TrustRadius Insights for Responsive are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Import/Export Feature: Users have found the import and export functionality to be invaluable, saving them a significant amount of time and enabling easy exporting of pre-formatted content. The flexibility of exporting into native formats or customized templates for Word, Excel, and PDF has been highly appreciated.
Auto-Response Feature: The auto-response capability has received high praise from users as it greatly reduces the manual effort required to respond to questionnaires. Reviewers mentioned that the system can automatically generate responses based on past answers, becoming smarter over time and handling a substantial percentage of the responses.
Keyword Field Mapping Functionality: Reviewers have highlighted the value of the keyword field mapping feature. It allows users to seamlessly map fields into their desired export template and responses, resulting in customized responses without additional effort. This functionality has proven particularly useful for mapping salesperson information, client names, and client nicknames.
RFPIO is used to respond to RFIs, RFPs, questionnaires, and due diligence requests. The tool supports the sales leg of our organization, both with new sales and addressing requests from current customers. RFPIO makes it easy to manage a vast library of technical question and answer pairs and greatly reduces the time it takes for subject matter experts to answer technical questions on RFPs or similar tasks.
Pros
Easily update your technical answer library.
Respond to RFPs faster.
Provide subject matter experts with direct ownership of and access to technical content.
Cons
Improve artificial intelligence to enhance the program's auto-response function.
Add or include a RFP procurement/issuance function.
Add a folding windows-style set up to the answer library for a more granular separation of content and answers.
Likelihood to Recommend
Excellent tools for companies who regularly respond to RFPs/RFIs and who do not have any RFP-response software in place. This tool will save hundreds of person-hours each month in developing RFP responses, increase your capacity to respond to a higher volume of RFPs, and will pay for itself. Its strengths over competitive programs/software include a straightforward, user-friendly UI and free, direct access to the local RFPIO office in Portland, OR for quick, responsive customer support.
RFPIO allows our organization to manage multiple RFPs and Security Questionnaires at one time with a lean workforce. It streamlines our content and allows us to organize by product, user type, and specific use cases from our clients. As a company with several different products, and versions of our products, RFPIO enables us to quickly find the right content for the right product, and quickly return questionnaires to the requester. Our content stays updated because RFPIO allows me to assign owners to each question and answer pair, and it automatically requests a review and updates at our specified frequency.
Pros
Intuitive user interface - users of any level technology-wise can use without issues.
Streamlined content review and update process which takes the responsibility from the RFP manager to the product owner.
Access content from anywhere -RFPIO has several add-on and plugin options that enable our teams to quickly grab content where they are working (Outlook, Slack, Microsoft products, Google Workspace, etc.
Cons
I am completely satisfied with RFPIO's features and functionality.
Likelihood to Recommend
RFPIO is an asset for organizations of any size. It makes our lives easier and enables us to focus on winning RFPs because we know RFPIO will assist in responding, and we will have updated content when needed.
We use RFPIO as our internal Bible for Q&A when filling out RFI, RFP, RFQ, Security Questionnaires, etc. It is managed by our Sales Engineering team and all of sales has access to use it, flag dated or questionable answers, etc. I really like how we've organized our questions/answers to align with a llmany of the common RFP templates we come across, cutting down the time spent significantly.
Pros
Organized answers with dates showing when it was last updated.
Easy copy button to copy the response and paste into your document.
Keyword phrase and search pulling from questions and answers.
Easy to flag and see already flagged/under review answers.
Cons
There are a lot of functions within RFPIO that we don't necessarily use, such as the signature piece or template piece, because they don't work with our processes or what is needed to submit.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any organization who has to do formal responses/requests would greatly benefit from having an easily referenced source of truth. The amount of time it has shaved off of my own work on these has cut it down to 1/3 of the time.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Sales (E-Learning company, 501-1000 employees)
Our proposal team is using the Answer Library extensively to find answers to proposal questions. Other departments do not use it. RFPIO addresses the business problem of finding information efficiently and accurately. We have done extensive work in the Answer and Documents libraries to organize and sort the information. RFPIO customer support personnel have pitched in and provided hours of assistance as we socialized the tool.
Pros
Promotes easy searches
Stores and organizes information effectively
Enables RFPs to be answered efficiently if they are in an Excel format
Automates review cycles
Cons
Projects (in MS Word) are difficult to run in RFPIO
Graphics and text boxes are not always working correctly
Some of the functions are hard to locate
Likelihood to Recommend
1. RFPIO is perfect for searching for specific information when you are responding to an RFP. Search engine is powerful. We narrow our search using several customized filters and know we are getting a thorough search. 2. Excel responses work very well in RFPIO. 3. Typical RFPs that are formatted in Word are challenging to run via RFPIO. We struggle with this. 4. We have yet to master the template.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Marketing (Hospital & Health Care company, 201-500 employees)
We use RFPIO to respond to RFP's. It is being used primarily by the Sales Engineering team but also Compliance comes in to assist on some of the questions. RFPIO acts primarily as a question and document repository for RFP's. You load in the RFP and then can quickly align answers/documents to recurring questions that have been saved to the library.
