Advisors to help Responsive shape its go-to-market and product strategies and scale as the breakout leader in Strategic Response Management, the next “must-have” B2B SaaS category

Beaverton, Ore. – June 3, 2024 –  Responsive, the leader in Strategic Response Management (SRM) software, today announced the formation of the Responsive Advisory Board. Composed of seasoned industry luminaries and thought leaders, the board will provide strategic guidance as the company matures its go-to-market and product strategies and emerges as the breakout category leader in Strategic Response Management. The advisory board brings proven expertise in scaling hypergrowth companies, building out enterprise-level go-to-market strategies, and evolving product roadmaps that will help Responsive accelerate growth and deliver maximum customer value.

Inaugural advisory board members include Lakecia N. Gunter, CTO, Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft; Dan Springer, Board Member and former CEO, DocuSign; Stephen Diorio, Managing Director of The Revenue Enablement Institute; and Amy Wilkinson, CEO of Ingenuity and Lecturer in Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Traditional response management is a manual and time-consuming process that is poised for disruption given changing business needs and technological innovation. Growth-oriented enterprises are turning to Strategic Response Management to quickly and accurately respond to myriad information requests from buyers, customers, partners and other parties using a unified platform that centralizes the organization’s most valuable, customer-facing content and information. AI-powered SRM is transforming how organizations respond to bids, questionnaires, and other information requests. According to Aragon Research, Responsive is well-positioned as the breakout leader in the new, “must have” SaaS SRM category, which is expected to grow to $22.7B by 2028 with a CAGR of 35 percent.

“This has been a landmark year in terms of our growth trajectory. We recently marked a company milestone with over $500 Billion in opportunities managed through the Responsive Platform. The expertise provided by our high-caliber Responsive Advisory Board will further inform our go-to-market and product strategies allowing us to deliver even more value to our customers, and advance our position as the category leader for Strategic Response Management,” said Ganesh Shankar, CEO and cofounder, Responsive.

Inaugural members of the Responsive Advisory Board include:

• Lakecia N. Gunter, CTO, Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft: Prior to her current role, Gunter served as Vice President of Device Partner Solution Sales and Vice President of Worldwide IoT Partner Ecosystem Sales at Microsoft. She also held numerous positions at Intel including Vice President, Ecosystem Development and Operations, Programmable Solutions Group.
• Dan Springer, Board Member and former CEO, DocuSign: Springer brings almost 30 years of executive leadership and experience driving innovation and hypergrowth across the SaaS industry. Prior to serving as CEO of DocuSign, Springer served as Chairman and CEO of Responsys, where he led the sale of Responsys as a public company to Oracle in 2013 for $1.6 billion.
• Stephen Diorio, Managing Director of The Revenue Enablement Institute: Over the past 30 years, Diorio has helped marketing and sales leaders from over 150 leading brands grow revenue and profit at a lower cost-to-sell. As a Senior Fellow at the Wharton AI Initiative and the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), he works with the leading minds in the science of growth to help growth leaders take advantage of advanced analytics and AI to maximize the lifetime value of their customers and the return on growth investment. He is author of the book “Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales & Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth.“
• Amy Wilkinson, CEO, Ingenuity and Lecturer in Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business: Wilkinson is a trailblazing innovation expert shaping new, technology-enabled business models that deliver growth at scale. Prior to founding Ingenuity, her background spans leadership roles at the White House, McKinsey, JP Morgan, and as author of “The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs.” She is a board director of HUT 8 (HUT) and Innovate (VATE) as well as several Silicon Valley startups.

“The depth and breadth of innovation Responsive is delivering with its response platform is exceptional,” said Lakecia Gunter, CTO, Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft. “I am particularly impressed with the comprehensive manner Responsive has been leveraging AI from day one – from automatically populating new information requests such as RFPs with ‘best of’ answers from previous responses, to automatically recommending subject matter experts to assists with novel questions, to most recently leveraging generative AI to help with tuning responses. I’m looking forward to engaging with the team as it works through various technical scaling considerations.”

“Several things stand out to me regarding Responsive,” said Dan Springer, DocuSign Board Member and former CEO. “The company is meeting a significant market need—enabling organizations of all sizes to more effectively and efficiently respond to myriad information requests and therefore grow faster—outcomes I care deeply about as a CEO. In addition, Responsive stands to become the single repository of an organization’s most current, compelling, customer-facing information given its role in  RFP responses; no other SaaS solution serves as this repository today. And finally, Responsive is tracking to become the industry standard platform for Strategic Response Management—replacing various point solutions and legacy manual processes. I’m excited to work with the company on its scaling strategies on its path to becoming one of the industry’s next great unicorns.”

“As an outcome of our analysis of thousands of go to market solutions, we identified Responsive as one of ten ‘must have’ commercial technologies given its potential to positively impact company growth, mitigate risks, and deliver compelling experiences,” said Stephen Diorio, Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute and Wharton AI fellow. “As more and more businesses embrace the notion of Strategic Response Management as a primary catalyst for scalable growth, Responsive has become mission critical to revenue growth. The way their platform incorporates AI to automate processes and leverage company knowledge to deliver more value to customers is unprecedented in the industry. I’m looking forward to teaching business leaders from across industries how leaders like Sodexo are using SRM/The Responsive SRM Platform to help their commercial teams drive more growth and greater visibility into business outcomes.

“Through my work on high scale entrepreneurship, where I’ve interviewed more than 200 top founders including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, I’ve seen first hand how entrepreneurs have identified compelling market opportunities, developed impactful solutions, and massively scaled their businesses,” said Amy Wilkinson, CEO of Ingenuity and Lecturer in Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I’m excited to engage with Responsive at this point in the company’s journey and believe that they too have a promising future ahead given their deep focus on delivering value to customers and use of AI.