The Challenge
When Alicia Lechtenberger joined Passport Technology in January as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, she brought 25 years in gaming but was new to RFPs. At Passport Technology, a fintech company with a team of 100+ people serving casino operators, RFPs were being “muddled through” manually in Word and Excel documents, and the team was “recreating the wheel every single time.”
Each manual response pulled in a diverse team of 15+ people: the sales team, three vice presidents, the CEO, and the product managers. The salesperson took the lead, starting from a repository of past RFPs, and then came “100 emails back and forth” as changes piled up in a shared drive. Nobody owned the process from start to finish, and the friction left the team dreading RFPs.
Deadlines made it worse. When an RFP arrived with two weeks to respond, people worked 18-hour days and gave up their weekends to finish it. “Everybody was pretty miserable,” Alicia says. The finished documents carried their own cost: the number of mistakes and grammatical errors Alicia found was exhausting. She knew there had to be a better way, and for a technology company, it was time to hunt for a solution.
In tandem, Passport’s marketing strategy was bringing in more enterprise opportunities, where an RFP is crucial to the buying process. Alicia could see more RFPs coming, what she calls “a good storm,” and the old process had no room for it.
The Solution
Alicia started researching AI RFP software almost immediately and spoke with two other vendors alongside AutoRFP.ai. “From what I saw, [AutoRFP.ai] was the most advanced,” she says, and its AI automation was “a huge decision maker.”
Before going further, Alicia wanted to benchmark the manual process and understand it completely, so she observed more RFPs go through the old way to see where the team stood. With no dedicated budget line for RFP software, she moved funds from another line item to procure AutoRFP.ai, on the understanding that “sales are important, but we’re not going to have sales if we don’t have a professional RFP program.” The team was live in the first week of June.
The new process starts with ownership. Under an SOP Alicia wrote, any RFP that lands in a salesperson’s territory belongs to that salesperson. AutoRFP.ai drafts answers from the team’s approved content, and product managers check the technical claims in each draft, such as specifications and dimensions, and confirm they are correct.
The first few RFPs were thin on responses, because the library was just starting out. Old RFPs completed before AutoRFP.ai brought outdated information into the drafts, and Alicia was not going to correct every answer and its citations by hand. Instead, the team kept adding new, approved responses. Alicia now administers the library herself so that the content stays controlled and current.
The library keeps growing with each new bid. Alicia is currently working through an 815-question RFP from a major prospect, assigning the roughly 140 questions the library had never seen before to the right people. The answers they approve will be ready the next time those questions come up. As the library has grown, Passport’s no-edit rate (AI-generated answers approved with zero or one word changed) has climbed from 18% in June to 33% in July and 58% in August. Overall AI automation now sits above 70%, and the first-draft rate exceeds 80%: for every new RFP, more than 80% of questions arrive with a generated response, and 58% of those are approved with no more than a one-word change.
“It's honestly been the best decision I made this entire year by far.”
The Results
This year, Passport has responded to more than double the number of RFPs it handled last year, driven by its marketing push into larger enterprise prospects. The team absorbed that increase in volume without a dedicated RFP hire. That was only possible with strong SOPs and AI working across the process.
The outcomes moved too. Last year, 14% of the RFPs Passport submitted were successful. This year that figure stands at 37%. On the response side, the change is in what goes out the door: answers drawn from an approved library, in place of documents full of mistakes and grammatical errors that the team took no joy in completing. The RFP is now “a great presentation for Passport.”
The effort behind each response is a fraction of what it was. In May, before go-live, an RFP of 500 to 600 questions kept 15 people busy for two to three weeks, an estimated 200 to 300 hours in total. A typical recent RFP in AutoRFP.ai involved 8 to 10 people at an hour or two each, roughly 15 to 20 hours by Alicia’s estimate. Behind that is the 58% no-edit rate: more than half of AI-generated responses go to submission with no more than a one-word change.
The work also feels different. “The team used to hate RFPs. Now with AutoRFP.ai it’s made the process much more fun,” Alicia says.
Contributing to RFPs also doubles as training for team members who are new to the company or to a complex corner of fintech: “it helps them to learn by editing.” Alicia’s own time goes back to “driving sales.”
“Let go of the manual RFP completion process. We’re in the modern age, and it doesn’t behoove you to do things in a very outdated manner. Streamline your processes, automation, don’t be afraid to join forces with AutoRFP.ai”
For anyone still hesitant, Alicia’s advice is to “talk to a user like me, talk to other users and really hear from them.”
