RFP: Involve More Contributors and Qualify Bids - James Breen and Amy-Louise Tracey - Revenue Today - Episode # 079

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Okay, so strategy number 2, involve a range of contributors. As Katie mentioned earlier in the chat, at Lupio, we now have someone who is helping us with our RFPs, but for a long time, it was the AEs who were running the first pass at this. So initially, when I saw this strategy and was working through it, I was like, oh, this is a bit scary. Surely the more people I'm bringing into my response is going to take me so much longer to have it complete. But the key is who you're bringing in and where you're bringing them in. So again, we look at on average, we're seeing about 8 contributors helping to respond to these RFPs. Top-performing teams are bringing in 2 more. So it's not like it's a huge number extra of contributors. And maybe it's your sales director who's just doing a final review of it. Maybe it's the CRO who's now doing that final review as opposed to pulling the answers together. So when we look at contributors, like who are we bringing in? It's obviously going to differ depending on the size of your team, of your organization. So you can even see here, like smaller companies are including less people. And typically we have different areas of expertise getting involved. So sales, they're obviously gonna be wanting to put their best foot forward from like a competitive differentiation standpoint. Marketing, I already mentioned about having that really nice consistent flow, having a really great look and feel to the RFP. Security, you should be checking just with your security officer or someone in InfoSec that everything you're sharing is correct, because that is something that can really lose you a deal. Like you could have the best RFP in the world. Maybe you're hosted somewhere that they can't purchase from. So making sure that you have your security take a look. And legal, obviously legal will always come in for certain areas. And then, as I mentioned, that leadership team. So taking away some of the work that maybe the CRO or your sales director has to do. And then just having them take a look at like the final review afterwards. Making sure that you're strategic about how you involve your contributors is the key to this strategy. So we want to separate out the different sections for the correct contributor. We don't want to have to send the whole entire RFP to legal when they only need to look at 6 questions. So let's parse out what parts are actually relevant to them. If you aren't using a response platform, this is really paramount, and that's having a list of contributors ready to go. So you should know in your organization who should be assigned which parts, and then more importantly, they should know that if an RFP comes in the door, they could potentially be involved in this. So that way you're not going last minute to someone in legal saying, I have an RFP, I have to get all of these questions reviewed. It's not a shock to them. They always know that potentially they're going to have to help. review as part of this response workflow, and they can help weave that into their list of priorities. And I think being upfront about that, having your workflow in place, it's going to decrease how much you annoy contributors. No one likes to be nagged. They have their own priorities as well, but deep— just decreasing asking people the same questions over and over. As James said, if you have your Google, you know, or your SharePoint repository, making sure that any net new answers that we do receive, we feed back into that so that we can make sure we're not burning out our SMEs by asking them the same questions over and over again.

Yeah, and I think, you know, getting them involved early is also a good strategy, kind of getting that initial buy-in of either A, hey, we're going to have to deal with RFPs, and here's, you know, the typical turnaround times that we can agree to. And so if that's the one person on your legal team, that might be a 5-day period where they have the opportunity to review because they're dealing with last-minute contracts, end of quarter purchasing software for your company. And when you do get that initial RFP, making sure that they're in the loop about timelines in advance, saying, hey, you know, as I'm finishing this RFP, I'm going to have my first draft completed by this date. And I expect that we'll need to have all of the contributors to be adding in their input by this date. It's 2 different ways of aligning either strategically or RFP to RFP with your contributors, because we all know without them, you know, even at like on an average 9 people in getting involved with small and medium-sized businesses, You know, you're not gonna have that quality of response and it decreases your likelihood of being successful in winning the RFP.

