00:00:01:18 - 00:01:45:14
Jennifer Tomlinson
Eddie, we are, excited to start our webinar, but we see people rolling in from their previous meeting, so we're just going to give it a couple minutes, till about 902 here Pacific. And then we will get started. But welcome to our webinar.
00:01:45:16 - 00:02:14:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
Okay. I am going to get things started. I know people are still coming in. But welcome to our webinar. We're so happy you could join us for our 10th annual benchmark report. Read out. We cannot believe that has been ten years that we've been running this report and benchmarking this industry. But this was one of our most exciting years yet due to the impacts of AI and some of the deeper dives we did in our industry specialty areas.
00:02:14:18 - 00:02:42:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
So I'm Jennifer Tomlinson, I'm the EVP marketing here at QorusDocs, and I am going to be your host, along with Ray Maring who is our CEO. And we're going to take you all through the top findings and feel free to put questions in, and we'll try to grab those at the end. We hope to finish sooner than in under an hour for you all, and we will be recording this so we can distribute it later to those on your teams that could not attend.
00:02:43:01 - 00:03:04:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right, so let's get started. Our agenda today is going to be a couple of remarks from our fearless leader, Ray, about the state of the world that the study was deployed into. And then we'll take you through how we set up the research. Do a quick poll, see who we've got on the phone today, on the call today.
00:03:04:04 - 00:03:19:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
And then we'll run through ten highlights plus one bonus highlight. I had to sneak another one in there and we'll be ready for questions. So with that I'm going to pop us over to Ray to open up our session.
00:03:19:17 - 00:03:40:09
Ray Meiring
Thank you Jennifer, and thanks to everyone who's joined today. It's, awesome to to have you here. And and as you said, ten years. I can't really believe, like, we've been doing this, a survey for ten years. It's been quite amazing to look back across all the surveys that we've done in this space and to see just how things have have changed.
00:03:40:09 - 00:04:02:18
Ray Meiring
We've got the pre-COVID years and the post-Covid years in this. And I kind of the current time that we're we're in right now, certainly something that we can say is that proposals, RFPs have just become more and more critical over that time period. The volumes have gone up, things have become more complex. And we saw that in this year's survey.
00:04:02:18 - 00:04:24:03
Ray Meiring
Once again, as you can see on the slide there, B2B buying is more structured and consensus, driven. So we're seeing a lot more structure, a lot more RFPs involved in the sales and renewal process. We're also seeing longer evaluation cycles and then again, volumes keep going up. Going up on the new side, going up on the existing customer side.
00:04:24:05 - 00:04:45:13
Ray Meiring
And we're going to talk a little bit about some of those trends and how we see those volumes going up. What the survey data tells us, but also what we hear and when we speak to our customers is that resources continue to be constrained, especially now as margins are tight, as timelines are tighter, it's, you know, do more with less.
00:04:45:15 - 00:05:14:08
Ray Meiring
And that creates constraints, around resources. We're going to see in the survey today how RFP and proposals are a critical part of that revenue mix there. We'll show that with some data points. And then as Jennifer mentioned, AI adoption. It's it's spreading. It's interesting to see how that curve has changed from just a year ago when I was kind of just starting to be used to now a fundamental part of what everybody's doing in the proposal space.
00:05:14:08 - 00:05:32:16
Ray Meiring
So, as the slide slide concludes, their, proposals are critical that just right in the center of that business development, sales process, renewal process. And we're excited to be part of that journey. So looking forward to getting into the stats, Jennifer, seeing how they support those, those statements.
00:05:32:18 - 00:05:57:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. So with that, let's show you all what our survey covered this year. So we we visited with 300 professionals who work with RFPs, proposals and software decisions across key industries that you see here on this slide. The companies surveyed in our survey, 60% had 100 million or more in revenue. So we we trended toward larger enterprises.
00:05:57:21 - 00:06:28:05
Jennifer Tomlinson
Another 23% in our survey had 25 to 100 million in revenue, and nearly 50% had financial responsibility for decisions made in their organizations, and another 40% shared in that decision making responsibility. Most titles were manager, director, vice president, so as you all can see, we had 26% identified as professional services, 24% legal services, 20% architecture, engineering, construction, 19% IT and tech and 11% other was.
