#587 - Why Most Sales Teams Approach RFPs Wrong (Stop Wasting Time!) | Konnor Martin

reps, receiving RFP in their inbox, but they get like carry potter imperial curse put on their minds. Mind control. It's like, oh, this is a real opportunity. I can move this. It's a big deal. And they're just like, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna go after it. You've gotta stop in that moment and be like, okay, am I really gonna push my team with subject matter experts and my proposal team and executive and whoever to spend 50 hours responding to this thing when I have no contact. Blind, that's not a good idea. (upbeat music) Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. I'm your host, Nick Sigelski joined with my co-host today, Mark Costagolo. And today, if you have ever struggled with RFPs, I have a love hate relationship with them because I feel like they always create an opportunity, but it creates this weird dynamic between you and the prospect and it kind of feels like the odds are always against you when you get an RFP. You are in luck because today we have the VP of Sales and Solutions at Responsive Conor Martin giving us an RFP master class. We break down everything that you need to know to win your next RFP that you get. We get into things like how to run discovery, even when they say no discovery. We talk about ways that you can sell in your answers to the RFP beyond just answering their question. And we even get into some ways where you actually might use no bidding on an RFP as a way to gain leverage in the RFP. So if you want to get great at RFPs, this is one to listen to. And F3, a 2, a 1, RFP, let's go. - First action will take away. I would classify broadly as qualify. We're going to qualify the RFP, like you qualify your deals. And I think most of us would think that normally run the qualification rigor against our RFP the way we would with an opportunity before we put it into pipeline. But what we can do now that we wouldn't have been able to do in the past is we can actually do this using AI and not just asking, hey, is this deal qualified but doing things like what's our competitive positioning on this deal? Put it into your LLM, prompt it with, what's our potential incumbent bias? What words are being used in the document that points to competition? Is there missing information that I need to understand and expose? What is the likely evaluation criteria from the writers or the company's perspective? And you could draft up a nice big prompt to capture all this in AI and say, hours in the way you wouldn't be able to qualify the past. - Great, what's number two? - Number two is really related around discovery. So I would say finding the hidden scorecard. And I think the best thing I can say about doing this is using the clarification period of the RFP response or of the RFP process where you get to ask questions back into the evaluation team or back into the company. And they're not blocking you or putting up the wall so you can't talk to them. Use that to ask discovery questions and find out what is actually valuable to them in the reason why they're putting this RFP out. - Beautiful. - Round us out, Connor, what's number three? - The third one is gonna be persuade and prove and we're going to write for the evaluator not for the requirements. So you're using that RFP response really as your sales narrative to launch you as a springboard or as part of your foundation into the proof stage assuming, you follow my advice and then you get down selected. And you can do this with some really practical things like making sure you're using white space effectively or using graphics and video in your response. You are using call out boxes to point to the context and the text that you need in the actual structure of the document and then ultimately that becomes, you know, a piece of your sales narrative that's the value story that you use for the rest of the deal. - Connor, I wanna talk about how I can win more RF. - Sure. - So in the prep doc, you first listed, the first step to winning more RFPs is to stop wasting your time on RFPs that you're never gonna win because you're just column fodder and you listed some checklist qualification criteria of questions that we should be asking to figure out if we should even bid on this. The questions are, do we have access? Do we understand the problem? Do we know how they're evaluating? Do we know who is involved and do we have a realistic path to win? Basically what you're trying to understand is like, do we have influence over this RFP? Do we have an actual advantage? Not just yet we can do it, but we are clearly better than the competition. And then also, can we tell a winning business story? Like can we make a business case not just check a bunch of capability boxes? And so what you were sharing with me is like, if you can't say yes to two out of three or those things at the end, it's not worth your time to go work that deal. I actually don't wanna spend too much time on that. The more interesting thing to me that you put on that doc is you said you need to win a procurement champion, not just a business champion. And if I think about when I sold ERP to law firms and government legal agencies, I remember getting an RFP from like, the Portland like, stay electric grids. Like I didn't remember my head was so bamboozled. And the