How to Influence RFP Creation: Using AI with Past RFP Responses to Win

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I've used this quite a few times in my career across RFPs to win many, many millions of dollars nicely. So, now I'm going to share that with the world. We're going to share that. People will be at different stages of influence from you're not currently influencing RFPs and everyone that hits your desk looks like it's rigged by a competitor all the way through to you've got frameworks and an understanding of this. >> Great. So, here's what we'll cover today. First, we'll start with some new statistics and research in 2026. We'll look specifically at what's changed in the buying process because that context really matters. Then, we'll take a look at some of the challenges with traditional RFPs. And then, Jasper will introduce the idea of a reverse RFP, what it is and why it works. And then, I'll walk through an example of how to actually build one step-by-step. When we finish, we'll leave you with some practical templates and resources so you could use this if you want to try this approach yourself. So, we'll move from context to framework

to implementation. So, what I want to start with is really a reality check of how the buyers' behavior has changed in 2026. Research shows that 80% of the B2B buying journey happens before a buyer even talks to a vendor. And more interestingly, more than half of them prefer to not even speak with a sales rep during this early research phase. So, by the time vendors are invited into the process, a major portion of these buyers have already defined their purchase requirements. They know what they're looking at and they have their categories. But, here's the other twist. Almost 94% of those buyers are using large language models like ChatGPT during their buying process to research those vendors and build those evaluation frameworks. And if you're thinking about where those LLMs are getting their information,

it's those things that are ranking at the top of Google that generally influence that. So, what does this mean? It means that buyers are more and more designing the evaluation before vendors are involved. And it's not just that, there's that another shift happening on the procurement side as well. So, procurement teams are getting asked more and more to manage dramatically more spend with way fewer resources. And McKinsey actually saw that spend under management per buyer has increased almost 50% over the past few 5 years. But at the same time, they're expecting procurement teams to shrink by 25% to 50%. So, they're under pressure, too, those procurement professionals. They have less time to design evaluation frameworks, vet vendors, and structure the RFPs properly. But, that does also create an opportunity. Because while they're being overloaded,

they also welcome help in structuring within their evaluation process. >> Yeah, and I thought there was an interesting example here. Recently, I was talking to procurement person at one of the world's largest healthcare companies, and I was particularly interested in they were going through a HR software procurement, multi-million dollar contract, huge, huge thing. And the thing that they were most interested in and most focused on though, while that was all going on, is air conditioners at one of their larger aged care facilities had gone down, and there was an emergency procurement to go in there and switch out all the air conditioners. Although the HR software RFP, and I'm sure all the HR software vendors were like, "Oh, this is very important. We need to have the right structure, the right thing." They in a way couldn't have really cared less about that compared to the other procurements that they were doing that were larger in size, larger in importance. People could literally die if those air conditioners don't get replaced in time, there's a heatwave, etc. So, it it totally makes sense this kind of concept of the slop RFP. Going

into ChatGPT, please generate this, and that's generating on the side while I do the procurements that that really matter. So, I think that's why we're seeing a lot more robust inside of RFPs. >> And this is the thing. There's a lot of problems with these traditional RFPs now. The fundamental challenge that they're facing is that traditional RFPs will put vendors in a reactive position. By the time you get it, the deal's already shaped, the criteria is defined, the scoring model exists, and the vendors are just competing inside that framework. So, then when vendors respond, they respond the same way in the sense of they're rushing to respond under tight deadlines. They're often thinking, "Ah, this is feeling a bit rigged." But then, the question is, what if you could be the one writing those requirements? >> Yeah, and that's what we're jumping into today is because the answer is you can, and many do. So, the reverse RFP's concept of a structured evaluation

