How SurveySparrow’s internal challenge is evolving into its next revenue engine

SurveySparrow, the company that transformed boring surveys into engaging chat experiences, is now taking aim at one of enterprise sales’ most tedious processes—Request for proposals. The startup’s latest innovation, SparrowGenie, tackles the RFP battlefield—using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an ally—to help sales teams that traditionally spend countless manual hours coordinating with various departments to craft the responses.

Organisations usually issue formal Request for Proposal (RFP) documents when they need suppliers for major purchases. These daunting questionnaires cover every aspect—from product features and security to compliance and pricing. For suppliers, this often means weeks of chasing input from different departments and juggling piles of data, making RFPs a major stumbling block in the sales process.

In an exclusive interview, Chief Customer Officer Vipin Thomas reveals how SurveySparrow has expanded its wingspan since launching in 2017. Having carved out a distinctive edge in the customer experience space with their conversational surveys, SurveySparrow has grown to 320 employees since raising a $1.4-million seed round. While the company isn't currently profitable, Thomas says it could easily be if it weren't reinvesting heavily in new initiatives and growth.

The new RFP-focussed product, SparrowGenie, was a result of solving internal pain points. The company processes 10-15 RFPs every month, with each requiring a lot of effort, meeting tight deadlines. What began as an in-house solution to streamline this process has now become a fully-fledged product with market potential.

By using AI to help companies respond to RFPs, generate proposals, and support sales teams with instant expertise, SurveySparrow is expanding beyond its core area of customer experience. The solution centers around a smart content library that learns from previous submissions and gives confidence-rated responses, cutting down the time and coordination required.

With the launch expected to be in May 2025, SurveySparrow is targeting the lucrative enterprise sales tech market and offers solutions beyond RFP automation to include proposal generation and a digital sales engineer tool that can be embedded in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or as a browser extension.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

YourStory [YS]: Tell us about the new RFP product you're developing. Can you give us a timeline?

Vipin Thomas [VT]: We’re working on SparrowGenie. It started off as an internal challenge. What happens is that in a month we get about 10-15 RFPs. And to fill an RFP we need to have people from legal, pre-sales, sales, sometimes customer success, sometimes finance, security… All of these teams have to be involved. Also, all these RFPs always have a tight deadline.

So, the sales guys have to chase these different stakeholders to bring this information and fill it in one single place. That whole collaboration and coordination is a very hard process. So, we thought we'll put some dedicated team members and make a particular team own it [processing RFPs]. Then the challenge was that even though we have put two people dedicated to it, this is very monotonous because companies are sending 400, 500 questionnaires in a single RFP. It's not an exciting job. It's not challenging for them, it's very monotonous.

For the sales, it's not coming in time, typically taking 8-10 days. The response is not always consistent with all the messages. Sometimes people have to review it. In this whole process you are missing deadlines, you're missing revenue and the manager will have another problem if he's continuously doing this job. How do I fill a growth path for this person [doing the RFPs] in the organisation? So that's another challenge. So, we thought, okay, we'll find some solution. We started looking out initially, but we could not find anything that closely matched our needs. Even if we found something that matched our needs, they charged a bomb—you would have to pay probably $50-100k.

We wanted something that we can implement in weeks at the most, if not days, because that's how our softwares are designed. We don't want it to be heavy & bloated software for our teams. That's how we started off building SparrowGenie. There was no intention of launching externally. We just built it for internal purposes and saw the accuracy is pretty good. Our sales & the supporting teams are liking it not just in terms of time savings but also faster responses & deal wins. When we talked to peers in the industry, most of them resonated with the similar challenges, that's when we thought why not extend it externally. Although we have it running internally & with few beta customers, we are aiming for public launch by May 2025.

YS: What exactly does AI do in this solution?

VT: What we've done here is we have our old RFPs & proposals that we submitted and we have a lot of marketing & sales enablement collaterals that we have to enable sales and customer success. It's all centralised. In most cases, these are the same dataset that is used to fill all the questions that are coming in as RFPs or RFIs.

So what we did is we centralised all of this and using AI, getting the best response from these collaterals, filling it to RFPs with a structured workflow & collaboration. And we would rate it with whether this has high confidence or low confidence. So you just have to review it, and it will complete the task in minutes.

Also, over time, we know that there maybe a specific person within the organisation who has always given high confidence answers. Next time it will automatically recommend going to this person. Eventually, if you've done—let's say 20, 30 RFPs—the accuracy increases automatically because you've covered pretty much a whole lot.

We're hoping to launch SparrowGenie by May 2025. Our immediate goal is to solve three problems. One is the RFP problem. Second is proposal generation. Third is a digital pre-sales engineer.

YS: Who is your ideal client for this product? And what size should a company be to benefit from it?

VT: This is typically for companies who are closing large size deals and have slightly larger sales teams. I mean I don't see a lot of companies in the SMB [small and medium] section, or those selling SMB tools using it because the average ACV [annual contract value] would be smaller. This [SparrowGenie] will be typically for companies dealing with large enterprise products having a lot of depth selling to enterprise customers because that's when typically RFPs come into play. But the proposal side could be used by anyone. And the digital sales engineer can be used by any organisation.

YS: What is the pricing model? 

VT: That's a very good question. At this point we have multiple models in mind. One is purely based on the proposals you generate or the number of RFPs you respond to. That's one model. Another model is based on credits, because when you have a digital sales engineer, the number of questions and answers will be a lot. So, if I say it will per answer it may be very challenging for organisations. Or the third model is a mix of the outcomes plus licence per user. But we have not finalised any at this point.

YS: Are there any adjacencies between your existing customers and this product that you see?

VP: Not really. It's actually slightly different from what we've done so far because SurveySparrow and ThriveSparrow [other products of the startup] are very focused on customer experience and employee experience, whereas this is purely on winning sales and sales automations.

YS: So, then this would probably require a separate sales team focused entirely on it?

I think the GTM [Go-to-Market] model for this is slightly different from the existing one in the sense that both SurveySparrow and ThriveSparrow can be very inbound focused. Since it's [SparrowGenie] more focused on mid-market and enterprise, the sales cycle is expected to be longer. There'll be POCs [Proof of Concept]. So, it's a more of evangelised sales, outbound driven and events kind of model.

But can the existing sales sell it? I think absolutely, because as sales people they are the daily users of SparrowGenie. So it's an added advantage for us that we don't have to do additional enablement or additional training. Because for them it's their own tool that they're using. They're dogfooding—so they will know the benefits themselves firsthand.

YS: And what kind of revenue contribution are you expecting from SparrowGenie?

VT: So immediately we want to get the product-market fit right. I think this year we might have only six months by the time the product launches. Usually, we go for product market fit with at least a million dollars in the first year. That's what we aim for. And I think it's not going to be very hard because in this space there's no one who charges anything less than $10,000 in ACV [annual contract value]. This means you probably need only 100 customers to meet that.

YS: And what is the benefit of switching to SparrowGenie? Is it the speed of accuracy?

VT: No, it's basically outcomes. Speed and accuracy is definitely one aspect of it that you can't compromise on. Because if you're getting incorrect answers then you're going back to what you were doing earlier and that doesn't serve the purpose. So that is the reason we are doing an internal release first and checking for hallucinations, among other things. We want to have minimal hallucinations. Where we will make a difference is that the players who typically charge a minimum $10k only cater for RFPs. But we are able to give RFP plus proposals plus a digital sales engineer all on the core foundation module of libraries in a very seamless user interface.