maybe a 70%, like how can you start to dial in and figure out what those margins might be? What separates like something where it's basically in the bag to something that is a coin toss, one you're willing to play. Cool. And then the cost of bid. There's always the writing time, right? So, you're considering how much of my hours is this going to take to do the information gathering, the drafting, the editing, and that's the most straightforward part of calculating the cost. But there's so many other elements that you need to consider that a CFO would, right? Which is the costs of the management time. So, is there kickoff meetings? Is there communications? Are
you pulling executives into those? What kind of level of people you can have people's people in an organization whose time is worth at least a thousand dollars an hour sometimes being pulled into the largest opportunities. So, this can be excessively increase the costs. The review time. What kind of subject matter experts do you need? For example, like if you've got you know, I'll give you another example, if you've got an AI engineer of some sort and they need to review some of this, like that could be a serious material cost because their opportunity cost of what else they could be working on just brings so much value to the organization. So, you think about those different subject matter experts and how much their time costs. Solutioning, right? Is there is it custom? Do we need those SMEs involved not just to review, but actually to build something out custom? Do we know the kind of cost range involved with that versus what they could be working on, right? So, some of our customers in like professional services, they could just bill out that same person that's going to build the scope of work for free on this opportunity that they could bill out to a real customer to basically
do the same thing. The legal element, right? So, the costs of that, if they if you have to rely on external parties or the specialist lawyers in some cases, that can get very expensive very quickly. So, having an understanding of the documents that have been provided, can they just sign your standard contract? So, that can basically be zero or do they need their own terms? Maybe times that by the number of pages and just start to get rough ballpark ideas of what these costs are. And then planning, right? So, implementation, product road maps, other elements like that. So, you might look at a security review component and say, "Great, we take the number of requirements that are to do with security, we times that by an average of 8 minutes per security questionnaire per question, and then times that by the opportunity cost." So, let's say $150. So, for 80 questions on this particular bid, the security review component is $1,000. And that's one of our many inputs, which makes up our total cost of bid, right?
So, here we've got all of those calculated out, the writing time, the management time, review time, solutioning, and you can see it really starts to stack to the point where maybe you thought this was like a $10,000 bid roughly and now it's like $24,900, which is going to materially impact those types of calculations. So, cool. We've gone through how to get all of those four. And I'll just start with some light examples of what you might ask to ascertain this information immediately. So, one is super easy, contract value. Just like, "What is the contract value and the methodology to calculate that?" You should have that down pat or someone in your team should be able to give you something for a ballpark. The gross margin, can we reach out to the team on that? And also, what are the elements? Maybe ask your finance team, "What are the elements that would impact the profit margin of a particular customer, and they might be able to tell you some of those aspects. You might ask some questions around that. And then, the probability of win. So, that's really where you get into all of the different types of questions you can ask. We have a template which has all of
the very generic and standard ones that we have observed, but these are usually down to the company and really something only a bid team can really know for sure. So, you really need to take ownership for that, understand the trends, and what influences that probability of win. But here, is this with our ideal Does this customer meet our ideal customer profile? Are there mandatory certifications? Does there need to be custom development? What are your strong suits and what are the weak points? And then, ask all the questions around that. And then, the cost of bid, right? So, go get those different elements that they require. Standard contract, how many requirements are there? What is the estimated word count? Will this require us to do X? And then, bring all of those elements. So, this is quite a lot of questions, right? If you were to hand this over to like a junior business analyst and give them this job, it would really be quite something. But luckily, we're handing this job over to AI, at least in the first instance, to be able to run through hundreds of pages and check it across all of these different criteria. So, it makes a whole new level of a go no-go process actually feasible.
So, we find that even some of the smallest businesses are able to achieve better go no-go processes than the largest Fortune 500s on Earth, just because of that. So, we do a lot, of course, around AI models. So, when we work with our models, we work probably like you, agnostically. So, we will switch from Gemini to Claude to GPT, all in the course of a day, it seems, these days. But when we're talking about go no-go, there's some important things to factor in for the actual model you use. Um because it's quite a different use case to your day-to-day chatbot, or even the writing component of the RFP process. So, just want to break down some of the more technical speak, but what you're looking for in these models and what benchmarks actually mean something for this use case. So, one is the context window. This is really important in certain industries in particular, but the context windows of a lot of the state of the art models are actually very small. What that means is how much can it actually see at once?
So, in the RFP game, we need a lot of content in there. We need all of the customers appendices, we need all of the invitation to respond, we need the Excel matrices, we need the word doc form fill out, we need everything in one place. And potentially even context about the customer at a higher level like where they're based, their employees, about us page, etc., etc. So, you can see the models here, some of the state of the art and like leading ones right are like your Claude Opus models. With a good amount of information per page, you can end up only fitting 93 pages into that model's window. Where Google apparently runs the state of the art and the highest level of performance in the large context sense, so they're up at 466 pages of yeah, detailed information. They're able to load huge amounts of data into that model and it can see all of that context at once. And why it's important to see that at once is so that it doesn't do this. So, if
you use Claude or ChatGPT a lot, you'll have this compacting kind of situation where it has the context and then it compacts it, which is basically writing a summary and then putting the summary in. So, it can miss correlations, it can miss things that you would miss if you would just have a summary of part of the document and then the rest maybe you can't make the correlation required to answer what the contract value is or to answer how big the implementation is and what that's going to require. So, context window is it was a huge limitation until Gemini, the Google team, stepped up to to really take care of that. Although, it's still possible in these smaller models to compact it and get the get the what you need, particularly if you're working on smaller amounts of documents or one document at a time. There's another aspect of it, which is the technical term for it is needle in a haystack recall. But basically, it's how much attention to detail does the model have? Because as much as we put the documents into different models, like, "Wow, that's an amazing result." It will
miss things. Certain models will miss things a lot more than others. Now, all have in profit impressive performance when you look at them because that's the benchmark. That's what it's all centered around is looking plausible, but you know, whether or not it is actually correct and it's completed the entire document is another question, right? So, you don't want to miss things in the go no go process. And that's why this needle in the haystack part is important. This is basically a benchmark they run where they can upload an entire book, for example, and then put in a very specific word or term or sentence and then ask it a question based on that book. And certain models are able to pull out on page 248, there was this phrase. And other models miss it completely as if it wasn't in the document at all. So, that's really important, of course, for this use case. So, again, the Gemini models from Google do extremely well on this, but also the Claude and GPT models, I believe, are nearly up to the stage of the Gemini models on this. So, they don't miss as much as they used to. There used to be quite quite a large gap. So, here you can see the older Gemini 1.5 model
benchmark. It would, yeah, find the needle placed in all of these different places and it missed the needle in the haystack very few times across a thousand a million tokens, which is a huge amount of information. Yeah, 500 or so very detailed pages or potentially thousands of lesser detailed pages. Whereas, the GPT-4 model turbo at that in that case couldn't you actually couldn't upload that much content even to start with. So, yeah, that's another aspect. And then reasoning. So, when you hear about new models and new benchmarks and which one's the best, most people are just talking about reasoning, which is basically its level of like intellect, right? Is it able to reason? And that is important, but it's not probably the most important thing for this use case. Just because in this case, the answers a lot of the time, for a lot of use cases, are just like stated in fact. They're just somewhere in the document and they just need to be found and then summarized. They don't really need to be connected. We don't need to think about it too much at a super big level of detail. Certain products, certain services, you might
