It’s rare that you hear this, but 2020 was awesome. When it came to implementing new proposal software features in RFPIO, that is. And most of the awesome ideas came from you, our customers!
Of the 1,855 submissions to our Idea Portal in 2020, we have already implemented almost half (769). Another 66 are planned or under development. 989 are still under consideration or waiting for other feature dependencies. Your feedback is integral to a better performing product. Keep ’em coming!
The following describes some of our favorite proposal software features of 2020. At the end of the article, you’ll see why 2021 is shaping up to be the year of “access anywhere” at RFPIO.
Proposal software features part 1: Project management
Automate Transfer of Intake Team to Project Team
“Intake” creates a staging area for RFP/Proposal requests where they can be evaluated in one place to make a bid/no-bid decision without using active project bandwidth. Now, the team you assign at intake will automatically carry over if the project goes active. No more re-assigning team members!
Choose from More Translation Options
- Translate entire projects or source files on-demand as they’re imported. Previously, this was only available within Content Library or individual Q&A pairs.
- Bulk translate content in Content Library.
- Retain images and formatting in translated content.
- Enjoy a better translation review experience to verify translation quality, whether you rely on automated translation or a translation service outside your organization.
- Try the new translation engine: DeepL now available in addition to AWS, Google, and Microsoft. You can choose your preference.
- Experience the RFPIO user interface (e.g., menus, modals, etc.) in Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Gather E-Signatures Without Leaving RFPIO
Instead of exporting or printing out for signing, you can now collect signatures and place signature related fields on documents right from RFPIO! What’s really cool about this is that you can set a sequential signing order, on both the team and the individual level.
After you’ve collected all your signatures (including guests), all that information flows directly into RFPIO—so you can easily check audit logs for signing activity history, including name of signer, time of activity, location, and type of activity.
Import Markup Tracking in Microsoft Word Files
When you’re importing long and complex proposals in Microsoft Word, RFPIO automatically generates a table of contents, so you can easily navigate up to 5 levels of sections and subsections.
Also, we know that when you’re confronted with… let’s just call them “creatively styled” RFPs, maintaining the formatting during import can be challenging. This new enhancement makes that process a lot easier.
Flexible Review Process at the Question or Section Level
With our new enhancements, we’ve strengthened our review functionality… which means you can get even more granular when setting up your review process.
Now, you have three options when setting up review cycles.
- All — Just as it sounds. In order for this question to be marked as “reviewed”, all assigned reviewers need to sign off.
- Any — Let’s say you have a go-to team of reviewers, any of whom you would trust to give the final sign-off on your content. By selecting “any”, if any one of those reviewers signs off on that content, the question is marked “review”
- Sequential — Need to get your immediate manager’s sign-off, before sending it up the ladder? No problem. All you have to do is set up sequential reviews, and you’re all set!
Proposal software features part 2: Content management
Streamline Content Access Through Linked Companies
If you have reseller partners that need access to your content — or if you’re a parent company of multiple brands that need to access — then the new linked companies functionality is for you.
It gives you the ability to grant access to your Content Library and specific collections in a completely separate RFPIO instance. That content will also be updated when you update the source file. You can enable (or disable) comments and discussions around specific content between linked companies.
Access Variable Answers Faster with Linked Content
Linked content allows similar content — variable answers to a single question or translated versions of the same answer — to be linked together and grouped for streamlined searchability and review management. You can even subscribe to specific content in the library to get notified any time there’s a change to that content.
Set 1 Source of Truth with Document Linking
This is something our customers have been asking for a long time.
Let’s say you’re responding to an RFP, and are asked to “please provide an example of when you’ve solved problem X.” This is a standard RFP request where you’ll want to use the same document — perhaps a case study — as your answer.
Now, you can attach documents (e.g. docx, islx, pdf) to question-answer pairs in the Content Library. And anytime you update the document, it automatically updates the corresponding linked attachment, establishing a single source of truth across the board.
Access Multiple Versions of a Document
Upload up to 20 versions of the same document. View the different versions of a current document as well as revert to any previous versions, a la Google Docs.
Get Help Choosing SMEs
The SME recommendation dictionary helps you choose experts and reviewers. RFPIO will auto suggest users when assigning individual questions within a project. Assign topics or keywords to users or groups of users. This is especially helpful for larger organizations with a lot of SMEs from which to choose. It makes it easier to find the right author to own the content.
Proposal software features part 3: Integrations
Access More Slack Functionality
We made a lot of Slack integration enhancements this year. Collaborators were already able to receive and reply to RFPIO project notifications and tasks within Slack–without having to log in to RFPIO. Now you can also:
- Add Slack conversation content into the RFPIO Content Library as new Q&A pairs.
- Search the RFPIO Content Library for answers to questions from Slack (this will help increase engagement with users who don’t use RFPIO often but are heavy Slack users).
- Search questions, answers, and fields such as tags, collections, language, custom fields, and more.
- Perform combination search using Boolean operators, range search, wildcard, and fuzzy search.
- Admins can customize the number and type of results shown when others execute a Slack search.
Experience Full-Circle Project Creation and Retrieval in Salesforce
Upload files directly from Salesforce and create a project request in RFPIO. View the status of in-flight projects and retrieve completed response packets back in Salesforce. Auto-publish completed response packets to Salesforce pages. Add team members while creating projects from CRMs such as Hubspot, Pipeline, Pipedrive, MS Dynamics, and Salesforce. If you have any task assignments in your CRM, then this is a great way to add that project team while it’s being created.
Get a Head Start on the Sales Cycle with the Salesforce Proposal Builder
The new Salesforce Proposal Builder allows sales reps working Salesforce opportunities to generate proactive proposals on a self-service basis using all of the dialed-in content and templates you already have in RFPIO. This feature is included in the RFPIO Salesforce integration. 
Try the New Google Hangouts Integration
RFPIO for Google Hangouts allows you to receive @mentioned comments as direct messages. Search the Content Library and view contents with a simple click.
Get Chat Endpoint API Enhancement
For those concerned with compliance, you can now pull all of your RFPIO chat conversation data into whatever 3rd-party location you prefer, from security to archival systems.
Proposal software features part 4: Business intelligence/reporting
Create Custom Reports & Dashboards
Improve how you analyze your data and make informed decisions. New reporting features include charts, tables, grouping, and aggregate functions. The dashboard provides an effective way of organizing reports in a single page with a combination of charts and tables. New improvements include date field calculations, daily/weekly/monthly scheduling, auto-delivery of reports, and more!
Visualize Data on Your Platform of Choice
If you use Tableau or other data visualization solution, you can now pull RFPIO custom configure paths for metadata between RFPIO and 3rd-party or homegrown reporting tools or BI systems.
2021: Introducing the year of “access anywhere”
If you thought 2020 features were good… wait until you see what we have in store for 2021!
2021 will be the year of “access anywhere”. In short, that means we’re going to be releasing features that makes it easy to work on projects and search for RFPIO content… from wherever you might be. This includes things like offline mode, a new-and-improved RFPIO Lookup, and more!
Contact us to learn more about these new proposal software features, and find out how you can take advantage of them.