Absolutely. So I think following these points is just really straightforward, really feasible. So for point number 1, like choosing the right people to participate, as I said, like have this documented, you know, that Brianne finance reviews pricing, Sean in legal reviews that section. They know, you know, and it just makes it really clear. And what it also decreases is you assigning something out to let's say James, and then James, 2 days before your deadline is due, being like, oh, this isn't my responsibility. So we want to avoid that as much as possible. And then this is where kind of point number 2 can come into play here as well. If you need to host a kickoff meeting, always have an agenda for it. Always make sure everyone is aware of what's going to happen in this meeting, who else is involved. And in the meeting, we want to make sure that we get people's Buy-in for their deadline. So everyone knows exactly what is needed from them, how many questions they're going to be responsible for, and then making sure that everyone agrees upon that as well. So there's no surprises. And then point number 3, like establishing responsibilities and clear deadlines. So this is so important. And I, like I said, I talk to people all day long, and one of my favorite descriptions of working with contributors Is trying to follow up with people is like herding cats. So people have their own priorities. Maybe your RFP is not on their top list. Maybe it's not even in their top 3 things on their list. So establishing those deadlines early on, clearly defining their roles is gonna make it really easy and just be helpful for the contributor to make sure they're getting their tasks done. Qualifying bids that you take on. So this is strategy number 3. And again, I think this is really important as you're scaling, like, As you're growing, going after maybe more, some more enterprise clients, you're gonna see an increase in the volume of RFPs. And there are likely gonna be times when you have to prioritize which bids you're gonna take on. So we do need to have some kind of process in place where we can qualify these bids. I think, James, you made a really good point around we qualify leads that come in. Why don't we continue to qualify the bids further to that? So, I think when we look at this, like assess the customer fit. As James said, like you might have a blind RFP or you might have an RFP that you're not really a good fit for. And many teams are just throwing paint at the wall and hoping something sticks. But in order to be more successful, the top-performing teams are actually taking a look at this and saying, you know what, we're gonna prioritize RFP A here because this is where we have the most likelihood of winning. It's a great customer fit. Maybe you have a preexisting relationship. Or you have, you know, there's been a referral or something else that's quite interesting is like if competitors are using it, they, people wanna all be on the, on the same line. They don't want their competitor having a software they don't have if it gives them a competitive edge. And then gauging the timeline. So what resources are involved here? James brought up a really great point around end of quarter. It's like, do my contributors have the capacity to help me get this RFP done right now? That should be included as well. And it seems like a really simple idea that we're gonna select the bids that are the best fit. Like, that seems to be very obvious. But when you have 10, you know, 15, 20 RFPs per month, it's easy to forget that and just try and answer everything. So really taking that step back to make sure that we're being selective and that we're really prioritizing which is going to be the best RFP for us to answer.

Yeah, what I've seen as a great strategy, Amy Louise, is really taking advantage of that initial Q&A period with the vendor. So when you're doing that first scan throughout any RFP, it's not always gonna be, or not ever gonna be 100% aligned with what your business can provide. There's always gonna be some areas where maybe a prospect wants extra services that aren't available or a product feature, and that's okay. Like we wanna look for a best fit rather than a perfect fit. But if you use that Q&A period really effectively and ask questions Like, could you rank the importance of these 5 criteria you've listed in the RFP? We also deal with companies that tend to go to RFP every year, and if they're consistently selecting a competitor versus your company, you really have to weigh the benefit of, does it make sense to respond again? Has something changed within the organization or to the RFP that you received from the year prior? Some companies, as part of their Q&A period, will allow that to be over the phone as well, which is perfect. That way you can have that dialogue and potentially ask some questions that maybe the responder wouldn't have answered on paper necessarily, but they might be a little bit more forgiving and provide that insight over the phone. And again, with RFPs, we always think that there are these technical documents, but there's still the art of selling behind it as well. So the customized answers, the leaning into value propositions, you know, asking more questions as part of that Q&A is a great way to understand, you know, One, should we respond to this RFP? And also kind of gauging how much effort do we wanna put into this as well? If it's a must-win, we're gonna divert all those resources to make sure that we're putting our best foot forward. If it's kind of a slimmer chance, we might go with some more generic answers. So it really depends on that qualification period.

Absolutely. And I think that really leans into being selective versus strategizing how we actually are going to prioritize these different RFPs that we receive, because sometimes we don't always have the opportunity to say no. We need to be responding to RFPs. So that doesn't mean that you still can't be selective about which ones you put more effort into. So maybe we have some of those smaller bids and we can have those more generic answers where we just customize a couple of areas as opposed to giving a really fine-tuned custom product to this particular large RFP that we're going after. And I think if you are following like strategy number 1 and strategy Strategy number 2, so having your content ready and available, having your contributors ready and aware of what's involved. This is likely gonna give you back some hours anyway, so we can put those together so we have a little extra time to get some more bids out the door, even if it's just more standard, smaller ones. And then the next one here, I, again, I think sometimes this is when we're looking at like, what RFPs should we kickstart first? Some of these might sound really obvious, but think about the length of it. Like, how many questions are in this? What is the product or service they're requiring? Is it something that's out of the box for my company, or is it a really custom solution that I need to bring product managers and engineers into as well? If it's something that's out of the box, you have that content ready to go. You have your couple of contributors lined up to get everything signed off. Let's Let's answer that RFP again. We might not be prioritizing it as one of our large ones, but we can probably knock it out the door quickly. The last one I do like to talk about as well is point number 3 here, like which bids can your team leave closer to the due date? I would just like to caution this, that if you are involving your additional contributors or collaborators, you don't wanna leave one of those to the very last minute. We wanna make sure that they're aware of it as it comes in the door. I hear people talk about sales reps and I mean, I I am one, so I can complain about us. But in general, what I tend to hear from, you know, sales ops, from marketing, from RFP or proposal teams is that, well, the AE received it on the 1st of January and I didn't get it until the 15th and it's due on the 20th. So not letting something sit in your inbox, having the process in place that yes, we're gonna answer this, but it's very short. It's very, you know, out of the box. It's due on the 20th. We'll take a look at it on the 15th, but making sure that all the contributors are aware of that. And are aligned and happy to do so. And that's kind of how we best prioritize which ones we can leave a little bit later.

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