need this if you're doing custom solutioning, but if you're selling, say, a software as a service platform out of the box or you're selling a you're doing DDQs for like asset management firm, you're selling financial products, a lot of the time you're going to be able to find that immediately. You're going to pick that needle out of the haystack and present that as the answer for the go no go process. You're not going to need all this reasoning. And if you do need reasoning, that's also not really where you'd want to rely on a model to do this particular part, I would say, just yet. Yeah, but that's the three aspects of the models. But I'll hand over to you, Rob, to step us through a Gemini example of how you can use that tool for go no go. >> Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Jasper. And apologies, everyone, regarding the chat. I had a deep into it and there was a setting on our Zoom account. I think it's a new setting Zoom added in, which disabled chats and I wasn't I'm not able to re-enable it for this webinar, but going forward, I've configured the setting. Always love when a software adds something new and make things change compared to last time you did a webinar, which is
always fun. Cool. So, I'm going to go into Gemini first using AI for go no go and then go into go into Claude. And yeah, really interesting stuff from Jasper just then about things like context window or token limit. Uh cuz we want to take that into account and that's where Gemini Pro 3.0 and million plus or million tokens really valuable for that. It's a huge context window as Jasper just explained. And then Claude as well, generally it's coming off very strong with things like following instructions. So, I'm going to show a new agent framework called Agent Skills, partially new probably in the last 6 months, and show you that in regards to Claude and it's very good at yeah following task list. Of course, you use ChatGPT as well, but I just won't necessarily be covering that today as well. Perfect. Awesome. Hey, one thing we're going to share in the webinar, sorry, in the email afterwards is our kind of free to download template of a go no-go decision template. So, Excel spreadsheet
and it goes through quite a lot of those components that Jasper mentioned towards the start around team, like cost of bid, RFP fit, where it's technical fit, legal, compliance, everything else. And effectively, I'm using this spreadsheet or you could use a spreadsheet you create yourself. I know a lot of people already have their go no-go spreadsheets. And you can feed that to the AI model. So, in my example, I'm actually going to be sending this to Gemini and it's going to use my own scoring matrix see criteria in its go no-go AI analysis, which is really powerful stuff. And that's how you can again, I'll be sharing prompts and the spreadsheet and everything else in the email afterwards. But again, you can use the same models and the same logic for your own prompts, your own spreadsheet, and everything else as well. Or of course, you can take what we're providing and customize it further to your specific business. I really implore you implore you to do that. One, I know
a lot of people already do this, but one kind of hack when it comes to creating really great prompts for the models is again, use the AI to do it for you. So, when I'm using when I'm creating this prompt for Gemini, Gemini created that prompt for itself. Like I asked it I find I work with it to improve the prompt, but models themselves are very good at creating prompts for themselves. That's generally the kind of the thing. So, if you're creating a prompt Claude, use Claude and Gemini use Gemini. But, let's jump into it. So, I have my prompt here, which I'm copy and pasting just from the other side of my screen. I'm putting it into Gemini. Now, what I'm using as an example is Cursor. Those who might be familiar, Cursor is a cloud Oh, sorry. It's an IDE, which is a effectively a developer coding tool. It's also one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies for in the last couple of years. Really on the frontier of AI SaaS development and taking developers by
storm and and everything else. Why I'm using them as an example because a few months ago and I did a YouTube video on this is that the Australian Tax Office, or the ATO, brought out a tender on coding agents and so on. So, that's the kind of the example tender I'm going to use. So, I'm going to use a real company, obviously a company I don't work for. I'm with no affiliation with Cursor, but yeah, I'm going to just chuck in all those different tender documents that I found via the government tender. So, this is a good example of private company Cursor maybe maybe looking to bid on a public tender. And then so, we download those documents. Probably I haven't even scanned those documents just yet. Let's say I was running this process. But, on the public portal we're saying, "Oh, before I even get into it, I want to use AI to give me that cursory glance." And Jasmine touched on that throughout around. Cool. We can use AI for very quick and strong analysis, and then human can come in and check and and so on. So, in this example would be a public tender that I found, and before I
even like bring it to the rest of the team, let's run just like a bit of a go no go and give me an analysis of that tender before I start having to read the tens or hundreds of pages that we find. And then what I'm going to drag in is my go no go decision template. So that is that Excel spreadsheet. So I've got my prompt. I've got the tender documents, and I've got my go no go spreadsheet. And now I can ask Gemini 3.0 to do the work. I want to go on to I'll kick it on thinking actually, for I feel like it'll take actually too much time for today's webinar, but I can check and make sure things like when we're using the models, let's say you're using ChatGPT and using 5.2, make sure it's on the thinking mode. Using Claude, make sure extended thinking is on. In this example with Gemini, thinking is on. Effectively, you're telling it to use more thinking, like more grunt work to complete this task, which is really important for something as detailed as large amount of documents and go no go. So I click submit, and then that's going to go
through and do its analysis as if I was someone from Cursor. I haven't obviously provided it too much details regarding Cursor, but there's quite a lot on the webinar. So it's going to go through, and as you can see, evaluate the different documents and so on. So I can open in here, and we can see the AI's own reasoning, and it's going through and effectively following my prompt to now try and present the go no go. And from that, you can see here it's starting to come out again. Where the Gemini models are, they're also quite fast, which is great. And so we can see here, it's giving me the detailed analysis. Effectively, it's saying you're not going to go for this, which I actually agree. I don't really know too much about Cursor, but they generally they are selling to enterprise, but I don't think they want to get bogged down necessarily in Australian government implementation. So it's probably not as good strategic fit, which is one of the one of the components in the spreadsheet and one of the components just I spoke about. They're a US company with a US data residency. They're probably not going to
go for that. And you can see right here, technical non-functional requirements regarding data residency and hosting presents a significant barrier. The ATO managed solution must be hosted in Australian region not stored offshore. And then it matches that against the technical requirements. So before I've even read the tender documents, Gemini in what was that? Maybe like 20, 30 seconds has a analyzed that for me. And I can go, "Okay, great. We're not going to even invest time into this bid." And I can but I can chat to it. I can say, "Okay, you found this functional requirement. Whereabouts do you find it?" And it would provide that detail. But before I give that prompt to it and chat to it about the documents, I'm just going to read back through further. And you can see it's given me a tender analysis, budget, and kind of what is the potential contract value. It knows that the ATO go to tender must be $10,000 or more. You can see a big range. I'm hoping this is in the millions of dollars. Key dates. You can see this was from a little while ago. So that it's obviously passed by now. Hosting, data residency, integration points. It needs
to integrate with Visual Studio and so on. Cursor actually doesn't meet that requirement. Which I'm surprised it didn't necessarily come up here. Cursor is a fork of Visual Studio Code but not necessarily meet that requirement. So you again you want to cross-reference and check this as well. And it's given me an information security summary as well. So I can talk to it and say, "Hey, what page of the documents did you find this information?" And I can ask for a sources. And then it can provide that information to me and so on. And And this is that just the point about needle in a haystack. You can go back and go, "Okay, in that recall, where did I find that information?" And you can see here it's specifically in the hosting requirements, which is a requirement 3.101. Great. So look at the document, verify that. And then if the AE Listen, AE just sent this to you or a sales person just sent to you, like, "Oh, we need to bid on this government tender, you can be like, actually, in 3.01 it specifies mandatory hosting requirements that we do not we do not fit. So, it's not a technical fit, it's not a strategic fit, we're not going to bid on it.
