The Hidden Cost of Ignoring RFPs in B2B Sales | Ray Meiring

RFPs have been there, but they've kind of been like the sideline thing that we have to do. In fact, years ago some people said if an RFP came along, we would disqualify the deal.

So much time talking about top of funnel and so much time talking about pipeline and so much time talking about discovering. Why are we not talking about proposals and RFPs? There's a real cost in the time that you spend responding to these RFPs, and then there's an opportunity cost associated with it as well.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is Ray Mayring, who is the CEO of Chorus Software, which is a company that's been quietly powering one of the most critical parts of go-to-market, which is how deals actually get done. We're not talking your SMB deals, we're talking like your real deals. Ray spent over a decade helping revenue teams improve how they respond to RFPs, build proposals, and execute at the final mile of the sales process.

This episode is about what really happens between we have a pipeline and we close the deal, and why that gap is still one of the biggest missed opportunities in GTM. Ray, thanks for joining. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you so much, Adam and Dale. Great to be with you guys here.

Ray, I appreciate your time. It's interesting. We talked a little bit before the show about RFPs and how many people do them well or don't do them well. But one of the things that we talk a lot about as well is just pipeline in general, which RFPs actually flow into. So, while everyone obsesses about pipeline, you spent your whole career focused on what happens after, and where deals actually fall apart. So, talk to us a little bit about that.

Well, you know, RFPs are interesting because many of them can like build the pipeline and then several of them, as Adam says, they're in that last mile. So, we have customers that the first opportunity they get or first touch point is that they receive this RFP or RFI and get asked to respond to it. That's the type of process. And then we have many who have been working the deal for a while and to close it out they need to go and complete the RFP. And I would say the final step in that as well is that for several customers the renewal is also RFP-based. So, they finished up with a three-year contract, they need to renew, the customer goes back out to RFP because of a procurement process. So RFPs and proposals, they really affect every part of that process. And as we all know, they're incredibly painful because we got to go answer hundreds and thousands of questions to get the deal. It's a real problem for customers.

It's a gazillion questions that have to be answered over and over and over again that likely there isn't someone to answer correctly. They're going back like there's not a dedicated person, and they're going back over and over again to do it. But my question is why isn't this thought of as part of the sales process? Like why is this something that we're talking about now as super novel, like "Oh, you know, we have to deal with the RFP?" We spend so much time talking about top of funnel and so much time talking about pipeline and so much time talking about discovering. Why are we not talking about proposals and RFPs?

I think historically RFPs have been there, but they've kind of been like the sideline thing that we have to do. In fact, years ago some people said if an RFP came along, we would disqualify the deal. Right? It was at that level. But what we've seen happen over the last five years is that the number of RFPs has increased radically and it keeps increasing year-over-year. And how critical that is to the sales process keeps going up. I think sales leaders are starting to realize this is not some ancillary function that we can put over here to the side. This is actually part of the beating heart of what we need to do to close enterprise or big deals, and even moved down into the mid-market to some extent as well, where you have to close an RFP there. So it's the frequency and how critical those RFPs have become that's creating more emphasis and discussion around it.

Let me collect my thoughts as I stutter because I have a very specific question I want to ask, but I need to think about how to word it.

I guess the question is like there's a lot of costs associated with these RFPs and like the amount of work that goes into them. And so, like is that just become an afterthought for go-to-market teams and like, yeah, we should go answer them. They don't really associate costs with them like you would like an event or something like that. So, like how would you recommend a customer look at RFPs from like that costing perspective?

Well, there's a real cost in the time that you spend responding to these RFPs. And then there's an opportunity cost associated with it as well. But let's just take the time piece because that's an important bit. What we've seen many customers do is start to build out these kind of specialized bid functions or RFP response functions, which often starts with one proposal writer and then expands beyond that. And the way they handle this is to kind of two-tier their responses. When it's a strategic response, high value, high profile customer, they go all in. They route it to that specific team. And there's a cost associated with that team. So the math on that's pretty straightforward. It's much easier to be able to say team costs X. We did X RFPs. What's our win rate? You start to build a perspective there.

