More RFPs mean more deal opportunities, but for leaner Ad Ops teams, meeting advertisers’ rising expectations can be increasingly difficult. Advertisers are increasingly looking for personalized, unique approaches to their RFPs.
Manually responding to an RFP takes too long to keep up with those time-sensitive demands, especially when advertisers are using buyer agents to query your inventory.
The Cost of a Slow RFP Response
Unanswered RFPs leave money on the table. The manual response process doesn’t meet the market’s demands for volume, speed, and specificity.
The impact of slow responses extends beyond fumbling isolated deals:
- Lean Ad Ops teams are faced with higher volumes of incoming RFPs, increasing the gap between demand and bandwidth.
- Publishers responding under pressure tend to default to familiar, broad segments, resulting in undifferentiated proposals to buyers who expect precision.
- Teams that are at capacity may sideline incoming RFPs, which registers only as unanswered briefs instead of lost revenue.
- Advertisers may deprioritize publishers who don’t respond with audience recommendations at the pace and depth they’ve come to expect from walled gardens.
- As more advertisers deploy buyer agents to search for inventory, a manual workflow has no answer for a buyer agent querying your inventory outside business hours.
The solution isn’t just to speed up the process but to improve the specificity of audience proposals. Agentic workflows supported by platforms like Optable make it possible to surface audiences that manual processes routinely miss and close the loop from RFP to activation without the bottlenecks.
How Agentic Workflows Are Changing the Sales Process
No matter how good the team is, a manual RFP workflow limits how many briefs they can strategically answer in a day. Agentic workflows remove that cap by changing what happens at each stage of the sales process.
When a brief arrives, instead of routing it to a queue and waiting for a data analyst to pull segments, the agentic workflow begins immediately. An agent can read the brief, extract campaign goals, and generate audience recommendations using the publisher’s enriched first-party data. Publishers with low or declining traffic can more effectively monetize their audiences when an agent surfaces precise, differentiated segments to target.
This process surfaces segments that a manual query would overlook: niche behavioral combinations, trait correlations, and audience overlaps that only become visible when systematically searching the full depth of the data. Optable's Audience Agent handles this step, proposing ranked segments with confidence scores and reach estimates that give the sales team something to review rather than build from scratch.
The team can adjust in natural language to instantly update the recommendations. A human reviews before anything activates, keeping the publisher in control of what goes out and to whom. Then, the agent can generate a response draft and activate audiences directly across ad servers and SSPs. The proposal, complete with audience definitions, reach estimates, and pricing, is ready to send in a fraction of the time.
Agentic workflows also change how buyers and sellers interact. As agencies and brands increasingly deploy buyer agents to search for inventory, publishers who aren't visible to those systems are out of consideration. A Sales Agent like Optable’s allows publishers to define their audience products, configure pricing and access rules, and make that inventory automatically discoverable and transactable to buyer agents querying for relevant audiences.
Publishers with premium audiences get access to more deals, and buyers receive a structured proposal mapped to their brief.
What Your Team Can Do With the Time Back
When proposal building stops eating up your team’s bandwidth, the work that requires human judgment gets the attention it deserves. For Ad Ops teams, that looks like:
- More thorough campaign analysis: With a tool like Optable’s Audience Agent handling brief intake and segment recommendations, teams can focus on surfacing compelling insights around their advertiser’ audience to build smarter packages around performance instead of availability.
- More niche, addressable audience products: With agentic support, teams can develop more compelling audience products that go beyond standard segments without allocating more resources to surface them.
- Unique, custom creative approaches: Brands aren’t looking for cookie cutter proposals. They want to see platforms with custom audiences built from unique first-party data that aligns with their vision, and agentic solutions give Ad Ops teams the time and ability to deliver.
- The ability to answer more briefs: Lean teams can address briefs that they previously would have deprioritized or overlooked due to bandwidth constraints, increasing revenue potential without expanding headcount.
- Stronger advertiser relationships: Teams that aren’t weighed down with manual processes have more time for data collaboration with buyers. Sharing audience insights, validating campaign fit, and collaborating on strategy builds transparency that fosters a long-term partnership.
Agents help relieve the mechanical burden of processing and responding to RFPs so your team can focus on more meaningful tasks that require creativity, strategy, and human judgment.
Win More Deals With Smarter Workflows
Ad Ops teams with the right infrastructure to support them can respond faster, propose better audiences, and build stronger advertiser relationships without working harder.
Agentic workflows change what a lean Ad Ops team can accomplish in a day: more brief responses, more precise audiences, and more time for the strategic work that turns one campaign into a long-term relationship.
Every brief the agent handles well is data that informs the next one. Every niche audience that wins a deal becomes part of a stronger audience product portfolio.
The buying landscape is moving toward greater automation on all sides. Publishers building agentic infrastructure are positioned to compete in that environment and won’t have to scramble to catch up.
Optable gives publisher teams the agentic infrastructure to do exactly that, from RFP intake and audience activation to outbound discoverability. Ready to see it in action? Schedule a demo.
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