Reuse, Improve, and Repeat Your Best Content - James Breen and Amy-Louise Tracey - Revenue Today - Episode # 081

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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.

We are going to put together a couple of resources and templates so that you can follow them along and help to get them done. We do definitely recommend taking a look at them because, as James said, they're very implementable. Like, you can do them quite quickly. You can even just take them to your team to start thinking about, hey, how should we reorganize or how should we solidify our process here? So we'll get into sharing those resources in a couple of moments, but one thing we did wanna really reiterate that the top teams do. So what's the secret to scaling your process? It's about building a repeatable process. That's the secret. And the amount of times that I hear from, from prospects, like, we don't have a process. RFPs come in the door, they land on our desk, and we just scramble to get them done before the deadline. So creating a repeatable process is really key. It's just so worth the time and effort. And if you know, and your team, if you and your team know what exactly is supposed to happen, what the chain of events in your RFP process is going to be, responding to RFPs becomes far more manageable and a lot less stress-inducing. So repeatability is the key when it comes to scaling your process. And then, as James said, let's reuse that content. If you have a winning bid, if you have a bid that was, you know, almost won that you're really proud of, let's set that up as our gold standard content. Let's reuse it. The next time we iterate on it, we improve it, and then we repeat it again. So starting from scratch, we're not gonna do that anymore. We're gonna take our gold star content. We're all gonna work from our best-in-class work, and then repeat, iterate, and reuse.

But Amy Louise, I know in talking with a lot of people that are responding to RFPs, they automatically think, okay, I have 90 different bids, and I need to make sure that, you know, we, we look through all of those bids and find the best answers, and each of them have 300 questions. Like, that's way too overwhelming. Like, where do people even start in that process of finding their content?

Yeah, I even like, even when we're talking to customers who are onboarding to Loopio, like we don't say take everything you've ever done. Start with maybe 5, 5 or 6. Maybe you have a couple for different industries that you responded to. And even as you're building out your own central repository, be it SharePoint, Confluence, whatever system you're using, make sure that you're not overwhelming it. Because if you put 2,000 entries in there and there's duplicates, it's very bloated. It's going to get out of control. You're not going to be able to keep up with your proactive review process. So keep it lean. Think strategically about where are my most recent winning 5 RFPs and start from there. So always start on the smaller side. Don't think you have to capture everything you've ever done.

And I know we're— we'll have Q&A at the end, but I do think this is kind of in the same vein. So someone in the webinar is asking, what's the biggest mistake that you see SaaS companies do when they're trying to scale their RFP process? So we We talked about boiling the ocean is one of the things that we've just seen. Like, the project to build an RFP repository becomes so big that you don't actually end up launching it. But are there other kind of pitfalls that you're typically seeing, areas that teams have maybe tried to do something to fix their process but haven't always ended up being very successful?

I think definitely when we look at contributors, and that's why I wanted to really focus in on strategy number 2 as well, either not getting the right people involved, sending things to everyone and then someone in legal or someone in, you know, product just skimming through the answers and not really getting to the parts that they need to focus on. So making sure that we parse out those and bringing in the right people, staying on top of them, because again, the herding of cats is definitely a big challenge for a lot of people. But if you do have that kickoff meeting, everyone's aligned, it's going to make it a lot easier.

Yeah, I think I'd lean into the go/no-go process as well. I think it's so critical to figure out, even using like a point scale system of like, if we do answer this RFP, like how likely is it that we're going to win? And that's like a really tough thing because from a sales perspective, of course there's ego involved. We think we're gonna win everything that we respond to. But when you're bringing in maybe, you know, a sales leader into the conversation that might have a more discerning eye, maybe sales operations, product, and CX to do that initial review. And you've done that first scrub and said, hey, I think we have an 80% chance of winning. Here's what I'm concerned with, with the 20%, and deciding holistically if that's something that's gonna be part of the Q&A, or if we are going to email the vendor back and say, because this was your number one requirement, and while we can satisfy numbers 2 through 7, Your number one, is it within our scope of services? I think it's a good way of like still putting your best foot forward, still saying that we're interested in future bids. However, for this one, according to our understanding, we wouldn't necessarily qualify. So using that qualification lens, I'll just double down on as well.