Where that starts to get blurry is with maybe the lower value or non-strategic RFPs, which the sales teams ask to respond to. And we know that no one in sales wants to really go and keep a time sheet of how much time they spent on an RFP. But we can start with the help of software, we can start to get a perspective on, you know, how many touch points did you have into this document? How many questions were there? Which starts to build out a cost associated with that RFP response. And we could do a real kind of ROI on, hey, how many did we do? What is the win rate on these things? What's the impact that's happening there? That's one way to cost that out.

I think the other element to that is the opportunity cost side, where it's, hey, how many RFPs did we not get to because we don't have a professional team or we don't have a methodology to approach this or some software to help us with that? And that could be a much bigger cost in certain industries.

Isn't it true though, and gut check me here. By the time you get told about an RFP, unless you're designing that RFP or unless you were in that initial conversation before the RFP, isn't it too damn late? Haven't you lost that RFP already?

Well, for Chorus Docs responding to an RFP as a SaaS AI company, we would 100% agree with that. And if we're just getting a last minute RFP slapped on our desk, which we have had no prior engagement with that prospect, we'll probably disqualify that and not participate. But if you're an engineering company or construction company or an architecture company, they get notified of the need through an RFI or RFP. And it's from that point that they might work to actually capture that deal or work on that deal.

We also work with a lot of law firms, right? And it works completely different there. They have these panel RFPs where you get selected to be part of a preferred vendor to that company before you even actually win the work. So you're basically responding to an RFP to be in a semi-exclusive relationship with that firm or that customer or that prospect. So, you know, RFPs take on such different shapes and forms. What we see in software isn't necessarily the real world of RFPs.

Well, yeah. I mean, every industry's got a slightly different spin on that. So, when we talk about like sales content versus marketing fluff, like how do you generate content that wins from proposals to RFPs versus just kind of checking the boxes and sending someone out a proposal? Like, how are you actually getting rid of the fluff and making it win?

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Yeah, there's two types of kind of parts to those RFPs. Very often there's this transactional part in the RFP where it's just like, "Hey, what's your tax number? Do you have redundancy in your data center?" I mean, these questions are...

Not winning questions. They're compliance type questions. I have this or I don't have it. But then you get to the point where you need to prove out the value and why you're different. And that's where the personalization comes in. And if you're talking about software, it is about a deep understanding of that prospect's problem and being able to reflect in your RFP response that you understand that problem very well and that you're able to actually solve that problem.

Now, the executive summary in those RFPs, or kind of the intro cover letter, that can be a big part of that personalization and that win strategy. The way you present your solution outside of the checkboxes, that's another area to really draw the value there. And of course, if you have some financial data to be able to size the problem on the customer side as well and you can build ROI and some kind of business case into that response, that's even better in that world.

If you're a law firm though, the way you're going to prove your value is by showing that you've got the best people and you've done this type of work in the past very strategically, and that's what's going to help you to win that. So again, slightly different based on your industry. And then he just brings donuts.

>> I have never in my life brought a client or a prospect a donut, to be very clear. Ever. And that says a lot because I started my career in pharmaceutical sales, where all they wanted you to do is bring people food.

>> Okay, bourbon. That sounds like a better way to live.

>> I've done that.

>> What makes a proposal actually resonate with buyers? Like, we talked a little bit about the checkboxes and everything, but you know, is it when you're talking maybe about the strategic ones, like how do you stand out in that whole world of sameness?

Personalization, right? It's not just saying the boilerplate stuff. It's that depth of understanding that will make you stand out. And then the way that you write that and express that will make you stand out.

There is this group of people. It's actually a big growing group called the Association of Proposal Management Professionals.

>> Seriously?

>> Seriously, right? And we're going to actually attend. Just when you think there couldn't be a group for it, right. But we're talking about thousands of people. I mean, when we started in this maybe ten years ago, we went to the APMP event and there were like fifty people in a room geeking out about proposals. I think the last one was like 3,500, and that's just a small subset of these proposal professionals. But these guys are trained and taught best practices on how to make your proposal stand out, how to write in a way that is going to resonate with your customer. And there is an art and a science to actually making it stand out.

