“At Microsoft, the investment in an AI-powered SRM platform has streamlined access to a centralized knowledge base, allowing field teams to quickly find vetted, approved answers. This has resulted in substantial productivity gains, more efficient operations, and better resource allocation.”
— Carrie Jordan, Global Director of Proposals at Microsoft
The gist
Microsoft’s Proposal Center of Excellence supports the company’s worldwide sales organization (aka, “the Field”), including all segments, industries, and solution areas.
Since 2020, Microsoft’s Proposal Resource Library — built on the Responsive Platform — has provided AI-powered content recommendations, content management, and workflow automation to drive YoY growth in:
- Increased productivity for the Field: Sellers gained 93K additional hours to spend on customer relationships and building pipeline, instead of searching for answers and proposal content.
- Dollars saved: Based on an average hourly wage of the Field, Microsoft saved more than $17M in four years using AI-powered self-service search of the organization’s knowledge base.
- Responses used: The Field used AI-powered answers — drawn from over 20,000 resources — more than 200,000 times in sales proposals, RFPs, RFIs, and security, legal, and compliance assessments.
The rundown
Microsoft’s response challenge
- Former proposal management software lacked project automation capabilities and could not pivot with the rapidly growing need for proposal support on a global scale.
- Complexity of bids and questionnaires grew while timelines condensed, resulting in the Field needing more support to build proposals and answer questionnaires.
- Siloed, scattered content made it difficult to work quickly, build proposals, verify content accuracy, and deliver brand consistency with every response.
- Lack of user-friendly workflow automation and content management capabilities frustrated subject matter experts (SMEs) and made it difficult for the proposal team to impact the organization on a global scale.
Impact and results
- Built a comprehensive Proposal Resource Library on the Responsive Platform to enable AI-powered self-service access of vetted, curated content across the company.
- The Field saves 20 minutes per search for proposal content, totaling more than $17M worth of time spent on customer relationships and building pipeline instead of searching for content.
- 18K authenticated users leverage Responsive AI to quickly find proposal content and answers for security questionnaires, legal assessments, and highly technical bids — as well as informal Field communications such as email, calls, and virtual meetings.
Scaling for growth and elevating the proposal team’s impact
In 2019, Microsoft needed to efficiently scale its proposal team’s productivity to meet increasing demand from the Field, more complex bids and questionnaires, and ever-tightening deadlines. They issued an RFP to find a Strategic Response Management (SRM) partner that could help them revamp operations with AI, automation, and opportunity for scale.
Responsive won the RFP, and it’s been full throttle ever since. Within a year and a half of using Responsive, Carrie Jordan, Global Director of Proposals for the Proposal Center of Excellence, saw the four-person team grow to 50 proposal managers, knowledge managers, proposal writers, technical writers, and graphic designers. For every $1 that Microsoft invests in Jordan’s team, she estimates the company gets $746 back. Last year alone, her team contributed to $8.5B in revenue for Microsoft.
“Really massive growth. We couldn’t have done it without Responsive,” Jordan said.
Building and maintaining the Proposal Resource Library for accurate AI output
Microsoft realized that the best way to support the worldwide sales organization was to open access to vetted, curated content. Amanda Heather, Director, Strategy and Operations for the Proposal Center of Excellence, collaborated with key stakeholders to build the Proposal Resource Library on the Responsive Platform.
To ensure that the Proposal Resource Library would be a trusted single source of truth for the Field, the team was meticulous in its construction. “Garbage in, garbage out” is a common refrain for AI output, so it’s vital that AI is backed by a clean, updated, and verified content library to deliver accurate, consistent results.
Knowledge Managers rely on Responsive features such as auto-tagging and collections to quickly categorize new content. Between content harvested from past proposals and new content added as solutions come online, the Field now uses Responsive AI to search more than 18K Q&A pairs spread out across more than 10 collections to find the most relevant content for their proposals or customer comms in a matter of minutes.
Responsive AI also helps automate review workflows for ongoing content governance. All communication happens within the platform, using in-app commenting and @-mentioning. Sellers and proposal managers use in-app collaboration features for their proposal projects. SMEs and knowledge managers communicate within each Q&A pairing, which helps keep content updated, accurate, and working in harmony with Responsive AI.
Prioritizing communication to engage SMEs and illustrate impact
One reason that Microsoft’s Proposal Resource Library has become a valuable trusted resource across the enterprise is because technical SMEs update content regularly. Microsoft captures and shares data to illustrate to SMEs how often their content is used, emphasizing the value of their contribution and enticing them to add even more content to minimize future issues that will require triage.
According to Heather, communicating is extremely important to maximizing the influence and impact of The Proposal Center of Excellence for SMEs, the Field, and leadership.
“The metrics you’re able to pull from Responsive can give you so many ideas on how to communicate. Communicating those metrics to your leadership — not just your win rate, but the impact you drive for the rest of the company — shows them that you are here to help win the business.”
— Amanda Heather, Director, Strategy and Operations at Microsoft
Activating Responsive AI to recommend content for 18K users
With a solution set as vast as Microsoft’s, sellers depend on Responsive AI to deliver the best proposal possible. Like most enterprises, Microsoft’s proposals include multiple solutions. The Proposal Resource Library contains all the most up-to-date customer-facing information available about every solution. Responsive AI outputs the most relevant details for a specific customer need, discerning what will resonate so that sellers don’t overwhelm customers with excess information.
Before Responsive, sellers might hesitate to answer questions outside their field of expertise. Even if they were well-versed in the segment, industry, and solution area, questions about security, legal, and overly technical matters gave them pause. Having a single source of trusted content in the Proposal Resource Library has upgraded that workflow, allowing sellers to move forward confidently while limiting risk.
“Centralizing the information around corporate content, technical and solution content, templates, branding — you name it — if you centralize that and open it up to the sales team, you’re ensuring that your entire company is showing up in the best way possible for customers.”
— Carrie Jordan, Global Director of Proposals at Microsoft
Organizations seeing higher revenue growth like Microsoft are 3X more likely to use an AI-powered Strategic Response Management platform. Using Responsive as a cornerstone, the 65-member team behind Microsoft’s Proposal Center of Excellence is able to provide the content, support, and winning insight that thousands of sellers need to focus on revenue growth.
Find out how you can compound the value of your proposal team and content like Microsoft using AI-powered Strategic Response Management with the Responsive Platform. Request a demo.