Pros
Provides a quick way to get access to answers/documents on questions that are frequently asked.
Easy to setup authors and reviewers for an RFP.
Cons
Recently RFPIO added deeper grammar suggestions which is a bit distracting. Sometimes passive verbs are just a part of describing a solution.
Likelihood to Recommend
RFPIO has sped up our cycle time for RFP submissions and led to greater consistency in our responses. Guard against answers becoming [too] boilerplate, but overall I would recommend it to any SE team.
We use RFPIO for RFPs and for security assessments. Our users are sales and IT.
Pros
Great collaborative tool
Great way to access information easily
Easy to learn
Cons
Importing complicated Excel and Word can be very time consuming
Sometimes after exporting it takes time to clean up documents
Likelihood to Recommend
Very good to look up information and to also input new questions and answers. As stated before it is sometimes easier to work outside of RFPIO depending on the complexity of how the project is designed. It is a great collaborative tool when we need multiple people to work on various questions in RFPs.
RFPIO has been very useful for our Global Presales Organization because it can help centralize answers for a high number of RFP requirements coming from different types of customer mainly from Public Sector. Usually RFx processes are very critical in time and RFPIO has helped us to reduce response time for our Solutions Engineers.
Pros
Create predefined templates by products.
Answer Library.
Organize and follow up RFP Projects.
Cons
Sometimes previewing files take long time to display.
Likelihood to Recommend
RFPIO is well suited for software companies with multiple products requires to address multiple technical capabilities with customer inquiries. RFPIO reduces dramatically response times for users that need to respond not less than 50 different requirements. RFP for Public Sector is our principal scenario where RFPIO helped to find correct answers in a timely manner.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Sales (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)
We use RFPIO to manage our RFP questionnaire responses. We have a large, geographically dispersed sales organization with centralized support. Additionally, we have several Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to assist in responses.
Initially, we import each questionnaire from excel, word, or PDF. From there, our RFP team answers each question and/or submits to a SME for further assistance. As sections are ready to be reviewed, they are assigned to the sales person for the account. Once everything is approved, it is exported from the system and formatted for submission to the prospective client.
RFPIO has reduced the time from RFP request to response significantly. It has also helped us to better engage our sales team and SMEs in the RFP process. Overall, we are extremely happy with our decision to purchase RFPIO.
Pros
Import/export - the configurations during import and export are invaluable. This saves us so much time during export with the amount of things we have pre-formatted. Additionally, this tool can handle export into native formats OR customized templates for Word, Excel, and PDF. This means we can export into Excel from outside tools, as well as utilize client/broker formats when needed - without minimal copy/paste (RFP friends... can I get an amen??)
Auto-response - once a questionnaire is uploaded, the system can auto-respond based on past responses. It gets smarter over time as more responses are in the system. We find this picks up 25-40% on the low end and 90% on the high end (especially when we are responding to the same broker or consultant who has their preferred template)
Keyword Field Mapping - the system allows you to map fields into your export template as well as your responses. The system auto maps these when exporting. We use this feature a lot to map salesperson info (custom fields for the stuff we want on the cover sheet/letter), client name, client nickname (the company, the client, the City, the County, etc.). This makes it easy to have customized responses without extra effort on our side.
Guest Question Authors - the system allows you to send single questions to guest users easily so that they can answer via a web browser on a computer or laptop without signing in. I also particularly like that I can track it as a comment which helps me go back later and find my open items.
Cons
Answer library creates unique records for each Q&A for each RFP. This means if you use an auto-generated answer from an exact matching RFP you end up with two records. This creates some unnecessary admin time on the back-end to merge duplicates. And during high-volume RFP seasons this work likely just isn't getting done.
Salesforce integrations only available for SF Enterprise users, which wasn't made clear during initial sign-up so we had to get a refund after the fact.
No custom roles settings which would be extremely helpful for our team, as a sales user doesn't need to see the same things as an RFP team user or a SME.
Likelihood to Recommend
RFPIO has helped us take our RFP response process to the next level. Our first level of RFP management was a searchable Google doc, then we migrated to an online RFP response tool. After three great years, we inevitably outgrew that tool and migrated to RFPIO. It has really been a game-changer for us. I would say RFPIO is appropriate for anyone who writes or reviews RFP responses or security questionnaires.