00:06:28:05 - 00:06:57:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
The bulk of that was financial services. So that is that was how we ran the survey. So let's go off to a poll question. We are curious for the folks that made the call today what industry you work in. So I am going to launch a poll. If you all can respond, you can see who we've got on the call and tailor our message a little bit to you.
00:06:57:22 - 00:07:28:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
Okay. Got a lot of folks responding still. All right. I'm going to share the poll and let you all know what we see. So we have 45% of our call today is legal 18% architecture, engineering, construction 20% identifies professional services which we have accounting, consulting, staffing in that bucket, 11% tech and 7% other. All right. We will head in.
00:07:29:01 - 00:07:53:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
We are ready for let me close my poll and then go back to the slides. So top ten highlights plus one. We made a ten balloon. And then we came up with another one okay so let's jump in. Highlight number one is around the volume the magnitude and the time it takes to do your job. So this slide shows our results to two key questions around the volume of proposals and RFP.
00:07:53:21 - 00:08:15:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
That's on the left side. That is the volume that people were dealing with. Did it increase. Did it stay the same. Did it decrease. And then on the right the graph shows how long it takes to complete RFP responses. So for proposals the majority which was 68% reported increased volume. That has been a steady in our survey for over ten years.
00:08:15:18 - 00:08:44:00
Jennifer Tomlinson
Every year it goes up. And this year it was quite a big increase. We see people reporting a majority of 5 to 24 proposals per month. On the RFP side, 63% reported increased volume and they were majority saying 3 to 9 RFP per month. That is tough. That's a lot. And on the right hand side, the majority say it takes about 6 to 10 business days to complete an average response.
00:08:44:02 - 00:08:49:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. Now what we have done is sorry, Ray, you probably want to comment on that before I get.
00:08:49:09 - 00:09:10:11
Ray Meiring
Back to the just I mean, obviously, as you mentioned, seeing the increase in volume there, it's key. It speaks to that point that we mentioned earlier that this is critical and we have to be able to, manage this increase in volume. What what's not on that slide is just the complexity as well of some of these RFP responses.
00:09:10:13 - 00:09:28:20
Ray Meiring
So the volume is up. Timelines are shortened to respond to them. And then there's more questions and more complex questions that are coming in there as well. Just making that even more challenging of a problem to to resolve. So interesting to see the split out, which I think is what you're going to talk about next, is by industry.
00:09:28:22 - 00:09:54:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yeah, exactly. So on the next slide, same kind of question. But what we did was break it out by industry. And I know it's a little small to see. So our graph on the left shows a number of proposals worked on per month by industry. And the takeaway there again, everybody's really busy with this. But legal legal services manage the highest proposal volume of all the industries we surveyed.
00:09:54:03 - 00:10:23:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
It is not far behind. So those are the colors like kind of the yellow and the pink colors on that first graph. The second one, RFP responses per month, Tech and Professional Services reported the highest volumes of RFP. But as you can see, most teams across the industries that we work with report that, they are quite busy each month with all of this activity, and they have to get all of this done in under ten days.
00:10:23:17 - 00:10:50:15
Ray Meiring
And in legal, you know, a lot of those kind of proactive proposals and documents like capability statements, that are increasing in volume as well. So they're kind of more smaller proactive type proposals. But the volume of those things just keeps, keeps going up, which might lead on to that RFP response. Well, that panel response at the end of that, that process that so good to see those, those increases taking place.
00:10:50:15 - 00:10:52:13
Ray Meiring
That's a positive sign.
00:10:52:15 - 00:11:20:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. Off to highlight two. And this is one of the the big takeaways from our survey this year. It's around RFP is being revenue gateways in organizations. So this slide actually shows you two sets of data. One on the left and one on the right. And what we're after is what percent of the revenue is made up of winning RFP for both new business on the left in blue and the existing business on the right.
00:11:20:21 - 00:11:50:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
So the chart on the left shows RFP as a percentage of new client sales. We are seeing the bulk of folks report 25 to 49% of their new business. Revenue comes from RFP, and another 38% report even more. 50 to 74% of new business comes from RFP on the existing client side, on the right, we have more people by 1% reporting 50 to 74% of their revenues from winning RFP.
