If your serve B2B clients, it’s common for you to respond to requests for proposal (RFP) from prospective buyers. But, many RFPs are complicated and feel overwhelming, which discourages businesses from exploring what makes a winning RFP response.
Learning how to respond to RFPs is critical to business success. The more compelling and responsive your proposal is, the more chances you win new business.
What Is RFP?
According to Wikipedia, A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that solicits a proposal, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service, or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals.
RFPs are typically issued as questionnaires for a specific need. If your company has a solution to the problem, you will respond with a proposal including all responses to the questions, pricing and required content.
In this blog, we’ll give you some practical tips to write a successful RFP response.
Demonstrate Your Knowledge of Client’s Request
It’s crucial to understand if the client’s objectives and requests are related to a product or service you can provide. It may seem like you’re repeating what the client wants, but in fact, clients always want to hear how much you understand their requests.
It’s similar to our shopping behavior today. We always look for salespeople who understand our needs better than we do. For example, we’re planning to buy a chair in the furniture store, but the salesperson keeps trying to sell the table—both a turn-off and a waste of our time.
Tip: Briefly summarize the client’s problems in a way that demonstrates you understand what they are asking for before suggesting your solutions.
Speak To Your Client’s Needs
Generally speaking, clients are pretty focused on what they want or need and don’t actually care that much about what you think (Harsh but true!). Assume the only thing they care about is how you can make their lives easier and improve their profitability, and you will be on the right foot.
An RFP response should be valuable, informative and transparent. Don’t forget to mention any social proofs illustrating your professionalism along with the past projects, case studies, or examples that align with the project’s goals.
Tip: Writing in a way that speaks to the client’s goals and objectives trying to achieve.
Pay Attention To The Evaluation Criteria
The client typically uses some form of evaluation criteria to rank the proposals they receive. It’s essential to understand the criteria and be aware that all of your hard work will be judged by that scale. It’s hard to win an RFP that is focused on rapid delivery and low-price when your main talking points are “unbounded creativity” and an “aversion to schedules” (it’s a joke, but you get the idea).
Tip: Think carefully before responding. Focus on the factors that account for the most significant scores.
Keep It Short And Simple
Remember your potential clients don’t expect your sales pitch in response to their RFP. The main goal here is to help them accomplish the project or objective. Keeping your proposal short and straight to the point is the best optimal way to increase the chance to be chosen.
If a buyer can get your answer in one page, having to read 25 pages of fluff is at best annoying, and at worst, likely to eliminate you from consideration.
Tip: Focus on your solutions, how to accomplish your plan, and why you’re a better fit than your competitors.
Be Clear And Descriptive While Answering Questions
Non-compliant responses commonly fail to answer the RFP’s questions, which means you gain a massive advantage if you answer all the questions. Also, your answers should be concise, clear and easy for the client to evaluate. There’s a simple trick for this, but it requires a bit of effort upfront – break down all the questions into all the parts and make sure your response covers everything that was asked.
Tip:
Make it clear and evident that you have met the requirements.
Set realistic expectations that you can deliver.
Don’t exaggerate about what your business can offer because your reputation is always on the line.
About us:
At SupplierGATEWAY, we offer a robust platform for suppliers where you can gain access to new business opportunities and connect with customers of all sizes – from Fortune 500 companies and globally recognized companies to your local health system, manufacturer or business. Our easy-to-use app will help you stay connected to the opportunities that could make all the difference to your bottom line. Get started today for FREE!
B2B Customer Retention – Definition And How To Keep Customers Happy
Acquiring a new customer is always exciting. Yet, it doesn’t mean they will stay with you permanently. It is a common mistake for businesses to overlook their existing valuable customers and instead, focus so heavily on acquiring new customers they fail to retain their existing ones.
