ChatGPT or Claude vs Purpose-Built RFP Software: Pros And Cons

Your RFP has just landed. Now you're wanting to use Claude to respond to that RFP in an effective and efficient manner. I'm gonna show you the crucial five steps you need to take in Claude for responding to your RFP. We're gonna go into setting up your own project with all your company context so that Claude has the right information on how to respond to your RFP. We're then going to go into AI go, no-go, so you can decide even before you start whether you want to bid on that RFP. We're gonna go through looking at the compliance matrix and do you even have a shot against the evaluator's criteria before going in. And then we're gonna go into generating win themes with AI and finally responding to the RFP. This is all so important, and you can actually use Claude skills along every step of the RFP to really nail your output.

And of course, as always, keep the human in the loop and ensure that your answers are accurate, and not only are you going to respond, but help you actually win. My name's Rob Dickson, I'm from AutoRFP.ai, and let's jump into it all. So how to respond to an RFP with Claude. So looking at qualifying, mapping, drafting, and finally getting that information out to your subject matter experts to help you win. Before we go into it, what is a go, no go? Effectively, it's looking into should we bid on this RFP or not. We ran a survey across over 100 winning bid teams with Stargazy, a bid manager community, and what we found is that 71% of teams that win more than fifty percent of their RFPs run a dedicated go, no go step. This is so important, and AI is really great for this. So let's jump into how Claude can help you with this.

But first, I have set up a fake company with a fake RFP for today's video. We have a Claude project. You can see here in setup in Claude or cowork with all the relevant documentation of that company. It has memory, and it has instructions. These instructions you can actually download in the description below and you wanna of course, make them relevant to your company, how you write and everything else. Other documents and context I'd put here is like technical information past RFP responses. If you have a library of historical context, that could be your security documents and policies, it could be your websites, it could be a bunch of like markdown files that are relevant to your company. I would really ensure you have examples of great responses. AI works really well when not only it doesn't have context about your company, but it also has examples of how you would actually respond.

Best way to do that is past RFPs or tenders you have responded to, and make sure that they're labeled correctly, and in your project instructions, point out to those different contexts and when to refer to it. What I'd recommend is almost having a context file called project context map.md and ask Claude to write and list all of the context that you have in the project file. And this can be something that Claude, in its instructions, is pointed to and uses consistently to find the most relevant context. Kinda like a knowledge graph or map for it. Once you've got your project set up, let's get into actually responding to an RFP. So I have my RFP. I go into Claude. I'm gonna use my go, no-go skill. So what your skills are, and every single skill I'm gonna cover off today, you can download in the description below off AutoRFP.ai's website. We have a skill library that is incredibly useful to use across all different kinds of parts of the RFP process, and you can download them all for free

on our website at AutoRFP.ai/skills or in the description below. So what is a skill? Effectively, a skill is just a predetermined instructions for your AI, in this case, Claude, on what it needs to do and steps it needs to take. This includes an overview, includes content. So here's the instructions of the skill, and this one also uses a go, no-go decision framework. So it's a built-in framework and even a spreadsheet file that it can use to then ensure that effectively it's generating consistency, consistent output. Again, you wanna make sure you customize these skills to your organization, and then you can share them across your entire Claude tenant, so everyone can use and share the same skill. So I've invoked this skill. You can generally invoke skills just with a backslash. For instance, AI Go/No-Go. And here I've used the skill, uploaded the RFP, and that's all I need to do. I don't need to worry about some complicated prompt.

Effectively, that skill is my complicated prompt that is saved in my organization, and it repeats and gives Claude a really repeatable way to get me a consistent output. So it's gone through, and it's scaled it as a conditional go at seventy-seven percent, so seventy-seven out of a hundred. The reason is because based off the scorecard of my Go/No-Go decision framework, it's looked at what we need to worry about. It looks at my past contacts or what we've promised to them in the lead-up to the RFP. It's looked at the references here. Are there any named references that are actually relevant to the prospect? So can we win this thing? Have we done this kind of work before? It looks at relevant pricing, and it looks at a whole bunch of other stuff as well, especially around contradicts contradictions and so on. And then it generated me my Go/No-Go analysis report, and then I could bring that to my team, and we can discuss that in detail about whether that is accurate and whether we actually want to proceed with this RFP or not. So that's the important first step.

