What's an RFX?
An RFX — or Request for Anything (X) — is a term that SalesOps, RevOps, and GTMOps use to refer to any request from a prospect to help move the deal further down the funnel. Broadly speaking, it includes:
- RFPs (Requests for Proposals): Sent either blindly from a prospect, or worse, their consultant (ugh), as part of a formal bid process—perhaps they are in a regulated industry/government, or best of all, you helped write it! It often includes an overview of their challenges, organization's direction, business/technical requirements, and a place for you to fill out a ton more pieces of info. On average, 70–400 requirements/questions, 7+ people involved in the process, 4 week turnaround1
- RFIs (Requests for Information): To kick off a discovery process, some prospects may send this over for general info as they broadly compare the landscape. This is normally for more legacy companies that can't do the discovery on their own (such as look at review sites, trial, watch videos).
- Security questionaires: Often includes
- One-off requests: An email about feature functionality, details about security for their InfoSec, a pricing estimate based on their solution needs.
Modeling the impact of RFX
For many companies, their answer to responding to RFPs or RFIs is a hard "no." And there's reason for this. They are super time consuming, generally are a pain to respond to, and with a small sample size, sales usually shares that they've only ever won 1 or 2.
In a recent analysis done by Twilio's GTMOps team, they found that RFPs were involved in 35% of their gross new bookings and had a surprisingly high stage movement (55%) from discovery to negotiation. And when they moved up-market in any vertical, RFP volume doubled; with it came a larger average account value (ACV) but also larger investment to close the sale (CAC).
I've worked with SalesOps and Chief Revenue Officers to model the impact of answering more RFXs, but with automation. Here's a simplified version of our spreadsheet 👇
RFX Automation ROI Calculator
Adjust the inputs to model your team's potential savings
This model doesn't account for additional sales process costs from increased pipeline volume (impacting CAC), nor does it model sales velocity improvements from automation—both of which would further improve ROI.
In summary
Responding to RFXs can represent a significant opportunity for driving new revenue, especially in up-market and enterprise sales. Investing in the right solution (hire more technical sales resources smart or automation) is crticial to scaling effectively and getting the ROI from the process.
Sources:
1 Twilio GTMOps findings, 2024. Source