procurement folks that sent us the RFP didn't seem all that friendly. And I was, I didn't know how I was gonna build a champion with the procurement people. How do I do that? - That's an excellent question. You know, there's two classifications. So we do have to face the reality that one classification of receiving an RFP is blind. You had no contact with the company. You maybe weren't even targeting them. And you just received that RFP. - Yeah, that was me. - Right? Other classification is you do have some access. Whether that was through an event, a demo, you knocked on their door pound in the pavement, you got somebody on the phone and you got some information through a 15 minute discovery call off of a cold call, or maybe you've actually progressed in a sales cycle and then the RFP comes later. But those are two different scenarios. So in the first scenario that you're saying, when I receive a blind RFP, I have no contact. I think that's where that qualification checklist, two out of three. I know you see I don't have to spend too much time on that, but I will say that part does become very important because what I see happen is reps receiving RFP in their inbox and Nick, I don't know if you felt this way, but they get like Harry Potter Imperial curse put on their minds and mind control. I can ruin this. It's a big deal. And it's hope-yup. They're smoking like, I don't know what it is. And you've got to stop in that moment and be like, okay, am I really gonna push my team with subject matter experts and my proposal team and executive and whoever to spend 50 hours responding to this thing when I have no contact. Blind. Probably that's not a good idea, usually. Now, you can look at that list of two out of three and you might have a compelling story 'cause they match your ICP persona so well. You're like, I know the exact value hypothesis. So this qualifies. And maybe you know that there's a champion in there that you just need to get access to and they're the best friend of the person you sold to at the other company or whatever and you just need to get them. And so sure, is there always an exception? Yes. So when it's blind, it's really, really tough. That's a hard one. What I can say is even when it's blind, this is a mindset thing. For the reps responding to an RFP, we've got to own it like it's our opportunity. Which means we're treating that procurement contact or contacts just like we would navigating the hierarchy or map of any other opportunity. And my best enterprise ops with or without RFPs that I've won that my team wins, we get a procurement champion. And the way we do that, when we have access, if it's blind again, it's much harder, but the way we do that when we have access as we ask those discovery questions about RFPs very, very, very early. So if we're working with the business team, we're asking about, what is this evaluation going to look like? Is it going to consist of any formal information gathering from multiple vendors? Are you going to consider an RFP process? And I will hear reps, reps have come to me, managers have come to me. I don't wanna ask about an RFP because then they're gonna launch an RFP. Like it's this fear based decision that we wanna stay with tomorrow on RFP 'cause that's gonna come ideal. Anytime we're making a fear based decision on a sales pursuit, I think we're probably going the wrong direction. So we shouldn't be scared of mentioning an RFP just like we shouldn't be scared of mentioning competition. Just 'cause you say your competitor doesn't mean they're gonna go look at your competitor, maybe they will, but if you're scared of your competitor, then you're doing something else wrong. So you can't be scared of an RFP. And it's gonna come, it's gonna come. So you should be asking about it, being proactive about it. And then that can give you an access to, yeah, we do RFPs. We did another purchase that was in this similar vein and we did an RFP for that and went out to five vendors. Okay, great, what's your follow up discovery? Who is involved in that RFP process? Who are the RFP evaluators? Who runs the RFP? What's the department that manages the RFP responses, et cetera, et cetera? Navigating your way, multi-threading, just like you would, working through the hierarchy organization. and don't leave procurement out of that effort. Don't just look at them as something I have to get around or something I have to get through. If you're able to build up a champion or even a coach in procurement, the massive win for your deal. - So most RFPs that we're in have fairly strict rules about how you contact, who you can contact, stuff like that. Have you found ways to get champions in those situations or are they more and the more like less closed ones? - Here's the best way that I think a lot of people miss. Really, really practical, really easy. You, there's a clarification period. So if you don't know what I'm talking about in an RFP, you get an RFP and they say, it has to be done by May 30th and it's May 1st. We'll take clarification questions up until May 15th or whatever it is. That's your clarification window. And the intention of that clarification window is that you can ask questions about what the requirements are. You don't understand what they mean by image upload or data storage or whatever it is. So you're supposed to clarify. - Yeah, clarify the