Mid-June, we held an updated training that covered the RFP response process and our main response management tool for team members who we frequently call upon to provide input for these responses.
If you’ve never heard of an RFP (Request for Proposal), these are requests by a current client or prospective client who is interested in doing business with us but needs more information about our capabilities and pricing to decide whether to select us as their vendor. These projects are one of our main channels to acquire new business, but we also frequently need to respond to RFPs for our existing clients who are testing the market for more cost-effective options.
From the client’s perspective, Venture Solutions is consistently one of the higher-priced vendors in the CCM space. However, we know from our many decades of experience that the lower prices offered by our competitors often come at the cost of lower quality and lapses in data security. That’s why it’s our job in an RFP response to paint the whole picture for the client and demonstrate to them the value of looking beyond the bottom-line comparison.
In the last two years, we have seen a major spike in the volume of RFPs received year over year. The total projects we completed in 2023 (55) nearly doubled the totals of the previous three years—32 in 2022, 25 in 2021, and 28 in 2020—and we are well on our way for a similar amount in 2024 at 33 projects YTD. These RFPs can come in with very tight turnarounds on major lifts: this year alone, question totals for single RFP have been as high as 414, and deadlines have come in as short as 9 business days between when we received the RFP and when our response was due.
Measuring our success rates on RFP submissions is a tricky business, largely because it’s not unusual for opportunities where we don’t have an existing relationship to never communicate their final decision to us. Often, we don’t know if an RFP we never heard back on was awarded to a competitor or if their decision-makers decided to put the process on hold until they have their budget settled. However, for those RFPs we do hear back with a final decision, we have a consistent 50% win rate, which far exceeds the industry standard.
Things that strengthen our RFP responses and help increase our chances of winning a client’s business:
We package all these pieces into a cohesive response that positions us as an authority in the CCM space and shines a spotlight on the expertise represented across our teams. Although we do our best to streamline this process, it is still a monumental group effort that demands time and attention from the subject matter experts we rely on to verify accurate, relevant, and updated information for each RFP. As we continue to build out our RFP process to match the demands of clients, we appreciate the ongoing commitment of these team members and leaders to help us prove to clients why Venture Solutions is the best in the business.
