A leader in the financial services industry wanted to increase their Request for Proposal (RFP) success rate and identified a need to upgrade the skills of the sales support team that wrote much of the RFP content.
Business Issues
An internationally-renowned financial services firm tracked their win ratio and found that they were not winning their fair share of RFPs. Because their RFPs tended to be very lengthy and complex documents, many people and departments were involved in the writing and presentation of the RFP document. As such, they established a multi-functional management task force to investigate areas for improvement in the RFP process.
The internal task force identified many areas for improvement, notably that the current process made it difficult to synthesize the work of many people to create a congruent message in the RFP. In addition, other major areas for improvement were to do a better job of highlighting benefits and differentiators and to improve the Executive Overview.
Sales Training Needs Assessment
Peak Selling interviewed the management task force and learned about the sales and business issues cited above. When we discovered that the majority of attendees for the RFP training program were sales support personnel rather than the outside sales professionals, we next identified the steps in the RFP process that utilized the sales support personnel the most. We also recommended to management that these attendees receive a pre-workshop assessment survey to help identify their preferred writing style and areas for improvement.
Sales Training Solutions
Peak Selling began the process by sending a detailed Writing Styles Assessment Survey to each attendee. The assessment was used to highlight each person’s strengths and areas for improvement in writing and communicating with customers. In addition, the collective results would be used post-workshop to identify the most critical skills to coach and reinforce after the sales workshop was concluded.
Peak Selling designed a customized version of our sales training program titled Writing a Winning Proposal (RFP). Two of the most valuable concepts from the sales training were to learn how to customize each RFP for specific clients and how to write a concise and compelling executive overview. Each participant received an electronic email reinforcement (link) planning form to be used as a post-workshop tool.
The output of the sales training program was that everyone became much more confident in their ability to write RFPs that would persuade clients to select their firm rather than competition.