If you’ve ever sold a house, you know what happens the day the sign goes up in the yard. Your phone starts ringing with agents, investors and anyone else who spotted it on the way to work. They all found out at the same moment, and now they’re all chasing the same sale.
The best agents rarely wait for the sign. They already know which homeowners have outgrown the place, which ones just had another kid and which ones keep mentioning a move closer to family. By the time the listing goes public, they’ve been part of the conversation for months.
Our industry has its own yard sign. It’s the lease end date.
Your rep knows it. Your client knows it. And using UCC filings and a little persistence, your competitors can usually figure it out, too. For most of this industry’s history, renewals have centered on that one date. It shows up on a report, the rep reaches out and the conversation starts at the same moment it starts for everyone else.
Plenty of tools promise to change that, and more of them run on AI every year. But a tool only matters when it’s pointed at the right problem, so I want to start there.
The Real Problem Is Where Selling Time Goes
Ask any rep what gets in the way of selling, and you’ll hear a familiar list:
- Data entry.
- Pricing approvals.
- Pulling account history from half a dozen places before a renewal call.
- Reading RFPs that may not even be a fit.
None of that is optional. Very little of it is selling.
When we looked hard at our own sales organization, the challenge wasn’t talent or effort—it was efficiency. Too much of a rep’s week went to administrative work tied to clients and not enough went to the conversations that generate revenue.
That became the question behind every change we’ve made over the past couple of years: what can we take off a rep’s plate without taking the rep out of the relationship?
Renewals That Start Before the Sign Goes Up
The information behind a good renewal conversation almost always exists. Our industry has never been short on data. The hard part has always been getting our hands around it.
For a sales rep working alone, that means digging through numerous different systems, making sense of what they find and deciding which opportunities deserve attention. And they have to do it while also handling customer service escalations and the rest of their pipeline. Not every rep has the background to do that well, and almost none of them have the time.
For years, proactive renewals at Marco depended on individual reps who did the work by hand. Today, a renewals assistant we built in-house does the heavy lifting. It uses AI to connect scattered data points and flag opportunities beyond the lease end date, including changes in a client’s business that give us a real reason to reach out.
The AI doesn’t make the call, though. Our renewals team reviews what it finds, decides what’s actionable and walks the rep through:
- What we’re seeing.
- Why it matters.
- What we’d recommend.
The rep still owns the relationship and presents the renewal. The difference is that they walk in prepared while also being earlier than anyone else.
Every opportunity also has to pass one test before it moves forward: it has to work for the client, the rep and Marco. A recommendation weighted too heavily toward any one of them isn’t a good recommendation. That rule was in place long before the tool was. The tool just makes it easier to apply every time.
RFPs Without the 1,400-Page Headache
If you sell into state and local government or education, you know RFPs are the main way into new business. You also know what responding to them costs.
Some of the RFPs we receive run 5–10 pages. The largest ran 1,400. Under our old process, someone had to read every page to pull out the requirements, figure out how we’d respond and answer the most important question of all: should we respond? A lot of that effort went into bids that were never going to move forward.
Now an AI tool does the first read. We loaded it with hundreds of our past RFP responses, so it’s learned how we answer and what our winning responses look like. It flags whether an RFP fits what we can deliver, shows us how we’d approach it and pre-populates answers based on bids we’ve won before.
Most of any RFP is repeatable. Who we are, where we operate and how we deliver service don’t change much from bid to bid. The customization is where our RFP team comes in, connecting subject matter experts to the sections that need a tailored answer to put us in the best position to win.
The result: We can now respond to three times the number of RFPs without adding capacity to the team.
We’re also not relying only on what reps bring us. The bid-sourcing services we work with increasingly use AI of their own to match opportunities to our locations and scope, so what reaches the team is a better fit from the start.
Where the Quoting Tool Fits
Quoting is the least glamorous piece of this, so I’ll keep it simple. Our old quoting platform had reached the end of its useful life, and we replaced it. The new tool runs on automation rather than AI, and clients won’t notice much of a change. A quote still comes down to the operational and capital cost of what they’re buying.
The real changes happen behind the scenes. The new tool eliminates manual data entry and gives us a clearer view of deal structure and pipeline before anything reaches the order stage. It also puts guardrails around deal balance, so pricing stays healthy for everyone involved. Plus, we’ve rolled it out in stages rather than ripping out the old system overnight.
It solves a different problem than the other two tools, but it serves the same goal: less time on administration and more time selling.
What This Means for 2027
Planning season is a good time to ask what your pipeline is really built on. If the answer is mostly lease-maturity dates, your forecast is built on the same information your competitors are working from.
The lens we’ve built gives us more than that. We can see where opportunities are likely to show up outside the traditional maturity window, which makes the pipeline easier to predict.
And because we’ve been running proactive renewals for a couple years now, we know our success rates and what a good opportunity looks like before we chase it. That’s a much stronger starting point for a 2027 plan than a list of end dates.
This business is remarkably consistent from one dealer to the next. We all manage leases. We all manage owned equipment. We all work the same basic math. That makes the renewals process highly repeatable, and we’ve been thinking about how it could help other dealers, too. If that’s a conversation you’d like to have, I’d welcome it.
What Connects All of It
A renewals assistant, an RFP engine and a quoting tool might look like three separate projects solving three separate problems. But each one traces back to the same starting point: giving reps better opportunities with a higher chance of closing and the time to go after them.
Our industry is talking about AI constantly right now. In my view, the tools are the least interesting part of that conversation. What matters is what they make possible, such as a rep sitting down with a client months before the sign ever goes up in the yard.
By the time everyone else sees the listing, we’d rather already be at the kitchen table.
