In this tutorial, Helena Liu demonstrates how to craft an effective prompt for ChatGPT to generate a high‑quality Request for Proposal (RFP). She first explains why a strong, detailed prompt yields better outputs, then contrasts a minimal one‑line prompt with a comprehensive prompt that assigns the AI the role of a senior purchasing manager and specifies every required RFP section. Using a concrete scenario—building an AI customer‑service chatbot for a financial firm deployed on web, Facebook, and Instagram—she shows how the detailed prompt produces a far more complete and relevant RFP. She highlights best practices such as being explicit about role, tone, and sections, and recommends using GPT‑4 for superior results. The video ends with a link to download the exact prompt used.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Helena here and welcome back to my YouTube channel. And in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you an exact prompt that you can use to start helping you write your RFP or request for proposals. Also, if you're new here, please make sure you like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss any of my future videos. All right. With that being said, let's dive into the prompt. So it's really important that you understand the benefit of having a very, very strong prompt. So the prompt is an instruction that you give to AI. And so the better your prompt, the better the output that you get. So I could very easily go into ChatGPT and just say, write me an RFP on block. So in our example, let's suppose that the company you're working for is looking to build an AI chatbot so that they have a virtual customer service support for their customers 24/7, 365. Now let's just take a look at an example of that. If I just went to ChatGPT and I said, write me an RFP to procure vendors who can build me an AI chatbot for customer service, right? So if I just write something, a very basic prompt like that, and go into ChatGPT, as you can see, the result that we're going to get is also going to be very generic and basic, right? So now I want to walk you through a good prompt, and then once we use a good and much more detailed prompt, then we can compare and contrast the differences in results that we're going to get. Now let's go back to our prompt here. So firstly, to start off this prompt, I'm giving ChatGPT a role here. So I'm saying you are a senior purchasing manager. You have been tasked with creating a request for proposal, RFP, to solicit proposals from vendors for products and services that your company intends to purchase. The RFP is a critical document that outlines your company's requirements, expectations, and evaluation criteria. Generate an effective RFP addressing the following points. Okay, so then now I'm telling ChatGPT exactly what sections I want this RFP to have. And based on your— the templates that you may have for your projects in your PMO, you may choose to take out some of these sections, as well as add in new ones that may be relevant. So we start off our RFP by having the introduction and background section. This just provides some background on our company, our mission, as well as the purpose of the RFP and the project that we are hoping to undertake. And then next, we get into the scope of work. So we want to clearly define what the scope is, what products and services we're looking for from the vendors, right? Then we get into the vendor qualification. Want to specify what kind of vendor looking for. So we want to define the criteria that are important to us, whether it's industry experience, certain certification, or other relevant factors, right? Then we get into the proposal guidelines, right? So the proposal guideline is the format and structure that we want our vendors to respond with. With their proposal, right? So whether we want them to have certain sections such as a technical section, which would explain how they're going to complete this product service, or whether we want them to include the pricing, the implementation plan, any references that they may have, etc. Next part of our RFP is that we want ChatGPT to write out the evaluation criteria. So we want the evaluation criteria to be on there so that vendors know what criteria are important important to us and how much do we weigh, right? So these criteria, these evaluation criteria could be cost, quality, experience, technical expertise, support, or any other factor. Next section of our RFP is the timeline and submissions. So we want to provide the timeline of when this submission needs to happen, any terms and conditions related to deal. This could include payment arrangement as well as intellectual property and who owns that. And then we get into any clarifications and questions. So this is clarifying questions that other vendors may have asked in regards to this RFP. And then lastly, we get into the proposal format and documentation. So in this section, we can specify to the vendors how we want their proposals to look and if we want them to include any supporting documents Or not. Then lastly, if there's any additional information, we can also include this in the appendices. Okay, and then this is in the end what what is the product that the vendors will hear a description of the product or service that we want the vendor to procure. So I'm just going to go ahead and copy this prompt here, and now get this into. ChatGPT, and then here I'm going to explain AI chatbot that we're trying to build, right? So then here I just add in exactly what we're looking for. We're telling ChatGPT we're looking for an AI chatbot for a company working in the financial sector, and this chatbot will answer inquiries related to this specific company, and the support ticket would be created if the chatbot doesn't know the answer. This chatbot is going to be deployed over web, Facebook, and Instagram. All right, so now let's enter in this prompt and see what ChatGPT has come back with. Now, so if we scroll here to the top, right, with our very, very basic one-line prompt, we can see that the RFP that we got— you can see here, this is actually not too specific. So it's actually not quite— not bad for just you know, one-line prompt and it's able to generate this. But let's see what ChatGPT has generated with our much detailed prompt, right? You can see here, because we told it more about the project, giving us the introduction and background, much, much more detailed and specific. And the results, you know, in the scope of work section is much more accurate than the first First RFP that was written was just a one-line prompt. So I hope you can see from this example, I want your main takeaway to be the better the prompt that you enter into ChatGPT, the better the results that you will get. So when you're writing prompts in the future, always make sure that you get as specific as possible and tell it the exact role that you want ChatGPT to assume, the tone of voice, the different sections in what you're trying to write. And if you have the budget, definitely upgrade to ChatGPT-4, which is about $20 a month, and you're going to get much, much better output by doing that as well. So I hope you enjoyed today's training. Hope you learned something new about prompt engineering. Also, if you want this exact prompt, please go into the description to download it now. Thank you so much, and I will see you soon.
