EP089: Get Ready for an Uptick in Infrastructure RFPs– with Dave Hulsen
The American Rescue Plan was signed into law in March, and with it, we anticipate an exponential increase in buying for infrastructure projects. So, what should your business be doing TODAY to get ready for the coming influx in RFPs?
Dave Hulsen is the Cofounder and COO of RFP360, a full-circle RFP management software solution that improves the way businesses issue and respond to RFPs. He has an extensive background as a technology consultant, where he gained experience on both the buyer and responder-side of the proposal process. Dave is passionate about developing technology that transforms the RFP process for all involved.
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, Dave joins us to discuss how RFP360 has best practices built into the system, encouraging buyer-clients to write better questions and facilitate a more transparent, fair and objective process.
He offers insight on what businesses can do now to prepare for the coming increase in infrastructure RFPs, challenging us to streamline processes, clean up our content repository and update references and case studies.
Listen in for Dave’s advice on imbedding images and videos in your proposal content and learn how to use the tools you have to make your RFP response stand out!
Key Takeaways
Why RFP360 offers both buyer and responder software solutions
How Dave’s background in issuing and responding to RFPs as a tech consultant inspired RFP360
Dave’s insight on how the nature of RFP questions is changing
The benefit of imbedding images and videos in your proposal content
How RFP360 has best practices built into the system (i.e.: transparency, fairness and objectivity)
Dave’s advice on leveraging a new technology or process to do your ‘spring cleaning’
How Dave’s team is working to help buyer-clients write better RFPs
What businesses can do to prepare for the coming increase in RFPs for infrastructure programs
1. Look at your processes
2. Do content review
3. Update references/case studies
How to make it easy for evaluators to find supporting documents
How to use the tools you have to improve RFP processes and organize your content repository
Connect with Dave
Resources
RFP Success Show EP89 Transcription
You're listening to the RFP Success Show with eight time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture in RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30 and even 50%. And meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
(00:24):
Hey everybody, welcome to part one of my interview with Dave Hulsen, from RFP360. We had a very great conversation and it ran long. So we decided to do this in two parts. So today you're listening to part one. Hello, everybody and welcome to the RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek, your host and I'm founder and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Excited for today's guest, today's guest is Dave Hulsen and he is founder of RFP360. Welcome Dave.
(00:57):
Well, thanks for having me, Lisa. Great to be here.
(01:00):
I'm excited to chat with you, all things RFP360 and some fun information about what's trending out there right now. And just learning more about your perspective on things. So we're excited that you're here. Let's kick this off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how did you come to have found RFP360 and then tell our audience of course, what RFP360 is?
(01:24):
Sure. Well, let's see, RFP360 is a software company that helps people with the request for proposal process. We sell two different solutions, one to the buyer side of the RFP transaction. And one to the responders are people who prepare proposals. They are independent of one another, but they are ideally when they work together, it's a wonderful way to exchange information as needed in the RFP process in a very secure and real-time manner. I'm a recovering statistician and I really like data. So I was involved with RFPs for a long time in telecommunications company and a couple of different consulting firms.
(02:08):
And I really found that the vehicle of the RFP to be quite helpful. I mean, most of the time, big technology purchases that was my background. And I have a lot of respect for that because I needed all this data to be objective and fair. And as I joked to you beforehand, the RFP has become a four letter word over time. And so many people have bad experiences and I totally understand it, but I wanted to bring some class back to it. And so in 2012, we set out to create this unified platform where buyers and sellers could work together on RFP responses and trying to put in the best practices of the RFP process. So that is how RSP360 came to be.
(02:51):
I love that story because it is interesting that whenever I meet somebody and they ask me what I do, and I tell them that I work with RFPs, they either don't know what it is or they roll their eyes and make some a groan because everybody pretty much hates them unless this is your career somehow. So I can totally relate to that. Well, obviously you're in the technology business and you help to automate and streamline everything. I love the concept of having both sides integrated together. Now, if we could just get everybody to do that, to make our lives easier, right? That would make everything great. But over the last year, obviously we're recording this in the spring of 2021. So over the last year, we've seen a lot of changes with COVID, the pandemic and everything is changing. So what are you seeing from a behind the scenes software perspective that's changed?