And I've done all of that in less than 5 minutes. So, that's one way where AI in this example of no go can be really powerful. And again, you can ask it more information. In my YouTube video, I do go further into having it like specifically look at the spreadsheet and fill out the spreadsheet for me, or at least provide me a table within the chat window. So, you can also you can get really deep into it and continue that conversation with it. So, what I'm going to share with you after, as I mentioned, is the prompt I used, the go no go decision template, this Excel spreadsheet that we have. And then you can take that and go even further with it as well, as you would like. Cool. Next is Claude. Jasper already knows that >> 13 minutes, Rob, as well, so you might >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, Jasper already knows, Fabby, I am a bit of an Anthropic fanboy, but one thing that's really cool about Claude, and it's actually become an open framework across all of the different models, is agent skills. So, this is actually maintained by Anthropic, but you can read up on it,
agentskills.io, and effectively it's great way to specify how it's going to use it. So, I've already uploaded my skill for Claude, and this one is an RFP shredder skill. So, it's going to go through the RFP and find the relevant information for it. So, I've made a fake RFP here. It's a Japanese bank, and I'm a B2B I'm a B2B banking software, and I'll ask it, can you use the RFP shredder skill to analyze go no go for this RFP? And you'll notice that my prompt that's all my prompt is. This is not in a project or anything else. And effectively, you can see here that skill sits in the back end of Claude in this example and it has all its detailed prompts to do list reference materials in that skill. And it'll go through and reference that to then complete the task. So what a skill is good for is a task. Anyway, it's going to go through that, complete
that information and again, what I'll share afterwards in the email is a link to the skill, but I implore you again to customize that to your business's needs. But this is where a skill is really powerful. Now that's going to complete. I think we're all going to know details quickly, but I'm going to throw back to Jasper and let him cover off kind of the next parts of the webinar. Oh, Jasper, you're on mute, sorry. >> Awesome, thanks. Yeah, let that run in the background. Sometimes it can take quite a bit. So we'll jump into like how we're approaching this at AutoRFP and it might give you some inspiration for other tools, internal workflows, etc., but what we set up specifically is project analysis. And go no go is a part of the broader project analysis. I'm just going to focus on on on go no go today's webinar, of course, but what I've set up here is a quick example where I've broken down those different areas, cost of bid, contract value, gross margin, win probability and then assigned some
basic questions to each of those. And these are just basic examples to kind of get your head thinking through what that could look like. example, reference cost, right? Under the cost of bid. So what are the customer reference requirements and then estimate a cost of $1,000 per reference. So I'm estimating it's going to take about $1,000 worth of time of the account manager to reach out to them and so on and so forth in order to get a reference. So just take the number of references we need and estimate those at $1,000 each. Then the writing cost, let's estimate the total writing cost of $40 per requirement. So I've done some math previously and then said, "Okay, cool. looks about $40 based on our current labor spend and the amount of efficiency we're able to get from our platform, let's say." And then, for security, what are the number of security questions, and assume a cost of $60 per security-related requirement, blah blah blah. So, I've built this in as that section, and then I've got similar things for what is the contract value, and I can even give it like a calculation methodology for estimating the contract value. So, here,
for example, I've just said number of projects will inform the pricing, estimate the pricing assuming that XYZ. So, you put your own pricing model in there, and then it's able to calculate based off that. The gross margin, is there anything that will impact that? The win probability, right? We could do a lot of different things, but for example here, if they need SOC ISO 27001 and SOC 2 type 2, that's a great fit. That's where we're going to be really strong, so return 100. If there's another standard that's mandatory, give it a score of 20. If there's other standards mentioned, give it a score of 80. So, depending on if there's other mandatory ones, whether how we fit into that particular thing, we're returning scores on a 0 to 100 point scale for that requirement. And then you can see there's a lot of other ones as well, like where do they need their data hosted? Return a score between 0 and 100 based on that. Is there an appetite for AI in their RFP workflow? If it's not mentioned at all, then maybe that's not a good fit for us versus they're very serious about it as part of their core business case, and
that's where we're going to to do better. So, all of those are built in, and I guess a point around what Rob's waiting for at the moment is that analysis is we run that analysis then automatically on any opportunity that's uploaded. So, if they've got like a Salesforce integration, the AE comes in, they upload their documents, and then all of that runs in the background. So, that allows us to use the best and slowest models and methodologies over time that can take extremely long amounts of time to get the best results, but we're able to to do that because of this approach. When I log into Auto RFP, I'm going to have the intake already created in this case. So, sure, I could create one manually, come in and upload the tender files, and start the import process, and then I can run that project analysis in real time. So, this is going to look through and find the customer name, and then start to run those calculations that we were talking about. But, in a lot of cases, that's already run. So,
I've even got one here for the intake, where someone has submitted this to me. It's pending, and I jump straight in. I can see all of the requirements, so I can see that the vendor must provide a minimum three case study references. There's 10 functional requirements that need reviewing there or these different areas. There's the security component that's being calculated out, the contract value's being calculated out. All of these different elements are all good to go, and we can also see the confidence scores actually coming from the AI as well. It's really hard to validate sometimes whether that's true or not at a glance. Like we saw in Rob's example, like it says all of that, but that's great, but is that true? Like where is that? And you're asking, is this on this page? And then I'm opening up the doc and finding the page and such. But, this is all sourced and linked specifically back to verbatim text in the particular document. So, here I can see the source. It literally says in the RFP, "Vendors must supply a minimum of three client references." So, it's showing me that, and I think that verbatim quotes is the
best way to rely on AI to make sure that's actually in the document as stated, and you can trust it. As well as just being able to view the underlying documents easily. So, yeah, that's a really quick workflow, and yeah, you can see here the other project I've created is all spun up, and exact same results there, and we're able to export that as well. So, now I can take that out of the system directly in this kind of format and take that over to a manager, CRO, AE and go, "Hey, here's the reason that we're not going to go for this opportunity, right? It's going to cost us XYZ. The estimated contract value is only this. The gross margin is less than 60% and because of these points, etc., etc." So, I've got nearly a business case for this particular response to say go, yes, we should 100% do it or no go. And we think this is really just the start of that entire workflow as well. Good to show that. I can cut you back I cut back to you, Rob. Unless you had anything else that I skipped over there. >> No, I was just going to say with that RFP project analysis or any project