template that you are providing proactively to the buyers early in their process that includes recommended requirements, maybe a response structure, and it flips that script right from you receiving a template that's already been influenced to you helping influence that template for the better. And it also helps you position very early in the procurement that you are strategic partner, that you're helpful, that you know what you're doing, that you're a thought leader, all the above. So, the first question I got around this was, is that is that fair? Which I think is an interesting one, and there's two parts to that, I think. I think there's ethics being the first one. And if we look at the ethics of this, most evaluations are already influenced by the competitor who got there first, the consultant, the PWC's, your Deloittes that are providing a generic template that was rigged to a big player from many, many years ago. Um an outdated RFP template from the last procurement they did 3 years ago in the same category, or

just ChatGPT with no particular category expertise putting out a generic Excel template and sending it out to them. I think when you're building one of these templates, a good test is would your framework still be a useful evaluation tool if you removed your name from it? So, if you were actually outside of that procurement, it was your three closest competitors, and you provided that buyer that template, would they still end up with a better provider because of it? So, I think that clearly passes that. And also, on the other side of things, and thankfully, I'm not a lawyer. And this is not legal advice. If you look at the procurement frameworks in the US, the UK, Australia, many other jurisdictions, not only is this not illegal or not not encouraged, like it's actually actively encouraged. They are looking for buyers to be more involved with procurement. They want more information up front. They want vendors in the market to help their procurement teams understand the changing environments in different areas, services, and products. So, they're

actively soliciting this type of information. And they're looking for more of it. They really can't find enough information on this at the moment. So, this gives you a lot of competitive advantages, of course. One is that your differentiators become formal evaluation categories. There's reasons that people buy your product. There's reasons that people buy your service above and beyond other options. And you can present those and make sure they're actually included. You're not selling You can sell to a more informed buyer with more coherent requirements. So, a lot of the time you read a RFP and you're just like, "How did they even get to these questions? They don't even make logical sense. How can this be true and this be true at the same time?" And these types of templates and frameworks help them navigate to a more coherent set of requirements. As I said, it also positions your organization as a helpful and a true partner, right? In trying to help them define what they actually need, help them think through that. And through this process, you will also save yourself a ton of time when it's

adopted. Right? So, if they take 20% of your requirements, you already have answers to 20% of their requirements and you're saving that time. But even more importantly is this last one here, which is the buyer can save a really significant amount of time. If they don't have a framework, what that can look like is reaching out to all the subject matter experts on their side, asking them, "Hey, do you have any questions that you would like to add to the RFP template?" It's like the problem that we have in responding to RFPs is that the SME comes in, there's nothing there, they need to write something from scratch, they're not necessarily experts in writing RFP requirements. So, by providing a template, you could be providing that to SMEs who are reviewing now a template, go, "Oh, those 10 questions actually make sense. I would add maybe two things to that or tweak that." And that helps the procurement team not only save significant time, which they obviously need, but sometimes it can even speed up the RFP process for them internally because they can get to a document that they're confident in a lot faster and that puts less RFPs in

jeopardy. It helps them move that pipeline along. So, giving them more information is super useful, gives you an advantage, but also gives them an advantage. Now, examples of areas of influence. So, I just wanted to go through some different ways that in different ways to think about requirements that you might add to this type of template outside of the obvious things, right? You're going to have functional and technical things that you do that maybe no other competitor does based off your competitive research and those are straightforward things. They should absolutely be included here. But there's a lot of other areas where people get it wrong, particularly procurement people get it wrong. You might get it right and it's a good thing to highlight. One of the examples is vendor viability and long-term partnerships, right? There might be a lot of players in your space that can give a really good demo and a great presentation, but not necessarily deliver a two-three year contract or work with a customer over the long term. You might be up against a lot of small

players who say they can do something, but maybe they can't. So, highlighting that, describing the customer success model, right? Maybe you've got a lot of resources and you're able to deploy at larger organizations than some of your competitors. Maybe you've got a interesting proactive approach to your account management. Another one is the total cost of ownership piece, right? A lot of the top lost reasons in RFPs outside of the controllable is the pricing. And a lot of the time you just get a question, how much is this going to cost based off X, Y, and Z? And what a lot of vendors do to try and get around this and have the best price when they don't necessarily actually have the best price is by hiding the total cost of ownership. So, is there ways that you could add requirements in around the vendor must provide an all-in cost breakdown including the implementation, etc., etc. So, actually listing everything that they would actually need to pay for and they can start to ask for that up front rather than figuring that out after they've signed the contract. Having them disclose costs that are not

