On ingest, SiftHub parses the solicitation and returns the submission date, the clarification deadline and the evidence the buyer expects in the package, including SOC 2 and ISO attestations linked from a connected trust centre. Sections route to subject matter experts on a hierarchy defined once rather than decided per bid. Partial answers are flagged as a yellow visual cue rather than scored as a percentage, a change Neil attributes directly to customer feedback that nobody could act on the difference between 75 and 85 percent.
The knowledge side is built on connected sources rather than a maintained library of question and answer pairs. Neil's position is that most teams do not need Q&A pairs at all, since static answers already live in HR policies, product documentation and help centres, and that teams migrating tend to phase their imported library out within three to four months. Three properties decide whether that is safe: recency prioritisation from source metadata, the ability to scope what is connected, and permission inheritance from the native system.
The personalisation argument runs through deal context. SiftHub reads call recordings, email and chat with a specific buyer so the first draft uses that buyer's vocabulary, illustrated with a healthcare customer whose prospects refer to their customers as patients.
Christina presses throughout on the questions that come up in real evaluations, including guest reviewer access for SMEs without a licence, the audit trail and redline history, and whether source citations survive a submission defended two years later.
What the episode covers
Milestone and required document extraction from the solicitation. Section-level auto-assignment and reviewer hierarchies. Confidence cues versus confidence scores. Inline response in Word and Google Docs. Template-based response from a requirements manual. Deal context personalisation. Agentic bid/no-bid analysis in a customer-defined format. Audit trails and redlines. Response analytics covering most asked questions, unanswered questions and unsupported feature requests.
Neil Parekh is Revenue Lead at SiftHub, with a background spanning sales leadership and proposal leadership. Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-parekh-08/
Christina Carter (00:09): Today we are going to have a demo of SiftHub, which is a proposal automation tool, or an agentic deal orchestration platform.
Now, I've sat through hundreds of these demos, and usually my eyes start to glaze over because they are so similar to each other. But SiftHub is doing things genuinely differently. I am so impressed with how deeply they understand proposals and the processes that are out there, especially in relation to the wider revenue and sales processes.
So I can't wait to hand over to Neil Parekh. He is the Revenue Lead at SiftHub. He has a strong background in sales leadership, but also in proposal leadership. You can tell every single time you talk to him that he understands proposals and RFPs at a very deep level.
All right, let's dive into the demo.
Neil Parekh (01:09): Thanks, Christina, for having me today. I'm very excited to show folks how SiftHub can help with bids, proposals, RFPs and questionnaires. Essentially, how do we create a flywheel of your most relevant, up-to-date knowledge to have customized, personalized responses?
First drafts, typically, that we've seen already much, much quicker. What we've seen from a lot of our customers is them having so much more time now to really personalize and go that extra step, so the bid or the RFP is extremely personal, based on very contextual nuances specific to that particular prospect or customer. That's broadly what I'm going to be covering today.
Christina Carter (01:55): I'm totally jumping in and interrupting, but I want people listening to be aware that that's one of my favorite things about SiftHub. It's not pulling from static content that's going to go into every single proposal. It's pulling from all these places that are connected to your customer as well, so you have that nuanced response. I'm excited for it, because that's one of the biggest changes in our proposals nowadays.
Neil Parekh (02:20): Absolutely. I've seen that shift over the past year or so, where maintaining those static Q&A pairs is such a cumbersome, time-consuming task. Even with so many resources deployed behind it, it gets stale so quickly. So how do you eliminate that problem?
The entire premise we built SiftHub on is that it's an AI-native platform. We've not tried to bolt AI on top of a legacy architecture. How do we operate with the foundations of what I like to refer to as post-ChatGPT? You'll see that at every step of the walkthrough we're about to do today.
The underlying premise is: can I not rely solely on static Q&A pairs? A quick example. What are your latest and greatest sources of information or institutional knowledge? Think Google Drive, your SharePoints, any public help documentation. Maybe you have your technical documentation on the likes of Zendesk.
