In this Revenue Today podcast, host Jared Robin interviews revenue experts James Breen and Amy‑Louise Tracey about practical tactics to improve RFP win rates. They outline four core strategies: (1) allocate dedicated time and produce highly customized answers, noting top‑performing teams spend an extra hour (average 21 h for <500‑employee firms, 31 h for enterprises) across contributors; (2) involve additional subject‑matter experts from product, legal, sales, and customer experience to enrich content; (3) be selective about which RFPs to pursue, using a framework to focus effort on high‑probability opportunities; and (4) maintain a centralized repository of past answers (standard company overviews, reusable customized responses, and new content) to avoid reinventing the wheel. The conversation expands on balancing standardization with customization—keeping a consistent brand voice and formatting while tailoring elements like client logos per industry. They discuss the role of marketing in reviewing baseline answers, the need for permission or NDAs before using client logos, and organizational models ranging from a dedicated RFP specialist to decentralized ownership by CROs or account executives. The episode closes with sponsor acknowledgments and a call to the Rev Genius community.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
After taking a look at all of these different strategies, we've broken it down into 4 that you can really start to use today. So these 4 strategies are going to help you look at your win rate, and I'm going to hand it over to James to get us kickstarted with strategy number 1.
All right, let's dive into the strategy here. So the top one is these top teams are spending actually more hours writing their RFPs. And I'm sure everyone's hearing a little bit of a groan in the room of like, okay, they're dedicating more time. Like, how is that gonna impact me? But what we've found in the research is actually that they're not spending more time on the RFP itself, but specifically around having really customized answers. So if you think about when you're putting together kind of that response, it's gonna be tailored to the RFP that you're responding to, and it's not gonna have like generic answers. It's going to be specific to that customized response process. They also involve more contributors, and it's not a lot more. We just found by 1 or 2 more contributors that are participating in this RFP process, you're gonna get a variety of different subject matter experts involved. So you might be reaching out to your customer experience team, your legal team, your product team, your sales team, and you have those great people that are experts within their domain that are really helping to beef up the content of your RFP. The third one is they are selective of what bids they take on. So, you know, there's definitely a concept in a lot of organizations that Amy Louise and I talk to of we just answer everything. Like, even if we have like a 1% chance of winning, we're gonna answer it. And really you have to think about where could that sales energy be better practiced? And so that could be things like prospecting, for example, or working with existing opportunities in the pipeline. So you really have to have a framework in place that everyone agrees upon, that you're selective of who you're responding to. The next one is that they have a centralized system for RFP answers. Slack doesn't count for that. It's a great help sometimes for searching for it, but whether you're using like a Confluence, you're using Google Drive, you're using, you know, any type of internal repository, it has to be that centralized place so that you're not digging through 50 different solutions to try to find the answers you're looking for. And the results are they're winning more than half their bids. So let's kind of unpack that a little bit here. And we'll go back to that question around, you know, for the people on this call, do you have a dedicated person or team that's responsible for RFPs in your business? Or is it more of the people that receive the RFPs are actually the ones that are quarterbacking them? Just doing a quick pulse check here of, hey, like, you know, is there someone that you hand this off to, or are you kind of responsible for You know, responding to them directly. And yes, Katie reflected at Lupio, we actually hired our first RFP specialist and manager about 5 months ago. So before that, Amy Louise was responding directly, and now she gets to collaborate with that central team. Yeah, even Kyle saying that the CRO responds to them. So that's— if you think about, you know, the CRO's responsibilities, that's a lot of, you know, Long hours that are spent specifically responding. Max saying account execs answer them, and then they collaborate with SCs on the team. That's, that's very common as well. So again, we're gonna try to focus on both the centralized model and the decentralized model. And Amy Louise, keep us honest as we go through if we're, if we're missing one of those perspectives here.
Absolutely.
So to start off, we'll talk about, you know, that dedicated time and quality. So You know, on average, not a huge spread here, but actually there was an extra hour dedicated by the top-performing teams in writing a response to RFPs. And I know that 24 hours or 25 hours may seem like a long time, but if you kind of go through the entire process of receiving the RFP, reviewing the initial questions, doing that Q&A at the beginning with the vendor, this is kind of the benchmarks that we're looking at. And it also dedicates to the quality of responses. So what we found is obviously with smaller organizations, time is really important, and typically you're responding to RFP values that might be lower than some enterprise organizations. So on average, if we break out kind of those industry benchmarks, small and medium-sized companies, companies that are under 500 employees spending about 21 hours. We have the mid-market enterprise scaling that process and enterprise bids. You know, they're probably the largest RFPs that are out there. On average taking about 31 hours to complete.
And I think as well, James, just to add on to your point too, it's like that's the hours that are being completed across all of your team or all of your contributors who are involved. So it's not necessarily, Kyle, this is 31 hours that your CRO needs to be spending. It's going to be more so someone is viewing this section, maybe someone is reviewing another section and working on that. So very much a total as opposed to me as an individual contributor needing to dedicate 31 hours.
And what we see kind of a trend across, regardless of the business size though, it's important that as you're increasing your writing time, it really doesn't mean writing from scratch. So think about that kind of dedicated repository of accessible answers, often from bids that you've won in the past. Like that's the goldmine of, hey, we have a really high quality bid. We've won this customer over. Now let's mine that information and try to make this process repeatable. So there should be a combination of 3 different types of answers as part of the RFP. One are things like company overview, where it's pretty standard regardless of the RFP that you're responding to. Another one is maybe an answer that you've used in the past that you're customizing a little bit. And there's always gonna be those net new questions, questions you've never seen about your organization that you're gonna have to create from scratch. So just balancing where you're pulling that content from is gonna help you to find efficiencies in your process. And then just think about like the value that you can unlock with your team from not writing out those answers from scratch. And then you can focus on areas of the RFP that really do need to be customized. Those key answers and responses part of the RFP that are gonna be maybe how you differentiate yourself from your competitors in the space. We often see those ones of like, what, what, why do clients typically choose you versus other vendors that are out there? You really wanna dig in and see, What are some value-driven statements specific to this prospect or customer that I wanna incorporate as part of that custom answer?
I think it's all about getting a balance between standardization and customization. So if you respond to RFPs in different industries, like let's say you sell into the marketing industry and you also sell into the insurance industry, your standard answer for your company overview can be the same, but maybe you change up your client logos. So thinking really strategically about what customizations do we actually need to make. And then something that's really important, like as a company is trying to grow and scale and kind of go after those bigger fish is the consistency in the language, in the formatting of your responses and in that overall brand voice. So that's gonna be really important. So if everyone is starting from scratch and writing their own answers, you're not gonna have that consistent voice. You're not gonna have a consistent flow. So this can be really helpful where like marketing can come in really key here, having your base baseline answered, reviewed by marketing maybe once every 6 months, once every year. And that's gonna make sure that that brand voice is flowing throughout your RFP, but without you having to do too much customization in certain areas.
Yeah. And I really like Lydia's comment in the chat here of, you know, a lot of customers don't want you using logos. So think about this as well. A lot of RFP responses could involve some port— some kind of a nondisclosure agreement between the 2 parties. So you might have answers that you can use, especially with like really sensitive company information that cannot be disclosed unless you have an NDA. For those brand logos, maybe you have to seek their permission before actually disclosing who those customers are. You'll see on the Lupio website, we have a number of customers that are kind of loud and proud, and you'll see those logos, and we include them as part of our RFP responses. But we do have a number of customers that have chosen not to allow us to use their logo unless they give us express written permission. So definitely, Lydia, I think that's a great point to kind of touch on when we're, when we're talking about using those brand logos.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
