How Does Proposal Management Help in Maximizing the Win Rate of Proposals?
How Does Proposal Management Help in Maximizing the Win Rate of Proposals?
Managing proposal projects requires an efficient process to ensure the team meets deadlines. Providing a clear set of instructions for each RFP can help minimize delays or missed deadlines.
Every RFP represents a significant investment of time, business insights and skillful storytelling. To maximize your company’s win rate, follow these proposal management best practices: 1. Invest in the right tools.
PerfectIt
A proposal management system provides a library of templates and tools that help to create error-free proposals. It also helps to improve consistency and quality, saves time, enforces house style, and supports collaborative authoring. It’s an important tool for every proposal team.
Proposal writing requires a great deal of research and expertise. This is because it is necessary to learn about the competitor’s approach to the project and contrast that with why your company offers a better solution. In addition, it is essential to understand what the client wants and needs from a project and how the solution will deliver on those needs.
It is important to remember that nothing, not a template, not a tool and certainly not a proposal writing machine, takes the place of diligence and responsiveness. If your proposals are too generic, they will look like everyone else’s and evaluators will be left thinking “price,” as they choose the lowest bid.
In addition to ensuring that the proposed solution is consistent with the client’s requirements, proposal management also ensures that all necessary documentation is in place for submission. This includes contracts, procurement documents, compliance paperwork and any other regulatory information. It also allows SMEs to reuse common questions and answers in proposals, saving them hours of work each time they write. This is possible because knowledge management enables SMEs to build a proposal knowledge library that is continually growing as common questions and answers are tagged, saved and reused.
Relevant Match
Using a tool like Relevant Match to help with the RFP process can save valuable time. The tool reads the solicitation work statement and compares the proposal draft to it, providing a score and highlighting any areas that are missing or inconsistent. This allows the proposal team to focus on those sections of the draft and ensure that it is responsive to the work statement.
When the deadline for an RFP approaches, it is a race against time to create a compliant and responsive proposal. Having an established proposal management process helps manage the timeline and improves win rates by increasing the number of quality proposals that are submitted. In addition, it can reduce the amount of time spent on non-competitive RFPs that don’t align with the company’s strategy.
The most important element of a winning proposal is understanding the client’s problem and how your services can solve it. This is especially important when submitting to competitive RFPs, which often require all hands on deck to create a compelling response. Using a tool like Relevant Match can help the proposal team find key themes and rewrite the draft to increase its relevance. It also helps to analyze competitors’ submissions and understand their approach to the solution. This information can then be used to distinguish your company’s offering from the competition.
Collaborate
Proposals are significant investments of time, business insights and skillful storytelling. Every bid requires a large team to perform the research, analysis and development required for a truly competitive proposal. Inevitably, these resources are diverted from the broader business or sales pursuit to support this effort. Unfortunately, once the proposal is submitted, this knowledge and investment often goes unutilized.
To combat this, many businesses turn to tools and templates for their proposal efforts. These tools are marketed as “cheats” that eliminate compliance problems, increase capacity (as an organizational force multiplier), and decrease the chaos and stress that surrounds the typical proposal process. However, utilizing these proposal “cheats” over time actually erodes an organization’s ability to differentiate and dumbs down the proposal process.
The best way to improve your win rate is to focus on creating tailored proposals that speak directly to the customer’s needs. This takes more time, but it will ensure that the customer understands why your solution is the best fit for them and ultimately leads to a higher win rate. To achieve this, you must have a starting library of proposal content that can be customized to each prospect’s unique situation and requirements. This can be accomplished by leveraging a specialized response management platform like Loopio. Using this platform, proposal, capture and sales teams are able to use Patri Score and Patri Explore to objectively qualify opportunities and avoid spending valuable resources on opportunities that are unlikely to win.
RFP360
For most proposal teams, the number of RFPs a company receives is a key measure of business development opportunities. However, a winning proposal requires more than just writing the right content—it’s about how that content is organized and delivered.
Using the best-in-class RFP response software will streamline your process and make it easier to create business-winning proposals that drive growth. Look for a solution that has templates, allows you to collaborate with team members, and makes it easy to track and manage projects. It should also support the following key features:
The leading RFP response software is trusted by some of the world’s smartest companies to manage responses to RFPs, DDQs, Security Questionnaires and any sales request that comes your way. With more than 175,000 users at organizations such as Google, Adobe Atlassian and Microsoft, RFPIO is designed to be a complete, full-circle response management platform that makes it easier for your entire organization to respond faster and win more business. It’s the reason it has been ranked top of its category on Spend Matters’ annual SolutionMap, based on a combination of scalability, integrations, supplier experience and front-end user and administrator experiences. For a free demo, contact us. RFPIO also offers a 30-day risk-free trial. Sign up now to see why top-performing companies choose to be RFPIO customers.
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