I have not written a word. I've maybe read the RFP. But before I even go to start writing my, on my blank draft, I've done my Go/No-Go. Once you've done your Go/No-Go, really useful one is then Compliance Matrix Builder. This is, again, another skill that you can download in the description below. And what this does it pr- effectively goes through after the Go/No-Go and checks whether we are gonna meet the compliance. It's gonna give me a mock evaluation score based on that. So anything that I need to look at, it's gone through, given me my project submission instructions what needs attention, and effectively what I need to action. So going in here, I can then see my submission checklist to everything I actually need to do, so effectively my own RFP submission checklist, which is really helpful ensuring the bid gets in on time, works really well in delegating those tasks to different team members, and ensure that we're a clean and efficient team to ensure we get through that. My evaluation criteria, so it's effectively extracted that from

the RFP document and looked at where, what the scoring matrix is. Because effectively, when you write an RFP to win, you don't only need to be compliant, but you need to make sure you achieving maximum marks as possible against their evaluation criteria. And then it's made some observations about the RFP as well as the requirements matrix. So it's exported and shredded that RFP for me and got everything ready to ensure that we can start writing. So we've decided to bid. We know what we need to achieve and do in the RFP. Let's get to writing it, actually winning the thing. That's where our next skills works. So firstly, we wanted to generate win themes. The win theme is what is the unique competitive positioning and reasons behind what we understand about the prospect, so l- putting it in their own language and everything else to ensure about why we're competitive and why we will win this bid.

So for instance, my talent acquisition software, we can look about what they're waiting, so what's important to them. We should-- I also have a lot of information about this RFP 'cause we've done prior conversations with the prospect. Talking about why now, so why are they actually looking to b-build, why are they looking to acquire my solution? Mapping all the stakeholders, so important. What does each stakeholder actually care about? Also very important. It's gone into the competitive field effectively and then it's generated my win themes. Gone into my second theme, consolidate hiring as well, and then gone into my third theme, board-ready numbers and hiring retention. So reporting is important to them. Then what it does is each of those themes that it generates, it maps those themes to the different sections, also take into account the evaluation criteria and everything else. Once we have our themes, then it's actually time to respond to the RFP. You've noticed most teams may start with a blank RFP and straightaway start writing.

I've used AI to do a lot of heavy lifting before that step to ensure that when we actually go to start writing, A, we know we want to bid on it, B, we know we're competitive and have a chance to win, and C, we know why we can win this and what we need to weave into every single respond to win the RFP. That's where Claude is really useful across the entire RFP response process and responding to the RFP to actually get you to win the RFP. So then we go in and effectively it started responding to the RFP, and it's given me the, that output in the prospect's original documents. And then I can go in, I can have a look. And then it's effectively it's started responding to that RFP. I can go down here. It's given me gaps, so like certain things that it can't answer, it's highlighted that. It's gone in to write me an executive summary. It's started responding each of this information. Again, you can see what context it has a gap for.

It actually has a lot of gaps. That gives me an indication I need to strengthen my content library in my Claude project. 'Cause if the AI can't find the answer, we've made sure that this skill for responding to the RFP will actually mean that instead of trying to guess and make something up that could potentially be incorrect, it's instead made sure it's highlighted that it doesn't have the information, and that's for me to go in and respond to So then I've given all that information, it's responded to everything. I would upload this to Google Docs or SharePoint for Microsoft Word, then I would tag the relevant team members and get everyone involved, and we start to respond to this RFP. And then once I've completed, I ensure that I go back to Claude, upload my completed RFP, and make sure that is saved to my context, so the next time we get these questions, it can pull from my completed RFP to then use that information to respond to the RFP. So that's how you can use Claude. I still have a lot of work in front of me, but Claude and a really strong bid process

helped me streamline getting started, get- gotten my first AI draft, generated my win themes, and even before we did all that, it helped me decide whether we want to bid on this and then what we need to do to submit and meet the evaluator's criteria. So I'm Rob from AutoRFP.ai. You can visit our website. We're an AI RFP software. So generally, if you're doing more than, say, thirty bids a year, and winning is incredibly important to your organization, getting accurate and quality responses in to actually win the RFP, you definitely wanna check out AutoRFP.ai. You can visit our website. Our pricing is transparent, and you can book a demo. Where Claude can sometimes fall short, and this is where teams will pick up AutoRFP.ai, is when they have a lot of different team members responding to that RFP. You'll notice in Claude, collaboration is incredibly difficult.

