Hello all,
My organization is looking to formalize our RFP process as RFPs are being responded to in an informal, ad hoc way. I was hoping that others within the PreSales profession would be able to provide insights into strong RFP processes, point me towards resources, or share experiences that can help us hone our process into one that is efficient and effective.
Some information about the organization. BenchPrep is an enterprise grade learning platform that revolves around the learner. We still don't receive enough RFPs/RFIs to bring in an RFP tool as we get at most 1 RFP a month. That being said, the RFPs we do receive are diverse in requirements, use case, and organization size which can make it a bit difficult to have a standard template.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
Hi Rhys, I'm sharing few best practices that might help you formulate a process around RFP response management. We currently align to a 6 - step response process with a set of best practices that has helped in streamlining our RFP response process. Below are few links that would give you more insights . https://www.rfpio.com/blog/how-to-improve-rfp-response-process/ https://www.rfpio.com/blog/how-to-respond-to-an-rfp/
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions on this. Happy to help
The most simple rule that we had been using:
have you been in touch with the prospect before the RFP has been issued? Respond
Have you never been in touch with that client pre-RFP? Don´t respond.
Can you identify any competitor language/wording? Don´t respond.
To be honest with you, we managed to win maybe one out of 10 RFPs where we came in super late. Have a look at this process chart from Garnter visualizing the modern B2B-customer buying journey: https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/04/PR_052_650876_Bryan_Update_Infographic-_A_guide_to_buyer_enablement-Desktop.png
You can see that buyers are halfway through their purchasing process when they are issuing an RFP . If you have not managed to get in touch with that client before - you have missed out on a huge opportunity to influence the RFP in your favor. But others have taken that chance...
And if you do respond: do it properly, or dont do it at all! This might be the German speaking in me, but dont do things by half-measures. At minimum, follow the 80:20 rule. Create a template with the most common questions and your responses (and delete all formatting; merging my document with the RFP template has driven me crazy ;)).
No need to scale beyond that for 1RFP/month