Discover the Best Open Source Rfp Management Software for Sales

Open source rfp management software for Sales

all right let's go ahead and get this webinar started my name is kelsey mcfarland i'm the events manager here at rfpio and i want to thank everyone for joining us for our first webinar of 2021. before i hand this over to our presenters for today i wanted to go over a few housekeeping items first all attendees are in listen only mode if you run into any sort of technical issues or need any assistance please utilize the chat feature located at the bottom of your screen second we will be opening it up for q a with our presenters at the end of the session as time allows if you have any questions please enter them into the q a panel located next to the chat panel at the bottom of your screen third we will be sending out a recording of the webinar after the event so you can catch anything that you might have missed now i'm excited to hand this over to our presenters jamie and brandon as they dive into 2021 they are of efficient and effective proposal management thanks so much for being here today guys well thank you everyone for joining us i am brandon my role within rpio is to help proposal teams explore how to automate their proposal response process joining me today is jamie thanks brandon and thanks everyone for joining us i'm jamie and i work on the marketing team here at rfpio and i'm a big fan of industry data and excited to share these 20 21 trends with you today we're going to hop into our agenda so first off we're going to share the context around the 2021 benchmark report on proposal management um which you can already download some of you may have already read it that's great um and then we're going to talk about some key trends proposal teams can expect to see and how to address them um and other major challenges in 2021 head-on awesome well i say we just jump right on into it then the first thing i'm curious to know and i'm sure others are as well what led you to put this together what was the motivation there i think like a lot of companies we reached a moment at the end of 2020 and decided to reflect and plan on how we wanted 2021 to be different and 2021 is an exciting time because 2020 taught businesses a lot about themselves and what was working and what wasn't and we also all learned together that market context plays a huge impact in how successful we are so understanding what's happening in the markets and the industries and what we can expect is a really big way of getting ahead of it and part of what made 2020 so hard was no one could had a way of anticipating and expecting what would happen next um so we took a look at our own numbers you can see some of them here and said okay from this we have a sense of what our customers are doing we've met with them we know where they want to be going in 2021 we're working with them because that's the kind of relationship we have um and then we also said but what about the wider world of proposal professionals we have a sense of how we want to align our business and help customers be successful this year but what can all proposal teams be doing to see a successful 2021 after such a difficult 2020. okay so now you mentioned our crayo customers and i'm looking at these numbers and i'm wondering did we reach out to anybody outside of our own customer base i'm so glad you asked that actually a hundred percent of this data from this report comes from ap mp members uh that's who we surveyed we have a close relationship with ap mp and we figured that those were the best professionals to tap into to answer our questions and get a sense of the state of the world of proposal management not just our customers so um in early um january 2021 we surveyed nearly 150 members of ap mp for those of you who aren't familiar it's the association of proposal management professionals and so this gives us a full mix you can see sort of the demogram demographic breakdowns here um so it's not just our pio customers in fact i say the majority of them are not rfpio customers it's a mix of customers and non-customers and that was really important to me so do me a favor and look at the um the bottom right it's the pink pie chart and it says that only 43 of the companies surveyed currently have what we call a designated rfp software solution in place this was really important to me from a research perspective this confirms that we did manage to get outside of just our own users um we were actually able to reach the market more broadly because only 43 are using any sort of software that's anything like rfpio and in that mix there's a whole variety of other tools they could be using now i want to draw your eye up a little bit um to the chart right above it which says that 40 um sorry 73 self-identified as leaders within their team this is really important for me as i was looking at this data because this allows us to forecast a bit better for 2021. these are the people who are hopefully in the know around their company's goals and hiring expectations for their teams and so we can really trust that these numbers um are aligned with the businesses not just um because they come from leaders ultimately you know and that actually makes a lot of sense when my teams talk to the proposal leaders about their 2021 goals a lot of them are coming to us with concerns about whether or not they're going to be able to keep up with a number of rfps they're going to be tasked to responding to that doesn't surprise me at all from our research we learned that 75 of teams plan to respond to more rfps in 2021 than they did in 2020 and 72 percent are also looking to issue more proactive proposals too that's a lot of work