Video Transcript
00:00:00:02 - 00:00:20:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
Welcome everybody to our QorusDocs webinar today. We expect to run about 45 minutes. But and we'll take Q&A after that period of time. But we are recording and we will have this available on demand. If you have to pop off or you want to share it with team members, or you're in a totally different time zone and can't even watch us live.
00:00:20:04 - 00:00:47:00
Jennifer Tomlinson
So I'm Jennifer Tomlinson, I run marketing here at QorusDocs, and I know you all have seen my face many times on these webinars. And today I'm presenting with Ray Meiring, who is our fearless CEO. We all know, and we are going to today run through kind of the top ten highlights from our proposal benchmark survey and discuss some of the impacts and interpret some of the data there.
00:00:47:00 - 00:01:14:08
Jennifer Tomlinson
And then we're going to follow up and show you some of the features and QorusDocs to help you tackle 2025. Based on some of these trends and things you're kind of hearing from us. So let's jump in. Our first slide really is interesting because we have surveyed customers and businesses in services verticals like architecture, engineering, construction, legal, tech, professional services for more than nine years.
00:01:14:08 - 00:01:33:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
This is our ninth annual survey, and it helps us to get a pulse on the RFP and proposal market and those that work in this area. And if there is one trend that we have seen throughout the years, it's that the volumes never stop increasing. And that is true for the ninth year in a row here that we've been checking.
00:01:33:04 - 00:02:02:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
We've seen a little tempering in the volumes in recent years, but our majorities continue to say that volumes are up. So because of that, we took a quick look to check in on our proposal management software category and the growth rate. And you all can see here that the category of this particular software in this business is going to be valued at 2.96 billion in 2025, at the end of this year, going up to 5.84 billion by the end of 2031.
00:02:02:15 - 00:02:31:05
Jennifer Tomlinson
And it's growing at a fairly rapid clip compound annual growth rate of 14%. And that is supported by our survey. So again, we see strong growth rates, increasing demand for streamlining processes, enhancing your collaboration, securing contracts and helping drive revenue in a business which we can now see a direct tie between software and revenue. So more and more companies are looking for help to address the ways that their goods and services are sold.
00:02:31:05 - 00:03:01:10
Jennifer Tomlinson
So on the side we just listed some reasons that their research says this category is growing obviously volumes, but competitive bidding environments needing to streamline workflows and digitally transform, and also increasingly tying the software to win rates. So we wanted to share this with you because it does support some of the research. And I thought maybe Ray would want to comment on just some of the trends we're seeing in the category, as we've been in this category for a long time, and kind of all the details.
00:03:01:12 - 00:03:25:12
Ray Meiring
Well, firstly, Jennifer, thanks for having me on today. It's this is one of my favorite pieces of content that our marketing team produces, and a ton of hard work goes into it. So thank you very much for forgetting all these numbers and statistics ready for us and for our customers and prospects. Of course, you know, I'm excited to see the increases in volumes and how proposal management software can really affect that.
00:03:25:12 - 00:03:56:05
Ray Meiring
But when we just look at that headline there, you know, compound annual growth rate of 14.1%, five point almost $5.9 billion by 2031, what it tells me is that proposal management software has really moved from this nice to have tool that maybe sits alongside our CRM tool. And, you know, it's helpful under a certain circumstances to an absolutely mission critical tool now because it's just so important to win business through proposals.
00:03:56:05 - 00:04:22:01
Ray Meiring
And that's what's driving a lot of this growth in the industry as well, is that mission critical element that's coming into proposal management, mission critical because of the things that are stated there, highly competitive environment, increase in volume, more complexity in RFP. So just a super exciting space right now for us to be part of. And great to see how this is just and growing.
00:04:22:03 - 00:04:25:20
Ray Meiring
Since we started this with nine years ago with the survey.
00:04:25:22 - 00:04:45:24
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. Well, let's jump in a little and talk about who was in our survey. So our next slide talks about what we call our firm graphics. So the majority of people that we talk to work in firms of a thousand or more people, we did have a smattering of folks take the survey that were smaller than that.
00:04:45:24 - 00:05:13:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
But just know as you're listening, it was firms that are fairly sizable, sizable in revenue also with the majority over 100 million. So that's going to skew obviously results a little bit. We did focus on industries of architecture, engineering, construction, professional services, legal and tech services. We did have some SaaS companies to also taking the survey. The majority of people taking the survey have responsibility for the buying decision in the organization.
00:05:13:15 - 00:05:33:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
So we were able to then get really good data on, you know, impacts that they had to kind of prove out to get the business case to buy the software, and the great majority have responsibility or are in the bid and proposal team. So it should be square in the sights of the folks hopefully on the call today.
00:05:33:06 - 00:06:01:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. So let's hop in and talk about the highlight reel. So our number one highlight is what we sort of alluded to in our intro. The state of pitching in RFPs majority have seen increases year over year. So in the five years I've been doing the survey, as mentioned, volumes have gone up every single year. The last two we've seen a little bit more reporting on our volumes are staying the same, but very few report decreases.
