CEO Ray Meiring Chats About the Future of Proposal Management

We recently caught up with Ray Meiring, CEO and Co-founder of QorusDocs, to chat about how QorusDocs has evolved—and continues to evolve—to meet the needs of our customers.

A bit of background: Ray launched QorusDocs in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012, along with Lee Child (Managing Director of EMEA) and Stephanie Laurent (CTO). After moving our headquarters to Seattle in 2017 to be closer to the booming tech market, we further expanded our global presence to London in support of the strong growth in the proposal management technology market. 

As more and more companies began to recognize the revenue-boosting benefits of proposal automation software—and with the industry expanding in kind—we shifted our focus to more tightly align with our clients’ needs, business trends, and new technologies.

And we’re continuing to innovate and grow as we help organizations around the world reap the benefits of automating and accelerating their sales response process.

We asked Ray to elaborate on QorusDocs’ winning strategies and what’s coming down the pike for both QorusDocs and the industry as a whole.

Tell us a bit about QorusDocs’ starting point and its growth

Initially, our focus was on generating documents for organizations. But as the trend evolved into generating sales documents, proposals became a big theme for us. We developed software around that theme to streamline the process, helping clients create compelling pitches, self-service proposals, and respond to RFPs more efficiently and effectively.

We quickly learned that we needed to support more than just RFP responses; we needed to stretch across the entire breadth of the organization and provide a proposal management platform that worked with experts in various teams.

We’ve mastered the process of taking content from pockets in a business and making it available—, and intelligently recommended—, to the sales, and bid teams, —creating a cohesive, integrated sales effort that consistently wins more business.

What sets QorusDocs apart in the marketplace? 

1. Customer success focus.

    We put a lot of energy and discipline into building out customer successes and making sure we offer our customers the very best overall experience to help them meet their objectives, efficiently and cost-effectively.
   
   And because every customer success team is underpinned by intelligent technology, we put a lot of effort into research and development and into building out new forms of technology to support customer needs.

2. Relationships with partners like Intapp, Highspot, Salesforce, and Microsoft.

   We’ve cultivated strategic partnerships to help our customers accelerate and streamline their sales response process, helping tighten the sales cycle and win more deals.
   
   Seamless integration with widely-used applications enables QorusDocs users to control and manage their own content in places they spend their time, whether they’re working with Microsoft Office 365 and Teams or within platforms like Intapp, Highspot, or Salesforce. At the same time, our customers can be confident all members of the revenue team are using a common content location that has the latest pre-approved and branded content to keep them efficient and productive.
   
   The ability to use our toolset in the context of someone’s daily tech interactions has been a game-changer for our customers. For example, sales teams spend a lot of their day in Salesforce or Dynamics CRM. Having QorusDocs available within this platform allows sales teams to close that last mile with their prospects and create sales proposals using content found where they are working.

3. We work across a broad spectrum of the organization.

   In today’s marketplace, it takes more than just the sales team to win deals. With this in mind, QorusDocs works with experts across a business.
   
   We also plug into Microsoft’s technology stack, pulling Microsoft Teams content into work with applications like SharePoint Online. This functionality means that organizations can control and manage their own content—and use it across the broad spectrum of departments in their organization. 
   
   

How is QorusDocs planning to grow in the proposal management space?

QorusDocs got its start serving niche markets: legal, healthcare insurance, and tech companies, in particular. We also have strengths in professional services, helping companies in fields like staffing, consulting, and accounting reap the benefits of an efficient, personalized sales response process. Our plan is to continue to develop functionality in our software that helps companies in these niche markets excel and prosper through higher win rates and consistent revenue generation. 

We want to continue making artificial intelligence (AI) pervasive across our platform, and work with these markets to see them benefit greatly from our specialization. (Did you know our AI-powered proposal management software can automatically detect, pull answers, and fill out RFP responses to help sales and bid teams respond to RFPs up to five times faster?!)

 
As we grow, we’ll introduce new markets and find different ways to:

• Ensure the technology reflects the needs of organizations in those markets

• Bring AI into every element of the QorusDocs platform

• Propel our growth as an organization into a leading global player in the proposal management space
  
  

What are some of your predictions about the proposal management space and its role in the sales tech stack?

The B2B sales technology landscape has exploded in recent years with a wide range of technologies, everything from CRM, prospecting, and lead generation solutions to sales automation, data intelligence, and demo tools. Notably, ‘closing’ solutions—and proposal management platforms in particular—have rapidly gained traction in the eyes of sales leaders tasked with creating efficiencies and enhancing selling capabilities.  

The rise in popularity of bid and proposal management solutions is no surprise. Just think about the hours, effort, and commitment required to bring an enterprise deal from lead to close. Proposal automation software makes all the difference in helping sales teams close deals in a competitive marketplace. In fact, we conducted a survey of proposal development software users and 63% reported increases in win rates from 2020-2021.

With the flow of RFPs showing no signs of slowing down, organizations need the capacity to respond to the growing number of opportunities or risk leaving significant money on the table. Adding proposal management software to the tech stack is the best way to accelerate the sales response process and shorten the deal cycle to drive more revenue.

With all indicators pointing to continued expansion of the proposal management technology market, QorusDocs is poised to innovate and evolve to ensure our clients can deliver personalized, accurate, and on-brand sales documents that differentiate their offerings from the crowd. Going forward, we’re committed to helping our customers create an efficient, frictionless sales response process that helps boost win rates and consistently meet revenue targets.  

We’re also really excited about some of the new technology opportunities available to us now, especially in the AI and machine learning realm, and are keen to bring AI into every facet of our proposal management platform.

For a deep dive into the sales response process and how to hone your proposal and RFP strategy to close more deals, download the QorusDocs Ultimate Guide to Mastering RFPs and Sales Proposals.