00:11:50:15 - 00:12:15:11
Jennifer Tomlinson
And then in second place, the chunk below that, 25 to 49%. So this is a substantial amount of revenue that is flowing through the formal response process. And it's clear that if you are effective in your proposal process and your RFP response process, your organization can compete for revenue. If you are not that that is become a key area for revenue generation.
00:12:15:16 - 00:12:20:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
And that was again, one of the bigger takeaways from our survey this year.
00:12:20:17 - 00:12:44:19
Ray Meiring
What I find interesting about the slide is that we we've often in the past thought about the RFP being very much on the new business side and how do we capture new clients, but we've steadily seen this RFP process increase on the existing clients, which means that our customers and the survey respondents are being asked frequently to kind of redesign business over and over again.
00:12:45:01 - 00:13:09:10
Ray Meiring
So that right up there on the right hand side with existing clients and the kind of the scale of increase there is definitely an indicator of just how far across the end-to-end business development process the cycle is, is critical. And to see it going up and just increasing in that area as well, it's once again, it's a it's a challenging thing, but we should see it as a good thing.
00:13:09:12 - 00:13:32:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. And we have noticed that ourselves at QorusDocs that transition happening. Okay. So on the next slide it is highlight three. But it is related to revenue. It is RFP win rates by industry. So we have again split this out by new and existing client sales. On the left you have new client sales winning RFP win rates.
00:13:32:11 - 00:13:57:17
Jennifer Tomlinson
And what I would call out here is that obviously new client RFPs are very competitive. And particularly we'll call out the architecture engineering construction vertical as they have that big 62% block, with the lower end of the win rates there. So that is it's tough and it's competitive on the existing side. On the right side we see dramatically higher win rates.
00:13:57:17 - 00:14:09:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
And again I'll call out ATC and and legal on that. So existing customers building relationships are still really key in outcomes for securing business.
00:14:09:20 - 00:14:12:10
Ray Meiring
And I agree it's that.
00:14:12:12 - 00:14:38:11
Jennifer Tomlinson
That all right off to highlight four. And now we're going to get into the sizes that folks are reporting of the opportunities that are coming into their organizations as well as missed opportunities. So on the left, first chart shows average opportunity sizes of RFP in organizations. We have a little bit of a split response, but you can see a majority in that middle section.
00:14:38:13 - 00:15:04:17
Jennifer Tomlinson
Our current majority says most are between 1 and 5 million. That's the orange bar. But close behind is a smaller 100 to 500,000 bucket. And then right in between those are third place. So that range 100 K to 5 million covers a lot of the opportunities in our audience size. On the second chart, we specifically asked, how many RFP could you not get to due to time constraints?
00:15:04:17 - 00:15:30:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
So no other reason but time. And this year the majority answer jumped up to 10 to 19%. And then it's followed closely by 20 to 29%, which is getting pretty high in missed opportunities. So even though we know organizations don't bid or, you know, bid on every RFP, that comes in, this question really focuses on the ones you wish you could have gotten to, but you couldn't because of time constraints.
00:15:30:04 - 00:15:40:21
Jennifer Tomlinson
And we know that in some of the industries we work with, they don't necessarily have a choice in responding to all the bids that come in. But we thought this was really interesting finding this year.
00:15:40:23 - 00:16:09:06
Ray Meiring
Well, it starts to kind of paint a picture of kind of like the missed market there, right? You know, the missed opportunities multiplied by the value of those RFPs. I've always been interested in this one because I speak to so many of our customers that are so heavily focused on the bid, no bid process, which absolutely makes a ton of sense because we only want to bid on those RFPs that we have a high propensity to win and that we feel really strongly about.
00:16:09:08 - 00:16:42:23
Ray Meiring
But at the same time, there are several opportunities that, as you mentioned, Jennifer would qualify through that bid, no bid process and qualify. Yes, we want to bid on that. But because of constraints around resources, many other respondents just aren't getting to those ones that just can't commit sufficient time. It's been interesting to see, almost like outside of legal kind of this move towards self-serve responses and certain areas, especially with AI now being able to do a lot of the work of answering questions and going through that process.
00:16:42:23 - 00:17:14:00
Ray Meiring
So we're seeing a trend towards self-serve on the lower value RFP so that customers can actually get to more of that missed opportunity space there. But that's a slow progress because we've got to move, you know, sales and business development folks who are not necessarily but professionals into responding to an RFP. And there's risk associated with that. But that's definitely the direction that we see things going with AI to be able to address some of this market that's so that's not being, worked on right now.
