Is Your RFP Tool Actually Saving You Time?

18 months of feedback from $10B–$200B AUM firms reveals why horizontal content libraries just aren't cutting it anymore.

Here is what we’ve heard and learned over the past 18 months about the horizontal RFP tools that are often used for asset management RFPs and DDQs. We should say from the start that –) to be fair, these tools work across industries and as such cater to marketers within but especially outside of asset management.

Horizontal RFP tools, or legacy RFP tools in the age of AI, tend to be private equity owned (e.g. cost focused) and serve primarily as content management libraries for your firm’s RFP content. Agentic frameworks and plug-ins are novel capabilities that have been added or bolted-on by these vendors to their decades-old systems over the last year.

While we have run into a handful of asset managers genuinely satisfied, even effusive, with their horizontal tools, most are extremely frustrated.

Here are a representative sample of direct quotes taken from firms ranging from $10B AUM to $200B AUM:

“So many challenges with the tool; we have to constantly upload, download, reformat just to answer an RFP. We’re constantly searching the library.” $150B asset manager

“It’s fine as a content repository; it stores our thousand plus Q/A pairs. Can’t use it to answer new proposals automatically, just too complicated. We use it for search/copy/paste and for internal collaboration.” $135B global equities manager

“We struggle with the system for answering RFPs and DDQs in different formats. Many of our teams have stopped using it altogether and reverted back to Word and Excel, again. Library maintenance is a huge problem; getting new content onboarded is so hard.” $125B asset manager across several continents

“We bought the system to replace another similar tool. We use it as a content library with keyword search and for copy/paste. We still use Microsoft Office to actually answer RFPs and DDQs. It is too clunky and not accurate to use for proposal completion.” $58B asset manager

“Seems like a great content tool, but it’s overwhelming to use; the product doesn’t understand asset management. Has a hard time supporting questionnaire completion, and it’s so painful to digitize questionnaires.” $156B global asset manager

“We spend more time managing our content in the system that we lose all efficiency gains.”  $45B private equity manager

“Started using one of the horizontal systems last year. Often takes more work to use it than not; easier to sometimes manage an RFP without it. Great at tracking content updates from portfolio managers. Not good at completing new RFPs and no functionality for updating data-driven DDQs. The RFP upload is a zero time-saver, too arduous to use.” $27B asset manager

If you are reading this post, you likely know one or more of the horizontal or legacy RFP system vendors from demos or first-hand experience using one or two of them at your firm.

So why invest time, money, effort onboarding a horizontal RFP tool when they seem to:

• Require a full-time content manager(s) that offsets any ROI

• Be limited in actually answering RFPs in the format published/received

• Have little to no capability to answer or update data-intensive DDQs

• Are not truly knowledgeable about asset management industry specifics

Over the last twenty years, the benefits of using a horizontal RFP content management system or library to manage compliance-approved content seem to have outweighed the significant limitations of these systems for asset management marketers.

But recently, there are AI-native tools available for asset management marketers to both manage RFPs and data-intensive DDQs with compliance built-in. The world has quickly changed in a big way thanks to AI. It’s just not equivalent to add an AI chat bot and/or plug-in to your decades-old product  and call your system AI-native or AI-powered. Not if you want to truly see significant ROI when responding to institutional investor and consultant RFPs and DDQs.

Firms and marketers should take the time to evaluate and consider purpose-built, industry-specific tools for their marketers and compliance officers including talking with as many industry-similar firm references as possible.

At a minimum, conducting 3 or more reference calls with actual users of these tools at similar asset management firms to your firm is a critical step in evaluating and selecting a partner for AI-native marketing automation including questionnaires and proposal and presentation generation.