for proposal okay see now i'm looking at these mountains here and i'm seeing everyone wants to respond to rfps which of course means that there's going to be a lot more competition but then on the right hand side i'm seeing this little tiny hill that they're not going to increase staff that's an excellent point um it's predicted that 2021 will see a huge amount of competition for winning submissions yet only 37 percent of organizations surveyed plan on increasing staff which is honestly kind of hard to fathom considering how much head count was likely lost in 2020 okay so you're saying that proposal teams are being tasked with responding to more but they shouldn't expect any additional head count to help them out with that i mean that's what the numbers are telling us so classically you would have hired more people to accomplish more if that's not an option the only thing i can see as a path forward is automation and streamlining your operations so that you can do more with less what's interesting though is how you win um and what you need to change about your process in order to win is also going to change in 2021 well i have to imagine everyone's wondering how do we win so how you win in 2021 is i'm going to say twofold on one hand you have to be more efficient and on the other hand you have to be more effective so competition in 2021 is expected to increase not just because everyone wants to respond to more proposals or issue more proactive proposals because they do but because b2b businesses are looking to um are looking just with heightened scrutiny at where their budgets are going and asking can we do better we saw this sort of as a knee-jerk reaction in 2020 as a lot of budgets just got slashed um but we're going to continue to see this in 2021 as renewals come up and so with this increase in vendor scrutiny there's just going to be more rfps in the market to respond to right okay so if i'm a proposal leader though i'm hearing this and i'm thinking okay more rfps that's great that means more chances to win for me i mean that's great if you can win them the question becomes how do you do that so in part it is a numbers game the more submissions you submit the better in fact ing to rfpio data from 2020 and um this is a conservative estimate the average rfp deal size was between one to three million us dollars so if you can get your team and your systems working for you at the right speed you can probably increase your opportunities to win and that's no small feat but honestly it might not be enough so if you had enough staff you might be able to get more proposals submitted but without that your only real option is to turn to automation so that's where you sort of get this juggling effect you need to streamline your operations build content libraries improve your efficiencies with a tool like rfpio and then you can probably use that to your advantage to continuously grow your business by churning out speedy proposals but they might be too generic to win um you need to keep your business healthy and in order to do that you really need to know that what you're spending time submitting has a good chance of winning and i'm just gonna say it the time for generic proposals is dead it just is so what you're going to have to do to be competitive is work away from getting that generic proposal you need to get to that first draft efficiently and then invest the time you saved in personalizing that submission to make the best fit solution case argument for your for the organization that issued the rfp so that they pick you that's your effectiveness and that's the clear path forward as far as i can see it for winning in 2021. so you know and i and i love this because this is actually a core value at rpio give back time and that's our goal ultimately right it's to help proposal teams automate their proposal response process so they have more time the questions up being though what do you do with all that additional time exactly so not only are you going to have to do more with less but you're also going to be expected to turn out increasingly competitive proposals um so companies are going to want to see customized submissions coming to them content tailored to them and not just in the executive summary but throughout and so as you can see from the data on the screen organizations using an rfp specific software complete 43 more rfps annually than those using a more manual system what makes this possible is having a dynamic content library of existing question answer pairs that they can pull from this helps you get a more complete first draft faster than ever before and with the time that you save you're then investing it into the personalization to make that best case argument for your organization so with rfpio we offer clients a smart ai powered answer library where past question answer pairs are stored and categorized so content organization and moderation becomes key content organization i'm going to say it again because it's so important even for people who are already using rfpio organization and moderation of your content library is key to being successful at this in fact control over your answer your answer library is a highly valuable time saving and streamlining process so that will give you the efficiency you need so that you can then layer in the effectiveness between the draft one and the final submission you know and that makes a lot of sense my team tells me all the time that the conversations they're having with proposal leaders generally they're in the middle of responding to a proposal and they just got to a breaking point where they're so tired of doing it manually and that doesn't really surprise me because even in 2020 