Responsive, a strategic response management solution provider, has customers of all sizes and all stages of maturity. The Responsive solution is powered by AI and enables addressing myriad information requests quickly and intuitively, with minimum manual intervention. As part of the Smart CEO CMO Series, Michael Londgren, the company’s CMO, shares the story of Responsive’s evolution and approach to marketing.

Brand Evolution

How has your brand evolved in recent years, and what were the key drivers behind these changes? 

In 2023, we evolved our company name from RFPIO to Responsive. We were founded as RFPIO in 2015 to build an AI-enabled SaaS platform facilitating proposal teams to respond more efficiently and effectively to RFP (tender) requests. Over time, our customers started using our solution to address a much broader set of information requests than RFPs/tenders, like security questionnaires, due diligence questionnaires, ad hoc information requests, and more. Given this greater usage, we elected to evolve our name from RFPIO to Responsive to better reflect our broader value proposition.

Customer Engagement

How do you leverage data and technology to enhance customer engagement and personalization across a wide variety of enterprise customers? 

Our marketing team is using a variety of technologies to drive awareness, interest, purchase and adoption of our solutions including organic and paid search, social, intent data, lead scoring, marketing automation and customer engagement tools, conversational intelligence tools, and customer usage data. We are working to continuously improve our customers’ journeys and are using the above data and technologies to inform our strategies, plans, and execution.  

Marketing ROI

What innovative strategies have you employed to measure and improve the ROI of your marketing initiatives?

We have implemented value-based selling to build CFO-credible business cases that our champions can use inside their accounts. We measure the success of the program based on win rates, time to close, and average deal sizes.

Emerging Trends

How do you stay ahead of emerging marketing trends and integrate them into your strategy and marketing execution process? 

We have built our team with forward-thinking marketers that are each very curious and committed to learning about and trying new technologies. At the leadership level, we also reinforce the need to continuously evolve and improve. Even though we’re an emerging company, we’re at the forefront of leveraging many of the latest technology trends including AI tools as well as intent data to drive bigger outcomes, faster. 

Crisis Management

Can you describe a time when you had to rapidly adjust your marketing strategy in response to external events or crises?

When I was at a previous company, a bad actor launched a phishing campaign using our name. We very quickly put in place a communications strategy, including content, on our website, alerting our user base to what was happening so they could avoid being negatively impacted. 

Content Strategy

What is your approach to content strategy, and how do you measure its effectiveness?

The central component of our content strategy is to bring forth the voice of our customers. We’ve got amazing customers of all sizes ranging from emerging companies to Fortune 100 leaders that are using the Responsive Strategic Response Management Platform to address myriad information requests. It’s great to see industry analysts and press write about the emergence of SRM as a category with Responsive as the leader. It’s even better to hear stories of how our customers are getting significant value including faster growth, lower risks, and better employee experiences using our solutions.