The Costs of Manual Proposal Processes
Typical Manual RFP/Proposal Creation Process
This child’s board game illustrates an all-too-common scenario for organizations with manual proposal creation processes. In this model, the proposal writer usually starts with an old proposal, copies and pastes to fix company information and is then forced to navigate a maze of other proposals, makeshift content repositories, and other proposal writers and/or subject experts to source existing answers to RFP questions and other proposal content.
When multiple versions of the same content item are found, the proposal writer uses their best judgment to guess the most correct or current version. They then manipulate this content to ensure contextual alignment, remove other client references, and format to match the new proposal before writing custom content that will help win the business opportunity at hand.
The problems inherent to this model are obvious and reach beyond just wasting time and reducing productivity. Mistakes, missed deadlines, and poor or unprofessional proposals reduce win-rates and hurt morale as they are often seen as failures of the proposal writer. This manual approach also allows no opportunity for the business to scale and no platform to learn from each proposal or improve effectiveness.
Manual Processes Are Costing More Than You Realize
Business development is critical to your organization’s success and proposals are the most critical business development document used today. The fact is that your manual proposal and RFP response processes are likely costing far more than you realize or can effectively measure.
These models waste time and kill the productivity of proposal writers, sales team members, senior staff, and subject experts who are required to answer repetitive questions. Worse yet, mistakes and inconsistencies inherent in manual proposal processes:
- Reduce your perceived professionalism
- Kill your down-selections and win-rates
- Make it more difficult for your salespeople to combat pricing pressure
- Reduce the likelihood that the prospective customer will invite you to participate in future RFPs
About Expedience Software
At Expedience Software, our core mission as a company is help organizations enhance, automate, and evolve their proposals and proposal creation processes. We are proposal people and have assisted thousands of customers across many industries solve the challenges associated with these critical business development documents to help them win more business. We have incorporated our 20+ years of thought leadership and best practices into what we believe is the easiest to use and most effective proposal automation software on the market today.
We would love to help your organization better determine the impact and results you should expect from investing in proposal automation software. We can also help you understand where our software best fits and how we approach solving the problems discussed in this document.
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