where you know budgets were being so highly scrutinized before we were still seeing people investing in rfp proposal technology because people were teams were really just reaching that breaking point and realizing that there has to be a better way to do this so that's expected to continue into the future um teams um know that there's has to be an easier way out there and they're looking for that but getting budgets um to do so or finding bandwidth to put such a tool in place i've gotten in the way hopefully with 2021 this is also a year where proposal teams are able to make that case for themselves at their profit centers and not cost centers we already talked about this a little bit the deals you guys work on is they tend to be huge bigger sales than most other sales um that 1.3 the one to three million dollars per per submission on average that's a lot of money you're bringing you're driving revenue you're bringing in money for your organization and you need the tools to be successful so i mentioned earlier that our survey found that 57 of organizations are not currently using an rfp specific technology so if you're still doing a manual process know that you're not alone but if your processes are painful if they were painful in 2019 painful in 2020 they're only going to get more painful in 2021 as competition increases okay so this is a lot of fantastic information i want to try to bring it all back so it makes sense sounds like this year 2021 proposal teams are going to see more of these coming their way with steeper competition also sounds like they're going to be expected to do all this additional work with less and they're going to have to do it faster from what we mentioned earlier they're not going to get any additional head count which to me means that having a proposal response process in place and automating that is no longer nice to have it's really become a need to have at this point and the benefit is once you do have something in place you're going to be more effective and more efficient ultimately winning more deals i mean that's what i hope for our for for people listening that they take this information and they they use it to build themselves a stronger responding organization as a whole fantastic i love it well thank you jamie i appreciate all the information well thank you brandon for giving me the opportunity to share and for um having some questions for me all right guys uh that sounded like the content we had set out i know a lot of you hopefully we're looking at the benchmark report as we went over and we did a few slides um polls during this time period so i wanted to hand it back over to brandon and jamie so that they could dive into some of that data and kind of continue the conversation um so the first one that we had that came out was just about what role describes it so i'll go ahead and share those results so that you guys have an idea there too so it looks like you guys aligned fairly well our group here today aligns fairly well with where you guys are sitting at for the team lead versus individual contributor um so jamie and brandon kind of what's your guys's thoughts on the difference there or why it was important to have those voices heard inside of the inside of the survey that we did or inside the benchmark report really much more than a survey i'm happy to take that one it's it's that we can trust the answers that come from leadership about projections for the next year not that individual contributors aren't in control of the work that they do and do a good job it's just that leadership that tends to be more in the loop about what the plans for the coming year are so when they say trends are we want it our goals are to do more or our goals are to hire more it's just more dependable and if an individual contributor is looking at this report right here what do you think that they should be taking away from it if they're they were the one who filled it out what questions should they maybe be asking their leadership then that's an awesome question um brandon is that something you'd like to talk about otherwise i'm happy to take it yeah so from from my perspective uh oftentimes we have conversations with individual contributors that because they're they're kind of in the wheelhouse they're in the weeds doing the work uh they recognize that there's that they are struggling they're usually the first ones to say hey you know this process is taking a really long time so my suggestion would be taking the information that's being provided in from this benchmark report and using it to you know have a conversation with your leadership teams to to i would say you can get the ball rolling um to push for an automated process if you're if the leader on your team isn't aware of what's going on then you know you're going to continue to struggle and it's only going to get worse with more rfps being responded to i think the only thing i'd add to that is your pain is probably real and matters and it's might feel isolated um and maybe your immediate leadership cares about you i hope they do especially during during a pandemic and working from home and all the other struggles we're all facing right now but in order to really get this tool to get the budget you need for a tool like this you probably have to make a strong business case and i'm not sure that everybody is used to making a business case for getting a technology um that's like this a sort of this automation tool which is a big a big purchase for a lot of companies um so if that's something that you're struggling with please like contact us let us know we help people make this business case all the time and it's something we'd be happy to work with you on