included in the base price, things like add-ons, etc., making them describe their pricing scalability. So, if that buyer was to scale and become 300% bigger in terms of a contract, what would that look like? So, maybe you've got some total cost of ownership benefits, and those are things that buyers should also be asking about and not just assuming that the proposal price is what the actual price will end up being. Then there's the cultural and strategic partnership side of things. So, not only the hard criteria, right? But what is the soft criteria? At the end of the day, with a lot of these large partnerships, you're going to need to work with the buyer's going to need to work with that vendor day in and day out for many years. So, describing things like your communication style, right? Your culture and values and how those align, how you would align executives over the long term. How you could maybe demonstrate specific expertise in a particular market, and you've got people on your team that have deeper industry experience than some of your competitors. These are very, quote

unquote, soft things, but things that can be very important, can be an actual very serious competitive advantage, and should be brought to a buyer's attention if that's where you're strong. Another one is like the technical fit and maybe integration depth. So, depending on the market, going outside of just the high-level stuff, right? Do you tick this box? Do you have this feature? Do you have this service? And really digging into what it actually takes for someone to buy your product and service and be successful with it. Is there, on the software side, specific APIs and integration capabilities that are required in order to deploy in a certain market? Is there certain legal requirements or ramifications for not doing something in a certain way? Really digging into the weeds and trying to work in those more technical questions that the average buyer might not always surface with a basic RFP. And then, finally here is just another example would be implementation and change management, right? So, it's great to be able to buy a product that ticks all of

the boxes, but how is it actually implemented? How do you replace the incumbent? What does the process for that look like? Change management is one of the largest blockers to any type of adoption of any product or service. So, that is a really key one as well. Do you have case studies of people moving from that incumbent to you? Maybe that should be a requirement in the RFP that they've actually worked with those types of migrations before change overs. Maybe it's a requirement that change management has been deployed and at that scale in that industry before, right? So, how can you use your credibility and your expertise? So, these are just five different examples of the types of requirements that you can work in outside of the obvious things that just differentiate you and your competitors. Cool. So, now going through that, we'll talk about how to actually build a reverse RFP. Nice thing is, if you're already using RFP software like AutoRFP or another

product, your content library already contains all of these answers, right? So, you can quickly assemble a reverse RFP, number of different templates, you can even go to the point of creating different sections for your different products or different market verticals, so they're even more specific. And it will turn your knowledge base from purely an internal thing for answering RFPs into also an external resource, so you're getting value out of answering all of these RFPs, finding the most common requirements that you're compliant with, and working that back, putting that back out to market, and basically getting leverage from that. If you're not right and you're an entirely manual process at the moment, you could just start with something basic, right? Get the last three RFPs you won, manually go through them, distill your differentiators, the common requirements, put those in a big list of requirements, and just start there. And the objective really here is to build a nicely branded and ready to use document, so the customer can basically receive your template, be like, "That looks good. I'm particularly busy with

some air conditioner procurements today." Slap your logo on it, send it out to the vendors, and receive it back like that. So, it's a really beautiful thing. Once you pull this off and achieve it, we're not saying that you achieve this every time, and you'll just receive your exact RF feedback in the exact way that you want it, but it would be a lie if I was to say I hadn't received nearly the exact template back with 15 of 270 requirements changed and won multi-million dollar deals off the back of it. So, it's definitely not something that happens every time, but when it happens, it's worth it. So, I'll hand over to you, Seema, and you can run us through an example of how you can get this done. >> Awesome. And this is not to say that you guys can't use ChatGPT to create a reverse RFP. You can, but then you're likely getting that generic category structure, and that would produce generic comparisons as well. So, the differentiator isn't necessarily AI, but it's embedding your actual expertise and offerings into the framework. So, I'll walk you through how to build that reverse RFP step-by-step. The main

