Top 20 U.S. Bank Drives New Business with Sant RFPMaster and ProposalMaster

Current Status

To ensure a high win rate for the 150 RFPs received each year by the Treasury Management Sales Group of this top 20 U.S. banking company, responses include up-to-date answers to as many as 1,000 questions, as well as a short customized proposal that presents additional recommendations and information. These RFP response packages are completed accurately and in a standardized format with Sant RFPMaster and ProposalMaster. By year-end, ProposalMaster will also be used by 50 sales officers in three major market regions to create as many as 25,000 personalized proposals each year that are presented to prospects during initial sales visits. The approach is expected to further boost win rates by as much as 15 percent.

Original Challenge

Before implementing the Sant solutions, the bank prepared their RFP responses manually, copying and pasting information from earlier proposals. This was a risky approach because information was not always current, and human errors sometimes led to inclusion of inaccurate content. Additionally, proposals did not adhere to a consistent structure and format, and did not always convey the bank's brand image or messaging.

The bank also had a problem with a direct sales program that was not meeting performance objectives. Sales officers made proactive visits to prospects but did not always present them with the personalized information required to boost win rates. "Basically, the only documents sales officers provided to prospects were glossies about the bank and its generalized service offerings," explains the bank's Vice President of Treasury Management Sales. "We knew we could win more business if sales officers presented tailored proposals that address the specific concerns of prospects, but there was no easy way for these documents to be created."

Solution

According to this VP, the bank decided to address both of these challenges with Sant RFPMaster and ProposalMaster. "We decided to implement the Sant solutions," she says, "not only because of the features these solutions offer, but because the company shares our customer-centric approach. They listened to our requirements and pitched their products to us in a way that matched our needs. Equally important, Sant solutions reflect this core belief, making it easy for customers to enter content into the database, to search this information, and to retrieve and present it."

To improve the timeliness and accuracy of RFP responses, the bank created a database in RFPMaster that contains the 1,500 or so questions and answers included in the standardized RFPs for treasury management products offered by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP). These questions generally serve as the foundation for virtually all of the RFPs received. As a result, keyword searches on the Sant database enables Sant users to quickly respond to these questions with pre-approved and up-to-date content, presented in pre-approved formats. Sant ProposalMaster can then be used to create cover proposals to these responses that include specific recommendations addressing the bank thinks the problems elicited in the RFP may be resolved.

ProposalMaster is also used in the bank's proactive sales programs for treasury management products. In this application, sales officers create personalized proposals for prospects before they actually make the initial sales visit. The proposals typically include information specific to the prospect's industry, company, geographical region, and treasury issues, and emphasize the bank's customer-centric branding messages.

Currently, the bank has about 25 sales officers using ProposalMaster who are expected to create individualized proposals for each of the five to 10 sales visits they make each week. But the number of users will double by year-end as the bank expands roll-out of the solution. With win-rates expected to increase by 15 percent as a result of the proposals, this initiative will have a significant impact on sales.

The Future with Sant

The bank's Treasury Management Sales Group is implementing version 8.2 of its Sant solutions in order to leverage new features in those solutions. Of particular interest is the ability of RFPMaster to generate automatic answers to RFP questions. Also, in the near future, ProposalMaster will be rolled-out to more sales officers, and to users in other groups in the bank.