How do we then weave in contextual jargon or terminology that a prospect or customer likes to use from your recordings, whether that's Gong, Zoom, Google Meet, what have you? The underlying premise is how do we build a knowledge or context graph across these fragmented, siloed sources of information to inform your RFPs and responses without having to rely on a static Q&A library.
Neil Parekh (03:35): I'll spend a minute talking about this, because a lot of folks have concerns. How do we ensure it's getting the most recent content? How do we ensure permissions? These are the types of questions I typically see.
We've taken a lot of effort to ensure that our algorithm is really prioritizing recency. Google Drive, Zendesk, all these sources pass metadata to us that lets us identify what files are recent, when a file was last modified, edited or updated, which lets SiftHub easily identify whether this is recent and relevant to the question or requirement at hand.
The second thing is that all of these can be scoped. What do I want to connect from within these sources? I don't have to connect the universe of all my sources. I can choose what to specifically connect. It could be a folder in Google Drive, a specific channel on Slack, what have you.
The third is permissions. Anyone who doesn't have access to something on the native source doesn't have access to it in SiftHub either. If I don't have access to something on Google Drive, I don't have access to it in SiftHub. I typically hear this a lot from InfoSec and security folks, so I wanted to lay it out. Everything flows down from your native source.
That's the high-level premise of how we create that bedrock of knowledge across your institutional knowledge, and pair it with some of your more gold-standard questions and answers. You don't want to do away with this. Think of questions that typically don't need a lot of maintenance. When was your company founded? Where are you headquartered? Things like those, I've seen a lot of customers prefer to keep in Q&A pairs. It's about getting the right balance between the two, using both in combination: Q&A pairs as well as your more living, breathing knowledge layer across your institution.
Christina Carter (05:52): Neil, I have a question for you. So many people watching this are incredibly used to Q&A pairs. It's how we've been living our lives for the past 20 years. But like you're saying, these questions that are the same every single time, your headquarters, where your other offices are, all that stuff that really doesn't change that much. Does it have to live in a Q&A pair, or could it be somewhere else? I'm sure that's also stored in HR documentation or something else. What is best practice here? Is it usually that combination between Q&A pairs and your connected content? What do you see working best?
Neil Parekh (06:29): That's such a good question. My recommendation is always that you don't need Q&A pairs at all, because even your headquarters and these more static questions live somewhere, like you said, either your HR policies or somewhere else in your organization.
But I've seen that when you're moving from a platform that is mainly reliant on Q&A pairs, that shift doesn't happen overnight. A lot of folks who are transitioning to a more AI-native way of doing things take some time to completely eliminate Q&A pairs. So I've seen that be a helpful bridge.
Even in terms of timelines, I see a lot of folks who will upload a lot of their Q&A pairs from their existing tools into SiftHub when they're transitioning. But within three to four months, those Q&A pairs are completely phased out, because they're now used to this new way of operating. They've seen such a huge uplift in efficiency, and it's not cumbersome maintaining that information.
Christina Carter (07:30): I love that. So you're giving features that help hold our hands. We know you used to do it this way. We're going to give it to you, but we're also going to give you all these other things that are going to make it better. That's so good, Neil.
Neil Parekh (07:42): And Chris, you bring up a great point as well. Folks are already updating stuff on their product documentation and on their websites. So why do I duplicate this in the form of Q&A pairs? Any robust AI system should be able to detect that this is accurate, relevant and the most updated information, and automatically sync it back in near real time. So the knowledge graph is updated with what is true in real time. Have I changed something in my product documentation in Zendesk or Confluence? Can it flow into SiftHub in near real time without me having to manually sync or do anything to ensure it's up to date?
Neil Parekh (08:20): That was step one. Let's look at a few other things. Typically, what I've seen a lot of platforms do is have the ability to create projects, upload files, have their templates ready, or fill out proposals within the web app. That's a great traditional way of doing things, and I see why folks are used to it.