00:06:01:21 - 00:06:23:07
Jennifer Tomlinson
And notice on this slide, we've kind of attempted to give you all a little bit of an industry breakout. So depending where your firm organization sits, we have broken out some of the results by whether you're a pro survey firm or a tech firm, AEC or legal. And I'm going to go through those verbally really quick. So on the top row this is about pitches.
00:06:23:12 - 00:06:51:12
Jennifer Tomlinson
And 54% of our survey takers reported increase in pitch volume, 40% said stayed the same pro serve 62%, tech 60% and AEC all reported increases or sorry pro serve tech and legal, all important reported increases. The majority of our AEC survey takers stayed the same. So that's why you have that kind of break out there, the volume increase itself.
00:06:51:12 - 00:07:14:01
Jennifer Tomlinson
So when we said okay, it went up, but by how many did it go up on average per month? Law firms are saying in the 6 to 10 range per month, and ASC is a little bit lower on the 1 to 5 per month. And again, everything depends on the volume of your organization. So we saw a huge span there and we just kind of report out on averages for RFPs themselves.
00:07:14:02 - 00:07:37:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
On the lower charts, we have 50% reporting increases in volumes, which is a little slower than our survey last year, and 40% staying the same average volumes. There were about 1 to 5 per month if you had an increase. So Pro Serve reported an increase. Tech reported stay the same AEC reported stay the same on the RFP front.
00:07:37:09 - 00:07:50:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
And law firms were our highest increase across both pitches and RFP. So I know Ray has some commentary on this, but we wanted to give you kind of a insight into, you know, how it's breaking out by industry a little bit there.
00:07:50:22 - 00:08:11:04
Ray Meiring
I think it's always interesting, Jennifer, to look at, you know, the words that I used some regard pitching as a separate function and then have recorded separately and some combine them together. I think the overall message though, is that by and large, it's either neutral or up, depending on the vertical or the industry that you're in.
00:08:11:09 - 00:08:35:00
Ray Meiring
I mean, if you think about, you know, doing six more RFPs a month, that's a significant increase in RFP activity that you need to do depending on the time that it takes to do that type of work. So it might look like a small number. But when you think about the effort that goes into the production of that increase and that volume, it's considerable.
00:08:35:00 - 00:09:01:04
Ray Meiring
And we know that in many cases, the teams that we work with haven't been able to increase headcount to counter that increase in volume. So how do they go about, you know, reaching the same levels of success with those RFP responses without necessarily having to increase the people that are involved in the process? We're going to talk about technology a bit later on, but that always strikes me when I look at this particular statistic.
00:09:01:06 - 00:09:19:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. And I wanted to call out to on our last webinar where we had a guest from Womble Bond Dickinson, she had shared as a major law firm that they do up to 500 pitches a year, you know, around that number. And so you think about, boy, you know, averaging 40 a month and then what that gets to per week, per day.
00:09:19:24 - 00:09:49:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
It's insane volume. It's a lot okay. So our second highlight is how many of our fees do organizations work on. And our average number in a month is seven. And again I'm referencing back to our prior webinar. We've got 40 plus. So there's a big range with the industry breakdown. Pro serve is reporting 10 to 25 per month, 23% of them, 60% of tech reports 5 to 9.
00:09:49:20 - 00:10:14:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
So they tend to be fewer. AEC was reporting three per month, but wait till you see the dollar amount on those. And then legal is hanging out in that 5 to 9 per month on average. The increase on this again is reported at about 1 to 5 per month. So just again highlighting averages. We have a big span depending on the industry there.
00:10:15:00 - 00:10:34:22
Ray Meiring
And you can see that in the data. You know the higher the value of the RFP, often the lower the volumes of those RFPs that kind of work in that way. But you know, what's not captured here is the complexity that goes into the into the RFP. How many more questions are in there? That's a really a difficult question to ask in a survey.
00:10:34:22 - 00:11:01:08
Ray Meiring
But what we've seen and heard from many of our customers is that the complexity of the are going up, in addition to the volume of that r, those RFPs as well. So that correlation volume up, complexity up same headcount really makes this an area of congestion and trying to get things out and a huge amount of pressure that comes to bear on these on these bid teams.
00:11:01:08 - 00:11:09:24
Ray Meiring
And we'll talk a bit about time frames as well later on, because that's the other factor that can really create the pressure points in a bid and proposal team.
00:11:10:01 - 00:11:40:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. So up to size. So RFP opportunity values is one of our questions. So in 2024 we saw a huge range from 50,000 and under to more than 10 million. So very you know very wide span majority report less than $1 million value RFPs. But the sweet spot was around that 100 to 500 K. That's where we saw, you know, a chunk of folks pro serve tended to be 5 million or less tech.
00:11:40:22 - 00:12:02:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
We saw a strange thing with our tech folks. It was either 50 to 100 K or over by the 5 million. So some really big stuff. 40% of AEC reported values greater than $10 million on their piece. Huge, huge, huge. And then 42% of law firms were in that 500 to $1 million range, which is a little down from last year.
00:12:02:23 - 00:12:13:17
Jennifer Tomlinson
But our average overall over all of our surveys was about 600 K. And so we use that number a little later on when we calculate some ROI. But big range there.
