Zycus Boosts Presales Productivity 1.5x with SiftHub

The cost of staying manual in an AI-first company

Zycus's global presales team handles a demanding volume of RFPs – typically 3-4 per rep each month, with questionnaires ranging from 500 to 1000 questions covering features, functionality, implementation, integration, technical requirements, and security. Before SiftHub, the team relied on Responsive.io (formerly RFPio) as their RFP tool. While Responsive provided basic RFP collaboration and content management, it lacked the AI capabilities Zycus needed.

"What was missing was intelligence. We had a vision that ideally we should not be the ones searching for content in a tool – it should be auto-populated and automatically generated because we already have the source of the content." said Hardik Kothari, Director of Presales Center of Excellence at Zycus. 

Without AI-driven auto-population, a single 500-question RFP took a minimum of anywhere between 8 to 10 days to complete, sometimes longer. The time pressure left little room for strategic work. Presales reps had no bandwidth to build customized proposals, often defaulting to standard template decks instead of tailored slides for each prospect. And when prospects demanded a 2-day turnaround – which happened regularly – the team was stretched to its limits.

Beyond RFPs, the pre-sales team faced compounding challenges across their workflow. Demo narratives relied on feature-based narration rather than the value-based "Intake-to-Outcome” approach Zycus's marketing team had developed. Reps defaulted to "muscle memory" – referencing the same handful of familiar customer examples regardless of the prospect's industry. 

"When you go into a different industry, it's not always going to be an F&B industry where you can throw out Heineken as a name every now and then. You go into different demonstrations, different industries, different use cases – and do you have transformation stories? Do you have values and numbers you can actually throw out for that demo?"

Maintaining the RFP knowledge base was another constant drain. While Zycus's security protocols changed only once a year, product features were updated every three months, requiring a team member to manually curate and refresh the Responsive.io’s Q&A library on an ongoing basis.

One platform. Every presales workflow.

Zycus evaluated tools across the market and selected SiftHub for the depth of its AI capabilities, not just for RFP automation, but for a broader set of AI-driven presales workflows that aligned with the company's AI-first philosophy.

For RFPs, the team now works directly through SiftHub's Excel plugin. Rather than uploading every document as a project, reps launch the plugin within their spreadsheet and let SiftHub auto-generate responses across hundreds of questions in a single pass. The first pass takes approximately one hour (given the volume of questions) and any question requiring more information is flagged up front, after which the team reviews, refines, and customizes before submission.

"RFP automation is just one part of it. The rest of the parts are much more strategic, and that's what we liked about SiftHub." Hardik explained.

Beyond RFPs, Zycus has built custom AI Teammate cards to address the team's other workflow gaps. A ‘demo narrative card’ coaches reps on building compelling, value-based stories using Zycus's "Intake-to-Outcome” approach – shifting from feature-based narration to stories grounded in real procurement scenarios tailored to each prospect's industry. 

A ‘case study card’ gives reps instant access to relevant customer transformation stories, use cases, and proof points so they no longer rely on the same handful of memorized examples. Hardik shared, "If I have a demo today and I need a couple of use cases from existing customers, I just use that card and I get case studies in five minutes. I can say that information out loud in the meeting, and then the prospect understands we have done work in their industry, we know how it works, we have experience. That's establishing credibility."

The advantages of a connected tech stack

SiftHub's integration with Avoma, Zycus's conversational intelligence tool, automatically surfaces the pain points and challenges discussed during discovery calls – giving reps the context they need to build demos that directly address what the prospect cares about. 

The Salesforce integration pulls historical account data that reps routinely missed during manual CRM research. And a direct sync with SharePoint ensures the RFP knowledge base stays current: as product information is updated in SharePoint, SiftHub automatically ingests the latest content without manual curation.

The team also relies heavily on SiftHub's bot for Microsoft Teams for quick answers on the fly, whether during a live call or while working through a document, without needing to open the full platform.

The impact: Faster RFPs. Stronger demos. Sharper intel.

The most immediate impact has been on RFP turnaround. What previously took 8-10 days per 500-question RFP now takes at least 40–50% less time. The first pass, which used to involve days of manual searching and populating, is completed in about an hour with close to 65% coverage. 

"We now see at least a 50% reduction in the timeline that we are working out on the RFPs. And that time can be devoted to working on the proposal – building custom slides for the deal instead of sharing a standard template." 

The freed bandwidth has changed the quality of the team's output. They can take on additional documents during critical timelines when prospects demand fast turnarounds. And SiftHub's account intelligence has surfaced insights that manual research missed entirely.

"We were very surprised. A field rep was doing manual research on a critical account and couldn't find any information. SiftHub was able to identify that the same account had come to us three years before, and that the deal was lost because something went wrong with one of our modules. The rep couldn't find it on Salesforce, but SiftHub did that for him through the integration."

Across the team, Zycus estimates a 1.5x productivity improvement per rep after just 5 months on the platform, with a target of reaching 2–3x improvement as they expand usage.

The presales team has also used SiftHub to prepare for discovery calls – generating relevant, domain-specific questions in seconds – and ran a dedicated "AI week" to embed SiftHub-driven processes across the full presales workflow, including testing bid/no-bid decision support and rolling out additional AI Teammate cards.

"We see a lot of potential in SiftHub. I don't see there is any other tool in the market that tackles the sheer scale of presales workflow automation that SiftHub provides out of the box. We really want to use this as much as possible to ease our processes and automate everything." 

Would Zycus recommend SiftHub?

"Of course. In fact, within Zycus, presales is the only team using SiftHub right now, but we have monthly strategy forums, and we showed the SiftHub MS Teams bot and AI Teammate to the sales folks as well. They are very keen to look at it from a feature, capability, and intelligence perspective. The BD team is also interested in AI Teammate. We're going to take a pulse call and gauge the interest level – but I think there are already a couple of teams within Zycus looking at it."