At SiftHub, while we have that approach, what we've tried to do differently, and what we've seen work very well, is enable folks to work within their native ecosystems. If I'm used to working on a Word document, if I have to create or fill out a template for an RFP in a Google Doc or a spreadsheet, why do I need a web app? Why do I need to go into a system which is going to be gated if I need inputs from a subject matter expert, or if I want to show it to someone on my team? Why would I want to gate it behind a web app? Why would I not want to work directly in the drafting ecosystem?
The third thing is collaboration. If I can have all my workflows here in terms of collaborating and verifying what sources answers have come from, it's me working right within the document without having to go through the hassle of importing, exporting, mapping columns, what have you. I've typically seen that when folks are importing and exporting, it becomes a very cumbersome process. That's why we've taken a slightly different approach: you work right out of where you would typically fill out a document, an RFP, a proposal or a questionnaire.
Neil Parekh (09:35): Let's look at a few examples. Typically there are three ways that I've seen a lot of our customers respond to these proposals. Format agnostic, whether it's a PDF or a Word doc. Are you responding on specific portals? Are you responding on a spreadsheet? So can I automatically fill out answers on that drafting document?
Going back to the three ways of doing things. One is I want to respond inline. I've got a questionnaire like this, and let's see how I can respond inline. The second is I have a template of sorts. This is my static template, which I like to respond to Word-based RFPs in, where I typically wouldn't respond inline, because it's an information or requirements manual, and I'm going to respond in a preset template based on everything I know about this particular prospect.
So let's look at how I can respond inline right within a Google Doc or a Word doc. I'm on the Google ecosystem right now, but it's the complete same experience on Microsoft using the add-in. All I would do, if I'm filling out something inline, is select the entire thing. You don't have to worry about mapping tables or the checkboxes, or any sort of complex documents. Can we fill this in one go?
There are two different types. Is it a questionnaire? Is it a proposal? You have complete flexibility of providing instructions. I've seen folks get very creative with this: formatting, tonality. Do I want to reference a very specific deal which I have recordings for in Zoom, which is also connected to SiftHub? I've seen folks get very creative with these instructions.
Then, do I also want to select my sources for each run? Maybe for this particular customer, I don't want to enable my CRM. I don't want to use Notion. I can select and deselect these sources.
Then I can also select collections. Think of this as a tagging mechanism. Do I want to have separate tags across my institutional knowledge base? Think of maybe five Google Drive folders that are very relevant to security, five spaces on Confluence that are very relevant to security, or even certain articles on my website. So it's not restricted to Q&A pairs. How do I tag all these institutional sources across my organization and draw a hard boundary by use case, by product line, by geography, by segment? Maybe I respond differently to proposals and bids for enterprise customers versus mid-market customers. That's typically the four most common use cases I have seen.
Now let's go ahead and fill this out. Before I do that, even languages. I've seen this be a big use case for a lot of bid managers and proposal specialists I speak to. They're responding in so many different languages. How do we enable automatic responses in those languages and provide a translation back to English, so if I don't speak that language, can I review it without having to go back and forth on translation?
Let's go back here and hit autofill. What this is going to do is automatically start populating answers within my Word doc based on all my configurations of sources and collections, adhering to any format that this native document has. Think of this being your template. You don't have to map any templates back to SiftHub. This will adhere to your template, any images, everything happening right within this document here.
There we go. And you'll see it's picked up the tables as well.
Neil Parekh (13:20): This is typically where I would respond inline. But now, do I want to review where these answers have come from? I'm going to hit review, and you'll see right here it's going to populate the question at hand and then give me the sources of where it's got the answer from. There we go. So here's the answer, here are the exact sources, and you'll see right here when the file was last modified, updated or uploaded. This is the recency aspect we were discussing, Chris. How do we ensure our algorithm is prioritizing what is most recent, and your hands are not tied with static Q&A pairs?
A couple of other quick things. Citations. We don't expect you to sift through a hundred-page document. We want to tell you exactly within that document where we got a specific chunk of information from. This is verbatim. Within this document, it's been modified because it's a table, for readability. But think of us having the ability to tell you exactly within this hundred-page manual, document or RFP where we got this piece of information from. You don't have to open it up and sift through the entire RFP to find out where this answer may have come from.
