Written by Charles Radclyffe
A Historical Reflection on Sales Performance
Nearly 80 years ago, former professional baseball player Frank Bettger published one of the classic sales books, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling.
Frank became one of the now-defunct Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company’s best salespeople after a period of destitution following an injury sustained playing baseball that ended his professional career. He wrote his book after meeting self-help writer and coach, Dale Carnegie (né Carnegey), who encouraged him to recount his experiences to help others.
Some of Frank’s anecdotes (now revised in later editions) have aged poorly with time, but in essence, it’s a story that sales performance comes from discipline and hard work. Any salesperson who advances the viewpoint that sales success is a numbers game owes much of this philosophy to Frank Bettger.
If you were to write a book on sales in 2047, it would likely be entirely a guide on applied AI. Even today, AI is permeating much of the sales process, from lead generation to prospecting, through RFPs/ bids/ tenders, and onboarding diligence. Even re-ordering and supply-chain reviews are processes where the use of AI is unavoidable.
The use of AI in B2B sales is possibly a topic worthy even of an entire book today – but here are a few areas where its use is proven and well established:
AI for RFP review
Many procurement processes require businesses to be put out to tender before contracts can be awarded. Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) processes are therefore often designed by consulting firms such as Efficio in order to solicit the best solutions to any given problem.
If you’re on the issuing end of an RFP, the tender opportunity is likely to be picked up by one of the many tender list providers on the market, and using more traditional data analytics techniques, filtered and distributed to a much wider range of potential respondents than would have been the case even a decade ago.
This often results in overload when tasked with reviewing these responses. Sometimes, even 5-10 RFP responses can be too tricky to run objectively, and when these balloon to 5-10x this number, the process becomes close to impossible.
In these instances, AI can be used to efficiently whittle down RFP responses to a shortlist, using data from successful previous suppliers/ contracts in order to help score responses more accurately than a human reviewer could ever achieve!
AI for RFP Response — and Why Chatbots Fall Short
With AI very much being used in review, how should it be used in the response? Well, let’s talk about bad practice – simply copy-and-pasting the questions into ChatGPT/ Gemini in order to generate responses. Here’s why:
- You might be breaking the rules of the tender process
RFP guidance documents are intellectual property which is provided under licence from the issuer. Simply copying and pasting questions to a public tool like ChatGPT or Gemini might be a breach of copyright.
Professional bid management software like EasyAutofill (EA) is exempt from these restrictions, as EA never uses data uploaded to the platform in order to train the AI model. Always check whether the AI you’re using uses customer data for training. If it does, it’s likely to be very high risk and could end up seeing your bid response being disqualified if you are caught!
- You’re running the risk of your responses being inconsistent
The most complex RFP requirements often ask similar questions worded in subtly different ways. This is to tease out nuance that is important to the buyer, but can often trip up sellers who use AI through tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Co-pilot, as the answer to Question 12 might be entirely different to the answer generated to Question 47.
Rather than uploading question by question and asking the AI to generate answers one by one, use a platform like EA’s EasyAutofill to generate a first-draft response to the entire RFP in one go.
Platforms like EA’s AI are designed as ‘agentic’ systems, which come with self-referenceability as standard. What this means in practice is that every answer generated in a first-draft RFP response is cross-referenced against every other answer generated in order to ensure consistency.
- You’re running the risk of your responses being wrong
Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Co-Pilot simply approximate our text across multiple sources, which gives the illusion of them being ‘intelligent’. Agentic Graph-RAG-based platforms like EA’s EasyAutofill platform might also have Chatbot functionality, but even this is constrained by facts provided to the system, and every answer generated has the potential to be reviewed, edited, and approved.
What this means is that through usage, EA becomes stronger, and because every response builds on previous responses, this is catnip to corporate comms professionals. Chatbots without this key feature simply run the risk of making things up!
- You’re running the risk of simple mistakes that will get your response thrown out.
Some RFP response platforms have hard character/ word count limits, which reduce the scope for mistakes, but those many processes which are submitted as Word, PDF, or Excel files have no such hard-coding.
It’s easy to break these limits, and those in the know will admit that AI has one critical weakness – it can’t count! Ask ChatGPT for an answer in 500 words, and you’re just as likely to get 600 back as you are 300. In both cases entirely useless for your RFP response.
Professional bid management AI platforms like EasyAutofill have word and character counting built in. Ask the AI for 500 words, and it will keep trying itself until it gets to 490, but never to 501. And word/ character counting clearly visible in the review/ edit workflow means that no human edit is going to accidentally take you over the limit, either.
Operational Due Diligence (ODD)/ Onboarding Questionnaires
So, you’ve sculpted the winning response, and you’ve won the tender – now the only thing standing between you and the Purchase Order (and your commission!) is the inevitable onboarding diligence. How can AI help here?
Onboarding diligence takes many different forms depending on the industry. For software companies, this might be mostly focused on Information/ Cyber Security (InfoSec/ CyberSec) questionnaires. Platforms like EA are perfect at handling these, as once an answer has been given to a question on a particular topic, it’s highly likely that it can be reused lock stop in other enquiries.
Even commercial operational due diligence processes can be streamlined using AI. When choosing software to help, look for solutions that can streamline the project management of the review, edit, and approval processes – and not just those which generate first draft responses for you.
Supply-Chain Reviews
So you got the PO, and you’re now an established vendor to your new favourite customer. But then, on the first, third, or fifth anniversary of that initial deal, you’re hit with a supply-chain review process. Often instigated via platforms like SAP Ariba, these can add weeks of delay and uncertainty to contract renegotiation processes or even repeat orders.
In many industries, this is where Environmental sustainability, Social justice, and corporate Governance (ESG) diligence occurs. Usually centred around a particular risk that your customer is trying to manage (e.g. carbon emissions, human rights, or anti-bribery compliance) – failure to complete is increasingly terminal to relationships, and the chief instigator of new tendering processes being started due to concerns that suppliers can’t turn around information on demand.
Don’t put your business at risk in these ways! AI platforms like EA can get these DD requests out of the door on the same day, giving huge confidence to your customers that you’ve got your own processes under control and, unlike manually-driven completion exercises, can give you huge confidence that the responses you’ve gone back with are accurate, up-to-date and consistent.
And finally, most importantly!
Many customers have come to us having already implemented Co-pilot-based solutions with the goal of putting an end to copy-and-paste activities, only for their teams to have become the integration points between the Chatbot and the spreadsheet!
While other AI platforms might generate first draft responses for you, and even provide a friendly web interface to review, edit, and approve answers, do you really want to go to all this effort only to run the risk of a mistake as the approved answers are copied and pasted back into the original format document supplied by your customer?
Choose an AI platform that autofills the original file format for ultimate peace of mind as well as operational efficiency. Platforms like EA’s EasyAutofill can consistently and reliably complete any PDF, Word, or Excel-based form – and that’s why we make our Zero Copy-and-Paste promise to customers!
Discover how EA saves your time today or book a 15-minute demo.