analysis or go no go that you're doing and Jasmine just showed you how you can export that. I know a lot of customers, for instance, that would upload they have a central place they want to store their go no go decisions. And it's really strong to have that. And I know Jasmine's going to cover more in relation to feeding that back into a really strong loop. But that that's why and it's actually a new feature that little export button probably in the last couple of weeks that the team brought out. You can also do it from the project details point of view when you're having existing project. So, if you have some no go go that you've ran through Auto RFP already and you want to export out of your projects, you can do that as well. Uh but yeah, I know customers >> Sorry, yeah, that's a really good point though around the structured information, right? Because you're not necessarily getting structured information unless you're capturing that manually inside of your CRM or something every time. The nice thing about this is not only having that to reference back to. Like, why did we say no to that opportunity last time or why did we ultimately choose to go to that red flag not come up and then have that in a
structured way. So, over time we could even gently run reports on, hey, here's new go no go criteria that you should be putting in or one worth removing that actually doesn't have a material impact on your win probability. >> Absolutely. Yeah, and then Yeah, Amy just asked as well in just a relation to that. Yes, you can definitely see that now in in order RFP as well. Yeah, perfect. So, I'll just I'll just quickly show you the that Claude analysis and then I'll throw it back to Jasper just to tie off the webinar today as well. Claude has gone through with that RFP shredder skill that I showed. Uh and again, I will share the skill after the webinar. And it's gone through and it's completed that entire analysis. It actually took quite a bit of time. So, it took about 5 minutes. So, that entire time Jasper was presenting, it went through and broke down everything there as well. It's pretty strong stuff. Other mandatory requirements, in this example it said, "No, do not go ahead." This was a Japanese bank. We don't have Japanese hosting requirements. I use a lot of SaaS examples just cuz I'm from
that SaaS background. But, it brought out some really good stuff. My one also then says, it if we were going to go for this as win themes we can incorporate. And that's where you can really use AI again to further not not replace a workflow, but just to help optimize and help make a process more efficient. And then the human comes in and provides more details there as well. So, yeah, there's this you can see here it's weighted every single criteria and that's why it's gone no go there as well. Yeah, really powerful stuff. Won't go into too much detail. I just want to show that final report that I can then download and so on. So, that's a good way how you can use Claude for your kind of RFP analysis. But, yeah, well then we're going to we'll tie off the webinar today and we'll finish off and yeah, we'll go from there as well. Jasper, did you have Did you want to share those last couple ones? That's right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Perfect. >> Cool. And yeah, jump in with any questions generally on go no go in general. Happy to weigh in on anything. But, yeah, I think I I I ran through that right in capturing that information. And I think the last part
system or not is you just want to make sure A to set up that framework, set up that math, analyze each opportunity using it, make decisions, and capture that reasoning somewhere. And then ultimately come back to that. Actually come back to that in a quarter, in 6 months, at the end of the year, whatever that looks like. And then have a review of what is actually pushing wins versus losses, and regularly implement the questions that would actually catch that out next time. And keep those a continuous flow. The market's going to change, your product offering's going to change, your services, etc. It's constantly changing. So for you to be able to predict the probability somewhat accurately, you're going to really need to be on top of what's actually driving wins and losses realistically. So yeah, constantly evolving thing. And I think that's what's maybe next for AI is going us in the right direction going, "Hey, I looked at 100 of the previous RFPs, and here's our current no-go. No, I would like to propose to make this change." But for right now, I think yeah, being really ingrained in that process, you'll
definitely see a return on your time. Oh, and yeah, as Rob said, we're going to provide out all of the different links. So no need to copy these off the screen. You'll get the email with all the different resources you could jump into the tools and the prompts and etc. And yeah, thank you very much for everyone's time today. We're looking forward to even more better prepared webinars in the future as well. So just getting started, and appreciate you joining us on these first ones this week as we figure it all out. >> Yeah, definitely. We'll have the chat for the next one. No, thank you. I was just going to say as well, just to Jasper's point, and if any feedback Thank you so much. So yeah, it's great to see Catherine, Shane, Chris, and Amy, everyone in the chat saying well done. So yeah, if you have any particular feedback on the webinar or things you'd like to see for next topics. So you've got I know a lot of people have Jasper's email, but from that email that I send out afterwards, feel free to reply to that email as well. I see that. And yeah, we can just keep working out. We look into these every month or so on very applicable use cases and how you can use AI. So if anyone
didn't have any particular questions, we do have a couple minutes, but otherwise we might finish up shortly. I know Jasper was jumping on that one question that was in there, but yeah, honestly that's a lot of it, guys. >> Yeah. >> As well. Jasper, do you have anything? >> around. Sorry, if a question within the go no-go matrix relates to a third document, does that need to be uploaded? >> And yes, like 100% you're going to want all of the context related to be able to answer that go no-go. Otherwise, the model might step out of its lane and kind of make assumptions and hallucinate the context that it might not have access to. So, definitely have a bias for uploading more content over less or even having two stages, one where you ask it, "Do you have the necessary content to accurately answer all of these go no-go criteria?" And then if not, then let me know and I can go dig that up for you so it's not tempted to go and just make it up. >> Definitely. I think another really important part about when you're sharing documents, like you'd have noticed >> I used >> fake data and examples, public examples,
is you do want to be cautious, of course, with data sharing back to training the models. So, in Claude's example with Anthropic, uh a paid subscription, have data sharing turned off. Same with ChatGPT, paid subscription, data sharing turned off. Talk with your IT team if you're unsure or the team in your company who manages AI use across the company. The last thing you want to be doing is putting in a private invite-only RFP with a lot of commercially sensitive information about a potential customer of yours or your company's own commercially sensitive information and uploading that and having the model train on it. So, that's one thing that we focus very heavily on with Order RFP. Of course, with our own product, we're not training on any customer data at all. It's explicit in our terms of use, and also when we're then using third-party APIs via Azure, like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google, we're also then not absolutely not
sharing any data back to models to train on. So, it's a really core part of our product and our ethos. But yeah, just making sure I know Jasper, you actually had it regarding Gemini. Exactly. >> All the personal accounts do go straight to training. So, yeah. That's good to know before you use it too heavily. Yeah, in your personal life or in your work life. >> Definitely. So, yeah, with Gemini, you can't necessarily turn off the training as well. So, again, customer sensitive data, being really cautious of that as well. Perfect. Everyone, yeah, thank you so much. And yeah, Jasper, do you have anything else to say at the end? Otherwise, I think we'll call it there. >> Not at all. Enjoy the rest of your mornings, evenings, and all of the above. >> Awesome. Thanks, everyone. >> See you. >> See you. >> Bye.
Pro Tip: Use an RFP tool with built-in go/no-go analysis so you can score fit, risk, and capacity quickly instead of debating in circles.
Step 2: Assemble The Right Bid Team Early
A tender response breaks when the right people are missing, or when everyone shows up too late.
Bid manager: Owns the end-to-end lifecycle and keeps the bid moving.
Proposal manager: Runs content, compliance, reviews, and final submission quality.
Bid writer: Drafts, edits, and maintains one voice.
Account executive: Owns account context, commercial momentum, and stakeholder alignment.
Solution engineer: Covers requirement mapping, feasibility, demos or POCs, and technical depth.