Christina Carter (14:53): This is incredibly helpful, having that auditability and verification. Some of the people watching this are from highly regulated backgrounds, like financial services or healthcare. Let's say we've submitted the proposal. A couple of years from now, is all this information going to still be here? Will they still be able to find where the source came from? Does this information always live here, these sources cited? Does SiftHub take this verification information away at any point, or is it always there?
Neil Parekh (15:19): You mean these sources right here at the bottom? It's essentially what lives on your native ecosystem. So if I removed it from my Google Drive, and we also flag when content in Google Drive has become stale and you might want to remove it, then it's living on your native Google Drive in this example. It's only going to factor into responses if it is recent and relevant to the question at hand.
Christina Carter (15:46): What I mean is, is SiftHub always going to keep the source that it came from? Let's say I've submitted this proposal. Will I always be able to go back and see the sources that were used to generate the response? Sorry, that was a really complicated question.
Neil Parekh (16:03): No, it will retain them. You see this run right here. If I go to autofill, every time you have a log of all these sources that were used. Anyone can come to this sheet and review the questions, and SiftHub will retain the sources over time. We will never do away with the sources.
Christina Carter (16:28): Got it. That's a really important question for a lot of people watching. That's why I asked. Thanks, Neil.
Neil Parekh (16:35): That was a quick example of me responding inline. I know it's a fairly simple example, but I've seen extremely complex documents and proposals, where there are checkboxes, radio buttons, obviously in their templates, that it handles flawlessly and seamlessly. Literally one click. The amount of time it saves for review and personalization is immense.
The second one I wanted to go to is where I'll have a Word doc where I'm not responding inline, but where I want to respond in a different template. That could be a template that I may have a bunch of different versions of, based on whether I'm responding to healthcare or financial services, and who I'm specifically responding to.
Let's see how SiftHub is going to handle that. Same experience. It lives on your Word docs, your PDFs, your Google Doc ecosystem. You don't need to be gated by a web app.
I'm going to create a proposal. Right here, I can either start with a blank document. What does that mean? When you start with a blank document, you want SiftHub's AI to use its discretion on what sort of format we should come up with. What are the best sections? What are the best headers? You don't have a static template, so to speak. If you have a static template, that's great, we can use that to fill it out. In my ecosystem, I'm on Google right here. Let's continue.
Now it's going to ask me for supporting documents. What are the Word documents, instruction manuals or requirements that are going to inform this template? Let's look at an example. I think I had one handy right here. There we go. This is Velocity Edge. They've submitted their background, objectives, how to respond, and the functional capabilities they're looking for.
You'll see there's no way to respond inline here. So I'm going to have to spin up a separate template, which is how I want to respond. Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to attach this Word document. I'm going to go into my desktop, Velocity Edge attached. Let's continue.
Same premise as we saw during the inline bit. I can give instructions right here. Do I also want to configure and select my sources for this template run? I can do that. Settings as well, language.
Neil Parekh (19:00): Another very important thing I want to spend a minute on, Chris, is the ability to use context from your deal sources. Think of the likes of your Zoom calls, any Slack messages with this particular prospect that may have gone back and forth, any emails. Do you want to use nuance, context and terminology from a particular set of interactions with that customer?
I'll give you an example I saw very recently working with a healthcare customer. A lot of their prospects refer to their customers as patients. Do I want to replicate that in my proposals? Some folks may call them customers, some may call them patients, some may call them consumers. How do we mimic really specific jargon and terminology?
That's what I have seen as a huge shift. The outcome is that we're able to draw in really specific context, personalization and nuance from these call recordings, emails and Slack messages, anything that has gone back and forth with that specific customer.
Christina Carter (20:18): That's so powerful. Being able to use our own words back at them really separates you from a generic proposal that a lot of your competitors are probably submitting.
Neil Parekh (20:28): Exactly. In typical workflows, you have the first draft ready, and then you'll probably take a few transcripts, put them into a Claude or a ChatGPT or some generic LLM to give you some insights. It's a lot of iterations or hops which we've tried to narrow down and reduce. Can we make that accessible in the first pass?