requirements that's important. What's more important is take that window of opening that they otherwise would never give you and start asking discovery questions. Send them over a list of discovery questions. And if you have one question about a requirement, instead of asking one requirement question, ask three. Be like, the question is, does the system provide executive reporting out of the box? Just really basic example. Instead of asking a clarification question that's based on the requirement to say, what kind of reports are you asking about? Ask the question, who needs to look at those reports? Who are the individuals that will be consuming this data? What will the individuals be doing when they are consuming the data? Why is that important? Like list out all your discovery questions and put them in there. And you know what that can lead to? It's not always gonna happen. That can lead to a phone call. Sometimes they build that into their clarification period where they allow for a phone call. Maybe you've been in these situations where it's kinda awkward. There's like other competing vendors. And you're in there, you're all asking questions and you're all in the same Zoom or whatever it is. And you're like, oh, so and so competitor just asked this question, this clarification question. You're in there with your competing sales reps. But what they can lead to that I was just outlining is a phone call just with you, just with your company. And these are really good questions. Or I can't exactly answer these questions over email. So we'll allow the business team or we'll allow the procurement team to get on a phone call. All that said, one thing I will also say, respect the procurement process because procurement people more than ever, procurement professionals have a very strong influence on decisions and spend. I think because we're, you know, there was so much experimentation, especially in tech and like deciding where to spend money and holding out because of AI. The procurement contacts have a lot of influence, a lot of authority and not everybody can say yes, but almost anybody can say no and procurement can definitely say no. So if you, you know, ruffle the feathers or go around the rules intentionally without being respectful, then you might work yourselves out of an opportunity. So it is important to stay, you know, respectful of the barriers that they set up. But going through that clarification process, asking discovery questions, asking the wise, try to uncover the outcomes that they're trying to get to, not just what the requirement is asking, that's where you can actually get into a position where you're building a relationship with the procurement contact and maybe even getting into live conversation with nobody else's howling. - One of the things that you said at the beginning, though, that is got me both is like, now that I done all that, you said, hey, make your proposal for the purchaser, not for the procurement person or for the evaluator, not the procurement person. And then you talked about putting in videos, every RFP I think I've ever done is just filling out a spreadsheet. So are you saying like, don't go out the spreadsheet? - I have personally filled out spreadsheets, but unless they tell you not to, you can supplement whatever you'd like. Supplement that spreadsheet with whatever selling document that your marketing team helped you put together and beautify the videos that your solution is consulting put together with a link to, you know, consensus or wherever you're housing demo videos and supplement, supplement. I mean, not even if it's just in the spreadsheet, there's no rule against putting hyperlinks in the spreadsheet. And, you know, they might set up rules on paper but only receive this and this and this if you put this in your disqualified, okay, again, respect the process. But if they're not stopping you from doing that, put it in there that doesn't mean there, who knows what they're gonna do with it when they get it over in their company? You know, once it's in their hands, they could, who knows? Who knows, who's gonna just gonna look at it? It could go anywhere. And I'm speaking from working with thousands of professionals either in sales, solution consulting or proposals that respond to these and doing hundreds of these myself. So these are from real experiences where like I've been told specifically that videos you inserted into your answers made the difference for you. I won't say who that was for but I can think of exactly who that was for. The videos you inserted into your answers made the difference in you winning this or getting down selected and we did win the deal. Structure really does matter and writing it for the people that are gonna be looking at it and solving those problems when they're ever meet throughout. - So I wanna talk about that, how you phrase some of your written responses 'cause you had some stuff in the prep talk about this. You said, differentiate, don't just comply in your response. Can you explain to me what that means? Because I imagine the way that you phrase your answers as a material impact on do they like the answer or not? - Yeah, of course. So they say, back to the reporting example. They say, do you offer executive reports out of the box? Yes, we do. Okay, obviously like that's not getting you very far. You comply, yes, we