00:12:13:19 - 00:12:54:00
Ray Meiring
Huge range. What's interesting to me about those numbers is that you're receiving an RFP for a 50 to 100 K piece of work, right? I mean, it used to be the case that these RFPs were issued for a large volume of works from significant purchases. Now, RFPs are being issued for even smaller amounts of services or product being purchased right now, which again, ties back to the fact that the volume is increasing because no matter where you are in that buying cycle, there's less discretionary spend happening out there, and it's more driven through a procurement process, which requires an RFP at the end of the day, and it requires someone to go through that very
00:12:54:00 - 00:13:23:22
Ray Meiring
rigorous process to actually respond to that. It's also interesting when you look at some of these RFPs, you could have a $10 million that requires the same level of effort for a bit team to put together as $100,000 RFP. It's a different product or service being sold, but the level of effort and rigor that is required to win that business hasn't necessarily or doesn't change significantly there.
00:13:23:22 - 00:13:42:11
Ray Meiring
So the numbers might make us think, well, you know, $10 million one is going to be a lot more work than the $1 million one. But sometimes they're actually the same amount of work just but because of the variance in the product or service that's happening, it still requires a significant amount of effort to produce these documents.
00:13:42:14 - 00:13:47:01
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. And we see that in our own company, too. We can feel that here too.
00:13:47:03 - 00:13:48:19
Ray Meiring
We do. Yeah.
00:13:48:21 - 00:14:11:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. So highlight number four and five relate to each other. But we always check in with our audience on just win rates. Like how are we doing with win rates on your new and existing business that's coming in. And the majority this year experienced new business win rates in the 25 to 49% range, with a median of 37% a little stronger than last year.
00:14:11:09 - 00:14:32:14
Jennifer Tomlinson
So that's pretty good. Also pretty normal. That new business win rates are in that range. Existing business win rates are always higher 50 to 74% this year. So again looks pretty similar in the last five years. Across these two stats. What's a little different is kind of on our next slide. How much of that is RFP in particular.
00:14:32:14 - 00:14:38:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
But I don't know if you have anything on this one in general. Or we can pop into the how much of that is RFPs.
00:14:38:20 - 00:15:02:09
Ray Meiring
I just say, you know, it's just great to capture both of these statistics. You have to see how important, RFPs and pitching and proposal is, both on the new customer side and on the retention or existing customer side. Both absolutely critical factors there. So it's a good data point for us to keep looking at.
00:15:02:11 - 00:15:27:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. And how important existing business is to organizations really. I mean, just renewing your customer base. So this is the question where then we said, okay, so how much of your new business came from RFPs and how much of your existing? Because we have been seeing an increase in this trend over the last few years. New client business reported a mean of 36% of all new business coming in from RFP.
00:15:27:05 - 00:15:55:07
Jennifer Tomlinson
So over a third and existing client business, we were getting 46% as an average from RFPs, so near nearing half. AEC alone credited 25 to 49% on new business from RFP and 50 to 75% on their existing RFP. So they were kind of our kind of outlier both ways, new and existing, but it's pretty significant amount of the business.
00:15:55:08 - 00:16:22:15
Ray Meiring
Yeah, it's a huge statistic this because it just shows again how mission critical these types of documents are to organizations. If you're winning or if 40% of your business, your new business, almost 40% comes from RFP based activities, or 40% comes of your existing customer. Renewal comes from that. You cannot be without a professional function here delivering wins into these areas.
00:16:22:15 - 00:16:43:05
Ray Meiring
Here. This has to have a very high level of attention and a very strong seat at the table when it comes to sales and when it comes to existing business. So great to see these numbers just increasing year over year showing how mission critical this function is in a business development team.
00:16:43:07 - 00:17:05:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. We're going to change flavor a little bit and talk about the major challenges when completing requests, which is always fun for us because there are so many for everyone. But it is one of our favorite questions every year because it supports the case for why proposal management software exists. Our top reason this year was a new one.
00:17:05:19 - 00:17:31:13
Jennifer Tomlinson
It was always on the list, but it was never number one, which is subject matter experts adhering to schedule and delivery input. So, you know, chasing around those experts for their contributions became number one kind of by a lot really jumped up there. But rounding out the top five or all of our usual suspects, which are finding content, organizing content, updating content, creating content and measuring content.
00:17:31:13 - 00:17:44:12
Jennifer Tomlinson
So I know Ray has some comments on why. You know, maybe we saw this shift in this mes coming to the top. Like what's happening in the in.
00:17:44:14 - 00:18:25:13
Ray Meiring
Talking to our customers. What we're hearing is that there's an increased complexity to pitches in responses. That increased complexity or number of questions requires more contribution from people outside of maybe the centralized the team. It requires specialists, practitioners to be involved there. And so there's this huge effort now that's happening to kind of corral everyone together to get their answers in potentially a reduced timeline with more questions when people are just doing their, you know, focused on their regular day jobs and now being asked to get involved in these activities as well.
00:18:25:14 - 00:18:58:21
Ray Meiring
And, you know, trying to do this process manually and track hundreds of questions that are going to subject matter experts, having people come in and contribute in a new system, as it were, back into this process, that is a real time consuming challenge. So bit managers move from the skill of having to read and understand the customer request and then build out the best proposal actually to being project managers and corralling everyone together to get these answers in.
