Companies often expand their product lines— multiple times even— without staff support levels increasing. This results in “shadow” sales and proposal teams taking on additional responsibilities that results in workers becoming frustrated as they must develop their own workflows.
As a result, workflows devolve into silos and duplicate work for team members— especially subject matter experts— involved with multiple projects. This is what happened to Netsmart, an industry-leading healthcare technology organization that added 13 new products, but no additional proposal team members, between 2019 and 2022.
To repair the fractured approach, Andrew Mersman, Senior Director of Solution Consulting, was tasked with unifying response content and processes on the Responsive platform.
Outside Solution
Mersman realized the organization already had the right platform solution after it upgraded to Responsive’s Strategic Response Management (SRM.) The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven SRM is purpose-built to manage strategic responses at scale, empowering companies to accelerate growth, mitigate risk, and improve employee experiences.
One of the first actions by Mersman was to implement Responsive’s AI Assistant to streamline the processes that would focus on supporting clients. Netsmart has in-house AI development expertise for their own products, so Mersman was well-versed on the complexity of AI solutions.
Mersman recognized that level of complexity and sophistication in AI Assistant from the beginning, stating, “If it were easy, we would have built our own solution. We need to remain focused on supporting our clients in their mission…That’s why we focused on partnering with (Responsive) versus trying to reinvent the wheel and get frustrated.”
Use of AI Assistants
Once the AI Assistant was set up, Mersman worked to scale quickly and get users on board in a timely manner. Through training and education, he won over stakeholders and relied on them to help win over other associates.
A Salesforce integration was key, as it enables users to launch Responsive projects directly from Salesforce, which in turn eliminated the need to communicate, collaborate or store content on other applications. Now team members can take project data, combine it with elements pulled from Salesforce and other Netsmart systems, and put it all into a data warehouse to closely analyze trends.
Re-implementing Responsive increased SRM visibility across the organization due to its “awesome reporting capabilities. We’re living A-to-Z in Responsive to complete our projects now,” said Mersman.
Other key results highlighted by Mersman include:
- Accelerating time to respond by 10X using AI Assistant;
- 67% more proposals submitted within 10 months of using Responsive — without adding headcount; and
- Reduced outdated content by 43% while growing the library by 105% and solidifying trust in the platform, as evidenced by 540% growth in user adoption.
Continuous Education
Mersman’s team now sends out a weekly email to spotlight key features within the Responsive platform and share short training courses on how to use the AI Assistant. Netsmart officials forecast it’ll save more than 3,000 hours per year, allowing responders to strategically enhance AI responses to personalize them for clinical or operational audiences.
Moving forward, Mersman believes the AI Assistant will “really start to predict and help see the future success of a proposal.”
“Our go-forward rate for RFPs is sitting at 93%, where last year we were at 65%. That’s huge,” he said. “It’s impacting the bottom line at the company because we don’t have the stumbling blocks anymore and are advancing to the next phase of an RFP.”
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