Professional services organizations rely heavily on a high-performing response process to drive business, with bid and proposal teams and business development professionals working tirelessly to create high volumes of proposals and pitches and respond quickly and effectively to the steady flow of complex RFPs.
Given the demands of the response process, it’s totally understandable that when you’re up to your eyeballs in RFPs with potential clients 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 on to the next opportunity. But the goal here is to work smarter, not harder.
Even if you’re using AI RFP software to accelerate and simplify your response process, measuring the data surrounding your RFP response process is a critical step on the path to understanding your performance to drive even greater efficiency, better engagement, and higher win rates.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other benchmark metrics are proven tools for taking your RFP game to a higher level. But which metrics should you be tracking?
Show me the money
Revenue-related metrics are a good place to start. Metrics commonly tracked include:
- How many bids were submitted?
- How many bids were won?
- How many clients were retained through RFPs?
- How much RFP revenue was generated?
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.
Looking beyond revenue
High-performing organizations tend to focus not only on win rates but also 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 AI RFP software like the award-winning QorusDocs, many useful content-related benchmark metrics will be tracked automatically. Built-in measurement tools enable you to track critical content and engagement insights within your RFP response, e.g., how long a reader stays on each page, what they click on, and what they share.
In fact, AI RFP solutions are able to automatically track which content fits best and what content is used the most in order to prioritize winning content. These metrics offer a distinct competitive advantage for creating responses with the highest probability of winning new and existing client business.
Tracking progress through the buyer’s journey
Let’s talk about opportunity progression rate. This metric reflects whether your organization 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 organization to a winning position on the prospective client’s shortlist. After this point, deals may be won or lost based on factors independent of the bid and 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 organization further along the client’s buying journey.
Evaluating your own RFP process
We spoke with Olivia Hardy, the founder and owner of Catalytique Consulting which specializes in RFP response and 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. AI RFP software helps craft a baseline draft, tailoring it to the RFP requirements and ensuring all necessary information is included. |
| 02 - SME Answer | 20% | If it's a new question that has never been answered before, we involve Subject Matter Expert (SMEs). AI-powered RFP tools expedite gathering of necessary data, information, and SME input. |
| 03 - SME Review | 30% | In specific circumstances, such as high-risk questions on InfoSec or a product roadmap that changes frequently, we send answers to an SME to be reviewed. |
| 04 - Shaping | 50% | At the shaping stage, we personalize the baseline draft document that the AI RFP software has generated, tailoring the tone and voice to the needs of the audience. With the power of generative AI, we’re able to play to our strengths, weaving in the ‘win themes’ that have been identified for the specific client. |
| 05 - Review | 70% | After shaping, the main stakeholders (e.g., legal, finance, senior management) review the response to confirm they're happy with the tone of voice and messaging. AI RFP software, such as QorusDocs QPilot, proofreads the document and conducts a quality review to ensure accuracy. |
| 06 - Design & Layout | 95% | AI RFP software streamlines the process of finalizing the layout, formatting, and ensuring that all elements of the RFP response are visually consistent and professional. |
| 07 - Response Submission | 100% | We've reached the finish line and the RFx has been submitted on time. AI RFP software simplifies the process, preparing the final document for electronic or physical submission, including any necessary copies or attachments. |
Making RFP progression metrics work for your team
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. The business development team wants 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 and discerning where you can leverage the power of generative AI RFP software to help streamline your process. Notably, an AI tool like QorusDocs QPilot gives you a leg up on the competition, generating drafts faster, reviewing faster, and optimizing the use of templates to save time and effort.
Never stop improving
Continuous improvement is the backbone of a high-performing RFP response process. By continually refining and honing your content and processes, you can create winning responses that propel your professional services organization 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.
Plus, learn first-hand how QorusDocs AI RFP software—powered by QorusDocs’ new AI assistant, QPilot—can help your organization quickly and efficiently respond to complex RFPs with smart, personalized documents to consistently win client business. Request a demo today.
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