00:18:58:22 - 00:19:21:19
Ray Meiring
Obviously, software is critical to that process. It makes it a lot easier to project, manage and to get everybody together and to be able to collaborate. And what we have to be able to do is help the subject matter experts collaborate in a way that they don't have to learn a new piece of complex technology to collaborate, because otherwise they're just not going to do it.
00:19:21:20 - 00:19:47:19
Ray Meiring
It needs to be in their natural environments, like direct inside of wood, directly inside of Excel. Responding via outlook are one of those areas. You know, the other one that I wanted to comment on is that second point. Their time spent locating, organizing and updating content. And I can't believe it's taken 22 minutes for me to say the word AI on this call today.
00:19:47:21 - 00:20:13:23
Ray Meiring
But we're going to spend a lot of time on AI a bit later on. I know that the thing that I want to mention is there's a misnomer out there that AI is going to kind of solve all of the content problems that teams have. But what we need to keep our eyes on is the fact that AI works on a kind of garbage in, garbage off type principle still to this day.
00:20:13:23 - 00:20:50:16
Ray Meiring
So if our content is not well structured, is not well set up, the use of AI is not necessarily going to be as effective as it would be if there was more attention to the to the content side. Now, that doesn't mean that we need to have every piece of content set up in the most amazing way. AI really needs facts to be able to generate content there, but it's the structuring of that content that's so important that it's there and it's centralized and it's in a library and that there is some structure attached to that.
00:20:50:16 - 00:21:16:23
Ray Meiring
And then to layer AI on top of that structure to be able to generate fantastic outputs there. We also sometimes think that, hey, we need to take our content and we need to go through this content revolution of taking all the content that we have in the business and structuring that, and spending months to years getting the content right before the software is going to be valuable, but it actually works the other way around.
00:21:16:23 - 00:21:41:00
Ray Meiring
We need to start with the structure. We need to put some seed content in there and then progressively using other content that's in the organization, build that library of facts up over time. So it's interesting to see it still number two. And it's an important number two on this list here because content is still critical to being effective even with the use of AI in organizations.
00:21:41:02 - 00:22:18:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. Great point. All right. So let's move on to highlight seven. How many people are generally involved in the response process? 50% of our survey takers reported ten or fewer. That contributed. But we had an overall mean of 22 and a median of eight. So those are all different. Like sort of scientific average type things. Legal and Pro serve reported a median of about 13 people, and tech was in the 1 to 10 range a little bit smaller now AEC 50 or more as their median.
00:22:18:11 - 00:22:30:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
So again, you know, ginormous RFPs, high dollar value and a lot of people having to contribute. So that was really interesting. You know, to kind of see the survey have to span all of that.
00:22:30:24 - 00:22:44:14
Ray Meiring
Well comes back to that complexity point there of just how many contributors are involved there. Again, why that number one position is having subject matter experts involved, because there's just so many people involved in this in this process.
00:22:44:16 - 00:23:09:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. Lots. Okay. And our eighth highlight number of business days to complete quests. We are sitting at a majority reporting 6 to 10 business days with an average of a little over nine, which again is a little bit more than a week. In business days this completion time is trending longer. So we dug back in our archives and in 2021, our average was six business days.
00:23:09:16 - 00:23:29:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
So it's taking longer, which may go to the point of ray with the complexity or the complexity for the industries that we work with. Proserpine tech had a mean of about 12 days per request. AEC spent the most time with an average of 16 days per request. Many reporting 20 or more and legal is a little shorter in the 3 to 5.
00:23:29:10 - 00:23:37:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
Obviously their volumes are quite high as well. So interesting that this is kind of trending a bit higher for us year over year.
00:23:37:21 - 00:24:10:18
Ray Meiring
Yeah, I think it comes back to that complexity point that these RFPs and pitches are getting more complex. And so there's maybe a little bit more time. But this is a statistic that I really want to keep my eye on. I think now what's going to happen is that as AI becomes more of the norm in responding to RFPs and producing pitches, so the procurement teams that are sending in these requests are going to have a compressed timeline to respond to the RFP, even with increased complexity.
00:24:10:18 - 00:24:27:00
Ray Meiring
So this is a statistic that I really want to keep focused on and see how that's impacted, maybe by expectations of procurement teams and what AI is doing in the in the vendor or the supplier can be an interesting stuff.
00:24:27:02 - 00:24:29:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
I agree.
00:24:29:22 - 00:25:01:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. And then I think this is our last non AI question non AI input question. But we asked about the impact of proposal software on the organization which is one of our favorite ones. Can the audience sort of articulate where their gains are in their in their life at work. And the biggest gains this year for those that use proposal management software, which I think was over 75% in our survey, were time savings, response quality and RFP win rates year over year.
00:25:01:23 - 00:25:30:08
Jennifer Tomlinson
Those were our big biggest increases. So time spent, we had a 72% positive sentiment on, you know, having less time spent on completing RFPs. 66% say they have a higher quality from using software, 64% had more time to personalize, which of course is really important. The age of AI that might help you do your mundane tasks over and over, but your personalizing still needs to happen.