Second, you have content that lives in a lot of different places, and you wanna make sure that can be centralized into your AI content library. Claude, although you can give it information, it's not the best at actually finding the most relevant information. You could see in my completed RFP that it had a lot of gaps, and I said maybe it doesn't have that information, or maybe it did and it just didn't try hard enough to find it. And you'll also find a lot of times when talking to Claude, you might have to ask, "Hey, where did you get that answer from?" Because you're not necessarily confident that it didn't just make it up. Even if you give all the great prompts and skills in place, you wanna make sure that you're still asking it to validate those answers, and occasionally you will get back, "Yeah, you're absolutely right. I made that up." That's where AutoRFP.ai is really strong in that we do AI citations, so every single sentence generated by AI, you can see exactly where it came from. You never have to ask where it came from, and the AI is validating that on every single output. And then secondly, you're not necessarily locked into Claude.

You-- We use all the best models from GPT-6 to Gemini 4 to Sonnet 4.5 and 5.5 And effectively, we use across every single model what they're best at in- across the entire RFP process to help you respond incredibly efficiently, as well as quality responses you can trust that actually will help you win the RFP. So I've been Rob from AutoRFP.ai. In the description below are all the different links for the skills and the proposal win rate report I mentioned at the start. And yeah, hope you have learnt something today about how you can use Claude to help you win RFPs efficiently. Thanks.

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.

Hey there. My name's Rob, and I'm from Auto RFP.ai. Today, we're going to be jumping into how you can use Chat GPT projects and the powers of Chat GPT's latest models to answer all of your requests for proposals, your requests for informations, requests for quotes, security questionnaires, and any expression of interest you might get from your potential buyers. Let's jump into it. So, here I'm going to create a new project. We're going to call that our RFP response project. And in this project, what are we going to be doing is pulling in all of our relevant company information, whether that be things like our policies and procedures, for instance, our business continuity policy. We're going to pull in other relevant information like our customer stories or case studies. We're going to pull in and most importantly, our past RFP responses. If you don't have any past RFP responses, potentially if you have other areas like your help documentation or

service documentations in relation to what kind of services or products you offer, that might be really helpful for kind of like functional or non-functional requirements that you might get in a request for proposal. All righty, let's jump into it. So, first we're going to start with instructions. Now, I've got one pre-planned here. And in an instruction, what that is is providing Chat GPT a lot of context and kind of like a master prompt that it uses in every single time it looks to answer any of our additional requests res- prompts in a chat. And so, it's really important to set up a master prompt or uh instruction here for success. So, what we have here is I'm giving it what part is it playing? So, it's a B2B SaaS sales professional cuz my fake company is a HR tech company in the US. We're an RFP manager and response writer, And its primary responsibility is to complete RFPs, RFIs, security questionnaires, and other relevant

information for this SaaS company. It's only going to be using official content provided and uploaded project files. So, I'm being really restrictive here in my instructions to really try to reduce the chance of hallucination. What I don't want happening is the AI to provide an incorrect response that it's made up on one of my RFPs. Of course, I'm going to be checking it before I submit it to the customer, but I want to make sure it's still pulling the information from the relevant files rather than just giving me kind of made up and hallucinated answers. So, I've provided a bunch of different prompts here and instructions to really make that less likely. Then, and then here, what I have is what kind of answers do I want ChatGPT to give? So, yes or no, one to two sentence explanations. I always like where it's, you know, yes, {comma} and then has information for that RFP. So, that's what I'm asking here. I'm going to click save, and I've just added that instruction to my ChatGPT