SMEs: Validate specialist areas such as security, legal, and product delivery.
“Project management of all the different parts of a bid is often overlooked. Ensure you have clear responsibilities and when you want content, answers, and revisions completed by. I would know, I once lost an RFP because I submitted it 26 seconds late.” – Jasper Cooper, CEO & Co-founder at AutoRFP.ai
Even with clear roles, managing multiple responses across teams can quickly become messy. AutoRFP.ai’s RFP project management feature helps you keep everything on track in one place.
See who is blocked, send reminders, and keep SMEs accountable from a single dashboard. No more spreadsheets, long email threads, or constant status meetings.
Step 3: Set Ownership, Timeline, And Working Rules
A clear plan prevents last-minute chaos and keeps quality stable across sections.
Assign section owners and deadlines.
Lock review rounds: SME validation, proposal manager review, and exec review.
Define version control: One source of truth, one final editor, one submission checklist.
Pro Tip: Use one workflow board for owners, deadlines, and status so nobody is guessing who owns what.
“When bids are truly owned by a specific team, you make fewer, better decisions: you decline low-fit opportunities early, you set a strong narrative before you write a thing, you constrain SME input to validation, not authorship, and you tie accountability to outcomes, not activity.” – Christina Godfrey Carter, Founder at Stargazy
Step 4: Build A Customer Insight Brief Before Drafting
Insight is what turns a compliant response into a persuasive one that evaluators trust.
In a survey of 94 bid professionals, AutoRFP.ai found that high performers used a defined customer-insight process far more often, with formal customer research showing up 88% of the time versus 67% for lower performers.
Buyer goals and success criteria: What outcomes they want, how they measure success
Stakeholder priorities: Finance, IT, delivery, procurement, end users
Risks and constraints: Timelines, integrations, governance, change management barriers
Proof strategy: The metrics, references, and examples you will use to back claims
Pro Tip: Write a one-page “buyer reality” summary and make it the required input for every section owner.
Step 5: Build Win Themes (And Lock Your Storyline)
Win themes turn insight into a persuasive narrative that stays consistent across every section and reviewer. In fact, win themes show up strongly in higher-performing teams, with 71% of the high-win cohort using them.
Create 3 to 5 win themes in buyer language, not product language
Tie each theme to: a buyer priority, a clear promise, and proof you can back up
Use a simple format: Because you need X, we will deliver Y, proven by Z
Assign each theme to the sections where it should appear, so it shows up repeatedly without feeling forced
Build a short “proof bank” under each theme: metrics, case outcomes, implementation examples, risk mitigations
Pro Tip: Build a compliance matrix that breaks every question into sub-requirements and maps each one to an owner, evidence, and where it is answered, so you do not miss pass-fail items.
Step 6: Decide What to Reuse Versus What to Tailor
Reuse saves time only if it is current, accurate, and clearly relevant. Teams that used content library automation were far less concentrated in the lowest win-rate tier, with 36% in the low-win band compared with 51% for teams without automation.
Reuse: Standard security, legal, policies, baseline capabilities, company credentials
Tailor: Business case, implementation plan, risk mitigation, commercials and assumptions
Keep one approved source for repeat content, so answers stay consistent across deals
Pro Tip: AutoRFP.ai supports this with its RFP content library step by helping teams find approved past responses quickly, reuse repeatable content with more confidence, and keep one governed source of truth across deals.
Step 7: Draft With One Voice and Clear Differentiation
Speed matters, but consistency wins trust. The response should sound like one team, not six people stitched together.
Provide each owner with the same inputs: Insight brief, outline, proof list, and tone rules
Keep responses tight: Direct answer first, then proof, then detail
Include a crisp differentiation line where the question impacts buying decisions
Pro Tip: Have the proposal manager do a single “narrative pass” across the full response before final review.
Step 8: Use AI And Automation to Accelerate the Repeatable
AI is now common in strong workflows, with 65% of the highest-performing cohort using AI proposal tech, but the advantage comes from how it supports a solid tender process.
Use AI to draft from approved sources, then validate and tailor
Use automation to retrieve evidence quickly, especially for security, compliance, and product detail
Reduce time spent hunting across drives and old proposals
Pro Tip: Use AI-native tender response tools like AutoRFP.ai to extract requirements, generate compliant first drafts on brand, and pull supporting content through library-less semantic search across tools like SharePoint, Google Drive, and Confluence.
Step 9: Validate With SMEs, Do Not Outsource the Story to Them
Specialists protect accuracy, but they should not own the narrative. High performers relied on SMEs to write first drafts only 6% of the time, while lower performers did this 22% of the time, which often leads to inconsistent tone and heavy rewrites.
Ask SMEs to validate key claims, risks, and feasibility
Collect evidence: Policies, certifications, case results, implementation artifacts
Prepare Q&A: Security, integrations, delivery risk, change management, and commercials
Pro Tip: Give SMEs specific questions to validate, not a blank page to fill.
Step 10: Run Final QA, Submit Cleanly, Then Debrief
Final QA is where bids quietly get stronger or weaker. Stronger teams showed formal review and governance more often, at 65% versus 42%.
Compliance check: Every requirement answered directly, no gaps
Proof check: Claims are current, supportable, and consistent across sections
Submission check: Formatting, attachments, certifications, and deadlines are correct
Debrief: Capture what worked, what failed, and what to reuse next time
Pro Tip: Track a simple “wins and losses” log by theme and requirement type, because teams that stack automation, reuse discipline, and systematic insight are much less likely to sit in low-win bands, at 16% versus 47%.
Can You Automate Tender Responses?
Yes, you can automate tender responses, especially the repetitive and time-consuming parts.
Tender response automation uses AI and workflow software to help teams:
Draft answers faster
Reuse approved content
Assign sections across contributors
Keep responses consistent across large documents
Instead of starting from scratch for every tender, the system pulls from past responses, company documents, and approved answers to generate a first draft faster.
Automation is less useful for sections that need judgment, strategy, or strong persuasion. Your team should still:
Shape win themes
Tailor messaging to the buyer
Refine answers that need a more human touch.
In practice, the best approach is to automate the routine parts and keep people focused on the parts that actually help win the bid. That means less time spent copying old answers and more time spent improving quality, accuracy, and strategic positioning.
Modern RFP platforms like AutoRFP.ai help teams go further by analyzing tender documents, extracting requirements, and generating compliant draft responses using your existing content library.
If you want to reduce manual work and respond with more speed and consistency, AutoRFP.ai can help you move faster without losing control over quality.
Check out how AutoRFP.ai can automate up to 80% of the tender response process, helping teams reduce manual work, move faster, and stay compliant at scale.
Video transcript
Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.
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.
