The Responsive SRM Platform helps organizations accelerate revenues and mitigate risks by enabling teams to respond more effectively to a broad range of business-impacting information requestsRFPIO, the leader in strategic response management software, today announced it is rebranding the company to Responsive given the significant expansion in the breadth of response use cases it supports beyond RFPs. Responsive now has nearly 2,000 customers including 20% of the Fortune 100, and more than 300,000 users. These companies are using Responsive’s industry-leading SaaS platform to handle a broad set of response use cases ranging from RFPs, RFIs and RFQs to security questionnaires, due diligence questionnaires, ad hoc requests for information and more.
Founders Ganesh Shankar, AJ Sunder and Sankar Lagudu established the company in 2015 after collaborating on RFPs at their previous company. While serving in their respective roles, they experienced firsthand the myriad challenges organizations face responding to RFPs with traditional collaboration and content management tools. Information was strewn in silos across the organization, inconsistent and often out of date. They also found it hard to collaborate with other subject matter experts on answers to questions, and difficult to project manage RFP responses in general. Given their experiences, the founders knew there had to be a better way to respond to RFPs – leading them to focus on building a platform with the capabilities necessary to enable organizations to put their best foot forward with RFP responses.
Fast forward to today, and Responsive highlights include the following:
- Largest, fastest growing, most profitable company in category: Responsive has nearly 500 employees globally and is the fastest growing company in its space, while also operating profitably. Furthermore, the team has carefully managed growth and is currently funding its operations with revenue generated from customers rather than additional rounds of funding.
- Significant value delivery: Responsive is driving significant business value for its customers by helping them win more deals and mitigate business risks associated with sales contracts, while also providing better employee experiences for response teams. To date, Responsive customers have used the company’s platform to engage in more than $200B in revenue opportunities to help fuel additional growth.
- Breakout leader in “Strategic Response Management” (SRM): Responsive has emerged as the breakout category leader in the new SRM market, supporting a broad set of response use cases that goes way beyond just RFPs. Aragon Research recently published a seminal paper on SRM titled “Getting to Faster Business Results with Strategic Response Management,” which featured RFPIO/Responsive as pioneering the category. Aragon estimates the SRM market size at $3.34B in 2022 growing to $22.74B by 2028 with a CAGR of 35 percent.
- Platform-approach and innovation focus create compelling value proposition for customers across geographies, business segments, and industries: Customers regularly select Responsive based on its powerful platform that delivers extensive collaboration, content management, project management, requirements analysis, proposal management, profile management, and analytics and reporting capabilities, as well as its best user experience, broadest set of customer success programs and most extensive set of integrations. Responsive’s close partnership with its customers has played a vital role in enabling the company to continue delivering industry firsts. For example, Responsive was the first in its category to leverage AI for pre-populating new information requests with “best of” answers from previous responses, optimize user experiences in real-time, and utilize generative AI to help responders tune answers in a variety of ways. New innovations in Responsive’s recent GPT, Spring 2023 Release, and Summer 2023 Release announcements demonstrate how the company continues to deliver the market’s most powerful platform.
- Highly experienced growth team: Responsive has recently expanded its executive team with veterans of hypergrowth SaaS enterprises, hiring Michael Londgren as chief marketing officer and Jeff Santelices as chief revenue officer. Michael is a technology marketing leader with deep executive experience scaling hypergrowth businesses including DocuSign, Google G Suite (now Workspace), and Seismic. And Jeff brings extensive leadership experience driving growth at companies including Apttus (now Conga), Mindtickle and Corio/IBM.
- Repeated acknowledgement for industry leadership: Responsive is regularly recognized as a leader within the industry and has generated top rankings in multiple G2 reports (Top RFP Software, No. 1 Momentum Leader in RFP Software, 2023 Best Software List for Office Products, and Best Estimated ROI for RFP), was included in the 2022 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, 2022 Inc. Power Partner Awards and 2022 Inc. 5000 lists, was celebrated for its company culture and diversity in back to back annual awards from Comparably, and was highlighted by The Wall Street Journal Pro – Venture Capital for its early embrace of generative AI in an enterprise SaaS solution.
“We always knew we were building a solution that was capable of doing far more than just fixing broken RFP processes,” said Ganesh Shankar, CEO, Responsive. “Today, our solution has become the industry-leading strategic response management platform that enables response teams to address a wide variety of business use cases, helping them increase revenues, mitigate risks, and provide better employee experiences. Given this significant expansion of our overall value proposition as well as the company’s overall momentum, now’s the time to rebrand the company to Responsive. We are excited about the company’s journey thus far, and even more excited about the path ahead.”
What Customers Are Saying
Microsoft: “Responsive’s impact on our pursuits has been incredible: It’s simplified and streamlined finding relevant content and improving it; it’s centralized and minimized burdensome administrative tasks. In short, the time it saves pursuit teams enables those teams to focus more on what will win,” said Mitchell Galloway-Edgar, Senior Business Program Manager at Microsoft.
Nationwide: “How do we manage our information, keep it up to date and make it available for people to use? Every time this information challenge comes up with other teams I tell them about Responsive,” said Linda Campbell, Proposal Director for Nationwide Retirement Plans. “So far, two other teams have started using it, with another joining this year. In the end, it’s all about the ease of using Responsive for information management.”
Optum: “Ultimately, people want to experience something that will make their job easier. That’s what we all want to achieve with Response,” said Joel Van Pelt, Director of Innovation and Strategy, Growth Proposal Services at health services innovation company Optum.
Teradata: “The ease of use cannot be understated. A senior manager on my team had never used a software system at all. He was skeptical because he thought it would slow down his process. When he saw Responsive,” said Terradata’s Joseph Ayala, Proposal Development Center Director. “I’m sold. The information security team is using it for questionnaires. It shortened their completion time from 40 hours to 12.”
Talkdesk: “We have a 100% customer satisfaction rate internally from all users of Responsive,” said Anthony Rossi, Proposal Manager. “Responsive has a multiplicative effect on your proposal managers; operationally, it doubles your effective headcount.”
