How MaxVal cut RFP time by 90% with Inventive AI.
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Cut through the most time-consuming parts of RFP responses with AI-powered automation.
From the first question to a fully polished, review-ready document all in just 3 hours.
Your weekends belong to you again. By streamlining the entire RFP process during work hours, your team stops sacrificing personal time to meet proposal deadlines.
MaxVal IP Services manages complex intellectual property software and services for corporations and law firms across a wide range of industries.
Their RFP process was high volume, deadline-driven, and heavily dependent on accurate, current product knowledge. With 10–15+ RFPs and security questionnaires per quarter, every response required speed, precision, and coordination across subject matter experts.
But when MaxVal's previous RFP tool, Avnio, was acquired and sunsetted by Loopio, the team had to find a replacement. After evaluating Loopio, Responsive, and Qvidian, MaxVal chose Inventive AI because it offered something fundamentally different: not another Q&A-pair library, but an AI-native way to generate tailored responses from live source documents.
The result: 90% reduction in RFP completion time, 30 hours reduced to 3, zero weekend hours lost to RFPs, and live source documents replacing stale Q&A library debt.
An 80-question RFP that previously took roughly 30 hours across a full working week now takes about 3 hours from start to review-ready.
What used to consume nights and weekends now fits inside business hours, giving Susan and the team back personal time and reducing deadline stress.
Inventive generates responses from live source documents instead of relying on stale Q&A pairs, helping MaxVal keep answers accurate as the product evolves.
"What took nights and weekends now takes one morning."
MaxVal IP Services provides end-to-end intellectual property management software and adjacent services for corporations and law firms. The platform serves as a single source of truth for patents and trademarks, helping organizations manage complex IP operations at scale.
Because MaxVal sells into customers with sophisticated legal, technical, and operational requirements, RFPs and security questionnaires are a critical part of the business. The team handles 10–15+ RFPs and security questionnaires per quarter, often under tight deadlines.
Susan Krelitz, Director of Customer Success and Solutions Consultant, owns the RFP response process end-to-end. She reviews incoming documents, coordinates subject matter experts across the business, and ensures polished, accurate responses are submitted on time.
For MaxVal, RFP response is not just proposal work. It is a high-volume, high-pressure process tied directly to customer acquisition and trust.
Before Inventive, MaxVal's RFP process was slow, manual, and stressful. When an RFP came in, Susan knew it meant nights, weekends, and deadline pressure. An 80-question RFP could take 5–6 hours per day for 5–6 days, creating roughly 30 hours of work for a single project.
"When an RFP came in, it was just dread. It meant nights and weekends, mostly up until the due date."
The team's previous RFP tool, Avnio, had been acquired and sunsetted by Loopio. As MaxVal evaluated replacement options, Susan looked at the obvious alternatives — and each tool still relied on the same underlying model: Q&A pairs.
That created several persistent problems:
Slow matching. The software had to find a matching Q&A pair for every single question before drafting could begin.
Wrong or outdated answers. Multiple outdated versions and small tweaks would surface as suggestions, with no clear indication of which answer was current.
Library debt. Q&A pairs became stale with every product release, forcing the team into constant manual refresh cycles.
Night and weekend work. RFPs routinely spilled into personal time, erasing any real work-life separation.
SME bottlenecks. Subject matter experts received rushed requests under deadline pressure, creating friction and stress across departments.
"An 80-question RFP could take five to six hours a day for five or six days."
For a company whose product is always evolving, a static Q&A library was always decaying. The team would update the library after each release cycle, but there was always a lag between what had shipped and what the library reflected.
In a fast-moving product environment, a static Q&A library is never truly current.
Susan's evaluation criteria were clear: she wanted a tool that could keep content current automatically, without constant manual refresh cycles.
Loopio, Responsive, and Qvidian all claimed AI capability, but Susan found that they still depended on the Q&A-pair model at their core. (Teams running this kind of evaluation often start with our comparison of the top RFP software tools.)
Inventive stood out because it flipped the process entirely. Instead of matching questions to a static library, Inventive AI reads each question in context, understands what is being asked, and generates a tailored response using live source documents.
"In the first meeting, I was like, oh my gosh, you guys turned this upside down. Goodbye Q&A pairs."
The key conceptual shift was simple but powerful:
Legacy RFP Tools — Search the library for matching Q&A pairs.
Inventive AI — Understand the question and generate a response from live source documents.
The Q&A library can still exist for reference, but it is no longer the engine of the process.
"It doesn't depend on keyword association to find a specific Q&A pair. I didn't even know that's what I was looking for."
With Inventive AI, MaxVal changed the entire RFP workflow.
Instead of starting with a blank page, searching for old answers, or manually reconciling outdated Q&A suggestions, Susan now starts with a strong first draft. Inventive reads the RFP or security questionnaire, understands the questions in context, and generates tailored responses from MaxVal's source materials.
That changed Susan's role from writer to editor.
"It's much easier to work with something you can edit than to rewrite everything from scratch."
The first draft is there quickly. Susan reviews it, tweaks where needed, and submits a polished response without losing evenings and weekends.
"The draft is there. Review it, tweak maybe a third of the answers, submit."
The time savings were immediate and measurable.
On the day of the customer conversation, Susan had just finished an 80-question RFP that arrived the same morning. She started at 9:00 AM. It was done by 12:15 PM.
Before Inventive, that same type of RFP would have taken 5–6 hours a day for 5–6 days — roughly 30 hours of work. With Inventive, it took one morning.
30 hours → 3 hours • 80-question RFP • 90% time reduction
Before Inventive, RFPs regularly consumed nights and weekends. After Inventive, Susan can complete, review, and prepare RFPs within normal business hours. The impact was not just operational — it changed the way RFP work affected Susan's personal life and the team's morale.