>> That I believe. I very much, as a company that does proposals that are fairly bespoke for every single one of our clients, I certainly believe no matter what your industry is, unless you're very SMB and it's literally transactional, you know, there is. If it's more than an order form, there is absolutely a science to speaking their language and getting them to understand it. How we would write a proposal for a restaurant tech company is very different than the proposal we would write to a legal tech company, right? And it's also about the visuals, right? It's about the design on those documents as well. Because in certain areas, what that document looks like is also critical. Things like call-outs and summaries down the right-hand side of the page, or if you're in, you know, engineering or even in legal, great head shots for the lawyers involved and how the visual elements of that looks. It's another key way to stand out.

I know on some of these like super bespoke high-value RFPs, design agencies have called in to take the creative bits that you're allowed to put out there, the non-transactional stuff, and actually design that in a way that makes it very real to Coca-Cola who you're pitching or to whoever.

>> So who owns that? Is that sales or marketing or how do they come together to do that? Because I know like as the sales leader, I'm going to say I want to control that verbiage. I know the customer. As the marketing leader, I'm going to say, well, I control the brand.

Yeah. Who owns that?

>> Typically, software, CRO, head of sales function owns that. Law firm, CMO. Marketing.

>> Yeah, it's just different in different spaces.

>> Yeah. I can see that. There's a lot of reputation stuff happening.

>> Dale, like your daughters worked at law firms. I'd imagine that they are very structured with who owns what and there is probably very little gray line in a law firm, right?

>> Yeah. Reputation means everything. Like one wrong thing goes out in a law firm and you're done. And it's a lot of transactional stuff as well, right? There's a lot of people calling in, you got a lot of inbounds. It's a lot of advertising to get people in. You know, somebody's in an accident or something or debt consolidation, like they're looking who has the best reputation, not like what sales person's calling them to give them the best pitch, right?

When you think about a law firm, like I'm sure you guys have been into many law firm offices, but they spend tons of money making those offices look amazing and having the butler deliver coffee to you when you're sitting there, right? They want to make sure that their pitches and proposals and RFPs represent their brand in the same way. So the CMO is really critical to that function. Whereas, let's say in a software company, it's more about the words on the page and it's about making sure we hit all the needs there and we have a depth of understanding of the solution. But that's important. So it makes sense maybe to be more CRO focused there. It's about the transaction.

So in the software world, there's been a lot of conversations on AI, and AI at the last final mile. And so in the proposal world, like how is AI changing that proposal world, how the responses are built? Like talk to us a little bit about AI, how you guys incorporate AI, and what some of the things are that people looking for this type of software should be looking out for.

Well, the first place that your mind goes to with AI is like can it help me answer all these questions, right? That's almost like the obvious place. Can it search through my past RFPs and find the answers that I've given before and then answer the questions? And I think that's been the starting point for us for years. And we've been doing AI and proposals since the late 2010s, right? That wasn't generative AI or agentic AI. It was machine learning because you need an AI way to take a question that's asked in a very variable format and go and find an answer in your library or your past RFPs that answers that. So that's the kind of number one ground to break.

But where we've seen it play more and more of a role is helping with the peripheral tasks that take up so much time around an RFP. For example, determining whether we should even answer this RFP or not. We call that the bid/no bid process. What's our history with that?

>> Though, right? How much time are we going to waste on this, if any? Critical. Critical, critical function. So should we bid on this or shouldn't we bid on this? What's been our historical win rate in this space? How does this RFP compare to our strengths? Does it match that or, you know, can it be written by a competitor?

>> So that's one area. Another one is something like, "Hey, let's there's some lack of clarity in this RFP. Let's go find some clarifying questions that we need to ask back out there." AI is great at writing you a list of clarifying questions because there was ambiguity in the ask in the original RFP.