(03:48):
Well, first of all, I definitely follow lots of bloggers and things. And despite a lot of headlines of the RFP is dead headline over the years, I can A, tell you it's alive and well. And B, I think that there's a lot of really clever RFPs and not clever in a bad way, but smart RFPs going on out there. I will say our sample size is skewed and small because the people that use our software have made a conscientious decision to reach out and say, "I want to buy things through the RFP process better, I want to sell my services better." But even more so than maybe even just two years ago, the amount of information that's on the web is mind boggling. And so the buyers are super well-informed, just think about the sites that we go to, to compare things.
(04:46):
And the amazonaffication of all this stuff, reviews and who does this and that, it's really challenged me in the last year to not try to sell our stuff. Well, we really never sold much face-to-face anyway, but I mean, even face-to-face businesses are having to sell things online. So people are starting their research online. By the time you get to an RFP, sometimes there's a lot more awareness of maybe your buyer knows a lot more about you than they used to. I mean, that's different by industry, but.
(05:19):
Yeah. It's a great point. First of all, I love your term amazonaffication. I have not heard that before, so it's pretty
(05:25):
Cool. I don't think it's a real term, so don't use it.
(05:28):
No, you've now coined the term. I love it, I love it. But it is true and I think with that also comes, there is a lot more noise for the evaluators and the reviewers, right? So you've got to be crisper and cleaner with your response, I think, than ever before, which I know your software helps to facilitate that. But I think for our listeners, you've got to remember that there's a lot of noise around for these evaluators and reviewers than they're out there researching you and then they're coming and reading your proposal. And if it's a hot mess, you're going to lose them. Right?
(06:08):
That's a great point in that also because your buyers are starting with maybe their own independent research, the narrative can be manipulated. I mean, a really clever marketing strategy can change the conversation. And we're using Zoom, Zoom has become a verb on things unlike people who even aren't using Zoom, they call it Zoom sometimes-
(06:34):
Yes [inaudible 00:06:34].
(06:34):
... just I feel like Kleenex.
(06:35):
[inaudible 00:06:35], right?
(06:36):
Exactly. And so I don't know if that was a conscientious thing that they did, that they really got out in front of it. But regardless, there are so many interesting things going on. And again, our sample size is very small, but the nature of even RFP questions are changing. And it's something that we propagate from our side because we tell buyers not to ask 500 detailed questions when you can ask for use cases, for example, and we were talking about this before the show, but the use of videos, because this is an online platform, the nature of questions have changed.
(07:11):
And thus, it just changes the content a little bit. Multimedia is big. We see lots of really pretty proposals coming through the system. And it's not that they're crazy format in and all this stuff. I mean, we give people for better or for worse. The skeleton, here are the sections, here are the questions answer these questions, but we try to give people the means to embed images and videos and format their content so that they can make their content stand out. And I think I firmly believe that the RFP vehicle is in its purest form when you take out all the other noise, like the delivery vehicle of the proposal, in the old days, I mean, people like my wife would drive stacks of proposals over in the beginning that was the business developer's job.
(08:01):
And now we try to bring that down and say, focus on the content, focus on the differentiators and things and not somebody who's got a bias because of their geography or previous relationship or something. I don't know and there's a pro and con for everything, but at least that feels more fair to me.
(08:19):
Yeah. I love the idea too. And like you said, we talked about this before we hit that record button, I love the idea of the multimedia and getting video in there. We do a lot of work with state government RFPs, and man, I don't know when that's ever going to come to fruition with state governments. We were just thrilled. I mean, always looking for the silver lining with COVID, right? We're like, oh, the states are now saying, "You can just email your proposal. And instead of printing out those binders and binders that people are still delivering." So I'm looking forward to that moving forward for sure.
(08:51):
City government of ours, I visited them on time. And they had their Dropbox in the front of City Hall and they'd put a sticker over it that says "We use electronic submissions only now." And I cannot tell you how many times I've talked to counties, especially, and cities. I mean, the bigger cities are obviously adopting technology very well, but some people, some organizations would not accept bidders from outside of a certain geographic radius. And I was like, I get it if this is landscaping, but this is not a landscaping bid, and having conference calls and things like that, I would read these things about this in-person pre-bid meeting and I'm like, "You mean conference call, right?" "Oh, no, we make them come in." I was like, "You told me you wanted to use this system because you wanted more fairness, transparency, and objectivity and now you have just completely ruined this by not allowing potentially really good bidders with scheduling issues or people not wanting to get on a plane to bid on this."
