How This Sales Operations Manager Boosted RFP Win Rates from 30% to 80% with a Simple Process Overhaul

Sure. And, um, it's again with a current company that I'm working with and in my current role, um, uh, so when I joined Indexx back in 2015, um, sales team really struggled. Uh, uh, I was talking about the RFPs, right? 200 to 300 RFP volumes in, in, in a year. The sales team really struggled to actually get, uh, you know, get the feedback from the various stakeholders and submit a quality. Uh, response out there for the customer, right? Our win rate was around 30 at that 30% at that time, and, uh, my, my task was to come up with a process which will help. Um, connect these pieces together, connect, uh, ensure that we have feedback from all the stakeholders, and, um, um, basically help sales team to, uh, offer a consistent quality, well thought, well reviewed, uh, proposals out there which took around 30 to 40 days to get out, uh, you know, when it comes to providing proposals to the customers, um. So, the, uh, during that time, uh, after, I basically, I basically tried to follow the, uh, PIMBO guide. I, I, I call it PM BO guide process, initial, initially trying to understand what would be the success criteria, what are the goals of the project, then, uh, in planning, trying to understand the dependencies, risk and. Basically come up with a draft design of the process and then executing it on our CRM Salesforce, uh, and as well as in combination with SharePoint and some other tools that we could use, um, so this, this process was then defined in Salesforce it started working fine we definitely, uh, got to, uh, a higher winning rate. Um, up to 80%, and then the, the number of days from 30 days 80% win rate, yes, in terms of RFPs, yeah, uh, especially for new logos and expansions actually. And then, uh, in terms of number of days, from 30 to 40 days, uh, it reduced down to 10 to 10 to 15 days. So it definitely be, uh, definitely helped sales team to kind of, you know, have more chal channelized efforts towards the, uh, towards the creation of these proposals. Uh, this process also got evaluated in ISO audit that happened back in 2017. Now. The, the continuous improvement piece that you were asking about was when, uh, part of this process was still not automated, which was contract review. So from submission of the proposal to the actually signing the contract once we win the business, that portion was still, uh, manually done, email driven, and basically that's where I got a lot of feedback from sales owners, uh, in terms of automation and needing need for. Information and that's what I did, uh, recently, uh, where basically, I not only removed the need of, uh, emails and manual intervention to review the contracts, but also in terms of generating the contracts, uh, using Docugen 2 and basically automated this process end to end. Which has again, helped the legal team, uh, to reduce their timeline, also to review contracts and uh uh has basically given a frictionless uh flow for the entire sales and legal team as well.

So, there are some qualitative and there are some quantitative metrics. So, win rate is, uh, definitely one of them. The average number, average number, as you said, average number of days taken. Uh, uh, to, um, um, start and end overall, that definitely helped. And also, uh, apart from that, the standardization that came into place, that, that's the qualitative metrics I would talk about, uh, the knowledge repository that was created as part of this process, also the, uh, standardization, uh, in terms of templates, uh, that earlier. The proposal templates would, you know, every sales owner would create their own template with Irix logo and, you know, simply submit that as part of the, uh, proposal response going outside the company, but there was no standardization as such, so those are some of the qualitative metrics as well, along with the win rate and average, uh, time to. Time to complete from start to end.

Um, so I would say that the initial challenge, uh, uh, something as simple as providing Eric's response, uh, in a standard template format, uh, you know, in a consistent way. Um, was one of the catalysts, but at the same time, uh, seeing the struggle sales team had in order to have this, uh, collaboration between the teams, there was, most of our sales team is actually remote. Uh, even prior to COVID, and, uh, Kirkland being the headquarters, and most of the, most of the teams sitting here, it was very difficult for the team, uh, uh, both from time zones perspective and sometimes on timely perspective, getting the input timely perspective. Uh, it was very difficult for, um, You know, uh, sales owners to manage this on their own. So that's why I think those were the, those were the catalysts for this particular process. But,

I was, I, I, I was hired to basically, uh, manage the proposal, but that was not the part, uh, that I would say I was responsible 100%. The automation piece came with my knowledge and expertise. I was hired to have someone in the headquarter, uh, to, you know, coordinate with these teams, but automation piece is something which I thought would help to make it more effective and scalable.

Mhm.