“Automation and response management enable teams to easily pull and utilize content from one central location, which is a win-win for creators and teams that need content to deploy,” says AJ Sunder, Chief Information Officer and Chief Product Officer, RFPIO in an exclusive interview with TalkCMO.
TCMO Bureau: How can enterprises better leverage innovative technologies such as AI and automation for response management and sales enablement?
AJ Sunder: The short answer is to find a solution provider that can work with you to get such technologies rolled out and implemented in a way that makes sense for your company’s unique needs. Choosing a solution and vendor that will become a partner and an extension of your organization to help deploy technologies that will benefit your processes in the best way is the+ key.
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It’s difficult to build out and prop up your own solutions for response management and sales enablement. To do so in-house requires a ton of time and resource commitment, whereas partnering with a solution provider is time, cost-effective and can lead to other technology integrations down the line as the company’s needs shift as it expands and matures.
TCMO Bureau: How can enterprises effectively address inefficiencies which are deeply rooted in decentralized and inaccessible content?
AJ Sunder: To put such inefficiencies into context, most marketing content is never actually seen, much less is used. Given the effort to create it, for any content to go to waste is a huge loss for enterprises, and the issue tends not to be the content itself, but rather the difficulty finding it, or worse awareness that it even exists.
This automation and response management technology is fundamentally changing what is possible by giving companies the ability to create and access their best content when and where they need it. If content is created, no matter how original or outstanding, but it can’t be found or accessed, then it won’t be used – simple as that. Automation and response management enable teams to easily pull and utilize content from one central location, which is a win-win for creators and teams that need content to deploy.
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TCMO Bureau: How can enterprises leverage emerging technologies for landing more and better-qualified leads?
AJ Sunder: AI is fantastic when helping teams decide which leads are worth pursuing. Teams can leverage AI technology to pull and measure data that factor into the likelihood of winning the account, how much time to anticipate the project or proposal will take, how many team members need to be pulled in to work on the project, estimated timelines, and more.
Technology complements human skills and talents. While employees can put in the time and effort to manually vet leads, technology alleviates that time-consuming burden while removing some human factors like bias and fatigue.
TCMO Bureau: What trends do you think will shape the response management industry in the foreseeable future?
AJ Sunder: Response management is a relatively new category, but one with tremendous promise. Teams spread out geographically due to remote work have certainly contributed to the growing need for response management since it’s more difficult than ever to collaborate on a project or access the information you need easily. Employees can no longer simply pop by a co-worker’s desk to ask a clarifying question or talk things through. Instead, employees interact via video chats, Google docs, and Slack messages, which aren’t always the most effective or efficient way to share and access documents or information.
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A host of pre-drafted, pre-defined, consistent information is the solution for many teams and will continue to be. Whether its teams that are down a few hands due to budget cuts, same-size teams scrambling to keep up with an onslaught of new business, or departments relying on easily accessible content to inform projects, response management and its capabilities won’t fade anytime soon.
An expert information security analyst, AJ Sunder has successfully implemented software development and security programs at Telecom Healthcare and Aerospace enterprises. Having been called to assist with RFPs as a technical SME numerous times, he understood the need for a collaborative solution and set out to build a world-class application with RFPIO.
