Sponsors stopped accepting anecdote.
The economics of RFP defense have shifted. Sponsors stopped accepting anecdote at the bid table and started asking distribution-level questions: responsiveness by country, prior-study yield by investigator, regulatory cadence by geography. A mid-cap CRO that cannot answer those in the meeting concedes credibility to the platform-grade competitor that can. The concession is expensive, compounding, and invisible on internal dashboards until the shortlist rate has already fallen.
One lost bid that rewrote the question.
Six months before evaluating Yendou, the CRO’s Chief Commercial Officer lost a €2.7M oncology RFP. The sponsor’s VP of Clinical Operations challenged the site allocation strategy in the proposal. The team answered in narrative: the calibre of the relationships, a decade of strength in EMEA oncology, the investigator names they would pursue. The VP nodded politely. The award went to another CRO.
“Our expertise on site performance was real. It lived inside our heads and inside our email. The sponsor needed to see it as a distribution. We could not produce that.”
Chief Commercial OfficerMeasure what they already knew.
The request to Yendou was not to teach them about sites. They understood sites. It was to measure what they already knew and visualise it so it strengthened the bid meeting. Site Graph, CDA Agreement and Feasibility were tested against a three-stage proof: a retrospective recreation of the lost distribution against CTMS ground truth; a live bid rehearsal with the CCO role-playing a sponsor selection team; and a second sponsor’s identical question answered live in under 90 seconds. All three cleared inside 60 business days, drawing on 90 site networks and 16,051 investigators. The CIO approved Yendou over two BI vendors and an in-house build at the same review.
The Global Head of Feasibility entered as the most sceptical stakeholder, worried a platform-grade data layer would sideline her team’s commercial authorship. Yendou resolved it structurally: the team authors the strategy, the platform measures the site engagement underneath. At the 90-day mark she reversed her position inside the executive committee.
“My team moved from chasing sites to authoring strategy and producing evidence.”
Global Head of FeasibilityWin rate at a two-year high.
Across the first two quarters live, feasibility turnaround median dropped from 11 business days to 4. RFP shortlist rate moved from 34% to 61%. On-shortlist conversion held steady around 44%, lifting aggregate win rate from 15% to 21%, the highest the board had seen in two years. Three incremental awards totalling €4.2M followed inside the fiscal year, on top of the €2.7M re-won from the original rehearsal sponsor.
“It’s not even about the time saved. Having a system that generates credible data on startup timelines and recruitment metrics is saving us hundreds of hours, headaches and arguments with clients. The certainty that we’re selecting sites that recruit to target has massive downstream value.”
Chief Commercial Officer