How to Win Deals from RFPs

As an ex-enterprise Solution Architect at Klaviyo and Oracle, and now a CEO, I have a lot of experience filling out >100 RFPs. At one point of my tenure at Klaviyo, I'd have at least 2-3 RFPs a week! Due to having so much exposure and being asked about how to fill them out effectively, I wanted to make a guide to help everyone in one swoop.

For everyone green to enterprise sales reading this, RFPs (Request for Proposals) are large documents (sometimes 50-100 pages) that ask vendors about who they are, what they do, how they handle data, how they secure data, and more. Receiving this document (usually) means that the client is considering you the vendor as their solution of choice.

Receiving one of these documents can be a daunting task that needs to be approached properly and without a proper handbook, you can be looking at some late nights, some angry coworkers, and a lost prospect.

However, if handled properly, these can not only be done without much stress, but also help you secure the entire deal, even if it was sent early in the process.

To help guide you to winning, I have 3 simple steps that you need to follow everytime you receive an RFP!

1. Scoping -- What is the deadline on this? Who on your team is the quarterback? Who is responsible for what sections? This section will be majoritively irrelevant for smaller companies.
2. Strategy -- What can we assume is the most important to the client? How do we accurately answer these questions without giving our competition the edge? How do we navigate through sections that are irrelevant to our solution?
3. Diligence -- How do we check for accuracy? What can we do to ensure proper storage of this for future RFPs?

Scoping

This section is all about what happens the DAY OF the RFP. I can't stress this enough, you don't want to receive this and think about these things after waiting a week, get it over with so you know that the work is at least punted in the right areas, and your coworkers have the opportunity to finish on time.

The first thing an AE/SE should do when receiving an RFP is ask the client when the due date is and put the due date in bold on the internal copy of the RFP at the top. If you use a tool like Loopio, name the file the company name with the due date. If you have messy coordination around when the RFP is due, it's going to make for a difficult time when passing off questions internally.

Secondly, the AE/SE should have a clear understanding of who the quarterback is. Who tags in legal, security, Dev-Ops, etc.. and what systems do you use to coordinate with each team. The way I've done it in the past is the AE answers all non-technical questions and tags in help from Sales Directors/Legal for all non-technical questions over their head. The SE owns all technical questions and similarly tags in security or Dev-Ops if there's anything they don't understand.

This gives a good overview of how to properly scope and plan for the RFP, again this all should be done the first day of receival.

Strategy

RFPs can be sent to you for a handful of reasons, best case scenario is that you're far along in the sales process and it's just due diligence, and worst case scenario is that the winner has been selected but management requires multiple competitors to be scoped out (this is often called RFP Fodder).

Winning a deal when sent an RFP can be boilded down to three steps:

1. Determine eligibility. If this is RFP Fodder and you won't be seriously selected you're out before you can try. This can easily be done by gauging a prospects responsiveness to your outreach. If they're willing to hop on a 30 minute call to go over the RFP in a reasonable time that's a good sign, if they refuse to have a conversation that's a red flag.
2. Understand what's important. Break down each question into overall themes. Generally, when reading through an RFP, you can deduce what's really important to the greater overall company mission through the questions and the themes they represent. Are they interested in security? Content management? etc.. This will differ on your industry. Schedule a call with your champion to help you confirm these assumptions.
3. Navigating No's. Often questions will be sent over that are probably "no's" in terms of functionality. Unless the question being asked is a security or privacy concern, instead of answering "no we don't do that", use this as an opportunity to help the client understand what you excel at. For example, if the client is asking for a feature your company doesn't currently support, can you think of partners, APIs, or any focus that you do well with in that category to help them understand how to finish this use case. Overall, remember that you're the expert in this field, and that if the client is asking for a completely different solution that wouldn't fall under your product category, that you can consult them in the RFP to help them understand what sort of technology they can integrate with to support that specific use case.

This will help you be selected in the RFP process, and if you take notes on what themes are important in the RFP, you can use that understanding to help navigate all touchpoints and conversations following. This helps give you an immediate understanding of what's important to the company, which will help you focus on how to best assist them throughout the sales process.

Diligence

This section focuses on the grind and sheer work that goes into the RFP itself. Answering these questions can be labourous.

To assist in this, one thing that helps is that if a company stores all information in other RFPs either in a google doc, drive folder, or by using an external tool.

To fill out all of the questions accurately and in a way that's scalable for future RFPs, I would recommend looking into a tool like SecurityPal or Loopio to help fill in the blanks. These typically cut response times to RFPs significantly when it comes to the brute force of actually answering these questions, allowing you to primarily focus on the strategy section of finding themes and bringing that into your overall pitch, thus helping you win the deal.

Summary

RFPs are large tasks that merchants give to vendors to learn more about them. However, the flip side of that is that the merchants are giving vendors hundreds of questions that pertain to them and their business needs specifically.

If the AE/SE on the deal reads these questions with the intent of understanding the client and what they're looking for from a company perspective, you can use this understanding to come out on top and in front of your peers in the sales process.