00:25:30:10 - 00:25:57:21
Jennifer Tomlinson
60% could process more volume. 58% said they had spent less time managing content, and 58% felt that they had more ease in their collaboration. Where we saw some gains and these are harder to articulate if you're not part of the business case of bringing the software into the organization and measuring its impact was on RFP win rate. So 38% felt that there are FP win rate, was impacted positively by software, and 32% felt higher.
00:25:57:21 - 00:26:07:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
Deal velocity movement of a deal or winning a client was impacted positively with proposal management software.
00:26:07:20 - 00:26:49:13
Ray Meiring
Great statistics. These really speak to the benefit of having proposal management software in an organization where RFP volumes are growing, RFP complexities are growing, timelines are possibly reducing subject matter experts are increasing that. First one, of course, is the highlight time spent on completing a request. And we're going to talk a bit more about this, I know, but the more time that we have, we can move that time from, as you said, Jennifer, doing the mundane tasks to doing more wind tasks or doing higher volume tasks that are absolutely critical to dealing with this increased volume there.
00:26:49:13 - 00:26:56:21
Ray Meiring
So a great start to see strong impact from proposal management software on the overall proposal process.
00:26:56:23 - 00:27:21:22
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. Now we're going to give you all three highlights from the AI questions. And then we'll move into kind of showing you a little bit about the product. We did ask this question. I think this was brand new this year around what is your generative AI platform tool in the proposal management world preference. So AI has come on strongly, as we all know in this industry.
00:27:21:22 - 00:27:50:02
Jennifer Tomlinson
And we want to just get a temperature check on how everyone's feeling platform versus specialty tool. So we went with the term platform tool meaning you can build off of it or use it for many general type tasks. And you'll recognize some of the names on this chart. Microsoft Copilot 42% 18% reported using ChatGPT. There was a 16% on other specialty tools, and then 14 just aren't really using gen AI software.
00:27:50:03 - 00:28:06:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
The bulk of that, shockingly, we're at tech services, survey takers. So I know Ray probably have a few comments on this because there's some interesting stuff brewing in the smaller chunks there on the upper left to chat through that.
00:28:06:23 - 00:28:45:17
Ray Meiring
Definitely. Well, you know, 14% not using an AI tool. That number is going to come down of a of a time quite rapidly. We've seen the adoption of AI being incredibly rapid and the benefits are clearly seen. So we would expect that number to radically different with within a year. I think the other point to mention is that in speaking to a number of firms and a number of customers that we work with, and there seems to be this kind of binary decision between, do we use a generalist or do we use a specialist tool?
00:28:45:21 - 00:29:11:11
Ray Meiring
The way we see the market shaping out is that there are going to be generalists, and there are going to be a ton of specialist tools that customers are going to make use of. And I always like to compare it to building a house. When we build a house, we have a general contractor. General contractor can help us and advise us on a range of things, but we don't want the general contractor doing the electrics in the house.
00:29:11:11 - 00:29:27:03
Ray Meiring
We want to specialize electrician doing the electrics in the house because they're going to be certified and we know that they're going to do it well and they're not going to cause a fire to happen in that house. So we need to think about AI in the same way. We're going to have generous tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.
00:29:27:07 - 00:29:55:03
Ray Meiring
They are not competitors to the specialists. Sure. Can they cross over in some areas and do similar things? Yes, they can, but the specialist tools should have a set of functions and capabilities that really only that specialist tool can produce, because it's been set up and trained and configured in a way to deliver specialized value into those areas.
00:29:55:03 - 00:30:21:13
Ray Meiring
So it's great to see a tool like Microsoft Copilot involved in the bid and proposal process. But there are a whole bunch of specialized actions that are two like Microsoft Copilot cannot deliver well, like answering an RFP question in Excel. It just can't do that type of thing because it's not specialized. It's thinking about Excel as a numbers type tool.
00:30:21:19 - 00:30:42:14
Ray Meiring
So we're going to see a change in that over time as well. I believe that we're going to see a rise in the number of specialist tools at the same time as a rise in the generative tools, and I think we'll probably frame this question quite differently in the coming years as well. One more thing to comment on, Jennifer, if I may, is 5% homegrown, right?
00:30:42:15 - 00:31:15:01
Ray Meiring
That's a really, really interesting statistic that we haven't seen, you know, for quite a while is this concept of home growing software the reason that the market moved away from custom building everything was because when you buy package software, you get the benefits of scale. You get hundreds of law firm experiences in 1 in 1 product, or hundreds of AEC use cases in one product versus just a singular use case.
00:31:15:01 - 00:31:45:13
Ray Meiring
So it's interesting to see how that homegrown number is sitting at 5%. I believe that that homegrown number is there as teams experiment and learn and get to understand this technology, maybe work through some privacy concerns that they might have with the tech. But over time, that homegrown number will reduce even further than 5% down. And we will see the platforms and the specialized tools performing the functions in the AI space.
00:31:45:13 - 00:31:53:08
Ray Meiring
So that's just some thoughts from me on this. Very interesting. We'll that we have here of AI tools.