two tools I'll be using are AutoRFP and Claude, but you can replicate this with whatever tools you I'm just going to steal the screen share from you, Jasper. Thank you. All right, perfect. So, you all should see my AutoRFP instance. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use AutoRFP and I'm going to aggregate all of my requirements that we tend to come across when we're responding to RFPs for our software. Now, if you don't have AutoRFP, just like Jasper said, you can use your own library for this so you're not starting from scratch, or use your last three most recent RFPs, but essentially you can replicate my exact same moves but with your own content. Now, by using AutoRFP, I'm actually going to take this a step further and not just use my Q&A library, but I'm going to actually identify where we are compliant, where our strengths are, and embed those into our evaluation criteria. And that's the strategic

layer. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to leverage one of our reporting capabilities called the gap analysis. And what the gap analysis is, it's a report that tracks and monitors your bid requirements. So, you have insight into where you have any product or service gaps essentially, and then it looks at where you're compliant and non-compliant patterns across your project and gives you insight into your competitive positioning. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to filter, keep it within the last year, for example, so I can have a large data sample. And I'm going to filter all of the requirements that I am compliant in. So, I'm avoiding the requirements that we don't necessarily meet. Then, I'm going to hit export. Now, I'm going to move to my LLM of choice. I'm going to go with Claude for today. Let me just bring my Claude in here. Perfect. And then, I'm going to

put my file my gap analysis export into Claude and drop in this prompt. Now, for the sake of you guys not staring at me for 5 minutes, I've already done this prior to this webinar, and I have it generated already. So, let me just pull up my reverse RFP real quick. And this is exactly what Claude generated. I haven't edited anything yet. It added a nice request for proposal intro page. These are all of my RFP requirements that are built on my gap analysis. It even went above and beyond to color coordinate my sections, which if anyone knows me, I love a good color coordination. And it added a nice weighted matrix at the end as part of the evaluation criteria as well. So, now you've created a structured framework that you could share with your buyers to help guide their evaluation process.

By proactively shaping the requirements, you demonstrated your expertise, you helped structure it around the important considerations, and what I think is most important is you positioned yourself as and your solution but competitively by highlighting those capabilities where you deliver the most value. And that's the reverse RFP, just like that. I will pass it back to Jasper. >> Cool. Thanks. Yeah, and that's the prompt right there, right? So, it's very simple. Please take the stock of requirements, create me an RFP in Excel format that I can share to vendors. Please remove redundancies or duplicates. So, you can really take that list and go from there, but of course, you're really leveraging and learning from all the different procurements that you've gone through as well, providing a lot of value to prospective buyers. We have an example of that as well. If you want to see an example of like how we do this in our particular category, we have of course got an RFP for RFP software template, as as meta as that

is. So, now that you've got it generated, the really important part is to actually get it in front of the buyers. It's only going to be valuable if you're actually not only have you packaged it in a way that's usable and is providing a lot of value, but it is really early in the process. So, as much as we wish that the proposal team could just send this out into the world and we would just start receiving these back, it really does sit on the shoulders of your marketing team and your sales team 99% of the time. So, just want to run through really quick and easy how they can get this distributed. So, one thing is in the marketing funnel, you basically want to make sure that this is the first template that a prospective buyer finds when they go to Google. So, for example, RFP template for X. If we search RFP template for marketing automation, right? Adobe has a sample marketing automation RFP template. So, click on that, download the source, etc. They're right there at the top of the funnel, but you don't need to be Adobe