The Fascinating Numbers Tell The Truth
Excellent customer experience is a significant competitive advantage that drives sales and great branding practice that potentially leads to referrals. A study conducted by The New York Times found that 65 percent of companies’ new business comes from referrals. Here are some customer retention stats you should be aware of:
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. (Invesp)
73% of U.S. consumers say that customer experience is a critical factor in their purchasing decision. If they love a company or product, 59% will still walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% will walk away after just one bad experience. (PwC)
Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5x as likely to forgive, 4x as likely to refer, and 7x as likely to try a new offering. (Temkin Group)
51% of B2B companies avoid vendors after a poor customer service experience. (Zendesk)
Among B2B decision makers, lack of speed in interactions with their suppliers is the number one pain point, mentioned twice as often as price (Temkin Group)
Calculate Your Customer Retention Rate
The above numbers have shown that customer retention is one of the best ways to increase your business revenue. Before diving into the solutions, it’s crucial to understand the key metric to guide and improve your customer retention strategy.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is a metric showing the number of customers that continue to do business with you over a given period. CRR is calculated as a percentage of the existing customers that maintain their loyalty to your business. With CRR, you can understand the lifetime customer value and quantify the efficacy of your current strategy.
Formula: CRR (%) = ((E-N)/S) x 100
The information you will need:
The number of customers at the end of a period (E)
The number of new customers acquired during that period (N)
Number of customers at the start of that period (S)
The result is a percentage that represents the customer churn rate. For example, if a company had 200 customers at the start of the period (S), then added 10 customers over the period (N), and 150 customers at the end of the period (E), the CRR would be 70%, or ((150-10) / 200) X 100 = 70%.
The goal here is to keep this rate as high as possible. What’s a reasonable retention rate by industry? The answer is infinite cause no one-size-fits-all. According to Mixpanel’s 2017 Product Benchmarks report, the average 8-week retention is below 20% for most industries.
How To Combat Losing Your B2B Customers And Keep Them Satisfied:
While it’s impossible to achieve 100% customer retention, you should still do your best within the realm of possibility to keep as many customers as you can. To do so, you need a solid customer retention strategy. Here are some highlighting ways you can apply to your business:
Setting The Right Expectations
“I don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.” – Larry Hogan.
Even though you want to boost your B2B customer retention figures, being overpromised will cost you more than you imagined. Customers are easily upset and even considering switching to your competitors if their expectations or perceived parameters are not met. Hence, it’s essential to be clear in what you can do, when you will deliver, and how you can make sure you keep your words and not disappoint them. The golden rule here is being transparent and straightforward in terms of communication.
Stay In Touch With Your Current Customers Base
Alert them with all upcoming promotions, discounts or reward programs, product updates that you think it’s relevant and exciting to your customers. Even if your efforts don’t drive sales immediately, your brand will pop up first in their mind at the right time.
Inviting Customer Feedback And Work On Solutions
Inviting feedback is one of the most personal experiences to build a long-term relationship with your customers. By doing so, customers feel their experiences and needs are being noticed and cared about, making them feel more comfortable and open to express any concerns or complaints instead of walking away. However, it’s also essential to work on solutions after collecting feedback.
You can collect customer feedback by checking in with them via phone, email or any other communication that is most convenient for you and your customers.
Leverage Customer Surveys
Unlike the personal customer feedback mentioned above, a survey is a great practice to get the statistics within your customer base regarding your products and services, new specific changes to have valuable insights for your organization. It helps understand your customer needs and wants.
Send Old-Fashioned Mail
It’s time to step away from the tablet and computer. The average customer today is intimidating by emails, phone calls and other digital channels. Sending a “Thank You” or “We Value Your Business” handwritten note along with some promotional items on special occasions will be a game-changer of boosting customer loyalty. This unique gesture stands out in the long run as it sticks to customer’s good memories. It’s never wrong to show your appreciation and let them know how much you value them.
About us:
At SupplierGATEWAY, we offer a robust platform for suppliers where you can gain access to new business opportunities and connect with customers of all sizes – from Fortune 500 companies and globally recognized companies to your local health system, manufacturer or business. Our easy-to-use app will help you stay connected to the opportunities that could make all the difference to your bottom line.
If your serve B2B clients, it’s common for you to respond to requests for proposal (RFP) from prospective buyers. But, many RFPs are complicated and feel overwhelming, which discourages businesses from exploring what makes a winning RFP response. 
Acquiring a new customer is always exciting. Yet, it doesn’t mean they will stay with you permanently. It is a common mistake for businesses to overlook their existing valuable customers and instead, focus so heavily on acquiring new customers they fail to retain their existing ones.