00:31:53:11 - 00:32:17:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. Great. Lots to change here I'm sure. All right. So the next two questions, we just kind of went in and said, hey what's the impact of AI on your organization today if you're using it in proposal management software, 38% of people have not deployed AI in their proposal management software yet. So that that's even lagging, you know, maybe the general platform tools.
00:32:17:03 - 00:32:47:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
But for those using 46% used for researching and summarizing content, 40% copy block work, 36% for exact summaries, 34% answering RFP questions. So that's coming up, 28% for Bios and 14% quality assurance. Now, AEC was our vertical with the largest use of generative AI, over 90% using it for researching and summarizing, and 80% using for Bios and exact summaries.
00:32:47:18 - 00:32:54:12
Jennifer Tomlinson
These numbers were much lower last year, so it's kind of cool to see it evolving.
00:32:54:14 - 00:33:20:22
Ray Meiring
And I think it's evolving really, really rapidly as well. Just a couple of trends that we are seeing as well. If you look at this list here, what you'll notice is a lot of it's like writing tasks, writing a summary, writing a copy block, writing an executive summary, writing an answer to a question. And when we think about generative AI, that's often where our brain goes immediately is, hey, this thing can do a great job of writing stuff.
00:33:20:22 - 00:33:51:04
Ray Meiring
For me, that's very true. But what we don't want to underestimate is how good it is at reading things for us as well. Being able to read and do a quality check, read and identify any gaps in our response, read and adjust a recommend. Adjustments in tone. So it's a fantastic writing tool. It's an even better reading tool that can come back and help us just to do what we're doing a lot better by reading.
00:33:51:10 - 00:34:21:14
Ray Meiring
And then one more comment on this. Just in terms of writing, it's always writing from something else. So you can think about AI like repurposing content. It might take 530 3 to 5 items of content, pull blocks of that together to write something new, but it's really a repurpose of what that original thing was just positioned into a different way, especially when responding to an RFP or building out a pitch.
00:34:21:15 - 00:34:37:20
Ray Meiring
So the writing is not kind of coming up with stuff out of fresh air. In fact, that's quite a quite dangerous. It's really taking what's already there and writing that in a new form or format. We'll show a little bit about that in a demo going a bit later on in the presentation.
00:34:37:22 - 00:35:22:14
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. And I think we're up to our last highlight. And then we will get into the product a little bit. This question was around what do you see the benefits of generative AI in proposal management for your organization kind of into the future. And what we saw here was the expected quickly drafting and optimizing content, 84%, 60% said more time to personalize, 56% said their staff will experience better use of their time, which we know is a huge a huge challenge right now, 40% will see simplified content management and then we got into the 30% range success, flagging risks, greater response volume, increasing win rates, a lot more probably coming in this space.
00:35:22:14 - 00:35:30:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
But we kind of wanted to take everybody's brains a little forward and see what they what they're planning to do next.
00:35:30:04 - 00:35:59:01
Ray Meiring
Yeah. Again, quickly drafting and optimizing content. We're going to talk about that in a demo shortly. Only 4% are seeing limited benefits, which I'm really excited to see that statistic there, because that means that 96% are seeing the benefit of generative AI or AI in their use cases. They're it's a very promising statistic because it talks through the benefits that were ultimately going to see.
00:35:59:01 - 00:36:01:20
Ray Meiring
And I think we'll talk about that in a slide or two later.
00:36:01:22 - 00:36:29:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
Perfect. So to round out, we basically took our own data and tried to kind of give everybody a ROI impact from AI powered proposal management software. So we took our own stats average opportunity size of 600 K per RFP, average number of RFP in a year, which is about 72, and this is around 43 million in revenues from RFPs.
00:36:29:03 - 00:37:04:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
Just regular run rate any given year. And then we used QorusDocs, lowest average benefit from AI, which we found around 50% increase in productivity using our AI. So if you take 50% productivity applied to that kind of run rate, 600 K 72 a year, you can actually increase your capacity by 50% and complete additional RFPs, which bring in, again an average value of 600 K a piece, potentially allowing another $20 million to be added to the top line revenue.
00:37:04:09 - 00:37:26:05
Jennifer Tomlinson
And this is just a this is just a calculation off of our average figures. Many of our clients have many more that many more RFPs they complete and higher dollar size. And some are smaller. But it just gives you a way to kind of make a case for how much impact it can make on an organization, just because we have AI here now.
00:37:26:05 - 00:37:33:21
Jennifer Tomlinson
So I thought I'd give Ray two seconds on that formula. But that was a new thing in our survey this year. Just kind of illustrate impact.
00:37:34:01 - 00:37:54:18
Ray Meiring
Well, thanks for putting this together, Jennifer. And obviously these numbers are very powerful when you look at it like this. Now, we know that every organization and every industry is different. So as you look at this, 21 million might seem like a small number, or 21 million might seem like a very big number to you, depending on where you are in the size, scale and what you're doing.
00:37:54:20 - 00:38:22:15
Ray Meiring
The overall principle, though, is that it drives up an increase in wins and in revenue ultimately. But we're very we would be very happy to meet with any one of our customers or prospects and look at this on a very personalized basis and kind of put these numbers into this formula and calculate with our prospects and customers what ROI looks like directly for them in their organizations case.
