When you’re up to your eyeballs in RFPs with prospects awaiting your responses, the last thing on your mind is RFP metrics. You just want to get that RFP response out the door and move onto the next opportunity. This is totally understandable but the goal here is to work smarter, not harder—and measuring the data surrounding your response process is a critical step on the path to increased efficiency, better engagement, and higher win rates.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other benchmark metrics are proven tools for taking your RPF game to a higher level. But which metrics should you be tracking?
Revenue-related metrics are a good place to start. Metrics commonly tracked include:
Tracking your win rates and revenue-related metrics is definitely important for building a picture of how successful your RFP process is but what’s even more important is understanding the why behind those metrics.
High-performing organizations tend to focus less on win rates and more on non-traditional, process-related metrics and people performance. Tracking quantitative and qualitative metrics, such as RFP response speed, team sentiment, and the performance of individual team members, can help you improve the efficiency and efficacy of your RFP response process over time and, ultimately, increase revenue by helping you close more deals.
If you’re using an automated proposal management software like QorusDocs, many useful content-related benchmark metrics will be tracked automatically. Built-in measurement tools enable you to track critical content insights within your RFP response, e.g., how long a reader stays on each page, what they click on, and what they share. These metrics offer a distinct competitive advantage for creating winning responses by uncovering which content will be most successful in future RFPs.
Let’s talk about opportunity progression rate. This metric reflects whether your company advanced to the next stage in the selling cycle (e.g., from RFI to RFP; from RFP to short list). By tracking the advancement rate at each stage of the buyer journey, you can use the feedback from similar bids to isolate trends and identify areas of focus to inform future improvements.
An important metric that falls under the opportunity progression rate umbrella is the shortlist rate. The goal of an RFP response is to advance your company to a winning position on the prospect’s shortlist. After this point, deals may be won or lost based on factors independent of the proposal team (e.g., competitor pricing that significantly undercuts your bid during the negotiation stage). Measuring how often your team progresses to the shortlist stage reflects the true success of your RFP responses in fulfilling their purpose of moving your company further along the prospect’s buying journey.
We spoke with Olivia Hardy, the founder and owner of Catalytique Consulting which specializes in proposal management, to get a glimpse into how professional proposal and bid writers monitor and measure their RFP response process to enhance efficiency and boost performance.
The experts at Catalytique Consulting use RFP progression metrics to help manage individual bids. “Just as sales teams uses sales stages to track the progression of a deal, we also use stages to track our progress in responding to an RFP, tracking the status of each question and assigning a '% completion' to each stage,” says Hardy.
| Stage | % Completion | Description |
| 01 - QnA Draft | 0% | This is the starting point. To complete this stage and progress to the next, we run the RFx through QorusDocs Auto Answer and search; we use boilerplate content as much as possible. |
| 02 - SME Answer | 20% | If it's a new question we’ve never answered before, we send to a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to get answered. |
| 03 - SME Review | 30% | If we’ve managed to answer the question but need an SME to check it (especially for high-risk questions on InfoSec or a product roadmap that changes frequently), we send to an SME to be reviewed. |
| 04 - Shaping | 50% | At the shaping stage, we tailor the answers to best fit the questions we've received, while playing to our strengths and weaving in the ‘win themes’ we've identified for the specific client. |
| 05 - Review | 70% | After shaping, the main stakeholders review the response to confirm they're happy with the tone of voice and messaging. |
| 06 - Design & Layout | 95% | If it's a Word doc, we'll make sure the formatting is perfect and that it is visually appealing. (If it's an Excel spreadsheet, this step can be skipped.) |
| 07 - Response Submission | 100% | We've reached the finish line and the RFx has been submitted on time. |
By calculating the number of days between the start date and the target completion date (usually two days before it’s due to allow some wriggle room), you can determine what % completion rate you need to aim for each day. Assigning a % completion rate to each stage for each question enables your team to calculate the average completeness for each section of the proposal, as well as the entire submission as a whole.
Hardy explains, “We update the progress stages daily, depending on the timeline, as part of our team's daily stand-up meeting. We then refresh the dashboard and can see instantly if we're on track, ahead of schedule, or running late and need to make a plan to catch up.”
Making these stats available beyond the immediate proposals team improves the communication process with stakeholders. Sales want to see that their RFP, a critical stage of their high-value deal, is under control and on track; SME team leaders can see the impact of running behind schedule. Having all eyes trained on the same metric – the overall response completion – builds cohesion and accountability.
“For each new RFx, we 'tune' the percentages according to the requirements of the submission. For example, if it's Excel only, then we can skip the Design and Layout stage completely and we'll zero the completion rate for that stage in our table,” says Hardy. “If we receive an RFx with a lot of bespoke requirements that will require more involvement than usual from our SME community, then we'll make those stages account for a bigger % towards the overall completion to make sure we give them enough time.”
Between RFPs, you can evaluate which stages consume the most time, with the aim of improving the efficiency of the RFP response process. For example, if ‘Design and Layout’ is taking too long, then you probably need better templates, whereas if the QnA draft is taking too long, you might want to focus on improving your QnA content.
Continuous improvement is the backbone of the RFP response process. By continually refining and honing your content and processes, you can create higher-performing responses that propel your company to shortlists at ever-increasing rates. And by using data-driven insights from various KPIs and process-related metrics, your team can help identify and address challenges impacting the efficiency and ROI of the RFP response process to improve success rates.
Interested in taking your RFP response process to a new level? Download our free RFP Response Toolkit to create smarter, customized RFP responses that will help you save time and win more business.