Key Benefits of Tender Response Automation
Tender response automation helps teams improve bid quality, speed up turnaround time, and manage more opportunities with less manual work. Here are the key benefits that matter most.
| Benefit | How automation helps |
|---|---|
| Higher shortlist conversion | Strong bid teams show a 63% median shortlist rate versus 38% for low-win teams, and automation supports that by improving consistency, speed, and response quality. |
| Higher win rate | Automation helps teams produce stronger, more complete responses with less manual effort, which can improve competitiveness across more bids. |
| More bids submitted with the same team | By reducing repetitive work, teams can handle higher tender volumes without needing headcount to grow at the same pace. |
| Faster turnaround time | Automation can reduce response preparation time by 40 to 60%, helping teams meet deadlines and pursue opportunities they may otherwise miss. |
| Lower compliance risk | Built-in checks, reusable approved content, and structured workflows help reduce omissions, outdated information, and avoidable errors. |
| Better cross-team execution | Shared workflows, centralized content, and clearer ownership make it easier for sales, SMEs, legal, and operations to work together on the same response. |
Common Tender Response Mistakes to Avoid
Tender responses often fall short because teams rush, rely on old habits, or treat the process as admin instead of a revenue-critical function. These are some of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
| Mistake | Why it hurts | How to avoid it |
|---|---|---|
| Relying on relationships to carry the bid | Familiarity does not replace proof. Buyers still expect clear evidence, decision logic, and a response tailored to their needs. | Treat every bid like the buyer is comparing you from scratch. Back up claims with relevant proof, results, and buyer-specific details. |
| Treating bids like they do not drive real revenue | Without clear ownership, governance, and cross-team support, bid quality becomes inconsistent and opportunities are harder to convert. | Build a defined bid process with clear owners, review stages, and support from sales, SMEs, legal, and leadership. |
| Assuming the team can absorb volume spikes | When tender volume rises, rushed timelines can lead to weak reviews, missed requirements, and more last-minute errors. | Plan capacity early, prioritize high-value opportunities, and protect enough time for reviews and compliance checks. |
| Letting the content library become a dumping ground | Reusing outdated claims, conflicting figures, or irrelevant content can weaken credibility and create compliance risks. | Maintain a structured content library with regular reviews, approved answers, version control, and clear ownership. |
| Skipping go/no-go discipline | Chasing every opportunity drains time and capacity. Stronger teams are more selective about which bids are worth pursuing. | Use a go/no-go checklist to assess fit, win likelihood, resource needs, and commercial value before committing. |
| Using AI on top of messy foundations | AI can speed up drafting, but it does not fix weak bid strategy, poor governance, outdated content, or unclear ownership. In that setup, it often scales generic output instead of improving performance. | Fix the foundation first by tightening go/no-go decisions, cleaning the content library, defining review workflows, and aligning owners before layering in AI. |
Tender Response Structure and Template
Let’s look at the key parts to include so your response feels persuasive, credible, and easy to score.
1. Cover Letter
Your cover letter is your chance to show that you understand the buyer’s situation before they get into the full response. Keep it short, specific, and relevant to their priorities.
A strong cover letter should:
Show you understand the buyer’s challenges and goals
Link your strengths to what matters most in this bid
Highlight measurable value, not vague promises
Set the tone for a tailored, serious response
Pro tip: Avoid turning this into a company history or a generic intro. The goal is to make the buyer feel that your team understands their needs from the first paragraph.
Download the complete tender response cover letter templates
2. Executive Summary
The executive summary is often the most important page in the entire response. It should give decision-makers a fast, clear picture of why your solution is the right choice.
A strong executive summary should:
Focus on business outcomes, not product features
Show how your solution reduces risk, saves time, or improves results
Explain what makes your approach different
Support claims with evidence, metrics, or results where possible
Side note: Think of this as the one-page case for choosing you. It should be sharp, relevant, and easy to scan.
Download the tender response executive summary templates
3. Company Profile
A company profile should build credibility, not list every detail about your business. Focus on the information that makes you a reliable fit for this specific opportunity.
Include details such as:
Relevant industry or project experience
Certifications, accreditations, or awards that matter to the buyer
Financial stability for long-term or high-value contracts
Delivery capability, scale, and operational reliability
Pro tip: Keep the emphasis on relevance. Buyers want proof that you can deliver in their environment, not a broad company overview.
4. Requirements Response
This is the core of the tender response. Each requirement should be answered clearly, directly, and in the format requested by the buyer.
A strong requirements section should:
Confirm whether each requirement is met
Explain exactly how your solution or service meets it
Point to supporting evidence, documentation, or standards
Add useful context where it strengthens the answer
Reinforce your win themes throughout the response
Pro tip: Avoid vague wording or unsupported claims. Buyers should be able to see exactly how your answer maps to their requirements.
5. Commercial and Contractual Information
This section explains the financial and legal side of your offer. It should be clear, complete, and easy for the buyer to review.
Typically, this includes:
Pricing breakdowns and cost structure
Recurring fees, optional services, or licensing details
Contract terms, payment terms, and warranties
Legal declarations and administrative forms
Any requested compliance with the buyer’s contractual framework
Pro tip: Present this clearly and make sure it matches the tender documents. Confusing pricing or incomplete forms can weaken an otherwise strong bid.
6. Case Studies and References
Relevant case studies help buyers see your claims in practice. This section should prove that you have delivered similar work successfully before.
Choose examples that are close to the buyer in areas such as:
Industry
Use case or solution type
Company size or project scale
Market or geography
Side note: The strongest case studies show measurable results, reflect similar buying conditions, and come from customers who can speak positively about your work if contacted.
7. Supporting Documents and Appendices
Many tender responses also need supporting materials that strengthen compliance and credibility. These may include:
Certifications and policies
Technical documentation
Security or compliance documents
Insurance details
Organizational charts or implementation plans
Pro tip: Only include what is relevant and requested. Extra documents should support the response, not make it harder to review.
Get your hands on winning templates that show how winning bids bring the main response and supporting documents together clearly.
Before you submit anything, use a pre-submission checklist to confirm that every requirement has been answered, every document is attached, pricing is consistent, and the response follows the buyer’s instructions exactly.
This final review step helps catch avoidable errors that can damage compliance, scoring, or credibility.
Download the complete checklist
Implementation Considerations for Tender Response Automation
Successfully implementing tender response automation requires careful planning and consideration across several areas such as:
Technology Selection Criteria
When evaluating automation platforms, organizations should assess:
Integration capabilities: How well does the system connect with existing CRM, document management and collaboration tools?
Scalability requirements: Can the platform handle current tender volumes and anticipated growth?
Customization options: Does the system support industry-specific requirements and terminology?
Security and compliance: Are the right data protection measures and access controls in place?
Data Preparation and Content Migration
Successful automation implementations usually require:
A content audit of existing response materials and templates
Data standardization to ensure consistent formatting and structure
A quality review of historical responses to identify best practices
A migration plan for transferring content into the new system
Change Management and Training
Human factors often determine whether automation succeeds:
Stakeholder buy-in from the teams that will use the system
Training programs that support effective use of automation features
Process documentation that clarifies new workflows and responsibilities
Performance measurement to track adoption and identify improvement opportunities
Measuring Success in Tender Response
Organizations should set clear metrics to evaluate tender response performance and identify where the process can be improved.