00:17:14:00 - 00:17:16:01
Ray Meiring
The that's.
00:17:16:03 - 00:17:42:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
Absolutely okay. And and there's a subset highlight on this one where we do break it out by industry. And this shows opportunity sizes as reported by industry. And here we see the largest opportunity sizes again in the colors off to the right of the graph there in architecture engineering construction and processor. But it also has a pretty large chunk of the 1 to $5 million range.
00:17:42:05 - 00:17:57:10
Jennifer Tomlinson
So it is clear large dollar deals in this RFP response process. And that does help explain why it is so important to the revenue of an overall organization. But pretty significant numbers on here.
00:17:57:12 - 00:17:58:16
Ray Meiring
Yeah.
00:17:58:18 - 00:18:21:20
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right I'm going to keep going. Highlight five. This is getting down to the challenges that you all reported when you're working on requests. And we have definitely asked this question for ten years. And we have seen some changes over the years. In the last two years, we've seen a new number one challenge rise to the top.
00:18:21:22 - 00:18:47:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
Used to be time locating and managing and creating content that got the number one spots. But now it is getting you are subject matter experts to adhere to this schedule and respond in a timely manner. So it's down to corralling the people less so the content issues. We believe some of this productivity gain is due to early AI usage, which we will cover coming up here.
00:18:47:17 - 00:18:55:05
Jennifer Tomlinson
Which does help with some of that locating, updating, managing, creating content pieces that used to be at the top on this one.
00:18:55:07 - 00:19:18:23
Ray Meiring
I was super excited when I when I saw this one. I'm not excited that SMEs, you know, are the problem here, but I'm excited to see that time spent locating content drop from the top position down because I agree. I think that is an indication that proposal teams are finding content and getting to the important stuff more effectively than they were, let's say, in the past.
00:19:19:00 - 00:19:46:03
Ray Meiring
And that was the number one problem. The challenge, though, of course, is with SMEs. Now we're trying to corral people to actually respond to these these areas here. And, you know, how much can I really do to help SMEs, subject matter experts, you know, get involved? They're sending out reminders. Sure, it can do some of that stuff. But you know, who needs just another email reminder going out there?
00:19:46:05 - 00:20:12:04
Ray Meiring
What we're exploring right now on this, on this problem is things like the use of voice and tying into call transcripts so that it's easier to, you know, interview and, subject matter expert and get them to comment on something or, you know, have I have a discussion around a particular question or have a voice interaction with that which is less cumbersome than sending a subject matter?
00:20:12:06 - 00:20:32:23
Ray Meiring
You know, a paragraph or a section. He's going to read this and, and write this section, turn it into an interview. Have I conduct that interview or take that call recording and then translate that down? But this is an exciting problem for us to work on. And it's good to see that search for locating content moving down on this list.
00:20:33:03 - 00:20:34:00
Ray Meiring
00:20:34:02 - 00:21:00:11
Jennifer Tomlinson
Agree. And in my life too, as a marketing person, it's been great. Okay. Highlight five be related. This is the industry breakout of major challenges, and I will just say it's very tiny for all of you. So I'm just going to highlight who gets who who complained the most about which challenge. So ability to personalize. This was highlighted most by serve creating content almost even across industries.
00:21:00:12 - 00:21:34:01
Jennifer Tomlinson
Who has challenges their SMBs subject matter experts was a big challenge for ATC and IT lack of centralized content still being reported and professional services responding in a timely manner. Highest result there was professional services as well as time locating content, and too few resources was particularly mentioned by it. But you can see due to the colorful nature of this particular graph, that the challenges are across the board in every industry.
00:21:34:03 - 00:22:09:23
Ray Meiring
You know, I'll just make one more note on this. SMB problem is, one of the issues that we've seen historically is that it's hard to train a subject matter expert on how to use a new system to go and respond in that area, because they don't touch into it that frequently. So with some of the agen tech capabilities that are coming out, and the idea there is to make it easier for people to interact with systems, whether it be voice, whether it be chat, whether it be email, whether it just be marking up a document and with a pen and pencil, to be able to send that in.