(09:56):
And then I don't know, some of that stuff just really frustrates me because they are standing in their own way. All these tools exist lets, please use these tools.
(10:07):
Yeah, let's use them and open up. I mean, it opens up so much more opportunity for all businesses, right? And it opens up opportunity for the buyers to find the right fit, regardless of geography. So, yeah, I love that too.
(10:23):
This has been bad for some of our business development efforts, but in our system, we require the buyer to put the point value on each section. And so if there are questions in there, like this question about our references, that's worth 100 points or something. And if there are three references, then each is worth roughly 33 points or whatever. And some people, some organizations want us to change the scoring to where, as you mentioned, state government stuff that "Here's the RFP." And then, "Oh, and then here's the criteria." And 50% of the points are based on how well you address the problem in 20... I'm like, "Well, that is not super objective. You're being a little bit subjective here because the content within your proposal that shows how well you can approach the problem is all spread out around here."
(11:16):
So we make the buyers put a point value for each question. And we also by default show that to the respondents so that they can see, "Oh, this is a big section we need to spend time here." And that transparency is very important. Now, the organizations that don't value that transparency don't ultimately choose us to be their solution. And that's okay with me. I just wish that more organizations, especially with taxpayer money would take their old template, print it out, fax it to somebody and light it on fire because it is very bad. Some of them are horrible.
(11:51):
Well, why do you think that they... What is their hesitation in being so transparent? What do you think that is? Do you think that they really don't want to be that objective? They want to have that subjectivity, or what's the whole back?
(12:05):
I don't want to throw too many of these organizations under the bus, but in one case, somebody told me that when they used to have binders rolled in for a giant defense contractor sort of thing, they had two different places. And when FedEx and UPS brought them in, they wheeled a couple of vendors over to this room and a couple of vendors over to this room. They already knew which ones were going straight to storage and which ones are going to be read. And you think about the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that some of those companies were spending on the preparation of these things.
(12:39):
That's brutal.
(12:39):
So, and this is why people hate the RFP process. There has always been malfeasance in that, a smaller degree. We don't allow the scores on the buyer's side to... So I'll take a step back in our system, obviously the buyer and all their people write the RFP, they put the scoring criteria and they publish it out. Each of the respondents comes in and they can have multiple users on their side. They're in charge of all that. They can have all these people, they can assign out tasks to people and there's dashboards. And so it's very collaborative on both sides. And then they submit their proposal back and the buyers score it all.
(13:18):
We don't let the scores... Well, somebody said, "Well, I want my scores to be able to sit in a room and talk about this stuff." I was like, "I don't know how I feel about this. I really feel to be objective. You need to do your scoring. And I do my scoring. And then we come back and meet. And if I gave you high marks, if I gave vendor A high marks on this response, and you gave the same vendor low marks, let's talk about the differences there. I saw something that you didn't see or vice versa. I don't think you should be letting the dominant voice in a room, push you in some direction." And so there are those best practices that we have built in. I'm an idealist also, and it's not great for business.
(13:58):
But it's your company and you get to pick right? You get to make those rules. I love it. And I actually think, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think that there's probably some fear around it being that objective to some degree is what I would guess.
(14:14):
Yeah, for sure. There's always the fear that somebody at one of your competitors jumped in and was able to control the narrative, to control how the RFP was written. And how many times have we heard we're not going to respond to this RFP because we didn't help in the development of it. That's a real thing. And until we have a whole library of very objectively vetted templates out there, which honestly will never happen. I mean, that's, because everybody's needs are different. You can't templatize that kind of stuff. But I will say that the customers that use us oftentimes are really thoughtful in putting out their objectives. They'll start off in a section, "Here are three marketing goals, main marketing goals for the year." And then they'll have questions like knowing our goals, how can your solution help us achieve these goals?
(15:12):
Some of that is just you could do that in our system or on paper. But I don't know. There are people who are really thoughtful about the way they're doing our RFPs. And sometimes the fact of moving to an online platform means that they want to do something differently and better. And also they say, "Oh, let's take this opportunity to rethink the questions we ask." We see that also with the people who respond to our RFPs, when they come to our platform, we say, "As you build your library question on this stuff, go through, review everything. And are you using the right voice? Is your terminology right, has product names, brand, names change?" People use that kind of stuff all the time on accident. So whenever you make a move to a new technology or new process, use this as an opportunity to do your spring cleaning.