Now let's close this out. The other thing I could also do here is add more supporting documents. Is there anything else that is going to better inform my response to this template? Think of any policies, instruction manuals, guidelines, what have you. I can attach them right here. You don't need to give text-based instructions, but you could attach files to better inform your responses for this particular prospect or customer.
There, we're ready. I can also have multiple different files. Let's say I'm working on a security questionnaire, as well as a template, as well as an AI and governance questionnaire for the same prospect. I can have three of these different files all fill out at the same time without me having to lift a finger. So I can have multiple different primary documents for one customer within the same project.
Neil Parekh (22:00): Let's give this a name. I'm going to go over to Velocity Edge. Let's select an owner right here. I'm going to select myself. Then there are a few other things I've seen a lot of our customers use, in terms of auto-assignment. Do I want to assign specific sections to specific subject matter experts automatically?
As an example, let's say in my template, once the security section is filled out, maybe I have a hierarchy of folks who need to review it. I don't want to manually spend time assigning this particular section or question to a subject matter expert. If it is under security and compliance, automatically assign it to the hierarchy that you have described. It saves a lot of time in reviewing, especially those lengthy, gnarly questionnaires with tons of sections and questions, and then reassigning them to relevant people.
Christina Carter (22:44): I love this, by the way. Project management is the biggest headache, at least for me, in proposal management. So I love seeing this.
Neil Parekh (22:51): We got this request a lot from our customers. That's why we built it out. They were spending so much time identifying who to route what to. If AI can do a good job at that, it can be incredibly helpful.
Neil Parekh (23:05): Now I'm going to put in an account name. Let's call this Velocity Edge again, and then let's hit create.
What's going to happen here is that it's going to start automatically populating responses within my Google Doc. We'll come back here in a couple of minutes. But what it's also doing now, and Chris, you brought up a good point on the project management part of it, is this. Think of any proposals or questionnaires you're working on. You'll typically have so many supplementary documents, evidence, dates for clarifying questions, dates for submissions. There are so many things that a proposal specialist or bid manager has to keep a check on. How do we help you do that?
We're parsing this questionnaire automatically, surfacing any milestones. Think clarifying questions, think submission dates. What are the required documents you need to submit along with this to strengthen your response package? Going back to a security example, maybe you need to submit your SOC 2 report and ISO 27001 certificate. What are the recommended documents that will enhance this bid response? Maybe I need to submit a cover letter. Can I have these specific documents recommended to me that would strengthen my response? All happening by passing any supporting documents as well as that particular RFP.
You'll see suggestions will be flagged here shortly. Then I can project manage this as well. Do I want to assign specific milestone tasks to someone on my team? Do I need a SOC 2? Do I want security to give it to me? Or do I want it auto-surfaced, given we're already connected with your trust center and with your Google Drive?
Here it's giving me a summary of this particular template as well. Very helpful, especially when the likes of your CRM and a lot of your contextual sources of information are connected. Let's go back here and see what this looks like. It's already generating answers, filling it out in my particular template.
Then I can start project managing this and in parallel reviewing it. You'll see right here it's given me an entire outline of each section, each question, that I can review, triage and collaborate on with different folks without ever having to leave this document.
Neil Parekh (25:50): Let's look at a workflow that looks something like this. I want to review this particular question. Where has this answer come from? I'm going to hit review. You'll see right here it's going to populate the question, give me the answer along with the citations. Even when I'm responding inline, do I now want to change this? Maybe for this particular question I want to cap it to 50 words.
Think of having the ability to give instructions at a question level, at a section level, to re-jig any sections or questions where you want to add more instructions or context. All happening right within the document. Let's say cap to 20 words. I'll give it that as a simple prompt for now. Then I hit regenerate. It's going to adhere to these instructions and repopulate the output. Then I would hit paste and copy it back in the answer's place. There we go.
Everything is happening right here. Now let's say I wanted to project manage this. Let's hit project right here. You'll see functional capabilities, each question under that outlined here, all as a first draft. Do I want to reassign this entire section to a subject matter expert for review?