Awesome. So taking a look at the resources that are going to be available, you can download all of these. But in order to kind of start building that repository, what it looks like, what is reusable content, we do have an RFP library template here as well. So you'll be able to start to work on building that single source of truth. We also have an RFP process checklist. So this is really helpful for tracking those contributors, making sure we know exactly who's supposed to answer what. We can easily then kind of track Are they completing all of those tasks on time? Strategy number 3, James has really doubled down on this with qualifying bids. You don't have to start from scratch here either. We have a go/no-go decision matrix available for download too. And then the final thing is, if you are looking at more of a centralized system, you can take a look at what an actual RFP automation response platform is going to look like and see different elements and how it can help you in your process today.

Yeah, question from Tessa on how we're gonna download these. So we'll actually send these as kind of like a nice package to all 27 of you who joined today's webinar. So no worries there, we will send that over via email. We'll ask for questions and thoughts. Feel free to throw them into the chat or the Q&A. Before everyone heads out, though, we do wanna end on the slide of the resources. So if you didn't have a chance to do a quick screen grab here, now is your opportunity. Otherwise, we'll open it up to the Q&A. And Amy Louise, you wanna tackle the next one?

Yeah, so we have one here about how do you recommend getting buy-in to approach each RFP as a team effort? I think talking numbers is really helpful because we wanna see, well, what percentage of our pipeline is tied up in RFPs? How many are we seeing? And numbers really talk to your SLT or to kind of director level and above as well. So being able to see if we are able to respond to 10 more proposals or RFPs, that's worth X amount to us in pipeline. I find that that's really helpful. And then that gets a little more excitement and enthusiasm behind actually putting an RFP together as a team. The other thing too is having your own kind of director support or your own leadership support and going and tackling that together as like a duo as well. Because I think when it comes to responding to RFPs. I've lost my train of thought there. Off we go. It'll come back. Don't worry.

Yeah, and I think buy-in is about explaining the why at the end of the day. As sales, we try to lean into that as much as possible. So whether that's getting contributors to actively participate or review content, explaining to them, as Amy Louise said, why are we even answering RFPs? Where have we won bids in the past that are now very successful customers with our company? If you kind of drill it down specifically to, okay, what does this person care about? And why do I need them to get bought in? And what's going to be relevant for them to get engaged with that buy-in process, I think is, is a key way that you can, you know, at least start to facilitate those conversations. But again, try to be proactive. No one likes a last-minute Hey, I never— I know you've never responded to RFPs before. This one's due tomorrow. So just try to be early about it.

It came back to me. Exactly that, Jared. I was saying about having the process like outlined as well to show to the contributors, hey, this is all you're gonna have to do. You're gonna have to take a look at 6 questions. You're gonna have to take a look at 2 questions. We're gonna have timelines in place so that you're getting this a week, 2 weeks in advance, and it is going to eliminate me coming to you with 4 hours' notice and needing to get these questions back ASAP. So it's actually going to make their life a lot easier too.

Yeah, and we had a comment from Lydia. Lydia is a Lupio customer, and part of her process with Go With No Go is finding out how much of the RFP that they can respond to kind of automatically using their library of repeatable content, and then how long that process will take. to respond to the remaining questions. So it's kind of like if you have an RFP and it looks and feels like a lot of the RFPs that you've answered before, maybe you can answer 60 or 70% with what you already have. That 30% remaining is gonna be something that you can actually measure. So, you know, for example, if you take a best guess and say each answer will take us 5 minutes, and that 30% of the RFP that's left is 20 questions, you know, you know that that's gonna take 60 minutes on average to do that final review, and then you can estimate how many hours this will take. That's a great kind of creative way of, of doing that no-go and, and also incorporating kind of that automation. Lydia, thanks for sharing that. And we'll do one last quick check for questions. Thank you everyone for being so engaged, especially with the smaller group. We're hoping that these key takeaways will be helpful, as well as the follow-up material. Amy Louise and I are involved in the Rev Genius community, so we're definitely available in Slack. If you haven't joined that community, it's part of the membership to Rev Genius. We're also available on LinkedIn as well, Amy Louise Tracy and James Breen. And as always, if you have any questions, just feel free to let us know. But Really appreciate everyone's participation, and we hope that this session gave you a little bit of insight of like, what are like 1 or 2 things that you can change in your process and start winning more RFPs ultimately.

And let us know in the Slack community in Rev Genius too if you implemented any of these. We'd love to hear if you've been successful or what you've done, what you would iterate on, what advice you can give going through these. So Get involved. We'd love to hear from you.

Yeah. And if you have any detractors, Amy Louise and I would be happy to talk to them for you. Other than that, thanks everyone so much for this lunchtime revenue webinar with Rev Genius. And we'll hope to talk to you soon.

Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.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.