00:38:22:15 - 00:38:45:12
Ray Meiring
As you plug these various formulas in, we've spoken to a number of customers about how they calculate ROI on this. What does it really mean? And so working that back, is it a quality thing? Is it a win rate thing? Is it a time saving thing. Where do we where do we get the benefit? We're happy to do that on a on a very individualized basis and come up with the number that works for your organization.
00:38:45:14 - 00:39:07:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
Perfect. All right. So I think we're going to transition a little bit to, you know, relate some of what you just heard over to QorusDocs and kind of explain how we can create some value for your organization. So we'll have Ray kind of walk us through our value waterfall and show us a couple things.
00:39:07:09 - 00:39:44:03
Ray Meiring
Yeah, we developed this value autofill last year through conversations, through surveys, through time spent with our customers who have adopted AI technology. And one of the first things that you see as a benefit when you start using artificial intelligence is that there is more time, but that's really not the headline story there. The headline story is, you know, what do we do with that additional time that we now have speaking to many of our customers, that more time translates directly into a higher quality proposal.
00:39:44:04 - 00:40:18:15
Ray Meiring
Now, the higher quality proposal comes in two ways, right? Higher quality proposal comes firstly of responding to RFPs that we have a higher propensity to win. So that bid/no-bid type scenario or at the same time personalizing those proposals more. That's where the higher quality comes in. What's also a benefit is that more time reduces team stress, reduces staff turnover, and those two kind of softer points also result in a higher quality proposal.
00:40:18:16 - 00:40:46:18
Ray Meiring
Having people that understand your business really well means a higher quality proposal. Having people that have the time and the mental capacity to produce the lower or the higher quality proposal because of lower stress. That's a huge one as well. On the other side of things, but we're also seeing in certain organizations is that time translates into scaling the volume of pitches or proposals that are putting up.
00:40:46:18 - 00:41:16:07
Ray Meiring
So these are maybe organizations that have been declining certain RFPs because they just don't have capacity to handle them, or handing more back to self-service with the help of AI, so that the sales team can actually deliver those proposals themselves and then scale the volume of proposals and RFPs. Ultimately, it's about winning more clients or retaining those clients, and that translates back into the increased revenue.
00:41:16:07 - 00:41:28:22
Ray Meiring
But that's really how we see that benefit stacking up and laying out in what we're calling that value waterfall.
00:41:28:24 - 00:41:56:12
Ray Meiring
So moving on to the next slide. When we've looked at the impact that QorusDocs has, and coming back to that first block right at the top there, we've seen up to 84% less time creating proposals. Again, that's like a single number that, you know, has a lot of nuance to it. But that's really the potential benefit of creating proposals with AI.
00:41:56:14 - 00:42:32:13
Ray Meiring
The biggest area in that 84% is generating content. How do we produce that content that's going to win for us? And then it moves on to composing answers, quality assurance and content management. But just one statistic or quote that's there at the bottom of that page is from one of our customers just illustrating that time element there, you know, 100 page document would take a few hours to read through, several hours to summarize that and then put the submission outline together.
00:42:32:15 - 00:42:57:03
Ray Meiring
Takes additional hours. So just getting into that RFP, let's call it a day. In that case of going through that document with AI, we can do that in 20 minutes or less, depending on that process. Because AI can read it can summarize, and then it can produce that submission document as well. So you can really see the time saving kind of kicking in there.
00:42:57:03 - 00:43:24:08
Ray Meiring
And then that extra time that day that you've now got back again that's spent on quality or volume or reducing stress or one of those factors that we've discussed earlier. But I think let's chat. I know we're at 45 minutes, so I'll just show one quick thing in the product. We've discussed a lot of statistics. So let's actually show something in the product here.
00:43:24:08 - 00:43:56:22
Ray Meiring
And I'm going to share my screen here to do that. Jennifer can you just nod if you're seeing okay. Awesome. Awesome. So you know, there's a wide range of things that you can do with QorusDocs and with the AI and QorusDocs. And we've shown a lot of those features in previous presentations. The thing that we want to demonstrate today in 5 to 10 minutes is that quickly drafting number one benefit that everyone anticipates that they're going to get from AI.
00:43:56:24 - 00:44:40:20
Ray Meiring
So let's just take a scenario. Let's imagine that we've just got off a call with a customer. We've discussed details of a project that the customer wants to put together or have us engage in, and they've asked us to pull together a presentation on how we might deliver on that project. In the world outside of AI, that's a case of taking copious notes and writing everything down, and then opening up the PowerPoint and going to find the last PowerPoint presentation that we did to someone, and then trying to kind of twist and change that PowerPoint presentation to match that customers requirements.
00:44:40:22 - 00:45:08:15
Ray Meiring
But with AI and with templates, we're not able to do that in a lot less time. So what you're looking at on your screen right now is this fictitious organization called Schrute. Levinson. You've ever watched The Office? Then you'll know where those names come from. Interesting combination. But one of the things that we've loaded into this environment here is a call transcript that has been recorded from a customer conversation.