offer it. Great. You can say yes, we offer XYZ reports. Okay, that's a little better 'cause you're providing more of what you do but is it touching on what you know the value they're looking for it is or even your value hypothesis? Again, thinking of the end in mind, like this should become part of the sales narrative that's part of your exact presentation, part of your value case, part of your demo flow and story, the whole thing that you're doing after the RFP. You need to have those things in the RFP response. So the right answer then, the best answer could look like something. The question is, do you provide exact reporting out of the box? You can say, we do provide exact reporting out of the box. We don't provide static reporting. Our reporting is dynamic, which gives executives the most dynamic real-time view of the pipeline of revenue that's blah, blah, blah, blah. Because that's your value hypothesis that you know that they are needing and that you know the other company that has a customer proof point also needed, which all the all set by the way, that customer proof point is worked into your RFP response. Connor, are there other things that I can be doing to tilt the odds in my favor in my RFP response? What I've gotten so far is like the phrasing of how I respond to questions should be detailed enough that I am like almost selling a bit in the response. I'm not just giving a wrote, yes, we have it. I'm selling our differentiated value in the response. I'm also not just stock replying to the Excel spreadsheet that they have sent me and filling that out. I'm including graphics and videos and links and other things so that my proposal, or rather my RFP is almost like a mini proposal or a mini demo where I'm cramming as much value in as I possibly can. Obviously respecting the process, but I want this to, I thought one of the first ways I can be perceived to be better is first being perceived as different. Are there other things that you are coaching sales and proposal teams on to stand out until the odds in their favor with RFPs? So two, one quick one, you don't want to just put more in. War doesn't mean better. The way that you've very practically structured your answer is you make that differentiator and your value differentiator that attaches to the value you know the need or your value hypothesis, you make that really easy to identify right up front. Then the more stuff comes after. Because if you just layer in the more, you're looking at a two-sentence answer versus a two-paragraph answer, you've got to make it really simple for them to digest right away because just like you as a responder, responding to an RFP, deadlines, pressure, like we've got to get this out the door, them as the reader and the issuer, the evaluator, they have the same thing on their side. So they're gonna be under pressure to have to evaluate this thing quickly, usually. - So in my response, it's part one is make it clear that we check that box and then sell the value. Don't sell a bunch of value and make it hard for them to figure out do they actually check this box? - That's kind of a thesis statement with your value. Yes, we comply. This is why it's valuable. Unpack. Here's more of the differentiator. This is how we do it. This is how we have a customer proof point for another customer that did it. Second one is we haven't talked about too much yet. But what are you going to do when you get an RFP? Most people, first thing they're going to do, throw it into an LLL. Maybe they have an RFP team, they have a prosal team and so they're not doing that. But maybe they're shipping it, maybe they're throwing it over the fence to the proposal team. You as a seller, like I was saying before, you have to have an ownership mentality on the RFP just like you have an ownership mentality on your upper qualified opportunity. This is a potential qualified opportunity. So you've got to own it just as much as you would with that outbound that you worked really hard to break into and you've got the right person. Not alone this RFP in that same way. And one way you can do that is right up front, whether you have a, you know, response software that's dedicated for this or not, you can use an LLM and you can put it in an LLM and before you start writing, we talked about the qualification criteria about how do you qualify using AI? You do the same thing right before you start writing. So now that you know you're qualified, now I'm actually going to look for my competitive advantages. I'm going to start team up the writing. I'm not just going to say, hey, answer these questions. I'm going to start team up. How should this be written so that my competitive advantages come through? What landmines can AI expose for you? Maybe it's looking at your internal resources, maybe you have it connected into your internal systems. What landmines can AI expose for you that your writing needs to address? So you're usually you would have to go out to your subject matter experts to start incorporating that stuff into your content. But you've got to take the ownership to do that first before you get the other people involved. You can spend I'll say AI minutes versus people hours. So save your people hours and spend AI minutes. And one of the ways you can do that is like own it, find the find evaluation criteria that AI can find, find the landmine