How to Respond to an RFP with Claude: Go/No-Go to First Draft

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.