00:45:08:20 - 00:45:34:21
Ray Meiring
This call transcript could have been recorded with Microsoft Teams. It could have been gong, or it could have been one of the other tools that record conversations and then transcribe those conversations. What we've got in here is really the output of that conversation, that call. Transcript. And if you scan through there, you can see that the conversations happened about looking for some specific support in a space.
00:45:34:21 - 00:46:01:13
Ray Meiring
You can see GDPR in there and CCP in there. You can see some pricing discussions that have happened. So this is an extensive call that's taking place. What we want to do now is generate a PowerPoint deck based on what was discussed in that call. But we want this PowerPoint deck to look like our films. Branding affirms presentation and needs to really look professional.
00:46:01:15 - 00:46:31:10
Ray Meiring
So in the background, what we've done in QorusDocs is we've set up an AI enabled template. And this template, as you just scan through, you can see, you know, fields in here like client name, etc. but it's got a bunch of cover pages in here and then it's got placeholders lower down in here for key challenges. The proposed solution that was discussed and industry overview and a pricing slide and a next steps slide as well.
00:46:31:10 - 00:46:59:18
Ray Meiring
So what we want to use that call transcript. Now to actually create this PowerPoint presentation. Let's do that. I'm going to go to the create button on this. And it's going to pop up a little form for me over here and just get everything ready. The first thing that I want to do is just tie this to one of my opportunities that I have in CRM, so it's going to link the two together so that some of the data is populated in there.
00:46:59:19 - 00:47:23:07
Ray Meiring
You'll see down here the customer names come through and it's going to populate the technology and the deadline and the owner's name. But before I produce this PowerPoint presentation, I'm going to use that call transcript that I just showed you as the baseline or the input for the PowerPoint. And then I'm going to run QPilot, which is QorusDocs AI agent.
00:47:23:09 - 00:47:53:18
Ray Meiring
And what you'll notice it's start to do here is it's reading through that call transcript. And progressively it's adding in various bullet points and pieces of content here as it reads the call transcript and it pulls it in. Now I could have used the call transcript plus a customer overview document, or we could have used several documents as input under the Select Documents area.
00:47:53:18 - 00:48:18:15
Ray Meiring
To tailor this a little bit. More specifically, we just use Call Transcript in this demo today. But you could use several documents as input into that. Once I've done that, I'm going to actually create a proposal and I'm just going to call it webinar and into PowerPoint. And I'm going to hit the create button. And this is going to go through the process now of merging that all together.
00:48:18:17 - 00:48:47:08
Ray Meiring
And it ran the generation there. And we'll see it pull through. And hopefully in a second we'll actually have a PowerPoint presentation generated for us. And it's going to do a couple of things. Firstly, it's kind of loading it up here. You'll see as it's generated that presentation for me, it's chosen the technology cover page. It's put in the key challenges for me.
00:48:47:10 - 00:49:18:24
Ray Meiring
It's built out the proposed solution, put in a technology overview area for me, built out some pricing slides as well. And lastly it's gone into the next step. So it's taken all of that just from the cool transcript and pull that into a beautifully branded template within a matter of seconds. That's now almost customer ready. And my responsibility now is the human in this process is to read through this, to validate that it's got it right and to refine it.
00:49:19:03 - 00:49:41:23
Ray Meiring
And as we're going through that refinement process, we can continue to use AI to refine. Let's just use a very, very basic example. Let's take these next steps. This is a lot of next steps that we've got here in bullet points. So what I want to do is just highlight all my next steps in here. I'm going to go across to QPilot.
00:49:41:23 - 00:49:55:12
Ray Meiring
And I'm going to say condense these next steps to five steps using the highlighted text.
00:49:55:14 - 00:50:25:12
Ray Meiring
Condenses next steps to five steps using the highlighted text and use number and instead of bullets. All right. Let's see how the AI does when we give it a specific request like that. It's taken that all of those steps there that are very complex and long, it's moved them into five condensed steps, just pulled everything together. And to put that into this document from Cupid, I hit the insert button.
00:50:25:14 - 00:50:57:15
Ray Meiring
It pops straight into the document over the highlighted text and I'm ready to go. So again, significant time saving. But that time saving translates into higher quality work, more personalized work, higher volume work that we can go through. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to sneak in a demo in a statistics call, but I think it's very valuable just to see how those statistics actually play out into real world use cases.
00:50:57:17 - 00:51:24:11
Jennifer Tomlinson
Perfect. Thank you Ray. Hopefully I'm sharing because I know we're a little bit over the link to our benchmark survey for everybody to go download. If you want to explore that a little bit more. We really appreciate you guys hanging in there. I know some people had to kind of drop off after the 45 minutes the whole webinar is recorded, so I'll get back to a couple folks had some trouble seeing the slides, so I will get those out to everybody that wrote me about that.
00:51:24:16 - 00:51:45:00
Jennifer Tomlinson
And if you have any questions, just write us at info at webinars, at QorusDocs. Com and we'll get back to you with any of your questions just so we don't continue to much longer. But I wanted to say thanks to Ray and thank you all for your time today, and we will send this out on demand here within probably 24 hours.
00:51:45:00 - 00:51:51:06
Jennifer Tomlinson
To everybody. Thank you so much. Have a great day or evening. Bye!