differentiators, the competition differentiators before you then do it and start drafting. How do you price the win? I think this is like always the thing you you have to put in a price. In a lot of RFPs, they decide mostly on price as long as you meet the you know the basic requirements. How do you think about pricing when you can't really negotiate? You can't really feel somebody out for pricing. It's never easy. I will say that. Fundational stuff you do up front really does matter. And the value store you're telling throughout your content and your response that you're expecting to be aligned to your downstream activities really does matter. Because I have seen it happen where you respond to something that's pretty much blind. But because you know your proof points, because you know your value story, because you know you have a really good hypothesis on what's going to fit. And you go with the Ferrari price, counting on the fact that you're going to earn a spot to get to the next stage. So I've seen that I've done that approach. I've been involved in that approach and seeing that approach. And that is I think the best navigation path I can advise. So it goes back to the it goes back to setting up that foundation on you know having this response be the sales and value narrative that you would be expecting to tell if you're actually selling this deal beyond an RFP. Mark when you've had to put a price in what sort of strategies have you used pricing was. Yeah we got pretty sophisticated at outreach. So in order for someone to get the RFP team to fill out an RFP they have to submit a ticket and sales force. So immediately we have the tracking of what is RFP based and what is non RFP based. Then what we do is when we go do our pricing we have historical records based on the account sizes, on the competitors that we think are in the deal on the industry and over time we've done enough of them now that we've created some baseline pricing for this is about where we think that we need to land in order to have a good sense of winning it based on wins and losses in those kind of cohorts. And then we have a really awesome RFP team that then uses all that information and provides us what we believe the pricing should be based on that data. And then there's a little bit of feels like Conor mentions like sometimes you have a little bit more access or you have there's something that you have that as a sales rep that will give your RFP team a little bit more information that lets you have a little bit more control over the pricing. It might be a little higher a little lower because of that but I say the majority of it is pretty database based on historic wins loss amounts. Well speaking of competitive I want to talk about competitive RFPs because I remember getting RFPs and reading some of the questions I'm like cool we can help with this we can help with this we can help with this this is literally written by a competitor like I remember getting the pieces in our RFP and being like this question it's planted by a competitor there's like there's no way we can answer this in a positive way and so obviously there's the qualification piece and if I feel like there's no shot of us winning this deal I'm not going to touch it but what do you do when you can smell undue influence from a competitor in your RFP and you kind of want to push back on it a little bit what is your recommendation for how teams actually do this if at all. No bit to cut to the chase it's no bit here's a real real example you can be a fit but you're not going to be the fit they want because it's written by or for your competitor yeah you say no bit they say fill it out anyway mm-hmm you say I'm not going to go through the exercise and put my team resources at risk you know seeing what we've seen to qualify based on what we've seen in this and and you may go so far as to say it's clear that company XYZ I'll to write this RFP I wouldn't recommend that I would recommend just keeping it more generic but if they really want you to that means something so I'll send to that and say if you're really wanting a response we're going to have to have a live phone call first and then based on the outcome of that phone call and the discussion that we have we will determine if we will respond and I've seen that work multiple times in fact one that we were involved in we did that and then came back around and became the preferred you know vendor yeah so that's that's a really practical way if they're really pushing you to try to get in there as column fodder I feel like a lot of times RFPs the way that sellers interpret the RFP is as if it is taking away all of their leverage all of their power in the relationship and they just have to comply comply comply comply and one of the ways that you can get some of that equal status back is saying look this thing is not fairly written so we're not going to bid on it and you you threaten to walk and if they actually want to get a response from you in your business and you are not just one of 17 people on a spreadsheet that they need to get a bunch of columns for they'll say no no no no no come back please please please and that gives you an opportunity to say I'm willing to come back to the table on these terms but you have to threaten that walk in order to get that leverage and again that goes back to the beginning of just because