The Pros of Hiring RFP Response Pros

To bid or not to bid. When it comes to the RFP response process, that is always the question.

It’s true. The RFP response process can be daunting. It’s a challenge for almost anyone. Having to comb through the request to make sure every metric is met and wading through the red tape of bureaucracy is no easy feat. Bidding is a great way to gain business, but not every vendor can dedicate enough time and resources to respond appropriately. 

Rather than developing your bid in-house, you can hire an outside firm, like The Bid Lab, to take over the bidding process. Here at The Bid Lab, RFP responses are all that we do. We are experts in responding to RFPs and creating tailored, high-impact bids that give our clients a leg up.

Beyond providing a level of polish and service that helps win bids, hiring an outside firm has many benefits, including simplifying a daunting process and providing an additional layer of consistency. In this article, we’ll outline the pros of hiring RFP response pros.

Tame an Intimidating Process 

Whether vendors are new to bidding or seasoned pros, writing RFI and RFP response proposals can be intimidating. There are so many things to be looking out for. RFPs are full of rigorous questions and small details that all need to be acknowledged and addressed. Ensuring you answer everything and fill in every blank can take hours of dedicated effort. Even in-house RFP experts take a long time to comb through every detail and answer every question. 

Agencies sometimes end up jumping through hoops to submit compliant, responsive proposals. Sometimes, there is an online portal. Sometimes, it is a simple email. And other times, it’s a 400-page binder.

However, missing one detail in the content or the submission can be grounds for instant disqualification. After all the time and effort sunk into the RFP response, one item can cause the entire packet to get thrown out. 

While there are plenty of reasons not to let the RFP process intimidate you, hiring a dedicated RFP consulting agency, such as The Bid Lab, will offload much of the stress. With a dedicated RFP team, proposal experts will review the entire RFP or RFI and ensure that every question is appropriately answered. 

Stop Unstructured Time Sink

Hiring an internal proposal team may be something your company is considering. But let’s be honest. How many RFP responses is your firm going to apply for each year? Depending on your industry and team’s ability to take on work, you might only respond to a few every year. 

Unless your company is going to respond to hundreds of RFPs or RFIs per year, it might not make sense to hire a dedicated in-house team to craft the proposals. Hiring a team to respond to procurements may cost more than the proposals bring in. Employees need time to manage additional workloads. Overall, smaller teams cannot afford to build the responses in-house. 

If you hire The Bid Lab, we can offer our services when it works best for your team. We can help find proposal opportunities for your team and build the responses. Our services will cost less than having a dedicated team for proposals on staff. 

Guarantee a Consistent Contract Bidding Response Team

Let’s say your company can dedicate one person to fulfill the writer position. They may fulfill that role full-time, or it is simply one of their responsibilities part of the time. This might put your team in a tight spot if they leave unexpectedly or are unavailable at a vital time when a proposal is due. 

Hiring an outside firm removes this concern entirely. The Bid Lab, for example, is available year-round to meet your business’s needs. Our team of RFP experts can meet tight deadlines and operate independently.

The Bid Lab will maintain a knowledge base of your provided information. This means that even if key players on your team are no longer available, we will still have the vital knowledge to adequately respond to the RFPs.

Leave Disorganization Behind

The RFP response process can get messy quickly. Many things go into just a single proposal. Team resumes, organization charts, methodologies, and many other items are routinely brought up in RFPs. So, finding the right information can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack. 

Having to keep track of all of that information can be exhausting. Finding and extracting what is relevant for each proposal is almost guaranteed to make a mess if you don’t know what you are doing. Even if you do know, it can be tedious and time-consuming to be pulled from different piles to get the right information at the right time. 

The Bid Lab has tried and true methods to keep RFP responses organized. Our writers and project managers are readily available to maintain complex knowledge bases and documentation. Simply put, we are here to simplify things and take the mess of procurement paperwork off your desk. 

Avoid a Disastrous RFP Response Submission

Some businesses try to circumvent having a writer on staff and draft RFP responses with their currently available team members. Often, that doesn’t get them the result that they want. 

First, it takes people away from their original work. They could focus on making sales, developing products, or doing their best. This can lower the morale of your staff and produce middling quality work.

Second, bidding is often an all-or-nothing process. Don’t waste time putting together bid proposals when you must focus on regular business duties. After all, the business is the point of the RFP.

Using an outside RFP firm, like The Bid Lab, enhances your chances of producing a winning bid instead of hastily assembling a document. We can concentrate on creating a high-impact, polished RFP response that stands out from the crowd while you concentrate on conducting your business.

Working with the Pros

An outside RFP firm has a lot of benefits beyond what you might initially expect. If you are a smaller team and do not intend to reply to a high volume of RFPs, hiring a firm will save time by helping your team when needed. We also bring years of expertise and knowledge specific to creating the perfect bids.

The Bid Lab will pick through the complex layers of the RFP response and create a polished, comprehensive bid highlighting your team’s best features.  

You Don’t Need to Tackle Your Contract Bidding Response Alone

If you are interested in bidding and need some help, consider hiring The Bid Lab to do the job for you. We have experience with these RFPs. We can even find opportunities for you via Bid Banana, our user-friendly RFP search engine. So, do you need RFP writing services? Then, reach out to The Bid Lab for a free consultation today! You can also give us a call at 1-844-4BIDLAB or email respond@thebidlab.com.