James Breen and Amy-Louise Tracey from Lupio share how top SaaS sales teams win 51% of RFPs versus the 46% industry average. They break down findings from a survey of 800+ companies and reveal what high performers do differently: standardized processes, dedicated RFP owners, and tools to speed up security questionnaires.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
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Hi, welcome to the Lupio webinar that, that RevGenius is partnering with. We're really excited to have James Breen and Amy Louise Tracy, ALT, here presenting to talk about, you know, SaaS strategies to achieve the 51% RFP win rate. I'm Bri. I am your partner success manager over here at Rev Genius. And, you know, really grateful to partner with Lupio, really grateful for the content that they're gonna be sharing with you today. Get active in the chat, let us know where you're from, and please feel free to ask lots of questions. And at the end, we'll do a little bit of question and answer time specifically. But with that, I'm gonna let James take it over.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for joining from wherever you're from today. Have some people from Brazil and New York, New York and Toronto. Amy Louise and I are really excited to talk about this topic today, and it's how top teams are winning more RFPs. Actually, the top teams that we surveyed on average are winning about 51% of the RFPs that they respond to. So by the end of this webinar, we wanna give you some quick actionable tips that you can actually bring as part of your organization's strategy for winning more revenue through RFPs. And I think, given the current economic climate and the economic uncertainty— sorry to use a buzzword— but I think it's more important forever that if you are, you know, making the effort to respond to RFPs, that you have a strategy in place so that you are, you know, in a good position to be primed to win them. So let's start off here. We'll do again some quick introductions. My name is James Breen. I'm the director of our commercial sales team at Lupio. Lupio itself is a company that helps through software for organizations that are responding to RFP security questionnaires and DDQs. Our aim is to help make that process easier, more simplified, more streamlined, and actually enjoyable for our customers. And I'll throw it over to my co-host to introduce herself as well.
Hi everyone, I'm Amy Louise. I'm a senior account exec here at Lupio. So I spend time every day talking about RFPs, Workflows. I talk to customers, prospects, colleagues. I know how painful these RFPs can be, and I know some strategies that are really helpful and are going to help you actually win. As James said, if you're putting your best foot forward with an RFP, you wanna make sure you have as much of a winning chance as possible. So I'm excited to chat to everyone today about these strategies.
And to go over a couple housekeeping just to kick us off here. Yes, there will be a recording of this webinar. So if you are eating lunch or have to run, we will be sending that to you after the presentation. We're gonna pause at the end of the presentation for questions. Probably the best way is to address them in the Q&A section as we go through so we can round them up outside of the chat to address them as they come up. And of course, if we can't answer anything today, we will aim, of course, to get through this on time, but we will send a follow-up with lots of Lupio goodies of information that we went through today, as well as answers to those questions. And to start things up, we're gonna get some engagement engagement, and we'd love to learn a little bit of a pop quiz. And to start us off, it's, do you know what your RFP win rate is? So to drill it down, an RFP win rate is essentially taking the total number of RFPs that you've responded to and dividing that by the number of RFPs that you've won. And depending on where you are within your organization, you might have an individual RFP win rate if you're an individual contributor. Or you might know holistically what your company's win rate is. So if everyone can throw a little emoji in the chat, or just type in kind of the yes, no, or not really sure, it'll give us a good gauge of where everyone's at and kind of understanding, you know, how are you tracking success in terms of RFPs? All right, we've got some panic faces. We've got a couple no, that's why I'm here. Danny is on top of things. He's got already a success rate criteria. There's a benchmark there. But that's absolutely okay that we're getting in a lot of answers here that, you know, that's not something that's currently being tracked, or I want to learn a little bit more about. And just wanted to level set about the people that are actually in this webinar today. So again, we have individual contributors. We have people that might be running a sales operations team or a sales leader. We're also probably talking to people who are— have a centralized process for responding to RFPs. So when an RFP comes in the door, you're handing it off to maybe a solutions consultant or an RFP manager or coordinator. And then some of you on the line that have a decentralized process, so all of your account executives, for example, are answering RFPs. And so we tried to gear this webinar towards all of those different audiences. So don't worry if you're directly responding or if you're managing a team, hopefully you'll get a little bit of information out of this webinar today. And to go over what you're gonna be learning, so to start things off, we're gonna kind of do that benchmarking, that kind of level set of, hey, what are the average benchmarks for these sales teams? And we've done this through surveying both Lupio's customers as well as externally in the market, like what are some benchmarks around RFP success that we're seeing? And this information is from last year. We're going to go through the habits of top-performing sales teams. We're going to give you a cheat sheet to help scale your RFP process and to give you some areas of Hey, here are one or two things that we can easily implement to try to streamline this process and to win more. And then of course we'll go over questions as I mentioned as well. And I'll throw it over to Amy Louise to kick us off with our benchmark survey.
Awesome. So as James said, the first thing we're gonna start looking at is just some benchmarks so you can see where you stack up against the average. I see Adriana, you're already ahead of the game taking a look at the Lupio site and throwing out some stats there. But in this section, we're really gonna dive deeper into these performance benchmarks for software organizations in particular. So we're looking at a variety of teams, small, medium, large organizations. And if you want to get further into this, you can take a look at our actual benchmark report. We do this every single year. It's original research. This is actually our 3rd industry report that we've done. So it really looks at over 800 companies who are managing a proposal process, whether that's an RFP, a proposal, a tender, a bid, taking a look at what's happening across North America within these teams. And you can always download that as well, should you wanna take a look at some additional figures. But it is always important to know where the stat is coming from. So as I said, we have looked and surveyed companies that have less than 100 employees all the way to enterprise organizations who have more than 10,000 employees. So obviously, the context of company size is going to matter when it comes to RFPs. So throughout this section, we're gonna highlight how performance benchmarking And I think that those benchmarks can change depending on the size of the company that you work for too. So just wanted to level set that so that you don't freak out in case the company is a little bit of a different size than yours.
And I think it's a good call out that like, this is a challenge that, you know, companies regardless of their size have to, you know, respond to. And like some of those companies under 100 employees, that could be a 10-employee company that are trying to win RFPs all the way up to the enterprise where often RFPs are part of new business acquisition as well as part of the renewal process. of different companies that are included here.
Absolutely. And to get even more granular, we're going to specifically look at software companies. So SaaS organizations, there was just over 200. So 224 software companies were a part of this benchmark report. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. So this is where we really want to dig in and understand what these teams are doing today to achieve this Really high win rate. So 46% is very much the average win rate of a software team, but there's over a third of organizations who have much higher than that. So a 51% win rate here. What we want to see, or what we want to learn about, is what are the strategies that they're actually employing in order to get this higher win rate? So these organizations, as I said, a third of them have a win rate of 51% or higher. I also just loved this slide here because it did pull out that no one is winning 100% of RFPs. So you're not gonna win every single one of them. So that's also something that you're gonna wanna keep in mind as well.
Yeah. And I think it's important to think about like all the times that RFPs get involved in the sales process. So this could be Kind of one of those blind RFPs that you receive at the very top of the funnel, maybe an SDR receives them via email information at your company's website. Or they could be when they've narrowed it down to like 2 or 3 vendors, and you then have to enter in the RFP process. So you're seeing them kind of all over the sales cycle as you kind of encounter RFPs as they pop up.
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