The High Cost of Responding to Every RFP

For growth-stage and enterprise teams alike, the temptation to chase every Request for Proposal (RFP) is high. However, saying yes to every opportunity often leads to 'proposal burnout' and a lower overall win rate. To maintain a healthy sales pipeline, you must learn how to prioritize which RFPs to respond to by focusing on quality over quantity.

Strategically selecting bids ensures that your team’s expertise is applied where it has the highest chance of success. Tools like Settle help automate the initial discovery, making it easier to filter for high-fit opportunities before you ever hit 'start' on a project.

The Bid/No-Bid Framework: A Better Way to Prioritize

A bid/no-bid framework is a set of criteria used to determine if a specific RFP is worth the investment of time and resources. Here is how to build one for your team.

• Strategic Alignment: Does this project fit your long-term goals and ideal customer profile?

• Technical Capability: Can you meet 100% of the mandatory requirements without significant custom development?

• Resource Availability: Does your team have the bandwidth to produce a high-quality response before the deadline?

• Competitive Landscape: Do you have an existing relationship with the buyer, or is the incumbent already favored?

Using Discovery Tools to Gain a Head Start

The first step in prioritization is actually finding the right opportunities. Manual search is often too slow, leading teams to rush through low-quality bids just to meet deadlines. Using an automated discovery engine like Settle's RFP Hunter allows teams to find high-fit RFP opportunities automatically. This reduces manual bid searching and ensures you spend your time evaluating prospects that actually match your strengths.

Assessing the 'Work Effort' with AI

When deciding how to prioritize which RFPs to respond to, you must estimate the effort required. Some RFPs are 10 pages; others are 200. Organizations using Settle can cut response time by 80% because they use AI to draft answers from a centralized knowledge base. If a new RFP closely aligns with your Library of approved content, the effort is lower, making it a high-priority candidate for bidding.

The Power of a Centralized Knowledge Base

Prioritization is easier when you know exactly what information you have on hand. A centralized proposal knowledge base serves as a single source of truth for all past answers, security responses, and product data. If you find an RFP that requires information you haven't documented yet, it might be a lower priority due to the manual research needed to complete it.

Collaborative Review and Final Decisions

Final prioritization often requires input from sales, engineering, and legal teams. Structured review workflows enable teams to collaborate without the chaos of email chains. By using a platform that tracks completion percentages and reviewer assignments, such as Settle, managers can see in real-time if a project is becoming too resource-intensive to justify the potential win.

Conclusion: Automation as a Competitive Advantage

Effective prioritization allows small teams to compete at an enterprise scale. By automating repetitive proposal work and focusing only on high-value targets, you can increase your win rate while reducing the stress on your subject matter experts. Use data, not intuition, to decide where your team spends its time.