And then we start to get to some of the kind of exciting agentic things. All right, if you're responding to an RFP and you need help from a subject matter expert, right? Historically, that's been sending an email to a colleague and asking them to answer this question and then bugging them like every five minutes. Have they answered it yet because you've got a deadline? That's one of the most painful parts of any RFP response.

Now we have opportunities to kind of pre-generate a lot of the stuff that they might want to say so they're redlining instead of inventing. To use voice agents to almost interview them on that question. So instead of them sitting down and typing out a bunch of stuff, they're on a call, we're asking them questions and we're transcribing that and converting that back into an answer. We have the opportunity to capture more of that SME knowledge so that we don't have to ask them that every single time.

So you know, it's those peripheral things that you wouldn't maybe initially jump to, but it drives the cost of those RFPs down significantly and drives the quality output up radically as well to get you to the win.

>> Ray, isn't there a risk of over-automating though?

>> Sure. There is. How do you balance that? Like how do you balance what human does versus what AI does?

>> Yeah. That's a question that comes up very frequently with our customer base is, you know, where's the human in this, where's the AI agent in this? Humans are great with creativity, with judgment.

With relationships, with empathy, with all of those elements there, AI is great at writing and doing stuff that humans get bored with or don't have the attention to detail around those areas. So it's that human in the loop combination of saying, "I just wrote this executive summary, but I'd like you to sign that off," or "Hey, can you give me five points that will make this resonate with the customer?" Then I'll write you a first draft and then you review it. So it's that handoff between the agents and the humans that's absolutely critical, because those agents don't have empathy. They don't have genuine creativity outside of their specific domain. That part's hard, right? I think everyone with AI struggles with that—where do you have the human nature that needs to come in versus just using AI? And I think we see that whether it's RFPs, whether that is people posting on LinkedIn, or no matter what it is. I think there's this over-reliance on AI, and I say it a lot—Dale says it even more. AI will accelerate the good 100 times over. AI will accelerate the bad 1,000 times over. In equals out.

>> Totally, totally, totally. And that's on your back you bet your brand and reputation, as we were kind of talking about on the law firm side of things. Yeah, 100%.

>> Exactly right. But you know, the thing that we feel is when a software sale or a law firm sale is taking place there—what do you want in that transaction? Well, you want to know that some human is going to come and sit across the table from you in your boardroom when you're dealing with a litigation issue, and they're going to say to you, "You know what? You can trust me. I've got this. I'm going to handle this for you. I understand the problem. I've worked with clients like you before. It was painful, but we're going to handle this." You also want to know that executing behind the scenes on the surgical elements of that transaction, you're going to have a highly accurate AI agent that's going to take care of some of the surgical elements of what needs to be done or the production of content and documents. So you want the empathy from the humans at the table across the table in the boardroom, and you want the surgery of the agent to be able to perform some of those very specific steps that need to follow from that.

100%. All right, let's move to some rapid fire as we come up on almost the 30-minute mark. Here's the rules: you get 10 words or less to answer the question. Every word more than 10 is money that Dale has to pay me. So feel free to go as long as you want. What's the most overrated part of the sales process?

Pricing discount conversation.

I like it. RFP—necessary evil or strategic advantage?

Strategic advantage.

You didn't even hesitate on that one, by the way. One thing that every proposal should include but usually doesn't?

Business value.

Love that. Last one as we wrap up: dream vacation destination, Ray, where are you going? Where are you bringing Adam?

I'm taking Adam to a safari in Africa. That is my dream vacation.

I'm down, Ray. Let's go. Let's have a good time. We'll talk some business. We'll make it a tax write-off.

Perfect.

I love it. Ray, where could people learn more about you? Where can people learn more about Qorus and how to do RFPs the right way?

Well, feel free to link in with me. Otherwise, our website is qorusdocs.com. That's Qorus with a Q-O-R-U-S D-O-C-S. And yeah, come and visit us at APMP if you're interested in proposals.

Awesome. Ray, thank you so much for joining the show, sir.

>> Thank you.

>> Appreciate it, man. Appreciate you guys. Bye.