Operational Metrics
Key performance indicators include:
Response preparation time across different tender types
Tender participation rates that show how many opportunities the team is able to pursue
Quality scores based on internal reviews, compliance checks, and buyer feedback
Resource utilization to assess whether time and expertise are being used efficiently
Strategic Outcomes
Higher-level success measures include:
Win rate improvements across different tender types and client segments
Revenue impact from successful bids and increased participation in high-value opportunities
Team satisfaction, especially where better processes reduce unnecessary pressure and last-minute work
Competitive positioning compared with other bidders in the market
Choosing the Right Tender Response Automation Tools
The right tool should do more than speed up drafting. It should help your team handle complex tenders, stay compliant, and make better bid decisions with less manual work.
Robust Tender Document Import and Export
A strong platform should be able to handle the messy reality of tender documents. Look for tools that can import Word, Excel, and PDF files, extract requirements and context automatically, and preserve details such as macros, dropdowns, and structured fields.
Export matters just as much. The platform should let you send the completed response back in the buyer’s exact format, with templates, validations, and workbook structure intact, so your team does not waste time fixing formatting before submission.
A Self-Building Content Library
The best tools do not rely on a static content bank that someone has to maintain manually.
They should automatically save approved answers, organise them intelligently, and make them easier to reuse over time.
Look for features such as AI tagging, semantic search, content ownership, approval controls, and review cycles. These make the library easier to trust, easier to search, and more useful during live bids.
AI That Matches Your Company’s Voice
Generated responses should sound like your team, not a generic chatbot. A stronger platform should learn from approved past responses and adapt to your tone, language, and style over time.
That matters because consistency builds credibility. When the wording feels off-brand or overly generic, reviewers may question how tailored the response really is.
Clear Answer Traceability and Trust Signals
Teams need to know where AI-generated answers came from. Look for tools that show the source behind each answer, how current the content is, and how confident the system is in the response.
That level of transparency reduces black-box risk and makes it easier for reviewers to check whether an answer is accurate, current, and safe to submit.
Portal Questionnaire Automation
Many teams still waste hours copying questions in and out of procurement portals. A useful platform should be able to pull questions directly from portals, generate draft answers from your approved content, and support export back into the required workflow.
This is especially useful for teams handling repetitive security questionnaires, vendor forms, or portal-based submissions across systems like Ariba, UpGuard, and Jaggaer.
Broad Integrations Across Your Existing Systems
Tender response tools work best when they connect to the systems your team already uses. Look for integrations with knowledge sources, communication tools, file storage, and CRM platforms.
Examples may include Google Drive, Confluence, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and similar systems.
Strong integrations help teams find approved content faster and reduce the need to work across disconnected tools.
Reporting on Win Rate, Capacity, Volume, and Velocity
Good reporting helps teams manage performance and plan workload more realistically. A useful platform should show metrics such as win rate, bid volume, turnaround speed, and team capacity in one place.
That gives leaders a clearer view of whether the team can take on more work, where bottlenecks are forming, and which parts of the process need improvement.
ROI Reporting for Automation Impact
Some tools go further by showing whether automation is actually creating value. This can include automation rates, time saved, cost savings, and efficiency gains across completed projects.
AutoRFP.ai is a strong example here. Its ROI reporting helps teams show how automation reduces repetitive work, improves efficiency, and frees up time for higher-value bid work.
That makes it easier to prove value to finance leaders, operations heads, or anyone asking whether the investment is paying off.
Gap Analysis Across Past RFPs
More advanced platforms can help teams spot the recurring requirements that keep weakening bids. By analyzing patterns across past responses, these tools can surface repeated compliance gaps, weak areas, or unmet requirements.
AutoRFP.ai is also strong in this area. Its RFP gap analysis reporting helps teams identify the requirements that repeatedly cause problems, spot patterns in non-compliance, and turn those insights into process fixes, content improvements, or product priorities.
Built-In Go/No-Go Analysis
Some tools can support go/no-go decisions as soon as a tender is uploaded. That is a valuable feature because it helps teams assess fit, effort, and risk before committing time and resources.
A built-in go/no-go view can surface unrealistic requirements, weak qualification fit, or likely dead-end bids early, which helps protect team capacity and focus effort on stronger opportunities.
Now that you know what to look for, watch this overview of the best tender management software to compare how different platforms support bid teams.
Video transcript
Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.
Do you do tenders? Then this video is for you. And you'll want to wait till the end because I'm going to share something pretty awesome about changing your tender approach and leveraging the latest in AI. In this video, we're going to cover off some of the best tender response software in the market. Let's jump into it. So, where we've gone to is a bid manager community called Stargazy or stargazy.io. They look at all kinds of proposal tech to really understand what's available in the market, and you can join that community and take part in it and talk to hundreds of other kind of tender and bid professionals across the globe and how they answer tenders and RFPs. So, let's look at the first one, Tendium. They are one of the newer AI-native
tender response software in the market. Really, they're all about growing your public sector sales. The first part of when you're doing a tender is finding and sourcing those tenders. You might be already subscribed to a bunch of tender databases, notifications from all kind of different counties and local government principalities in the UK and elsewhere, all your kind of different tender notifications for your business. And the categories are confusing and you just get overwhelmed with what's there because you get these emails every single day and you have to sift through it. That's where software like Tendium and other kind of tender aggregators can help you find the right opportunities. Then you can leverage AI to help respond to those tenders and you read more about them. There isn't too much about their product on their website, but I'm sure you can get in contact with their team and then sign up for a free trial. Next, we have GovDash. Now, I've included GovDash, even though they're
much more suited for US federal or US sled government tenders. GovDash, if you are doing US federal or US sled government tenders, this is the software for you. So, they also help you use different capture programs and source those proposals and contracts. They're really well suited for your long-form tender response, where you might get 100-page PDFs and you have to provide a very persuasive narrative response for the tender. You can find out more information on their website or the different integrations they have. You can book in for a demo and understand more about their product at govdash.com. Next, for our tender response software, we have Use Rogue. Similar to GovDash, really well suited for US federal tenders and sled, but they can also be used across any long-form narrative
tender. You generally will have three different types of tenders. That is your long-form narrative response, short-form response, and your tender portals. Your long-form tender response, what that looks like, and you will know if you receive these because you're writing in response to the tender tens of thousands of words in Word doc and PDFs. It's very much a narrative about your business, about your product and services, and how that will meet the requirements in the tender. Now, that's long-form. So, your providers like Use Rogue, GovDash, Tendium, and a quite a few of these providers are really well suited for long-form response. Using those software will feel like using Google Docs or Word Doc, where effectively you're in a document editor writing a response and leveraging AI to help you
write that response. Then you also have a short-form tender response. You might also get in Word Doc, Excel, PDF. Usually there's more requirements, so they might get into the hundreds of thousands of requirements. They're asking shorter questions, and they expect a shorter response. Usually the response might be five sentences max. Your short-form tender response often is in Excel, can be in a Word document with tables throughout. And then finally you have your tender portals, where you're answering every single question in that portal. Use Roq. They're really great for your long-form tender responses that might come in an RFP, an RFI, a tender. And as you can see, it's more of that Google Doc style editor, except that you can leverage AI. It has all your organizational context, so your past tender responses to leverage that with AI to then answer the tender. Has AI assistance to really help you provide that. Really interesting is
their non-compliance feature, where effectively can go back to the compliance or evaluation criteria that you often will see in a tender, and then flag any inconsistencies or anything where you're not meeting those compliance matrices that you received from the tender. If you want to find out more information about Use Roq, you can definitely go to useroq.com, sign up, or book in a demo. There's more information on their website. Next we have Altura. Altura are a AI native tender response software, where effectively it has some really strong go no go features, where you can upload the tender requirements and it can analyze them to see if you will even match that tender based off your organizational context. It has a database of all your previous tender responses and everything about your organization to help answer that tender. There's more information about Altura on their website. You can book in for a demo and another kind of like a
long-form tender response editor. Then you have BidScript. BidScript, newer player into the market, free trial you can get started with by going into their website and have a look at their product, bidscript.co.uk. Very much built for the UK tender market. It has your bid library where you can pull in uh all your past winning RFPs and tenders. Uh it has your go no go uh decision matrices as well, so it can help with deciding whether you want to go ahead and proceed with a tender or not. Especially useful in the UK when you see public tenders and you want to make a quick decision on whether to start bidding on that tender or not. Then it also has other features like sourcing and analyzing those tenders. So similar to GovDash, which had sourcing for US FedCon, BidScript can help you with sourcing UK tenders. And that's really powerful to have the sourcing and the response in
the same platform. Again, really useful for your kind of long-form narrative style responses, pre-bid intelligence to understand more about the tender and their buyer before you get into it. You can find out more at bidscript.co.uk. Then you have mytender.io. Definitely probably the newest entrance into the tender response software market. Again, AI-native tender software. You can go to their website and have a go at their software or book in a demo just to understand more about them. But effectively, like a lot of the other software, it really helps you with the tender response. So, it you can upload a document, whether that's a PDF, Word doc, and then it can start summarizing that tender and answering it for you based off your organizational context. I think what's cool with them is you can really understand more of that project management angle with regards to your tenders. So, it really helps with managing your pipeline of different responses as you progress through.