00:22:10:01 - 00:22:34:17
Ray Meiring
So I think this is a challenge that is, well suited towards a genetic by bringing down the, challenges around learning a system and making it more natural to to be able to engage with the application and to contribute in towards that RFP or that proposal that's being sent out there. Again, I'm, I'm excited to to solve this problem.
00:22:34:19 - 00:23:11:21
Jennifer Tomlinson
Great. We'll move into a brand new question we asked this year around including return on investment, proof points in your proposals. And we asked the question, hey, is it important? Is it important part of your proposal process? And eight and 87% said, yes, it is key. So whether that includes classic things like, you know, a payback period or net present value or return on investment, you know, many of our industry show their value by their experience records and their employees experience.
00:23:11:21 - 00:23:24:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
And biographies. It is clear that adding value into the proposal in some way is paramount and can be a differentiator. And I know Rey has lots of comments on this.
00:23:24:21 - 00:24:02:14
Ray Meiring
Well, I mean, firstly, from a strategic perspective for QorusDocs, that's really validates one of the strategic moves that we made in 2025, which was to acquire a value enablement, company shot finesse, the acquisition that we made last year to be able to bring those financial value elements into the proposals in the RFP that we're having. But I bet and this validates that, is that the future of proposals and RFPs is less about, you know, finding pieces of content and, project managing SMEs and updating content centrally.
00:24:02:17 - 00:24:29:07
Ray Meiring
It's about the words and the things that we're going to say that resonate with the buyer in the process. And what we're definitely seeing a trend towards in our business and across every business, is that everybody is being pushed to demonstrate value earlier in this, in the process, to commit to value early in that process, and to show financially what the product or service is actually going to do, should it be purchased.
00:24:29:09 - 00:24:52:19
Ray Meiring
And so being able to pull all of those stats to show them visually as part of an executive summary or business case that attaches to a proposal that we see as a critical piece, going forward. And it's going to become the center of the story that many people are going to tell us. How do we better explain the value that we offer in our proposals, in our discussions?
00:24:52:21 - 00:25:03:20
Ray Meiring
And this data point is huge, 87% already incorporating elements of that. I mean, doing a lot of manual work around actually setting up those value points.
00:25:03:22 - 00:25:28:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yeah. So it's so important to differentiate in the busyness of how many of the volume that's going on and not reduce it down to just competing on price. And so, I think that is a great indicator. All right. Off to highlight seven, which is around people power. How many people are involved in RFP responses. And we just went ahead and put the industry view here so you could see what what goes on.
00:25:28:04 - 00:25:52:11
Jennifer Tomlinson
But the majority say the average around this is in the 6 to 10 range. But we do have quite a few in the 11 to 15 range of folks that need to touch an RFP before it goes out of an organization. And so this matches the the coordination, complexity and most difficult challenge that we're having reported elsewhere in the survey.
00:25:52:13 - 00:26:13:23
Ray Meiring
I think we're going to change this one for next year. Jennifer because I love this people power one a for next year. What it's going to be interesting for us to see is people plus agents. Right. How many agents are we getting involved in the RFP response process. Yeah. So agents and people working together to be able to respond to this one.
00:26:14:01 - 00:26:53:14
Ray Meiring
This aligns very closely to the SMB discussion that we've already had. But I think the future of this slide is going to be agents plus people. So yeah, for next year, that's going to be an interesting stat for us to track just how that kind of delegated to an agent, process looks. And in terms of getting them involved, getting these agents involved in the RFP and proposal process, we're seeing it with some of the early adoption that we're doing on agents in our customer base right now where, agents taking, a lot of mundane work and performing those work that that work on behalf of the person, and then the
00:26:53:14 - 00:27:16:18
Ray Meiring
person's checking the work and applying their judgment and creativity to that. I see that trend continuing. And, you know, people can get to more work while the agents stack into the slide in future and take out some of those pieces of work that really just take a lot of manual time to perform. So, it's going to be interesting.
00:27:16:20 - 00:27:18:15
Ray Meiring
New slide for us to introduce.
00:27:18:15 - 00:27:40:06
Jennifer Tomlinson
So yeah, and we have, we have even so many changes from the previous year on the AI questions to this year. So that will be even more of a seismic shift. Okay. So we're almost to the AI stuff. Highlight eight quickly is primary software applications used. So we always ask this question where do people work all day?
