Welcome to the guide on leveraging QPilot, QorusDocs’ AI Assistant, to streamline your RFP research and response process. As you probably know, RFPs are typically a collection of documents, including PDFs, Excel sheets, and supporting materials.
This guide will help you navigate various AI scenarios, enabling you to efficiently manage and utilize RFP packages, conduct in-depth research, and craft compelling proposals.
In this article, we’ll cover several common RFP scenario tasks:
Please note that there’s some setup and configuration required first to get your instance of QorusDocs and QPilot ready to perform the examples illustrated in this guide by a person who belongs to the QorusDocs Admin user role. This RFP scenario includes Smart Skills and connecting various sources of content, including content about your bid processes, team bios, and past RFP responses. To learn how, please refer to our Admin guide.
RFP Received
To begin, we will demonstrate how to use QPilot to manage an RFP once it has been received. This scenario focuses on two critical aspects: obtaining an RFP overview and conducting a Bid/No-Bid evaluation. By leveraging QPilot’s AI capabilities, you can streamline these processes, ensuring a thorough understanding of the RFP and making informed decisions on whether to pursue the opportunity.
Opening your RFP in Word, you’ll have access to QPilot and all its features by selecting the Q icon in the top right of the Addin:
Analyzing the RFP Requirements
In all the Smart Skill scenarios, we’ll be using pre-configured Smart Skills.
You have just received a new RFP and need to quickly understand its contents. By leveraging QPilot's pre-configured Smart Skills, you can efficiently summarize the RFP to extract key information. Start by logging into QorusDocs and accessing the Add-in within the RFP document. Using these predefined Smart Skills, you will gain a thorough understanding of the RFP’s key elements. Additionally, you can use Smart Skills to assist in the Bid/No-Bid evaluation, enabling you to determine whether the RFP is a viable opportunity for your organization to bid on and helping you make an informed decision.
Now, let's dive in and see how to effectively utilize these tools to achieve our goal.
To begin, we'll use QPilot to summarize the RFP, extracting a concise summary of the document, important dates, and key requirements. This will be accomplished using a predefined Smart Skill called "Extract RFP Requirements," designed to streamline this task.
- Navigate to QPilot
- Select the Smart Skills tab
- Find the Smart Skill you need, in this case, it’s “Extract Key Information from RFP”
- Select the Smart Skill and click on “Run Skill”
After running the Smart Skill, you will be directed to QPilot's Chat tab, where you will find the results of your prompt. Here, you can review the summarized information, key dates, and extracted requirements. This process saves you valuable time and effort, ensuring you have all the necessary details at your fingertips quickly and efficiently. Here’s an idea of the results to expect:
- Summary of the RFP
- Key Dates
- Requirements
Note: Be sure to still skim through the full RFP to confirm that it’s all consistent
Bid/No Bid Evaluation
Next, let's use another Smart Skill which has been pre-configured, the "Bid/No Bid Decision." This Smart Skill runs through a guided process, utilizing predefined "Bid/No Bid" criteria to help determine whether this RFP is worth pursuing. By following this guided process, the Smart Skill will analyze key factors and provide an informed recommendation on whether your organization should bid on the RFP. This ensures a strategic and data-driven approach to your decision-making process.
Yet again, navigate to the “Smart Skills” tab, select your version of the “Bid/No Bid Decision” and run the skill.
Once loaded, you’ll be brought back to the “Chat” tab, where QPilot will present you with a series of questions. These questions are designed by you and your organization, created, stored, and managed in SharePoint Online, and connected as content sources, as highlighted in the screenshot below.
In the chat tab, you can interact with QPilot by going through these questions. They are designed to guide you through the evaluation criteria, ensuring a thorough assessment of the RFP. This helps you make an informed decision on whether to bid. You can also set up a scoring system to assist in this process—if the RFP does not reach the minimum score, it is a No Bid, and vice versa.
This interactive process is invaluable, as it ensures you systematically consider all key factors, leading to a well-informed and strategic bidding decision.
Communicating the Bid/No Bid Outcome to the team
Now that we have decided to bid on the RFP, it’s time to automate our communication and follow-up processes. QPilot’s integration with Outlook allows you to leverage the insights and history from your previous interactions within QPilot, ensuring consistency and efficiency in your outreach. In this section, we'll guide you through using the History tab in QPilot for Outlook.
Using the History tab, you can easily access and reference the details of your previous conversations, summaries, and decisions made during the RFP evaluation process. This ensures that all relevant information is at your fingertips, allowing for more informed and cohesive communication with your team and stakeholders. Let’s dive in and see how you can make the most of QPilot for Outlook to enhance your proposal management workflow.