Then, for our last one, we have auto rfp.ai. That's actually where I'm from. So, I'm brought from auto rfp.ai. Different to the others, where we're really powerful is in your short-form tender response. So, if you receive a lot of tenders in Excel spreadsheets, in Word doc, and PDF with tables, and it's less about a narrative over tens of thousands of words and more about answering questions about your product or services, what is your encryption for data in transit or at rest, those hundreds of questions, that's where rfp.ai shines. An Australian company with offices all across the globe, including Australia, Vancouver in Canada, and Sweden in Europe. Our strongest features is to do with our ability to import anything, whether that's an Excel spreadsheet, Word doc, PDF, and our AI OCR processor automatically scans the document and
finds every single requirement, response cell, everything that you need to effectively respond to in that tender and gathers the context of that tender without you having to really do anything. Then, you've got our browser extension, which I mentioned. If you are answering in tender portals, where you actually have to answer questions, that's what our browser extension is built for, effectively allowing you to quickly ingest and respond to any tender portal questionnaires. So, once you have your document in order, our AI response workflow then uses the context about your company. So, you would upload past RFPs, past tenders, your documentation, your internal docs, anything you have about your company that you can use in your tender response. You would upload that to Auto RFP. Then our semantic search, which effectively is an LLM searching across your context, finds the most relevant information to then use to generate that
new response. What's AutoRFP.ai's unique proposition is around the transparency and understanding exactly where that response came from. We call this our trust score. And you can effectively source down to exactly what response was used to generate that response. And it's just AI you can trust. Then there's a lot more about our collaboration features in relation to workflows to assign different SMEs and different team members to answer the tender and so on. And AutoRFP, our pricing model, unlimited contributors, so you can have as many team members log in as well. Now, if you want to find out more about AutoRFP.ai, you can book in for a demo to chat to our team and find out more there. I mentioned at the start of the video to watch the end for something really exciting. So, we've spoken a little bit about tender search and aggregating and understanding your tenders. What if AI
could help look at all available and public tenders and find the most relevant ones for your company? You can get started with that with AutoRFP's tender search, and you can use it for free. Enter your email, and within 24 hours our AI would have scraped and looked at every relevant tender in the globe for your company. So, get started at auto rfp.ai, search tender opportunities, or you can find it in our footer. Thanks. See you.
Future Trends
The tender response automation landscape continues to evolve rapidly, driven by advances in artificial intelligence and changing procurement practices.
Advanced AI Capabilities
Emerging technologies will enable:
Predictive tender identification that proactively surfaces relevant opportunities
Automated competitive analysis that assesses likely competitors and their strengths
Dynamic pricing optimization based on market conditions and client requirements
Real-time collaboration with AI assistants that support response development
Integration and Ecosystem Development
Future automation platforms will offer:
Deeper CRM integration that connects tender activity with broader sales processes
Supply chain connectivity that incorporates partner and subcontractor capabilities
Market intelligence feeds that provide context about clients and the competitive landscape
Regulatory compliance automation that helps ensure responses meet evolving requirements
Industry-Specific Solutions
Specialized automation tools will address unique needs in sectors such as:
Government contracting, with specific compliance and reporting requirements
Healthcare and pharmaceuticals, with regulatory and safety considerations
Financial services, with a focus on risk management and security
Technology and SaaS, with technical validation and integration requirements
Respond Faster and Win More Bids with AutoRFP.ai
If your team is still managing tenders through scattered files, manual copy-paste, and last-minute rewrites, AutoRFP.ai offers a better way to work.
It helps you qualify opportunities faster, find reusable answers, generate compliant drafts, and keep everyone aligned during live bids. The result is a process that is faster, cleaner, and easier to scale without adding more chaos.
Explore AutoRFP.ai to reduce manual work, improve response quality, and win more bids with greater confidence.
Frequently asked questions
What makes evaluators trust one tender response over another?
Trust usually comes from clarity, relevance, and evidence. Evaluators are more confident when a response is easy to follow, directly answers the question, and supports claims with proof. A response feels weaker when it sounds overly generic, makes vague promises, or leaves the evaluator to connect the dots.
Should you use visuals in a tender response?
Yes, but only when they make the response easier to understand. Timelines, implementation plans, process diagrams, and comparison tables can help simplify complex information. Visuals should support the evaluator, not decorate the document. If they add noise or take up space without improving clarity, leave them out.
What should you do if a tender question is vague or unclear?
Start by checking whether the buyer allows clarification questions. If they do, ask early and keep the question specific. If not, make your assumptions clear in the response and answer in the most practical way possible. It is better to show reasoned judgment than ignore ambiguity completely.
Can you reuse case studies across different tender responses?
Yes, but they should still feel relevant to the buyer. A reused case study works best when it closely matches the buyer’s industry, problem, scale, or delivery context. Instead of dropping in the same story every time, adjust the framing so the evaluator quickly sees why that example matters here.
What happens after you submit a tender response?
After submission, the buyer may review compliance first, then score written responses, shortlist suppliers, and move into presentations, clarification rounds, or contract discussions. Your team should stay ready to answer follow-up questions quickly. A well-managed post-submission process can strengthen momentum and reduce delays.