How FusionAuth Completes RFPs Fast and Easy with 1up
The Challenge
FusionAuth is a leader in Identity Access Management. With some of the most security-conscious customers in the world, it’s no surprise that they respond to a very high volume of compliance questionnaires. To handle this while keeping their sales engineers focused on mission-critical work, they needed a fast and simple way to automate complex questionnaires.
The Outcome
1up was quickly deployed at FusionAuth and became the first step in how they automated questionnaire responses. As a result, FusionAuth is now able to take on more opportunities by generating accurate questionnaire responses faster than ever before, all while minimizing distractions for their SE team.
Matt Hathcock, FusionAuth Sales Engineering Manager RFPs and questionnaires are a critical part of our sales process. No one loves doing them, but in this industry, you have to.
FusionAuth is an authentication and authorization platform designed specifically for developers. The company provides developers with control and flexibility, while maintaining a focus on developer ergonomics, simplifying the complexity often associated with identity systems.
The platform is API-first, allowing developers to implement complex standards like OAuth, OpenID Connect, and SAML, as well as additional login features to meet compliance requirements. The company is best known for its high-performance, scalability, and developer-focused approach. In the extremely competitive CIAM market, FusionAuth stands out as a powerful solution.
RFPs Have Become More Complex Over the Past 5 Years
Before 1up, the process was a whole-team effort for FusionAuth.
That’s because modern questionnaires are full of technical jargon, complex concepts, and even off-topic questions. This required the hands-on participation of multiple stakeholders and subject matter experts to complete a single questionnaire.
Sales engineers would need to spend hours searching through documentation, writing answers, reviewing them, and in some cases, soliciting the help of experts from other parts of the company to complete a single questionnaire.
Matt Hathcock, FusionAuth Sales Engineering Manager Before 1up, a complex RFP response involved 4-5 people to answer it. Today, we only need 1 or 2 people to look at any response.
The most obvious change in FusionAuth’s workflow is that they no longer needed to search for information. They don’t even need to preview or triage an RFP before submitting it to 1up.
Today, when their team receives a questionnaire, they load it into 1up and move on to other critical work while 1up goes about the tedious work of referring to their trusted internal knowledge sources and generating bespoke answers. 1up’s automation does all the grunt work of searching through documentation and answering questions so the SEs can continue working on customer deployments.
When 1up notifies them that the questionnaire answers are ready, FusionAuth need only read it and polish it before sending it to customers.
So, how has 1up impacted FusionAuth’s RFP throughput?
Matt Hathcock, FusionAuth Sales Engineering Manager Throughput has definitely increased. When we were responding to RFPs manually, we would say no to opportunities because we didn’t have the capacity. Now we’re saying yes to every questionnaire. The volume of inbound RFPs is no longer a blocker.
The Knowledge Base Is Their Favorite Feature
With 1up, FusionAuth maintains complete control over a closed ecosystem of their knowledge. With trusted internal sources of information connected to 1up, the team does not worry about AI-generated factual errors or hallucinations.
Being a developer-first platform, FusionAuth’s documentation portal is MASSIVE.
Connecting 1up’s RFP Knowledge Base to their documentation portal and other sources ensures that the team does not have to search through hundreds of documents to find the answer to a question.
With 1up’s fast response generation, gone are the days of rushing to finish questionnaires at the last minute. FusionAuth’s new way of working on RFPs with 1up is dramatically less stressful.
Kahlil Lewis, FusionAuth Sales Engineer We got a 200-question RFP on a Monday and had to have it done by Friday. Previously, such a short timeframe would instantly put any deal at risk. With 1up, we got it done easily and on-time.
The Quality of Questionnaire Responses Has Improved Significantly
FusionAuth’s customers are receiving more comprehensive answers to their questionnaires because 1up is now part of the workflow – RFP responses are thoughtfully composed and look less rushed or copy-paste. The answers 1up generates are clear, detailed, and even include references to additional information sources.
1up also makes it easy to do large sections of an RFP without context-switching.
Kahlil Lewis, FusionAuth Sales Engineer I don’t need to question the sources when 1up gives me an answer. This confidence allows me to chunk large questionnaires and take them on in smaller bites throughout my day.
Deciding Factor in Choosing 1up: Data Security
RFPs, security questionnaires, and even due diligence documents depend heavily on sensitive customer information.
As a leader in cyber security, FusionAuth has set a high bar for what they expect of partners. 1up’s commitment to never training AI models on customer data was a key differentiator in their vendor evaluation process. The 1up founding team’s experience in the cyber security industry was apparent.
Matt Hathcock, FusionAuth Sales Engineering Manager We hold customer security in high regard and we really like that 1up holds their system to that same standard, as opposed to some AI tools that will use our information to train their models. Data integrity comes first for us – it’s non-negotiable.
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