Typically, a lot of questions may have a no information found. Or if there's a partial answer, which means we've been able to answer part of the question but not the entirety of it, we will highlight that in yellow. It's more visual cues, because we've seen percentages be very confusing for our customers. How do I know what the difference is between 75 and 85 percent? Where should I spend more time?
Christina Carter (27:16): It means nothing. Agreed.
Neil Parekh (27:18): Visual cues are so much easier when you're scanning through a document, in terms of confidence scores, or confidence cues as we call them. Then I would scan through this and assign specific questions and sections. Let's say I want to request content, or submit something for review where I want to run something by a subject matter expert. Where I've got no information found, I can request content. But let's submit something for review.
Assign this to a distribution list of teams, or even individual users. Let's say I assign this to my colleague Harsh. You'll see a due date for this particular section as well. I can add a comment and tag, give some more context saying, hey, this is for Velocity Edge, need your inputs, and then hit submit.
Guest users are supported as well. Do I want to assign a question to someone who doesn't have access or doesn't have a seat for SiftHub? I can do that very simply. The beauty of working out of these documents is that you can share the link with them. They don't need to be gated by a web app. They have all the context right here.
Let's submit this.
Christina Carter (28:26): Let me make sure I understand, because that's huge. If I'm a proposal writer or solution consultant responding to this RFP, but I need someone in finance to look at something really quickly, and they don't have a SiftHub seat, I can share this with them and they can still take a look at it?
Neil Parekh (28:41): Exactly.
Christina Carter (28:43): Very cool. So it's not, sorry, you don't have a seat, you're going to have to copy and paste and email this and it'll be annoying.
Neil Parekh (28:51): Yep. That's a good point you bring up, Chris. Let me walk through that very quickly in terms of guest users. You can put in their email, they get notified, and they see this entire sheet. That's why I keep coming back to the ability of working within your ecosystems, whether that's a Word document, a PDF or a Google Doc, because you're not gating access behind a web application.
Christina Carter (29:15): That's so important, because proposals is such a team sport, especially for winning teams. It's not one person doing everything.
Neil Parekh (29:23): Yep. There we go. You'll see the outline's been updated. Harsh would have got an email. Let me show you an example of a notification. I've been assigned a new question. What does that typically look like? I can hit view question and I go straight to the Google Doc that we were working on right here.
So email, Slack, Teams, wherever you want folks to be notified. What sort of frequencies do we want to set up for these notifications? Do I want Harsh to be reminded every two days, three days prior to due date, one day prior to due date, and on due date? Completely configurable notification frequencies.
Neil Parekh (30:20): That's responding to a template completely. What I will also show is that I can respond to something like this inline, rather within the web app, in a native view. Let me walk through that. I've seen a few folks who are used to that way of working appreciate this sort of template.
Let's go here. I'm going to create a proposal again, fill a template. Instead of putting my link here, I'm going to upload the same template that we walked through. Let's continue. I'm going to attach the same Velocity Edge RFP, and then hit continue.
Let's call this Velocity Edge 2. Let's select an owner, that is me. Even in terms of what I've seen a lot of proposal managers do is link their HubSpot or Salesforce, or any intake mechanism. Obviously I'm creating a project from scratch right now. But typically they dump it into Salesforce, it flows in, or HubSpot, or whatever intake mechanism, maybe it could be a Jira ticket, and it flows into SiftHub where all of this is automatically done. It also helps in terms of, do I want to push information back to my CRM, look at a lot of analytics? That's a workflow I've seen a lot of folks enable and use. Let's call this Velocity Edge 2 and hit create.
Neil Parekh (31:20): While this happens, let's take a look at a few other things I've seen be very useful. Guidelines. This is one we've given for SiftHub: I always refer to SiftHub as SiftHub and not SiftHubbing for responses. Across your responses, are there specific account-level guidelines that you want to enable for folks when you're responding? You don't have to give these, obviously. You can give very specific questionnaire-level instructions or even section-level instructions. But do I want to give very specific guidelines at an account level?