it's an RFP doesn't mean it's a qualified deal correct you can't be scared that you're going to lose you're not losing anything flip this on its head now I want to talk about maybe influencing RFPs from my competitors don't get a fair shot I imagine both of y'all have done this in your careers if I'm a seller and I'm working a deal or I've got an account or I've got a customer that I know is going to an issue an RFP what are some things that I can do to help that RFP be written in my favor we call it the golden RFP that's what we call it if you don't have this at your company it for everybody that's listening would recommend having one on hand that is the questions ready to go because inevitably you will build a relationship and you will get the question can you help me with this RFP meaning can you help me write this RFP and you don't want to be scrambling to write an RFP just like you're scrambling to respond an RFP have it ready proactively so that you have the questions that you know are the differentiators and the things that only you can respond in a way that's really valuable so that'll be the first thing as I would say be ready so that you can be like really fast on the uptake when they're asking for help when they're looking for that's one thing be prepared when I've had a success at influencing and helping to write RFPs which quite honestly I wouldn't say is like something that happens a lot but when it does it's really impactful is is when they have a list of requirements they typically haven't prioritize that list and what you want to do is you want to take the areas where you have real differentiation and make those of a higher priority or a higher weight a lot of RFPs we get are just a straight list there's no waiting or anything and sometimes what you can say is very simply is hey we're going to try to fill this thing out however we want to make sure that we go really deep in the areas that are more heavily weighted are you waiting areas differently and if so how and if not would you like us to help you figure that out based on what customers like you do and like I said I would say that's not a huge thing that happens frequently but if it lands you know you drastically improve your chances yeah totally agree with that I think another thing that doubling down don't be scared to ask if there's an RFP in the evaluation process during discovery. Love it. Connor, this has been a phenomenal episode. The clock's ticking. We got to move for the last question. We've talked about a lot of dues, a lot of best practice as it relates to RFPs. Now I got to ask you about a don't that you have not yet covered. So the last question is, what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sales teams exhibiting as it relates to RFPs that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps. Throwing it into an LLM and just taking whatever it gives you. That's my first reaction and it's very serious. It's very, very common. And even first huge companies that you would think there's more regulation or what they have internal controls in place, it happens. Whether it's co-pilot, Chatship and Thaupac, Gemini, it doesn't matter. Sput it in there, give me a first draft and then going with it. That isn't not going to help you or anyone. I know it's hard to, you got to resist the temptation, but that is not the way to get it done. Amazing. Connor, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. All right, folks, it is time for your two by two recap. I'm doing the whole thing today because Mark had to jet. So number one was use the clarification period as an opportunity to ask discovery questions. So typically when you are in an RFP bid, there's an opportunity to ask clarifying questions about their questions. You can use this as an opportunity to ask light discovery about the questions that they had. Number two is when you are filling out their RFP and their spreadsheet, don't feel like you are stuck with just giving text-based answers. Connor talks about using demo videos, hyperlinks, visuals as a way to supplement your text response as a way to sell in the RFP. Number three, if you get an RFP that you can tell it is written by your competitor and you're like, there's no way I'm going to win this because it's unfair, no bid on it on it. You're never going to win it and you can use the no bid as a way to get leverage back in recrafting the RFP. So if the qualification criteria, you're just never going to win no bid on it as an opportunity to see if they are serious about you as an entrant in this competition. And then the last one is ask them to prioritize their questions so you know what matters. This actually goes back to number one around using that clarification, the questions about their questions as a way to run discovery, get them to prioritize. What matters most? If they give you 100 questions, you probably need to know which ones you should put extra muscle into and this helps inform your positioning and how you respond. Folks, if you want to know how to help 30 NPC out today, if you liked this episode, let me know. Send them a note on LinkedIn. He is the RFP expert. If you need help with that stuff, I promise his team responsive can help you out. So send him a note. We would appreciate it. Responsive is a sponsor of 30 NPC. We appreciate listening. We'll see you next week on the show.