"I can get everything done, reviewed, and ready to go in one or two days. You have no idea how happy that makes me."
"Now I'm like a normal person and I can have dinner with my family."
With legacy tools, every product release created more library debt. The team had to manually refresh Q&A pairs, remove stale answers, and figure out which version was current.
Inventive removed that burden by generating responses from live source documents. This means MaxVal's answers can stay aligned with current product documentation, security information, and approved content.
No stale Q&A pairs. No manual refresh cycles. No library debt.
Before Inventive, subject matter experts across MaxVal often received rushed questions under deadline pressure. With Inventive generating stronger drafts upfront, SME requests became fewer, better-framed, and less stressful — reducing friction across departments and helping the RFP process feel calmer and more controlled.
Better first drafts mean fewer last-minute SME fire drills.
MaxVal is now using Inventive in full production and can manage multiple RFPs at the same time. The team has also adopted new product features, including table support, helping them respond to more complex RFP and questionnaire formats.
From one stressful RFP at a time to multiple concurrent projects in production.
The most important architectural difference between Inventive AI and tools like Loopio, Responsive, or Qvidian is not the UI, not the integrations, and not even the AI features bolted on top. It's the data layer underneath.
Legacy RFP platforms treat the Q&A library as the source of truth. Every product change has to be backfilled into Q&A pairs. Every stale answer has to be manually identified and updated. Every contributor has to trust that the library reflects what shipped last week — when often it doesn't.
Inventive AI treats your live source documents as the source of truth. Product docs, security policies, past proposals, and approved content live where your team already maintains them — in SharePoint, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, and other integrated sources. Answers are generated from that current content on every RFP, not retrieved from a parallel library that's always slightly behind.
That's why MaxVal stopped fighting Q&A library debt: there's no Q&A library to maintain in the first place. (For a deeper read on what changes when you automate RFP responses this way, see our full guide.)
"Legacy tools improve search. Inventive changes the workflow."
Susan emphasized that Inventive required almost no ramp-up time. The UI was simple, navigation was logical, and the team became operational within days, not weeks.
"It's very intuitive. The UI is just simple but very easy to navigate."
MaxVal was running live RFPs within days of setup, without a lengthy onboarding program. The platform was easy to understand, and the workflow shift was obvious from the first real project.
First real RFP. Immediate difference.
Susan's one honest caveat for buyers: expect a short calibration period while the AI learns your company's voice and tone. With support from the Inventive team, MaxVal reached production-quality outputs faster than Susan expected.
A short calibration period. A long-term workflow transformation.
The biggest adoption shift was not learning a new tool. It was changing the team's role from writing every response manually to editing strong AI-generated drafts.
"I don't think I could say enough good things about how much this has seriously changed our RFP process."
MaxVal also highlighted the relationship with the Inventive team. Susan described the team as responsive, knowledgeable, and high-integrity — during the sales process and after purchase.
"You guys have been so responsive."
Even when Susan sent questions over the weekend and said they could wait until Monday, the Inventive team still responded.
"There were times I sent a question on a weekend, I'd specifically say don't worry about this till Monday — and you still got back to me."
Susan also saw her product feedback taken seriously. Suggestions from her conversations with the Inventive team made their way into the product, including embedded table support.
Requested. Built. Shipped.
Susan felt trust during the original sales process and saw that trust maintained after implementation. She now proactively offers to speak with Inventive prospects as a reference customer.
"In terms of making that original decision, I felt the most trust with you."
Loopio, Responsive, and Qvidian all offered recognizable RFP workflows. But to Susan, they still shared the same limitation: they depended on a maintained Q&A library.
That meant the team still had to manage stale content, reconcile multiple suggested answers, and spend time reviewing whether old responses were still accurate.
Inventive changed the architecture. It does not start by looking for a matching Q&A pair. It starts by understanding the question and generating a response from current source materials.
Legacy tools improve search. Inventive changes the workflow.
For MaxVal, that difference was the reason Inventive stood out.
No. That is the core architectural difference. Inventive AI generates responses from live source documents, including product docs, past proposals, security certifications, and other materials in the Knowledge Hub. The Q&A library can still exist and be referenced, but it is no longer required to generate a high-quality first draft.
Susan described a short calibration period across the first few projects where tone and voice needed some adjustment. The Inventive team worked directly with MaxVal through that phase. In practice, MaxVal reached production-quality outputs faster than Susan expected.
Loopio and Responsive add AI to a Q&A-pair system. They can surface matches and fill gaps, but teams still need a maintained library and still spend time reviewing suggestions. Inventive AI skips the dependency on Q&A pairs — it reads the RFP, understands what is being asked, and writes a tailored draft from source materials. The first draft arrives quickly and requires editing instead of writing from scratch. (See the full breakdown in our Loopio vs Inventive AI comparison.)
Yes. MaxVal uses Inventive for both RFPs and security questionnaires. The platform supports complex formats, embedded tables, multi-part questions, and security and compliance terminology across DDQs, VSQs, and similar formats.
"For anybody spending nights and weekends doing RFPs, or turning RFP responses down because you don't have the resources, this is the tool to go with."
Inventive AI helps proposal, revenue, customer success, solutions, and security teams respond to complex RFPs and questionnaires faster using live, trusted source content.
With Inventive, teams can eliminate Q&A library debt, reduce response time, improve answer accuracy, and reclaim nights and weekends.
Book a demo to see how Inventive AI can help your team move from manual RFP writing to AI-powered response review — or read more customer stories from teams that made the switch.