(16:00):
There's so much more behind the failed RFP than just lost revenue. Employee engagement increases with each loss. And the Gallup Survey suggests that it cost up to 10 grand in salary per employee with 15% lower profits. If you're ready to increase your win rate consistently and put our winning and repeatable strategies in place, schedule your consultation now at bit.ly/chatRFP. That's bit.ly, B-I-T.L-Y/chatRFP.
(16:26):
Yeah, it's interesting on the responder side, we see it too with companies that are really interested in developing a culture around winning RFPs versus the company that's starry-eyed because there's a $12 million RFP that just came across their plate that they can do. There's a totally different feel to that. You can tell. And so as I'm listening to you talk about the buyer side, and it sounds like you've got a particular market that is very thoughtful about how they want to release their RFPs and they truly do want it to be objective. I feel the same thing on the responder side. They really want to build that type of business and build a culture of winning instead of it just being the frantic moment of this RFP on our plate today.
(17:16):
Part of that is making sure that to use the sports analogy, what your at bat, like, make sure it's a good one. And I will say it was easy for us to pitch this in the beginning for the responders, which was, "Are you passing on RFPs because of capacity?" "Yes." "Oh, well then you need a tool to help out." Well, that's assuming everything else is great, then that's a real that's a real issue. But in reality, we have to be much more selective in what we take on. And we pass on our RFPs that come to us all the time because I see this out especially, especially if they're looking to purchase our buyer's side or issuing side functionality, because if they don't write a good RFP there, that's going to reflect poorly on us because it has our name in it.
(18:07):
And people fill at the end of every submission, there's a thumbs up or thumbs down. And I get the emails of like, "What did you like and what did you not like about this?" And when somebody complains about the content of the RFP, it makes me feel bad because I didn't write the RFP, but I let somebody in the door to write that RFP in our system. And so we are trying to find more ways to help people write better RFPs the same way, in previous podcasts, you've had people on to talk about how to write better responses, active voice, the reading level of the responses, and there are lots of plugins for your browser for that kind of stuff. So we don't build a lot of that into the application because there are multiple choices to plug rather, but I don't know, those are all wonderful things to think about, but you have to be willing to change or else you won't get better.
(19:03):
Absolutely. Well, it's interesting as we're talking about this, and I think it's an interesting segue because with the American Rescue Plan that was signed, that bill that was signed, we are likely going to see an increase in buying for infrastructure type programs. And this was one area where I feel that I think there's going to be a lot more RFPs that come out around this. And I feel this is going to be an area where people certainly are like, "Oh my gosh, well, we can do this. So let's just bid on everything and anything that we can," but I'd love to know for businesses in the applicable niches, we see technology or anything really that would support infrastructure. What do you feel are the most important action that they can take to get ready today in preparation for that potential influx of RFPs that might be released?
(19:54):
The funniest and sadly, very common response I hear about. So we track onboarding into our system and we know where we want, how long in days we want this to occur. And sometimes people either won't make a decision to use our software, or they slow the onboarding because they're so busy working on RFP responses. And the funny thing, I mean, the irony is not lost, right? But that means that in a time like this, for a lot of our customers, 2020 was a really tough year. And so we let people out of their contracts, we let people go multiple months or we downgraded all this staff because we honestly care in business. We were one of the fortunate ones in that push to go online, but take this opportunity to do three things. And one is, look at your process.
(20:51):
So, is your intake, right? All the stuff that the APMP teaches about, capture, planning, all this stuff that happens before the RFP, get this stuff down. The content review is huge. And so if you've got a writer who's got a couple hours a week, go through and make sure... look at your best answers. Now, this is where tools help, because we can tell you every answer and how many times it's been used and what proposals and how many times it's been edited and by whom, so tools like that obviously help.
(21:23):
Yeah, great data.
(21:23):
But just go in and clean things up and then references in case studies. So this came from our marketing department. This is where I have used a stale use cases in the past and take that time to go out there and get some new, fresh stuff. So whether it's your content or making sure that you've got referenceable customers, case studies and things updated.
