RFP software helps a seller answer a buyer's request for proposal (RFP): a long questionnaire that a large buyer sends to several possible suppliers before it chooses one. It is also called RFP response software or proposal management software. In India, an RFP from a government body or a public-sector company is usually part of a tender.
An RFP can run to forty pages and hundreds of questions. It asks about the product's features, how it is installed and supported, the seller's finances, references from other customers, and security. Most RFPs have a firm deadline, often within two weeks. A seller who misses it loses the deal. The answers must also match what the seller wrote in earlier RFPs, because buyers compare them.
Most questions are not new. The seller has probably answered "Describe your data backup process" dozens of times before. So RFP software keeps a library of approved answers. Each answer has an owner, and a date when it was last checked. When a new RFP arrives, the software reads its questions and finds the closest approved answer for each one. Today, a large language model writes the first draft of each answer from the library, in the wording of the new question. Questions with no good match go to the expert who owns that subject: security questions to the security team, legal questions to the legal team and pricing to finance. The software tracks who still has to answer what, and sends reminders. At the end, it puts the answers into the buyer's format, which may be a Word file, a spreadsheet or the buyer's online portal.
Consider a Bengaluru company that sells cloud contact centre software. A private bank in Mumbai sends it an RFP with 312 questions, due in 10 days. The software finds approved answers for 241 of them, and the AI drafts those 241 in two hours. Another 49 questions need an expert: 30 go to security, 12 to legal and 7 to the product team. The last 22 questions are new, for example where the bank's call recordings will be stored and for how long. The proposal manager writes those with the head of product. The response is submitted on day 8. The 22 new answers are reviewed and added to the library, ready for the next bank.
The security part of an RFP is often a separate document, the security questionnaire. A related tool, security questionnaire automation, specialises in it. On the buyer's side, RFPs are written and scored in procure-to-pay software, as part of strategic sourcing. The content for a proposal often comes from sales enablement, where marketing keeps the approved slides and case studies.