Vendorful AI Response Assistant

In this week's newsletter: - AI training AI... training AI... training AI...  - MY chatbot isn't evil, YOURS is evil! - Perplexity perplexed by robots-dot-txt

Don’t buy RFP response software to save time (though it WILL save you time). Buy it because you can compete on way more opportunities. RFP response automation completely changes your go/no-go analysis on RFPs. It opens up opportunities that GTM teams are throwing away today. I know because it has completely changed our own go/no-go analysis! Example: We just put the finishing touches on an RFP response. It’s something we wouldn’t have bid on 2 years ago. Here are just a few of the reasons we would have passed: ▶ One-week deadline (lol and wtf, but that’s a whole different post) ▶ Indications that we might be column fodder for a solution already in mind ▶ Request for sector-specific references (we have few in this niche) Without an RFP response solution it wouldn’t have mattered that we’re a great fit in terms of functionality. Responding would have been 2 weeks of work with a 1-week deadline and a low probability of advancing because of the soft factors I mentioned. In other words, hard pass. At least back then. But today? Using our own RFP response automation tool? Half a day of work for one person, plus some executive proofreading. That’s well worth the effort given the potential contract size, even if we think the odds of getting past the first round are 5-10%. And an added bonus! It pulled out some awesome content from a previous RFP response in a closely related sector that none of us remembered pulling together, probably because we didn’t get past the first round on that one. So our response is higher quality on top of being ridiculously fast to assemble. This is just ONE example. Having an RFP response tool at my disposal completely changes how I think about incoming RFPs. I used to dread them - that dread is why we started experimenting with automating our responses. I love them them now. :)

Vendorful sits in an interesting spot, seeing RFP trends on both the buy and sell sides. The biggest thing we're seeing now is RFPs moving downmarket, hard. A few years ago it would probably have been unthinkable for (say) a $20,000/year SaaS purchase to go through a formal RFP. Maybe "3 bids and a buy" in some organizations and if there were close competitors to compare to. Now we're routinely seeing this on both sides. At these price points an RFP is usually on the "light" side, to be clear. Again taking SaaS as an example, you might see 15-25 functional requirement questions plus a condensed InfoSec questionnaire. Not the 250-500 question monsters you routinely see at the upper end of the market. But it's still a formal process involving a cross-functional buying team, requiring a formal cross-functional response from the vendor. Curious to hear from sellers - are you seeing this as well or has it not made its way to your market (yet)? #RFPs #Sales #ProposalManagement

In this week's newsletter: - A new Claude variant from Anthropic - OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever (finally?) steps out on his own - Hollywood's AI moment gets delayed

In this week's newsletter: - No Apple products at Tesla? - A viable competitor to Sora...and it's free - The first step towards a bionic future

In this week's newsletter: - Leveling up weather forecasts - AI-based calorie counting - WhatsAds comes to WhatsApp

Things are getting too hot to handle! 🌶

We’re *very* excited about this one 👏🚀

Sellers are missing out on opportunities because they assume their competitors wrote every RFP they didn't write themselves. That's less and less true every day.

Fewer than 6 months into my career I got a lesson on executive soft power I’ve never forgotten. This is the story of Oliver, Wyman & Co.’s last day of "business attire". It was fall of 1999. I was working at Oliver, Wyman & Co., but rather than doing consulting work I was assigned to an internal tech project, which would eventually be come ERisk. The dress code for most office jobs in New York was business attire - i.e. suits and ties for men. With exceptions: travel days, summer Fridays, etc. Oliver Wyman was in this camp. But there were two things causing pressure on the dress code: 1. The Dotcom boom 2. A tech startup in the office ERisk used the same pool of consultants who were working on client projects. I shared a 5 person office with 4 people all assigned to clients. Ditto for my ERisk teammates. Our officemates didn’t see the point of wearing suits when the people sitting right next to them weren’t. And we didn’t see the point of wearing suits if we were literally never seeing a client. As with any behavioral bar, the dress code standard is not the MINIMUM. When suits were standard, khakis and a dress shirt were fairly normal to see. When dress shirts and khakis became the standard, polos and jeans became normal. It was an unstable equilibrium. Any little event might destabilize it and prompt change, in either direction. In Fall of 99, the event came. A senior partner (or several) had enough of lax enforcement of the dress code and sent a company-wide email. I don’t have a copy, but I remember it was a good memo. Well-argued. Pointed but fair. Emphatic but reasonable. It reestablished the line, and we would all have to observe it. So the next day, everyone (including ERisk) was back in suits. Everyone, that is, except one Alex Oliver. Yes, the “Oliver” in “Oliver Wyman”. Alex happened be flying to London that day. So a travel day for him - an exception to the business formal policy. And he wasn’t wearing khakis. No, he rolled up in jeans, work boots and an untucked flannel shirt. That was the end of business attire for people who were not meeting with clients. A new policy came out a short time later. I don’t claim to know Alex Oliver. In my time at OWC I had exactly one real conversation with him, and that was my first-round interview (a good story I’ll share someday). But I strongly suspected, then and later, that he knew exactly what he was doing. His message - intentional or not - was loud and clear: I don’t care how you dress, your work is what matters. It was my first lesson in executive soft power, and still one of the best I’ve seen. Without saying a word he ended discussion on a contentious topic and got what I must assume was his preferred outcome. In short: when you are a position of power, be thoughtful about how you act, because everyone will notice and follow your lead.