Neil Parekh (32:10): This is something I've seen being used a lot in terms of response guidelines. We want to adhere to this way of responding. It could be tonality at an account level. It's especially popular with a lot of agencies in my experience that work with us, where they have very specific brand guidelines in terms of how they want to respond to proposals.
Neil Parekh (32:35): While this is loading up, I've seen a lot of folks spend time on reviewing whether they should bid on a particular RFP or not bid on it, and on creating a cover letter. Can we agentically enable some of these workflows to ease your decision-making process?
In this example, I already have one handy here. It's my bid/no-bid for the attached Velocity Edge RFP. You'll see it's going to give me citations at each step. This is my format. How do I like to consume a bid/no-bid? A lot of our customers will customize this in their criteria, their format. What is the recommendation, or what is the format that they prefer to analyze a bid/no-bid?
You'll see right here, functional capabilities largely met. Are there any red flags? Given we have access to the open web for this module, were any competitors involved in drafting questions or seeding questions for this particular prospect?
It's very comprehensive in terms of how detailed we can get with the format. But the key outcome I've seen here, especially for teams underwater, is how do they make data-backed decisions in terms of whether we should spend our time and resources responding to this particular RFP.
You'll see right here it can also create a document which I can download and push back to any endpoint I want it to be stored in. Maybe if this is a bid/no-bid, I want to push it back into Salesforce. That's what I've seen as a workflow. Push it back into your CRM or any system of record where you can keep track of why we decided not to bid on this, or why we decided to bid on this.
Christina Carter (34:18): So essentially, because everyone has their own bid/no-bid qualification setup, this is totally customizable in SiftHub. I can say these are my things?
Neil Parekh (34:26): Completely customized, yes. You would attach the file here in terms of what your format is. Have you already got a pre-baked format? You attach the file here and we pick that format up automatically.
Christina Carter (34:39): Very cool. I've never seen one company agree on the exact qualification way of doing things.
Neil Parekh (34:46): Which is why different teams in the company can too. Maybe I, as a solutions engineer, have a different criteria versus a bid manager. So I want to stick to my format. That's why we kept it simple. You attach your format, we replicate it.
The same principle applies for things like cover letters. Do you want to have a cover letter ready in your format, with your branding and your images, with each RFP run? I can create it manually right now, but the whole idea is how do we have these different pieces ready as part of your response package.
Neil Parekh (35:30): Let's go back here. We touched on suggestions as well. You'll see right here it's now flagged, by parsing this Velocity Edge RFP, what the submission dates, clarification questions and deadlines are. What are the documents that are required with this? You'll see a SOC 2 Type 2, ISO, VAPT, any audit reports, pricing proposals, implementation plans. It's also recommended that I submit some references and case studies.
Anything that I don't want to use or want to remove, I uncheck. But let's say all of this checks out to me and makes sense. I can create tasks for this, and you'll see them in the task tab right here, which I can now reassign to folks, or use the auto-assign that we spoke about. So I'm not spending my time manually finding these relevant documents, it's routed to the correct subject matter expert from the get-go, and I'm not missing anything.
Let's say security attestations. Do I want to reassign this to a particular subject matter expert? I can do that from right here. Assign by assignee, find the user, reassign it to them, or auto-assign from the start. Leave some comments in case I want to. This is going back more to the project management piece. How do I ensure I have everything in one place?
Typically you see the documents right here. Once you have all your institutional knowledge connected, let's say your trust center, can we automatically link out your SOC 2 and your ISO certificate? So you don't even have to go to someone, you're getting the link for the latest versions of any policies right here. It eliminates me trying to find different documents that have been flagged.
Neil Parekh (37:08): There we go, this is ready as well. Think of having an in-app editor experience right here with the entire outline, a very native Word doc experience. The same experience we saw on the Google Doc, but right within a native view.
Each question, you'll see the outline right here, but also each question right here. Do I want to make some manual edits? Do I want to change questions to sections? Do I want to remove it from the outline? Do I want to review where this particular answer came from? Same workflow, I hit manage question. Here's the answer. Here's the source of where it came from.
