Your RFP Process Shouldn’t Need Heroics

Summer’s here, and your sales engineers are finally stepping away—from back-to-back calls, late-night reviews, and the constant pull of “just one more thing.”

They’ve earned their PTO. But while they’re offline, the work doesn’t stop. RFP deadlines still land. Buyers still need answers. And too often, the process falls apart without the person who always “just gets it done.”

That’s not resilience. That’s a single point of failure.

The Problem: Every RFP Needs a Savior

We’ve all seen it. The AE scrambling to draft a compliance section at midnight. The SE jumping into Slack from the airport to answer a last-minute technical question. The proposal manager cutting and pasting three outdated responses into something barely coherent—because the SME is on a beach without Wi-Fi.

These aren’t systems. These are survival tactics. And eventually, someone burns out.

The Fix: Systems That Scale, Even When People Are Offline

The best teams don’t just build for speed. They build for sustainability.

A strong RFP process doesn’t rely on heroics. It relies on:

• Centralized, up-to-date content that doesn’t live in Slack or someone’s inbox
• Role-based workflows that assign ownership automatically
• AI suggestions that pull from past submissions to draft smarter, faster answers
• Async collaboration tools that let your team contribute—even across time zones or PTO

When you structure your process like this, you remove urgency from the equation. No one has to scramble. Everyone knows their role.

Let Iris Handle the Heavy Lifting

With Iris, your team doesn’t have to be online 24/7 to keep deals moving.

• "Ask Iris" brings forward high-performing answers based on deal context
• Team members can tag, update, and approve content without rewriting from scratch
• The system flags gaps or inconsistent language before answers go out

So even if your best technical mind is offline, your best content—and your best process—is still at work.

Final Thought: PTO Shouldn’t Be a Risk Factor

If your RFP process breaks down the moment someone’s away, it’s not a headcount issue—it’s a system issue.

This summer, let your team unplug. And let your process do what it was built to do: deliver great answers, without the stress.

→ Want to see how it works? Book a walkthrough

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