(21:49):
Yeah. Great advice. Great advice. And I do love the advice of on the front end, making sure that you have enough information that you can bid based on knowledge that you have of the client that you can't ask after that RFP comes out. Right? But yeah, absolutely. And tools like yours definitely helps support that cleaning up of the content and making sure it's ready to go. So great advice. Now, I'm really glad to have your perspective on this next question, because of course we see what sets RFP winners apart from RFP content. We've been talking about that a little bit strategy, submission standpoint, but what do you see from a software platform standpoint, are key differentiators in winning submissions versus the losing?
(22:30):
This is really tough for me. And this might be our fastest question out there because as I was putting together some thoughts for this, with our marketing team, almost every bullet point we came up with has nothing to do with technology. Don't dance around the question. You just answer it, use their terminology from a solution standpoint, we're seeing that outside of our tool, there are more online bidding technologies out there and people complain about them all, ours included when they have to use them. Obviously you got to dance to their tune. So make sure you're comfortable using those tools. And that's a given, but the one thing that is software technology dependent is the multimedia aspect. And even with there were paper proposals, and then we moved to CD-ROMs. I used to have to get one version of paper and then one CD-ROM, and then I would distribute it out to people.
(23:32):
That still exists by the way.
(23:34):
I know it seems so far in my rear view mirror to do that. Yeah. Then when we moved to people were using portals with where you could drop content and I'll use the term Dropbox, not that specifically, but similar to that, you could drop a bunch of content out there, including videos and links and things. And that helps. Contextualness is super important. So one of the things that's always been tough is to ask questions here and provide supporting material over here, because the scores are not going to spend a lot of time going through and digging through the FTP site or whatever.
(24:12):
Again, shameless plug for us but that is something we built all the way in. So the context is always there. I asked you this question, here's my supporting documentation, video attachment, whatever it is, it's right there. And I think that provides a better experience outside of our platform. Find ways to do that because there are ways to embed a video link or something, so that it's at least somebody reading this in a word doc or PDF and they click on this and the video opens up. That's not the end of the world. So it's better than nothing.
(24:43):
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too. I just think, I know you had said that people will complain about software's certainly they complain about not having a software. So I would say when I look at this question, obviously not from a software platform standpoint, but I think when we're trying to make our content better and when we're trying to do all of those things that we need to do to have our content stand out better and make our answers better. If we have a software platform like yours, it gives us more time to be able to focus on those things. And I think that that's a piece of the puzzle that people don't pay as much attention to, especially for those maybe mid-sized companies that are in growth mode and the way they've been piecing it together has been working. But I got to tell you, it is a huge time saver once you get to know the software platform, to be able to focus more of your efforts on that content, which is really important.
(25:39):
Yeah. And whether it is putting your documents into a shared folder... When I would interview people in the beginnings of this in 2012 and 2013, even there were the proposal coordinators who were taking the RFP and they were manually going through previous responses, putting things together and saying, "Okay, Dave, here's how you answered these questions in the past." And I was like, "How long did they take you to put together?" And she's like, "Ah, three, four hours. I did this." And I was like, we measured in milliseconds, how fast the search engine goes out and says, "Here's how I've answered previous questions before." Whatever, and any system does that now you know Google Docs is a great place for that kind of stuff. But we collectively have been doing things a certain way. And for decades, I didn't look at RFP tools when I was a consultant running RFPs. There wasn't a need. I mean, when you're charging by the hour, why do you care about efficiency, kind of thing?
(26:41):
But having everybody on the same page is really important. And even little things like having everything tied into your inbox. Well only one person can see that. All these things, there are so many different tools, RFP software aside to help us with these things. And I think this is where it kind of if you're in this column before the storm period, go out there and find something, and it doesn't have to be expensive. If you're a Microsoft house, you've got lots of tools. If you're a Google house, you've got a ton of searches, obviously fantastic and Google products, but there are lots of ways to at least improve your process and your content repository pretty quickly. But if you've got content stuck in PDFs and PowerPoints and stuff, oh, good luck finding it. I've never had that kind of [inaudible 00:27:29].
(27:29):
Yeah. And the bigger that library of those documents gets the harder it is. And who's got time, so.
(27:36):
This has been another episode of the RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcastatrfpsuccess.com, no matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, the RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20 and even 50%. Learn more at the rfpsuccesscompany.com.