to do this. You can actually rank a lot at the moment in these different Maybe not so much after the webinar, but you can rank a lot of categories. RFP template for X. Not a lot of people actually put the time in to one build it, and then two actually put it on the internet, right? So, another one is like a classic one from a customer here, SugarCRM, right? CRM buyer's guide. That's another great keyword, but there'll be a set of 15 or so keywords, maybe specific to your industry, of what procurement teams are searching before they go out to RFP, RFI, etc. So, that's the best way to do it. And the really nice side effect of this is not only do you get Google, you also get referenced by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Co-pilot. They're using the same underlying search to come to these web sources, and I think that those teams will even be more influenced cuz they'll just assume it came from Claude. In reality, it came from search result one on Google, and it's copy pasted all your requirements and stole them. But this is the kind of art we would like we would like ChatGPT to steal.

So, on the sales pipeline, we also want to implement it there. The best way to do it is on the initial call/demo, particularly if you've got an enterprise-specific or government-specific sales team with account executives or like inbound business development reps who are really on the line at the very start of that relationship as soon as the buyer actually does reach out post-marketing. One of the things we want to do there is try and put in a quick discovery question for someone that seems like they're the type of profile to go out for RFP. So, something along the lines of out of curiosity, how are you looking or planning to evaluate the vendors? Do you have a formal scorecard or what does that look like? And they might go two of like one of two ways. Maybe that's actually handled by them and they're still trying to figure it out themselves. So, that buyer will actually have to build some sort of qualification criteria or scorecard themselves. And then on the larger side of things, oh no, this will definitely have to go to RFP for this ticket size, blah blah blah. So, in both cases, we want the sales

team to go great, I've got a great resource for that I can share with you, etc. etc. and send that over as soon as possible during that initial call. Not only providing value immediately, but obviously starting that process. And then another one is, which is interesting, is follow-ups. A lot of sales people are always looking for value that they can give to follow up after they haven't heard someone or they've been ghosted for a few days. This is a really good one again for that same type of buyer that might be going towards an RFP. After not hearing from them for two to three days after a demo, you might reach back out to the champion, attach that spreadsheet, and send something like this. Great speaking with you. I know pulling together the criteria can take a lot of time, blah blah blah. We've got an evaluation framework based on X procurements based on the last 100 RFPs that we've done. You also use however you like, adapt it to your internal process, but just a starting point and happy to walk them through it if it's helpful. And that puts it in front of them, doesn't apply any pressure, but does provide

them the framework. And it genuinely is influenced by your hundreds of procurements that you've gone through, the best practices and learnings of what the smartest in the industry are asking when they go out to market for the same thing. So, that's two easy ways to put on the sales side. And then the final side, and I'll say this is really just the Hail Mary stuff at this point, is of course during an RFI submission, This is a really nice resource to have. Sometimes you can attach this during the RFI and say, "Hey, please see Please see attached RFP and some of the requirements and blah blah blah and work it in there." Some RFP RFIs will have strict criteria that prevent that from happening. But, what you're able to do there of course is once the RFI closes and then there's quiet period sometimes before they go to RFP, there's nothing necessarily stopping you. Check the requirements of and the policies behind the procurement of course before doing this, but you can send over that RFP template and go, "Hey, you know it's been a while since the RFI. I imagine you're going to move to RFP next." You send that person in procurement that

same thing and then hold on tight that they might use that during the RFP process, right? And then finally, it during the clarification process, more of just a useful resource, right? Can you check your standard template RFP against the requirements that they have and is there any really smart clarifications or things like, "Hey, I saw you didn't have a section on X. If you refer to our RFP template, there's some good questions on that you might want to ask in this industry." Or, "I saw you phrased it this way. This is how we would usually phrase it to catch out X, Y, and Z." So, it just becomes a good thinking framework for working through clarifications of requirements when you first receive the RFP. So, that's six different ways that you can use it throughout the sales pipeline. So, the call to action for Monday is build that first template if you haven't already. If you already have one, then maybe double down on some of those examples, update it, and refresh it with Claude, see if there's any other angles that you can add to it, beautify it, make the formatting better than ever,

and easy to replace with a buyer's logo. And then, actually go ahead, draft the email, maybe make the blog post, get it all ready and packaged for your marketing team, for your sales team. So, they don't have to do any work. You're not explaining something high level. You're just giving them value and then that playbook can be adopted by those different teams. Cool. So look, that's everything we had to cover today. We'll send over the recording and the resources so you can dive straight in there. But happy to take any questions as we have them. Go free to put them in the chat or I'll also try and find the Q&A area. Cool. Nothing just yet, but also our multilingual. Yeah.