project. And you can see it here, and that's going to always going to use that when I'm going forward. Next, I want to add my files. Your files might be things in relation to your company like your company pro overview, your policies, your procedures, customer stories or case studies, and most importantly is your past RFP responses. So, if you've previously done RFPs or and proposals and so on, you want to make sure you're providing that information there. Again, make sure the information is timely, relevant, and don't provide too much here. Although I just said provide as much as possible, if you have too much, you're going to wait A, potentially hit the context window of the the token limit of ChatGPT when it goes to answer, and might not be able to look through all the documents, but B, it's actually more likely that you hit the limit that you can have in a project. But, start by giving it as much as possible, and then try to remove things if it's not as relevant for those

particular answers, or when you go to answer particular RFP, ask it to only refer to certain project files that are relevant for that RFP. So, here I'm going to add my documents. So, I have past RFP answers and business continuity plan, and I have a company document that's all really relevant for my request for proposals. So, I'm going to add that in, and then like I said, ChatGPT will be able to search those documents. Uh these are all in document .docx, they could be in PDF, PowerPoint, and so on, Excel, and it's going to then use that what I'm going to answer. And you can see there, there's my project files. Next, I'm going to be trying to answer a new RFP here. Can you help me answer this RFP? So, I'm going to add that file, and here's my fake RFP. This RFP is a fake library in the United States, uh and they're looking for HR tech,

specifically applicant tracking software, which is what my software, or fake software company, provides. Jumping in here, it's going to And you can see there, I haven't provided much of a prompt. Usually, if when I'm using ChatGPT, I provide a lot more information, but because I have those custom instructions and project files, it's using all that context when answering this particular information. So, even though this is quite straightforward, it's actually going to be looking through and then try to answer that information. It's now looking at You can see here, it's going through and analyzing. It actually did pick up that my fake RFP had two sheets. So, I've got a sheet for my non-functional requirements and a sheet for my functional requirements. And it's going to be going through here and answering that information. And there we go. It's answered that. So, let's have a quick look at it. So, I'll download that information.

Great. So, ChatGPT has gone through there that project instructions and looked to answer all of the Excel questions. So, jumping in here, we can see that it's completed the functional RFP responses. And you can see that I've kind of chatted through and asked it to have a look at all the relevant information. It's gone through and answered that information. And then I can kind of download those relevant CSVs. This one's a little bit confusing cuz I've had multiple tabs. So, it's kind of worked through all separately and then yeah, it tried to answer each one as it can. And you kind of see this information here. It's It's done pretty well. There's some pretty useful information. Uh and once I export that and pull it back together into a spreadsheet, I can have a look at what my functional and non-functional requirements look like. So, here I have my requirements. And you can see here it's kind of answered those different details. So, does my system support SSO integration with active directory? Uh yeah, it says it's a pre-built AD connectors are available. Um

whether this analysis is my fake customer, so whether this is correct or not, I'm not sure. So, I gave it some fake information to base it off. But, you can kind of work through it. And obviously, you would know your company best whether this information was actually correct. It hasn't really followed my instructions too well in terms of yes, {comma}. It's kind of just provided more generic description and comments. But, I can obviously go through here and answer those. Either way, it saved me a lot of time. It saved me from having to either A, manually go through and find those answers, or B, it saved me time from having to look back and kind of copy and paste between those responses. That's pretty good for a $20 a month subscription. Now, if you're doing anything larger than this, or if you want to save even more time, so I'm Rob and we're from AutoRFP.ai. We're an AI RFP software. So, you can kind of see here, we do everything that ChatGPT might be helping you with and a lot more. We have great collaboration

features, built-in trust scores, so you know how reliable that answer is, and not just and no project limit in terms of how many different content items you can have. You can load as many as you'd like. You can upload PDFs, Word docs, automatically answer and generate responses for you. We're trusted by some of the world's largest companies from startups to Fortune 500s, including software companies like Sugar CRM, Red Rover, or Fintech OS. And we're rated 4.9 stars and more on G2, Gartner, and other review sites. But, you can find out all about us at AutoRFP.ai. And if you're interested in learning more, you can of course book an online demonstration. I'm Rob from AutoRFP and I hope you found that run-through really interesting around RFP response with ChatGPT projects.