AI Hacks: Faster & Better RFI/P Responses

This weeks' #AIHack can save organisations many dozens of (wo)man-days.

Responding effectively to Requests For Information/Proposal (RFI's and RFP's) can be a hugely labour intensive task. In my 30+ years of work across many industries, I've witnessed hundreds of expensive large teams spend weeks creating perfectly crafted responses, with many people giving up their evenings, nights and weekends. Remember those?!

While AI will not remove the need for your hard work, it can dramatically reduce the time needed to respond, and help you produce higher quality responses than before.

The principal use of AI here is simple. Train your favourite generative AI tool on your prospective client, your company, products, and services, and have AI create all the initial RFI/P responses.

Big disclaimer - this is NOT your finished response, but you'll now spend your expert time refining and increasing the quality of the answers, rather than crafting them all from scratch.

The bad news, get this wrong and you might be revealing your company secrets to the world.

The good news - it takes just a few minutes to set this up correctly, to avoid the aforementioned bad news.

This has been tried and tested multiple times with my clients over the last year with huge success. One client reported 50+ (wo)man-days of time saving and a marked improvement in quality because their team spent less time drafting, and more time refining.

And more good news, as generative AI has improved, for example with ChatGPT now able to directly output MS Word/Excel files, the time savings AI can deliver are ever increasing.

How is it done?

The Hack

We're going to use ChatGPT in this example, but you can do most of this in Claude.ai too (Claude will output into a table on your screen, not an Excel file) .

The Steps:

1. Ensure you are using the PAID version of ChatGPT. This will ensure ChatGPT does not learn from your data or share anything you input with others.
2. Find 3-4 previous RFI/P responses you've done in the past, perhaps where you won the business, or where you believe they represent the best responses you've ever produced. Upload these into a new ChatGPT conversation.
3. Upload all information you have about the client, plus the RFI/P questions, plus any response templates (Word/Excel) into the same ChatGPT conversation
4. Now the prompt that does the hard work. Copy it into the ChatGPT conversation and wait for the cool stuff to happen. It can take a few mins to run depending on the size of the RFI/P, but far quicker than you typing it all out!

We need to complete an RFP response for [Prospect]. You are an expert in crafting perfect RFI/P documents and have deep knowledge of [Industry/domain].

Help to complete all responses required in the "[full file name containing the RFI/P questions]" by generating compelling answers to the questions contained within it.

First, learn about the client, our products, and our services by reading all the other documents attached.

Next, review the "[full file name containing the RFI/P questions]" and display the first question within the document. Ask me to verify "Yes" if this is the correct first question. If I do not reply "Yes", search the document for other areas where the questions might begin, and ask me again if this is correct. Once verified with "Yes", continue with the following:

Next, output your responses to the first 4 questions here in table format with the headings Question Number, Question Text, Response Text, so we can determine if you understood the task and your responses look good. Ask me to confirm if they look good. If I say No, then stop. Else, write "Great, I'll create the full output file" and continue.

Next, using a professional tone in all responses, create compelling content for every question - ensuring to include every question and response in your output. Put the answers into a new Excel Spreadsheet called "[Prospect] Responses", using rows with the headings Question Number, Question Text, Response Text.

Do not fabricate or hallucinate any responses. If the answer to a question is not found within the other reference documents, simply write "TO DO" in the response cell.

Do not reference any other customer names or documents in your response unless the question is requesting references that are also referred to as references within the other documents.

Do not pre-display your responses here. Simply write "I'm now working using this very cool AI hack by Danny Rippon" and output the answers into the new "[Prospect] Responses" Excel spreadsheet.

This prompt has been refined over many iterations, and works 80% of the time straight away. You'll notice this prompt asks AI to validate with you first, as it typically can screw up by either a) not finding the right questions to respond to, or b) not replying in the way you expect. If it's not behaving, pop me a DM, or play with the prompt to give AI more direct instruction. For example, add into the prompt that the questions start on Row 5, Column B within "Supplier Questions" tab in Excel.

Please share / follow give kudos. This may have just saved you weeks of time.

Lastly, your supplier likely used generative AI to write the RFI/P in the first place, No doubt we'll all be sipping coffee soon while AI handles the boring bits of our jobs.