00:27:40:06 - 00:28:02:12
Jennifer Tomlinson
What platforms are they in? What applications are they in? Where are they doing their work? And this year's survey was very similar to last year, where we've got the vast majority and Microsoft Word. That is the blue, line there to the right. And that's followed by Microsoft PowerPoint. We do see Adobe InDesign popping up in certain industries to preserve AEC, for example.
00:28:02:14 - 00:28:07:18
Jennifer Tomlinson
So any comments on this one that you've heard in our, our base?
00:28:07:20 - 00:28:29:00
Ray Meiring
Well, work's been around for a long time. Right. And it's like I think it's dominated this the survey question that we've used for many years now. What's been the interesting trend that's been continuing for a while is the rise of PowerPoint and the number of, customers who are using PowerPoint as the primary way to put a proposal together.
00:28:29:02 - 00:28:57:13
Ray Meiring
Even in certain cases, you know, basic RFP responses are coming out in PowerPoint or slide based format formatting there. I think what that speaks to and of course, it's different per industry, but what it speaks to is the visual nature of what our customers are looking to do. Very some presentations and so proposals need to be very narrative based in certain industries.
00:28:57:15 - 00:29:22:06
Ray Meiring
But let's take Lego for example. We just see a huge rise in the number of PowerPoint, pictures and proposals that are being produced there, because you can create such a beautiful visual representation of a biography of your experience, records, in that space. And so we're working very hard to just add more automation onto that PowerPoint side of, of what we do.
00:29:22:08 - 00:29:56:13
Ray Meiring
I also think, you know, speaking towards more visual representation is how important Adobe InDesign is in certain industries around us as well. And we know, for example, in our AEC and some may have responded, in the professional services area that it go straight from, let's say, you know, a project kind of overview or a pursuit overview straight into InDesign or skipping that PowerPoint or that word phase completely and just build the whole proposal directly in InDesign.
00:29:56:13 - 00:30:19:11
Ray Meiring
So a question we're asking and working on in our roadmap right now is how can we better support Adobe InDesign? And we've got some exciting features coming out on that InDesign front, as well. So yeah, I think it's going to be a trend towards more visual proposals in certain industries. Narrative is still really critical, which is why I will always see word in there.
00:30:19:13 - 00:30:28:04
Ray Meiring
But definitely the visual proposal is as an important part of, of our customer base and what they're looking to do.
00:30:28:06 - 00:30:47:13
Jennifer Tomlinson
Perfect. All right. Let's hop into the AI. Deep dive some of the questions we asked. So on AI automation, on the left, we ask, how are you using AI in your proposal process, if at all? And I can remember back to last year and we had a lot of I haven't started yet and I haven't done anything with this yet.
00:30:47:15 - 00:31:23:07
Jennifer Tomlinson
But in this year's questions, the vast majority are active with AI, some quite active, and are using it for research, summarizing, answering questions and creating drafts, which is kind of where we are with AI at the moment. Only a third are kind of getting into that decision making, strategic use. And and of course, as the agents and agenda gets closer and is here, that's going to we think that will change quite a bit on that, on that graph on the left and then the chart on the right is how much of your process do you feel is automated today?
00:31:23:09 - 00:31:50:19
Jennifer Tomlinson
And again, last year didn't have a lot of activity on this chart, especially in that lower than 50% plus range. So right now majority are in the 25 to 49 under half. So lots of room to grow there. And I do think, you know, in the coming years we're going to see a shift from tasks being automated to more work like more workflows being done and ability to inform decision making from the AI.
00:31:50:19 - 00:31:55:23
Jennifer Tomlinson
So we'll have to stay close to these and probably update the questions even as we go forward.
00:31:56:01 - 00:32:22:15
Ray Meiring
I fully agree with that. You know, it's great to see this kind of start. And this is almost reflecting the more generative AI, pieces of of what I can bring. So I read this document, summarize this document, pull out pieces, check the document. It's very much the read write type activity there. What's going to be amazing to see is how some of these lower ranked ones here, as you said, decision making RFP.
