Winning a seat at the table: A response strategist’s playbook

How to elevate your position within your organization

Sodexo is a global organization and the world’s largest provider of catering and food services. Sodexo has 430,000 employees globally and is the 17th largest employer on the planet.

As the VP of the Proposal Development Center, Danelle runs the North America Response Team, which has over 80 full-time employees across three subteams. Last year, the team managed 1,000 opportunities valued at $4B in annual revenue.

Danelle’s team is a shared service model supporting eight verticals or lines of business. Each segment is a formidable multimillion dollar business with its own C-suite. She said their team services are a key driver of the company’s growth engine.

Three weeks into her new role at Sodexo, Danelle met with her CFO for the first time. She thought she was stepping into a meet-and-greet session. Instead, he announced that he was cutting her team’s budget by 80%.

Danelle was perplexed. Sales and retention targets were up, and while managing costs and keeping overhead low makes sense, you simply cannot cut your way to greatness, she said.

This decision could impede growth and compromise the team’s ability to hit their targets. Unfortunately, there was no discussion — only a final decision. Danelle was determined not to let this happen. Instead, she wrote the proposal of her life to create a business case for investment in the proposal department.

Proposal teams struggle to feel represented in their organization

Danelle pointed out that the significant cut to her team’s budget would negatively impact their ability to create growth and hit their targets for the quarter/year.

As Responsive and APMP uncovered in the 2024 State of Strategic Response Management Report, about 48% of company revenue is tied to RFPs, bids, tenders, and proposals. Additionally, 70% of companies reported an annual increase in revenue generated through RFPs and other strategic responses.

Couple this with another discovery: only 65% of respondents reported feeling like they’re business partners who are well-known across their organization. It’s easy to see why bid and proposal teams across the industry feel like they’re both undervalued and unable to keep up with the rising volume of incoming proposals with dwindling budgets.

As we’ll discover later, Danelle’s proposal wasn’t just about keeping her budget intact. It was also stepping up to affirm her team’s value to the organization through clear metrics.

Writing the proposal of a lifetime

Danelle kept her audience – the C-suite – in mind when writing her proposal and focused on six key areas:

1. The business challenge
2. Feedback from stakeholder interviews
3. A side-by-side comparison with peer functions
4. A new mindset and perspective
5. Illustrating the why in the investment
6. Remedies and recommendations

Danelle knew Sodexo had a healthy balance sheet, so her budget cut was not due to a lack of available funding. Instead, she had to educate and convince executives on her team’s value and their direct tieback to the bottom line. This meant Danelle had to convince all eight C-suite members that investment in her team was a profitable investment.

Danelle studied other companies that win more business and proposed a new model for the department, shifting from a traditional proposal department to Strategic Response Management (SRM).

She also proposed four major improvements and illustrated the ROI of investing in the new team model. It started with the business challenge. Her team’s success is interlocked with the company winning, which means making and exceeding their numbers.

Danelle dug into what was causing the business to underperform, looking at both market dynamics and internal data and perspectives. Ultimately, she discovered her team needed to improve their ability to sell and win more business. That was her challenge to solve.

Leveraging AI within SRM to drive faster, better responses

In the 2024 State of SRM Report, Danelle goes into detail about the importance of both technology and AI in helping proposal teams scale and keep up with rising demands.

“Responding to information requests is a cross-functional process, involving nearly everyone. Proposal teams are responsible for ensuring that the process is effective, efficient, and positive.

Sodexo was able to leverage AI across their SRM processes to drive faster, better responses, allowing their team to focus on high value activities such as tailoring responses to customer needs and driving better alignment across the business.

“We’re able to learn from customer insights, scale best practices, and operate more strategically, allowing us to be more proactive than ever before,” she said.

Transitioning proposal teams from cost centers to vital peers

Adding qualitative feedback from stakeholders is just as critical. Danelle went out of her way to understand what her stakeholders were saying and what some of the barriers were to growth.

Beyond lagging sales, the top concern was the quality of responses. The voice of the stakeholder was strong, and that informed Danelle that getting the “yes” for the funding was going to revolve around solving their pain points.

Next, she outlined a side-by-side comparison to the other functions in the growth ecosystem: sales and marketing. This was one of the biggest needle movers.

By interviewing sales and marketing leaders, Danelle discovered that those teams experienced increases in their budget and their staffing while the proposal team was infringed in every area. To help sell her team’s importance, Danelle positioned the proposal team as peers to both sales and marketing, not as a subservient party.

In her investigation, Danelle realized that while other functions were growing and striving to hit higher revenue targets, targets her team significantly contributed to, her team was the one hit with the significant budget cut.

From there, Danelle took on a new mindset and perspective, considering both the buyer’s journey and the customer lifecycle — the growth engine.

The growth engine is the ecosystem of driving business through the company. It spans the flow of lead generation, opportunity management, and all the way through client management. It shows not only the collaboration of teams, but also the order of operations, product, marketing, sales, and then client management.

Each one of these functions is a gear that works collaboratively with the next. While each cog is an independent function, the engine cannot function if one cog fails or without collaboration.

The growth engine also demonstrates that the proposal function can and should sit alongside sales and marketing as peers, not as inferiors.

