Background
Sympa is a technology company that provides a cloud-based Human Resources Information System (HRIS) to manage the entire employee lifecycle. The company empowers organizations to streamline HR operations, automate routine tasks and connect HR and leadership in one flexible, multi-geo platform.
The challenge
As Sympa’s platform evolved and began attracting larger, global customers, the volume of RFPs surged. With up to seven hitting their desk per week, the presales team quickly became a bottleneck for growth.
"As both HR needs and HRIS tools are complex, it took a lot of time to understand what kind of functionality the customer was looking for, and how well Sympa could solve that need for them."
— Jani Asikanius, CRO at Sympa
Sympa lacked a reliable place to find answers – and the right tools to manage RFPs. Choosing which opportunities to pursue was slow, and filling responses manually in spreadsheets was time-consuming. This created a ripple effect: sales and engineering redid the same work for every deal, re-checking integrations, pricing, and scoping from scratch. The result was inconsistent outputs and a slower, less predictable sales cycle.
Why Realm
Sympa found that legacy RFP tools were limited to response automation and relied on static content libraries requiring constant upkeep. Realm offered a dynamic approach: it connected directly with Sympa's tools, automatically indexing company knowledge across past RFPs and product documentation. This intelligent, always up-to-date knowledge base could then be used to automate RFP responses and answer technical questions. Sympa was particularly impressed by Realm’s enabling the team to build agents for initial sales qualification phase and gate reviews.
Impact at Sympa
The impact of Realm is felt across the sales process. It enables Sympa to quickly understand what customers need and either craft the perfect package of modules and features, or disqualify poor-fit opportunities early.
“Realm has allowed us to review an RFP against our offering, and make a quick and informed decision on whether or not to bid.”
— Jani Asikanius, CRO at Sympa
Before, answering an RFP took days. Now, Realm powers through spreadsheets containing hundreds of questions in minutes, providing responses grounded in Sympa's past RFPs and company knowledge.
“We’ve been able to automate 50-70% of RFP responses with Realm. Processing times for RFPs have dropped to tenths of what they were.”
— Jaakko Mattila, Head of RevOps at Sympa
Realm also frees up time across the organization. Because it answers most questions automatically, SMEs can review and approve responses in one sitting through Realm's collaboration features, instead of being constantly bombarded with repetitive questions over email and Slack.
“Realm has eliminated several iteration cycles and reduced SME and leadership involvement in the process by 40%.”
— Jani Asikanius, CRO at Sympa
Jani also expects Realm to improve win rates by helping the team efficiently filter out poor-fit opportunities and prioritize those that best align with Sympa's offering.
Looking ahead
Beyond sales, Sympa sees potential for Realm in other go-to-market functions like marketing and customer success; using Realm’s comprehensive knowledge base to unlock deeper insights and enable more proactive engagement across the customer journey.