00:32:22:15 - 00:32:45:05
Ray Meiring
And take some of those areas where AI agents start doing work on our behalf. Those are going to rise up the ranks in the survey, as we run this in the in the coming years. Because researching, reading, writing, it's it's amazing at that. But it's getting even better at the doing pieces of what we need to have done.
00:32:45:07 - 00:33:13:14
Ray Meiring
Build me a first draft and it goes researchers. It does all the work, both the first draft or write me, the clarifying questions for this RFP. Go and research. Read write those clarifying questions. Prepare those things. It's the doing work that's coming next with the agenda AI. So this one's going to change a bit, but it's great to see that we're out of the gate using AI moving in the right direction.
00:33:13:16 - 00:33:15:19
Ray Meiring
Super excited about that.
00:33:15:21 - 00:33:39:17
Jennifer Tomlinson
Awesome. Okay, so our next slide is a slice of this by industry. It is a little tough to read because it's tiny. So I'm going to interpret it for everybody. But the first graph is again the percent of your proposal process being automated today by AI by industry. And this shows that it maybe not surprisingly, and architecture engineering construction are a bit further along.
00:33:39:19 - 00:34:09:07
Jennifer Tomlinson
And again, most teams are in that 25 to 49%. And we expect that to rise. The second graph, how AI is being used in the proposal process today by industry is very small and her to read. However, I will give you some highlights. Research and summarizing is the most automated use case across every industry right now. Pro serve is showing the strongest adoption across all vectors in all the different charts and usage.
00:34:09:07 - 00:34:31:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
Their legal is very strong and answering RFP questions and rating exact summaries. Again, maybe not a surprise. And then decision making and RFP intake are among the lowest automated areas overall. And we discussed that on the last slide. So AI is being used where the work is repeatable and content oriented. But we see adoption dropping when it becomes more strategic.
00:34:31:04 - 00:34:41:09
Jennifer Tomlinson
And and again that can be partially the market and the product available to do that in the world today around AI and and we will privacy big changes on that.
00:34:41:11 - 00:35:03:10
Ray Meiring
Definitely see the big changes there. I think a key point to highlight here still the human in the loop on this one because like if you think about answering RFP questions, first draft creation, writing and executive summary AI is always going to be great at coming up with a draft, coming up with some ideas, writing some basic things it'll probably get.
00:35:03:12 - 00:35:38:16
Ray Meiring
It is good at refinement, like make this more concise so make this shorter. You know, expand on this, but the creative elements of an executive summary, the empathy that goes with understanding the client's problem and writing those things clearly, that's a human. That's a human factor to human nature. That's not going to go away with AI. It's just going to shortcut some of those kind of more mundane tasks there of researching and finding and pulling together the blocks that we need to to write those areas.
00:35:38:18 - 00:35:44:19
Ray Meiring
So good trend on, on on that front, to see those areas being used.
00:35:44:21 - 00:36:03:13
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. We've made it to highlight ten. But remember there's a bonus highlight. Highlight ten is the expected benefits of AI. So this is us asking what do you think it's going to happen? What do you think will be happening in the future. And 86% say a positive impact on time to personalize and customize. So that is great.
00:36:03:15 - 00:36:30:01
Jennifer Tomlinson
That's what we want people freed up to do. 82% anticipate improvement in quality, 79% expect reduce time to manage content, and 77% believe they'll be able to respond to a greater volume of requests overall. In this question, we felt that the AI is being looked at to help win. Better, not just move faster. So that is great news.
00:36:30:01 - 00:36:39:00
Jennifer Tomlinson
And I think again, just a leading indicator, this is people kind of imagining what it would be doing for them in the next three, six months. Down the road.
00:36:39:02 - 00:37:18:17
Ray Meiring
And I think it's a direct relationship. More time equals higher quality or an equals a better document, because freeing up humans to spend less time finding content and corralling subject matter experts and spending more time thinking about what's the one strategy on this, having the conversations with the with the client really kind of engaging on that. So it's freeing up time to go deeper into certain of these proposals and pitches and RFPs to really understand how we should win from that, because we don't have to spend the time doing the administrative, mundane work there.
00:37:18:20 - 00:37:29:14
Ray Meiring
We can focus on the win strategy. That's the that's the correlation back from the long time to it is how do we do that better, more effectively.