absolutely fantastic so the next poll that we had out um just kind of dived in to a bit more of those numbers and again they aligned really closely with our set of data from the benchmark report with people really are looking to do more rfps in 2021 the other one that's interesting is while the majority of them don't plan on hiring an additional head count there was a good chunk of people who are unsure if they're going to be hiring and i don't know if that speaks to kind of where we're sitting at currently where there almost feels like there is a slight tide change in where we're sitting at so it'd be interesting if you guys could just kind of talk about those ideas a little bit so i would imagine from the standpoint of being unsure it's you know when i'm when i'm thinking of an issue and i'm i'm going through a process if i don't know of a software that can help me solve it i might look to increase headcount it might end up being the to you the only option but in reality in in this case there are options out there um and so if i'm someone thinking if i'm someone who is unsure as to whether or not i'm going to increase head count that's probably coming from the standpoint of i know 2021 is going to be rough with the number of rfps or increasing head count could be a way but i'd like to avoid it and i could avoid it by getting a proposal management software i mean and i think there's just so much uncertainty right now it's nice to hear that there are things happening in the world that change the market conditions that maybe our economy will start to shift um in better directions at least the us i know is trying to put out those plans other countries are doing better or worse than that and building plans internationally i think we all are pretty comfortable with uncertainty right now but it doesn't surprise me that there is just so much uncertainty around goals as companies are figuring out um maybe the plans are i mean a lot of companies have changed to 90 day plans not even whole year plans anymore so it doesn't surprise me that people are unsure just know that they're there are solutions and there are options i've had count if increasing head count isn't an option for your organization fantastic and then the last poll that we went out is a little bit of a deeper dive i would say in this case um it kind of dives into this idea of efficient and effective um the first one definitely what scenario matches your current situation we're at a 50 50 split there so some people are taking a lot of time to track down generic answers and some do have a streamlined approach to their um again matches pretty closely with what we have and then i 21 to 40 uh or 43 do say that they can reuse some of their questions across the across the projects and i think this really hits on that effective and efficient one so i didn't know if you guys kind of had any more thoughts or if maybe there was some other data that we had inside the report you kind of wanted to highlight these ideas um i would i guess my point would be that i look at this and i think okay it's probably pretty painful if the if in general your rfp answers are not reusable if you're in that zero to twenty percent that can be really difficult because an automation platform is just not going to get it's only gonna you know give you 20 of the answers on each on any given rfp you use to help so you are going to end up doing a lot more manual work than people who answer a lot of repetitive questions but i'd say that if you have even 21 if even if you're in that 21 upwards you can save a huge amount of time not looking for those answers manually um and there's a real opportunity there to streamline your operations and get things done faster if you're if you're using a tool that says you know what that's an that's an already answered question that you've used in the past in fact you have a subject matter expert who reviewed it and provided that answer it's already been moderated maybe there's even a few different flavors of that answer that you can pick from easily um that's going to save you a lot of time it's gonna save your organization a lot of time it's gonna save your subject matter experts from stopping what they're doing to answer your questions and they're being like i already this has been asked and answered i already know you i've given you this answer before um and you're just gonna it's just gonna increase the overall um agility and morale of your organization is what i'd say very nice um i don't wanna put you on the spot but i guess i'm going through right now as we were obviously putting this webinar together there's a lot more inside the benchmark report so was there anything inside of there that didn't make it into this webinar that surprised you maybe in a way jamie or that you found interesting and weren't expecting definitely um i'd say the two things that really popped for me as i put this together um one of them is in the benchmark report and one of them isn't because i kind of didn't even know what to make of it from an analyst perspective so i'll go with the one that is in the benchmark report you can look at it you can read it um and but didn't make it into these slides and that is the number of tools that organizations are using so for example we found that organizations that were doing a more manual process were using a lot more tools to get any one rfp proposal created which means they're switching between tools um pretty often which can be very jarring if you've ever been someone who has a lot of tabs or screens and you're working between them i mean we all have our monitor setups now at home it can be really hard and you waste a lot of time switching between tools what