By accessing QPilot in your Outlook QorusDocs Add-in, you can select the “History” tab and find the interaction you’ve just had QPilot when vetting the RFP you’ve just received:
This will bring us back to the previous interactions “Chat” tab, where we can further interact with QPilot. The next step is to prompt QPilot to write you an email. Here’s an example of a prompt to your leadership team: “Rewrite this summary and outcome in an email to my leadership team, highlighting our good fit for blank, our ability to meet the dates, and how we scored in the Bid/no bid decision.”
Once the prompt has been entered and QPilot provides a response, you can choose to insert the content directly by selecting the "Insert" option at the bottom of the QPilot response. Alternatively, you can highlight and copy the specific parts you wish to include. Whichever method you choose, some intervention will be necessary to ensure the accuracy of the response and to format the email text appropriately.
RFP Response
As we transition into the RFP response phase, our primary goal is to craft a comprehensive proposal that aligns with the specified criteria. Utilizing QPilot within the QorusDocs template becomes indispensable during this stage, empowering us to efficiently address the outlined criteria and locate relevant content with ease. Additionally, QPilot streamlines mundane tasks, allowing us to allocate more time to refine our proposal effectively.
Finding and inserting a team member's bio
Note: The Content Source has already been set up and configured for QPilot on QorusDocs Hub.
We can seamlessly showcase the expertise of our team members by requesting QPilot to provide a shortlist of individuals suited for this RFP.
Accessing QPilot within the QorusDocs add-in is straightforward: simply navigate to your RFP In your RFP Response you can navigate to QPilot, within the QorusDocs add-in:
- Use the chat tab
- Enter in your prompt: “Recommend 5 team members with experience in landscaping: List the members first”
- Expand and select the Source to your bio library, in this case, it is “People”
- Run prompt
Once the prompt has run, you will get a list of suggestions with a brief overview of the team member and a reference to their bio, which you can click on, for a preview, and vet. Here’s what to expect QPilot to return. At the bottom, you can expand the references:
When you select a member you’d like to include, a preview window will pop up, so you know what to expect. Here you can select the “Insert all” option:
If you want QPilot to reference a specific document or piece of text, you can use the @ mention feature to streamline the process. Instead of selecting content from the Sources dropdown, simply include @this document or @highlighted text directly in your prompt. This allows you to seamlessly reference the relevant content within the context of your prompt, ensuring that QPilot addresses the exact material you need:
You can also utilize the @ mention feature to reference recently used documents. If you have recently interacted with a specific piece of content, this feature allows you to easily mention and include that document in your prompt. This functionality streamlines the process of retrieving relevant information, ensuring that your references are both accurate and contextually appropriate:
Responding to unanswered questions
Another feature of QPilot is its ability to address unanswered questions within the RFP, even those that may not immediately come to mind. Utilizing the chat function, we can effortlessly copy and paste the question and select the source from our "Past RFPs" content library, where we store our top-tier RFP responses for reuse.
This will search your Content Source, where you host all your previous winning RFP responses linked up to QPilot. When QPilot provides a response, it will also offer references. You can then click on these references to verify the accuracy of the information before reusing the content.
To complete the RFP response process, we highly recommend utilizing two Smart Skills for maximum efficiency. Let's delve into these Smart Skills and explore the automation they offer to streamline our workflow.
Writing an Executive Summary
The first Smart Skill we’ll explore, the "Write an Executive Summary," serves as a significant time-saver. This skill facilitates the generation of an executive summary for proposals by posing essential questions and gathering pertinent information regarding the proposal's objectives, target audience, and distinctive benefits. It offers a structured framework for dissecting the proposal and crafting a succinct summary.
Let’s take a look at what to expect:
- Navigate to the Smart Skills Tab
- Select the “Write an Executive Summary”
- Click “Run Skill”
This will bring you into a new chat, where an executive summary will be drafted out by QPilot. You will be able to see the references QPilot took into consideration when drafting this executive summary. If you are satisfied, you can copy and paste the QPilot output under your Executive Summary header in your RFP response:
Checking for Red Flags
And for the final Smart Skill we suggest you run when utilizing QPilot is to check your RFP response for any red flags. This skill will run through your document and check for any red flags as determined by your organizational policies.
Let’s see it in action:
- Navigate to the Smart Skills tab
- Select the “Check for Red Flags” Smart Skill
- Click on “Run Skill”
In the QPilot chat, any potential Red Flags, as defined by your organization, will be listed for your review. As depicted below in the demonstration RFP, there are a few identified Red Flags. This feature significantly streamlines and expedites the review process, providing you with specific areas to focus on rather than meticulously combing through the entire RFP response.
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