00:37:29:16 - 00:37:53:06
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. Are we ready for our bonus? It's my favorite question a ringer just like I'm on here okay. So highlight 11 is the impact of using proposal management technology to organizations in our survey. And we were pretty blown away by this one. This year we've asked this question at least for five years that I've been here. But the numbers have really popped up.
00:37:53:06 - 00:38:17:15
Jennifer Tomlinson
And we do believe that AI has an impact on this and the ability for people to actually know and measure things that they didn't otherwise have time to do. So we see extremely positive impact in. That's in the green and strong numbers for personalization and customization, strong impact on RFP win rates, RFP quality and time and overall volume.
00:38:17:15 - 00:38:38:16
Jennifer Tomlinson
But all the numbers are very strong. We had years where people couldn't really articulate an impact on win rates or velocity of deals moving through, and now people are able to do that. So this is, again, one of my favorites to just see what the impact of, of technology can be on, on somebody's daily life and into an organization.
00:38:38:17 - 00:39:06:05
Ray Meiring
It's a hugely positive slide. And I'm delighted to see that 81% of respondents said proposal technology is helping with win rate, because that's exactly why we built this technologies to just to drive the win rate. As I commented on the previous slide, you know, quality of response going up 82% probably directly impacts, win rate going, you know, a win rate being 81%, in terms of positive impact there.
00:39:06:05 - 00:39:29:22
Ray Meiring
So those two are tied together. But that's really the goal is to, you know, drive up those those win rates by producing higher quality output that really, gets the deal closed. So a couple of other ones are cost of proposal generation going down. And that's a positive impact. 77% of respondents said that customer proposal generation was positively impacted.
00:39:30:00 - 00:39:45:16
Ray Meiring
That's that's really great. And I think, again, we want to work on that ease of collaboration point there 75%. So it's still very high. But how can we just make it more easy to bring in the subject matter experts and have them collaborate as well?
00:39:45:18 - 00:40:05:17
Jennifer Tomlinson
Yes. All right. You all made it through the ten plus one of our next slide. And really our conclusion you all can put in any questions you have is just a link so that you can download the full benchmark report. And I am warning you, it's about 70 pages long. But it has all the details by industry for every single question.
00:40:05:17 - 00:40:23:04
Jennifer Tomlinson
We gave you the highlight reel today. But you can click that and get right to the benchmark report. If you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat. We have a couple of minutes, but we did want to strive to get you off early into your next meeting with some time, unlike some of our other webinars.
00:40:23:06 - 00:40:23:16
Jennifer Tomlinson
So one of.
00:40:23:16 - 00:40:26:10
Ray Meiring
The things that we've done times, you know, I know.
00:40:26:12 - 00:40:46:21
Jennifer Tomlinson
Our patting ourselves on the back, but we will again send this out on demand to everybody who registered for the webinars of teammates. Couldn't attend. We will get that to you. We'll wait a little bit longer for some questions, but we do run this survey every year, usually in the fall, to kind of capture what happened across the course of a year.
00:40:47:03 - 00:41:00:22
Jennifer Tomlinson
And then it takes us a, you know, a month or so to get it written up and out to you all. But it is one of our favorite things that we do every year to understand our audience and what the challenges are that they're working with, in their jobs.
00:41:01:00 - 00:41:24:12
Ray Meiring
What I love doing with this big document, it's 74 pages. You said, and that's a lot for us to read. So pop it into your favorite AI tool and then, have it read it and then ask questions. That's another, good approach to, to take with this. I've found that effective and just, you know, asking a question that's maybe a specific industry or a specific problem.
00:41:24:12 - 00:41:28:12
Ray Meiring
Point is great. And just reading that, kind of summarizing it.
00:41:28:14 - 00:41:29:02
Jennifer Tomlinson
Like.
00:41:29:04 - 00:41:37:21
Ray Meiring
That. So yeah, please, everyone on the call dive into this research. It's a, it's a great part of what we do every year.
00:41:37:23 - 00:41:57:03
Jennifer Tomlinson
All right. Well I don't see any questions popping in, which is great. That means we maybe explained everything. Okay, so we'll let everybody get back to their the rest of their day. Thank you all so much for coming and again, we'll get this out to everybody shortly after the webinar. Thank you so much.
00:41:57:05 - 00:42:00:12
Ray Meiring
Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks, everyone. Bye!