“The reality is that proposal teams are strategic response teams that align cross-functional stakeholders, processes, and systems to deliver winning responses to information requests by harnessing a company’s knowledge,” Danelle said.

As a result, teams function better, employees are happier, and there’s a greater topline revenue. Again, while each team is an independent cog, any engine missing a cog will fail to function.

“It’s time to recognize proposal teams for their vital role in making the revenue engine hum,” she said.

Embracing a new way of thinking as a business and portfolio manager

To make the case to invest in the proposal department, Danelle needed to embrace thinking of the proposal department as both a business and portfolio. This had two key components.

The first is that your team, no matter the size, is a business. Your team itself is a business independent of the company at large, so teams should think like business owners. Think of your proposal team like a machine. Your company is investing money into your team with the expectation and the promise that it will generate more than invested in.

The second key takeaway is that you are a portfolio manager. You’ve been afforded resources, perhaps money in the form of a budget or staffing in the form of personnel, and every day, you’re making decisions about how to invest those resources with an expectation of generating a return. This is capital allocation.

Management allocates capital regularly, and individual contributors do too. Even if you don’t manage people or a budget, you are managing precious resources, time, and energy.

Danelle outlined six key questions she wanted to ask as a part of her proposal-writing process, all of which can serve as a valuable model for bid and proposal teams everywhere to determine where they are spending their time and what their ROI is as a team.

1. Where are you spending most of your time?
2. What activities are guzzling up most of your energy?
3. Are you getting the maximum impact for how you spend those resources, or are you guzzling up resources with little return?
4. What impact is your time yielding?
5. Are you spending time on high output, high reward tasks, or are you guzzling time with tasks that don’t generate much return or impact?
6. Have you ever audited your time against what you got back from it?

Danelle ran her numbers and determined that her team, in accordance with the six guiding principles above, would see a significant ROI if the company invested in the team.

Responsive experts brought up much of these same points in the second part of a two-part blog series we posted earlier this year, where we covered how proposal experts can demonstrate and expand impact with their leadership using clear, measurable data.

Four major improvements to elevate your department

Danelle also found success when she compared the cost of the investment in funding the proposal team against the value of the average deal size. If her team could win just one more deal this year, the investment would pay for itself.

She also had to demonstrate how the money would be used and what the investors can expect as a result. To sweeten the deal, she proposed four major improvements to level up the department:

1. Leveling up talent
2. Creating new positions
3. Harnessing technology
4. Elevating the impact and the visibility of the team

Each one of these four areas tied back to solve for the pain point of quality with demonstrable proof points. “Strategist” was a new role she created to help level up her department. While the historical titles of proposal writers, proposal managers, and project managers are important, this simple reframing created a more high-end role with greater visibility and impact.

To help sell her point even more, Danelle supported all of her recommendations with industry-leading data — and the numbers were clear. Companies that invest more, win more. Market leaders invest in growth. 

With all the prep work done, Danelle put her business case together and didn’t just ask to preserve the team and budget. She asked for more, confident her findings would back up her request. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.

The 2024 State of SRM Report found that companies with greater commercial success understand that growth requires appropriate resourcing and investment in their bid and proposal teams.

Those teams that are already succeeding are far more likely to be:

• Increasing budgets for bid and proposal teams (not significantly slashing them)
• Investing in technology solutions (such as AI and SRM platforms)
• Focusing on training teams

In return, these teams are seeing higher win rates. Companies that are investing in these key areas are also more likely to report an annual revenue increase.

The rewards of a well-crafted proposal strategy and elevated team

For all her hard work, Danelle not only secured the cut funding, but also received the 20% increase she asked for. It was the largest funding of the response team in company history.

This transformation would not be possible if the numbers didn’t support her claims. She needed results to show for their work, and they were all rooted in board and executive-level metrics.

• 17% increase in the win rate
• Won more mega deals than any prior year
• 50% increase in customer satisfaction scores

The evolution from a bid and proposal team to a strategic response team changed perceptions, allowing Danelle’s team to operate at a higher level and get a bigger seat at the table.

The team went from a transactional cost center to a strategic growth driver. They went from order takers to shaping commercial strategy. They elevated from low visibility to four-level visibility, and they evolved from understanding products and writing about them in proposals to leveraging information collected within Q&As and influencing the product roadmap.

This transformation was not exclusive to large enterprise employers or those with VP titles. Danelle said these same techniques can be applied at any size company and at every stage of growth, from start-ups to large global enterprises, across every industry around the globe.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re in your early career or a more seasoned veteran. This message, these learnings, and this impact is for all of us,” she said.

Key takeaways in earning a seat at the table as a strategic partner

The transformation from back-office cost centers to strategic response teams is not just a possibility, it’s a necessity for proposal teams looking to demonstrate their value in today’s competitive business environment.

As Danelle’s story at Sodexo illustrates, with strong leadership, a clear and intentional strategy, and a focus on delivering measurable outcomes, proposal teams can reframe perceptions and play a central role in driving organizational success at the highest levels.

The path to transformation is challenging, but the rewards—greater recognition, influence, and impact—make the journey worthwhile.

We referenced the 2024 State of SRM Report many times throughout this article. If you’re interested in reading more, you can access the full report to see all the essential data that will shape a winning SRM strategy for teams small and large.