we found is that people that were using an rfp specific software still use you know maybe five tools because we're all still gonna be in word we're gonna be in powerpoint we're gonna be in excel depending on what the proposal requires um but we found that they were using five tools compared to on average nine with a more manual process and so there's just a huge amount of time saving there and just makes it just an easier process i'd say um so that was one of the things that didn't make it into this conversation but it's in the report and you can read in more detail the other one was the survey results overall suggested that the number of people involved in completing each rfp was just so much higher um in the survey results than we see with our own rfpio data so overall on average from the survey for this for this report we found that um the average number of people oh here's here's a question um the average number of people involved in you know i'm going to let people answer it and then i'll give everyone a second i want to skew the numbers um but on average from the survey results we found that it was somewhere between it hovered around eight eight people involved in each rfp um response whereas our own rfpio numbers put it down at closer to like 3.5 um and that to me just shows a more streamlined operation that you're probably not having to go back to as many subject matter experts every time i mean i saw some numbers in the raw data where people were coming back with like 45 different people touched any one rfp response i can't even imagine oh yeah so here okay we have survey data now that's awesome um and we do see that people are hovering in that like six to ten people are involved in each and each response um but that the next results on there are like one to five so people do have streamlined processes um it would be interesting in my mind that a follow-up report would look at what the optimum number of people involved in each response would be fantastic yeah you set me up so perfectly for this survey that i didn't get a chance to launch during it um so i was excited to be able to do that right then so it would be great to know um and we did get a question that came in um it would be interesting to know the breakdown by industry was that a question that you asked inside the report um yes it is and i believe it is in the final report let me pull it up if not i'm happy to share those results separately um i think by and large we bucketed people into one of ten industries um i don't think i included it in the final cut because it was just a pie chart that didn't look that interesting but i am happy to um share those results out in the follow-up email to this session but we included we had 10 different industries and um if there's another question let me come back to that one if that's okay yeah definitely you can take your time outside of there uh brandon you weren't asked in the aspect of being able to help put this report together jamie really did the um analyst but how was there any other questions that kind of come up that you thought wow this is super helpful for my sdr team or some of those key points that you guys have um the data was matching up what you guys are hearing on the phone i guess i would say in that case yeah absolutely and apologies uh construction going on in the background here right so one of the biggest things that that made absolute sense was the number of individuals that are working to respond to rfps um when i when i first joined rpo and i started hearing you know individuals say oh i've got 10 people i've got 11 12. i'm thinking there's no way and every conversation we have there's generally a decent sized team actually responding to rfps and being involved in that process beyond that what's been beneficial to the team to my team in general just to understand is the number of of systems and tools that are being used to respond in in in that process um talk to um a company that was using teams slack and email just just three different communication systems just to respond to an rfp um and the amount of back and forth that that leads to how how much how long it takes us to get a response to me i can see why having a system in place to automate that and make it faster and streamlined just makes so much sense absolutely i can see how things can get lost inside of there um i don't have any more questions they're coming in so jamie i didn't know if you were able to find the answer to the industry or if you guys do have any other questions feel free to chat them or put them inside of the the q a panel down here too i'm earnestly pivot tabling um but i will how about i i clean up that data and send it send it to you kelsey and then everyone can get it um in the final in the follow-up email perfect that sets me up great um that is um all the time that we have for the session and it looks like most of the questions here as always if you are an rfpio customer even if you aren't please feel free to reach out to us your csm um your sdr that you're working with or maybe your ae are always here to help you out with anything that you have questions about um so please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you do i will be sending out an email with the link to this webinar so if you want to catch any of that um that you might have missed it will also have a link to the benchmark report so you guys can download there um and then jamie's promised answers to what the industry breakdown looks like i want to thank you guys all again for joining us for our first webinar 2021 we definitely have a whole bunch more lined up so hope to see you in the future thanks so much for joining us everyone have a great day