Yeah, that is an interesting one. It would be interesting. Yeah, in larger markets, I imagine the search engine optimization can become even easier if you're working outside of English. So having the converted page and the converted requirements could actually be a lot more useful. I would say translate that. You might be able to, if you're working with a cloud or ChatGPT, be able to automatically translate it into a number of different languages pretty easily. Yeah, Brian had a good question about putting out the RFP template publicly, won't that help competitors? And that's a good It's a really good question and I think you've got all of your base requirements in there and then you'll also have your differentiators and they're all mixed together. So you won't necess- like the other competitors won't necessarily know what the differentiators are that you're proposing. But then I also think it's the same with anything, right? If you put out your screenshots of your product publicly or information about your product publicly, won't your competitors use that? Yes, they will.

How much will they use it? How much will they actually get value compared to how much will the actual buyers get value? I think that's a question. So if you put it out in the market, your competitors don't actually respond by having their own template or anything like that, then you're still ahead. The buyers are still using your template. And that's also why in competitive markets, we always need to be ahead. We always need to be updating these things. So, it's not just a a once off and then the competitors copy it. You're By the time that they've copied that last version, you've already got the next version. You've got the 26 and the 27 and the 28 version of it. So, I would say on at its total, I think it's definitely worth doing even though they could download it. And when it comes to marketing as well, you can gate these things, right? So, you can have it there's no Gmail sign-ups, there's no Outlook sign-ups, so it can't be any of those. It needs to be a company domain that signs up. And then it also lessens the chance of a competitor getting their hands on it cuz it's going to require a real business domain. And maybe they just download it via their actual

domain, but like that can start to add some friction around that process at least. >> Yeah, and Michael, you absolutely can. That's exactly what we were saying, but you miss the competitive advantage of leveraging the requirements that you're a compliant in if you just use past RFPs and have your LLM generate the responses. Part of where we took this a step further was leveraging that gap analysis where we could filter to the requirements that we were specifically compliant in, aka our strengths, and then build that reverse RFP based on that. So, that's a really good question. Jasper, don't know if you have anything to add on to that. >> Yeah, yeah, I think you should yeah, get your previous RFPs, but I guess just focus on that work of getting to what's compliant, what's actually differentiated, and try and get a lot of information so you've got really good coverage and scheming across the different requirements. So, absolutely nothing stopping you. We'll try to make it accessible for everyone.

Cool, cool, cool. I think we can wrap it up for today unless anyone else has questions. Next webinar is going to be really interesting. It's on the future of AI agents and there'll be some big releases. We're actually doing a webinar with another RFP software company that focuses more on the construction, facility management, and things like that. And we'll talk about how we've both architected different agents and yeah, be releasing some agents actually on that webinar and talk through the engineering and background process of building agents specific to RFPs. So, that'll be exciting as well. >> Jasper, we've got a last question. Is a reverse RFP on our road map? >> Definitely, yeah. So, we highlight this workflow today of using the gap analysis which helps you win in other ways by closing the gap, but absolutely. I think it's a very easy workflow for us to go from gap analysis to generating the reverse RFP and maintaining it for you automatically. So, 100% Brian.

Awesome. And Michael just popped in one of the last, of course you can have a demo. Go to our website, book a time, and yeah, we'll we'll make sure to line it up and happy to cover anything you you'd like. Have a great rest of day all. Thanks for making the time.