Guide: Managing the RFP response process
- James Barker
- Mar 11, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 14, 2024
Delivering excellent RFP responses is a critical part in successful enterprise selling. The required skills are predominantly around developing clear definitions of ‘good’ and managing input of a team of people. These are things that sales people are not always intrinsically good at. However, this guide should help provide a map for you to follow.
Overview of the process
Assess
Is there a ‘fit’
Secure buy in - exec and team leaders
Response Plan
Carve the document
Identify bonus points
Tasks and owners
Format of response
Commercial Proposal
Team Alignment & Execution
Kickoff
Articulate approach
Deadline for input -72 hours
Secure commitment
121’s
Review and Enhancement
Assess the document / fit
(DONT FORGET OUR CHECKLIST DOWNLOAD AT THE BOTTOM)
What you’re assessing here is the chances of a successful outcome. If there’s a low-chance of success, you need to consider whether it’s worth the considerable effort of the organisation - remember you’re all-in or not at all! As my old boss used to say "FULL PULL!".
3 areas you need to assess:
Functional Fit
Competitive (Dis)advantage
Time to respond
Functional Fit: Read the document and assess what high-level fit you have. Are there any ‘hard’ requirements stipulated in the document that you can’t fulfil? If so, consider whether chasing this RFP is the right thing. Your team is about to put in a lot of work to this. Make sure that you have a reasonable chance of success before you throw your weight behind it.
If you make the team constantly chase losing deals, they’ll very quickly stop wanting to support you.
Disadvantage: Did you know about the RFP coming in beforehand? I.e is it blind? It’s common for a vendor to be selected, or at least have a massive advantage, before the exercise starts. If you hadn't met the prospect before the RFP then you might be starting off with very poor odds.
The only caveat to this is that, if you are a leading brand in the market, you might start with an advantage based on brand strength alone even having not met them. For example, if you’re Salesforce and there is an RFP for a CRM system, whether you have met the prospect already or not, you are probably still in a strong position.
Time to respond: There is no point making a half-ass submission. Sometimes RFP’s come in with ridiculous and unachievable timelines. A professional RFP submission should provide 2 weeks as the absolute bare-minimum, and ideally 3-4. Getting a document with a 1 week deadline has many implications, none of which are good; ranging from you getting the document last to a buyer that doesn’t care about the quality of the response.
In cases where the deadline is unreasonable, push back! Over 50% of the unreasonably short RFP deadlines I’ve received, I’ve managed to have pushed back. It’s better to offer some friction, than load unreasonable pressure on your response team.
Secure Buy-In
This is often skipped. It’s very common for there to be disagreements as to what constitutes a good fit. More often than not, one of the contributors (e.g pre-sales or product) will be of the opinion that the company should qualify-out and not respond.
If this isn’t addressed fully and early it can undermine the quality of the response.
Ask yourself whether you have enough weight in the organisation that everyone that needs to contribute will follow your lead.
It’s often a good idea to speak to the VP / CRO and get their buy-in. With their weight fully behind the response, you’re less likely to get resistance from other teams that need to contribute.
Response Strategy
Carve the document
Identify the bonus points
Create internal briefing pack
Commercial Proposal
Carve the document: Mark up their entire RFP document with notes and clearly tag sections where a specific individual or group in your business is needed to respond. Be clear about what you want from their response. People aren’t psychic. Any ambiguity is the responsibility of the Account Exec managing the RFP response.
Identify the bonus points: Good RFP’s answer the questions clearly, GREAT RFP’s answer the questions that weren’t asked buy should have been.
All the 'BONUS POINTS' should be detailed in a second internal document and added to the marked up version to create an exhaustive and clear 'ask' of the internal team supporting you in the response. (see below)
RFP IMPORTANT ADDITIONS
Brand it
Exec Video
Diagrams and illustrations
Implementation plans
Brand it! : If you’re a company that either works in the front-end (UI) or other similar applications, take some time to drop their brand and logos into the mockups you create. This shows serious commitment and will help their evaluation team picture them using your technology. It might sound trivial, but it’s these small touches that demonstrate your attention to detail.
Create a separate document that details additional documents and expectations from the team.