There's also an audit trail, which is very important. I'm getting an entire trail of who has changed what in a particular question or at an RFP level, along with redlines or vector diffs. What was changed, changed by who, an entire audit trail. That makes it easier to map or track anything.
Christina Carter (38:08): So important. Like I said, for the highly regulated people, you have to have it.
Neil Parekh (38:13): You'll see right here this has been flagged as partial. If I go to this, I've clicked this button right here. Do I want to reassign this or submit for review? Because this is partial, I need a subject matter expert to come and review it. I'm going to assign this to Harsh. Please review this question. Submit. Harsh gets notified, and you'll see the outline is updated. This particular question is pending review with Harsh.
This will typically go through the approval workflows from pending review. If I'm the delivery manager, I have authority to approve this. Let's say I want to select this particular section, approve it, assign it back to myself as a delivery manager, done. Once this entire thing is worked through, I can export it. Good to go.
Neil Parekh (38:55): Another big thing I've seen a lot of folks use is that, given our integration with a lot of CRMs and endpoints, a lot of folks like to analyze data within their own systems. That's great for more objective analysis, in terms of how many RFPs I've got, who's working on what RFPs.
But where SiftHub is really different is the subjective layer. The objective is fairly easy to do. Can the AI pass through all of the proposals and RFPs we're working on to help you with trends, in terms of what the top asked questions typically are? What are frequently requested features that we don't support today? Think of product gaps. It's almost like a flywheel of knowledge that can go back to product based on what your prospects or customers are actually requesting within these questionnaires or proposals.
What questions are typically unanswered? In my demo account it's a funny one, but I have "what is the capital of Belarus" as a top asked question that is very frequently unanswered. So maybe I need to better document unanswered questions. This really helps folks who are building this repository identify what sort of questions are typically unanswered.
Even in terms of categories. Let's say I look at security and compliance. What are the questions that I'm typically getting most often, semantically layered together? What are the subcategories that I'm getting questions on? Under security and compliance, typically I get a lot of my questions for role-based access controls, for data encryption and protection. So it's more the subjective layer. How do we help you sift or capture very relevant insights from across all the proposals and RFPs your teams are working on?
A lot of other insights as well in terms of delivery managers, median completion times, workload, how do we help better manage workload, and so on. But that was a very high level of what I wanted to walk through. I'll stop sharing my screen. I know we have about nine minutes left.
Christina Carter (41:16): That's perfect, Neil. One thing for everyone who just watched that. Obviously Neil didn't show every single thing SiftHub did, or we would be here for hours and hours, but he really did focus on the differences within SiftHub. As somebody who has seen hundreds of these demos, I can safely say that there are really specific differences in SiftHub.
One thing I do want to mention, which is hard to demo, is that it really is good at connecting with the wider sales and revenue process ecosystem. It's not fully siloed on the proposal or bid process, which is really important nowadays, especially when it's hard to get budget for a tiny point solution. Not that proposals are tiny, but the broader the better.
So this is something that has amazing proposal management, and if you want to bring it to the wider sales process, this is one to bring forward to your revenue or sales leaders as a great tool that can do all those things.
Neil, this was amazing. Thank you so much. I want everyone also to go follow you on LinkedIn, because Neil gave a great demo, but he also genuinely understands proposals in a really deep way and has a lot of insights on it. Not just the best practices that we've been used to hearing for the past decade, but what the new things are and how we can apply those new ideas to win more RFPs. Thank you, Neil. You're amazing.
Neil Parekh (42:40): Thank you, Chris. For anyone watching this, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. I'd love to share insights and learnings. I speak to a ton of proposal and bid managers, a ton of SEs, so I'm happy to share best practices of what I'm seeing a lot of folks across the industry do today, and also where we're headed, because everything is changing so quickly and it's hard to keep up. I'm always keen to connect with folks and try to understand how they think this space is going to evolve. I don't even want to say within a year, because six months down the line there might be a very different way of doing something.
Christina Carter (43:23): Thank you so much, Neil. I appreciate it.
Neil Parekh (43:26): All right, thank you, Chris.