Presentation quality matters! : Their response might request that you put all responses in their excel sheet, which you should do, but only to be compliant. Excel as a format is limiting as it’s hard-to-read and doesn’t allow for images and diagrams easily.
Create a second copy with a high aesthetic standard, carefully selecting fonts, images, diagrams, and anything that elevates your response to a work of art.
The amount of care you put into a response like this says a huge amount (subliminally) about the attention to detail of your business.
Commercial Proposal
Communicating capabilities is a key part of RFP’s - but don’t forget the commercial proposal itself.
Here are some important points to remember:
Start early: If you work for a large company, internal signoffs can be killer. Make sure you get the ball rolling ASAP.
Describe the functional modules in the proposal: The customer won’t understand your BoM (bill of materials), so it’s important they can tie-back line items in the proposal to specific and easy-to-understand functionality
Be clear about whats in scope: By extension it also means you’re clear about what is NOT included. You want to avoid any thorny conversations with procurement where they insist you said X or Y was included. The price should be tied to
Your standard contract terms and liabilities
SLA’s
Infrastructure
It’s likely they will want to add bells-and-whistles later, and you need to set yourself up clearly so they have no basis to expect that for free.
Only price what they have asked for: You don’t want to be opaque, but be mindful that if you position your pricing as sky-high without considering how the proposal is read, you might get eliminated unduly. To put this into context. If you’re Buying a 3-series BMW, the entry price advertised is £40k, but will the addition of 4 options the price can quickly go up to £70k.
Align The Team & Get to work
This is your opportunity to walk the team through the document you have marked up and be crystal clear with your expectations. Everyone needs to be summoned onto the group kick-off call!
Never EVER rely on giving verbal instructions! It provides too much latitude for people to miss-hear, mis-interpret or just plain ‘miss’ what’s been asked of them.
Make sure the document you have prepared describing expectations from the team is circulated BEFORE the call and use the kick-off call to walk down the document item-by-item.
In advance of the call you should have created a briefing document which is a combination of
a) The RFP marked up with the names of internal team members that need to own that part of the response. Be clear on exactly what you need from them
b) Additional briefing notes for additional documents, appendices, visuals - everything
Personalisation: All the responses should directly answer the question being asked by the RFP. Many of these are recurring from every RFP, so it’s perfectly reasonable to re-use generic content, but ALWAYS be sure to make sure it’s all relevant and if it’s necessary, be sure to personalise. Don’t be lazy!
Deadline: I’ve lost count of the amount of times certain teams have been late to add their contribution, leading to a last minute rush, lots of stress, and BIG issues when their contribution doesn’t meet the standard.
All internal submissions should be added no later than 48 (working) hours before the final client submission deadline. Then, if you turn up issues - and you will - you have baked in enough breathing room to make final enhancements.
It might sound petty, but this internal deadline needs to reconfirmed afterwards on email to the entire team, in CAPS AND BOLD. Remove any chance for people to plead ignorance.
121’s
Schedule 121 calls with all contributors the day after the kick-off call. This means they will have had time to digest the document, think about whats needed from them and should be able to play-back what is needed from them.
This is an opportunity to really dig into how they plan to craft their part of the response and, importantly, give you an early warning if things look like they are going off-the-rails.
Expect to face a little resistance to these meetings. People tend to get a little ‘funny’ about the perception of micro-management, but it’s better than the alternative. Once the team has worked together (successfully) on a number of winning bids, these can increasingly become short check-ins, but the reality is that in immature organisations where a standard of excellence hasn’t yet been clearly defined, these are critical.
Review and Enhancement
With the strong foundations laid earlier, this process should be much less hurried and stressful than it’s been in the past. Still, its likely there will still be some work to do, so don’t order the cocktails in just yet.
Personalisation is key. Often time-compressed pre-sales and product managers will copy-paste generic content. Every response needs to be carefully reviewed to answer this one question.
‘Does it precisely address the question the RFP asked?’
Only once you can truly be confident that it does, should you submit it.
Be careful for silly little mistakes that can undermine the quality, like copy and pasting a previous company name in one of the responses. It'll make you look amateur, so take the time to get 2-3 people to proof read it properly.
All done?
Go and order beers for the entire RFP team - they deserve it!!
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