Winning deals in the marketplace is a result of relentless team effort, understanding your customer needs and being able to communicate the value that you can bring to the table is a challenging task. It is a result of your sales and marketing team’s ability to build relationships with customers and partners and to develop new businesses.
The culmination of most sales activities however, is the submission of a well-written proposal. Writing proposals involves thorough research, reviewing your client’s requirements, complying with RFP terms, collaborating with your subject matter experts—all within a limited timeframe.
When you have a manual, inefficient proposal creation process, writing it becomes a time-consuming exercise. What is even worse, is if your team crams into submitting a half-baked proposal, chances are, you will lose business every single time.
So how do you produce high calibre proposals without needing to spend too much time making them? Here’s how.
Make contents searchable in a few clicks
Does it seem like you’re spending more time looking for content than putting it into your proposal? Playing hide and seek with your documents can be avoided by having a central repository and making it searchable in a few clicks. Pertinent information such as case studies, CV’s or default service inclusions will all contribute to a good proposal, so it’s important that these are available at your salespeople’s disposal. As your sales and marketing teams will be on the road most of the time, having it accessible any time of the day, anywhere they are, and on whichever device they are using will save them valuable time.
With the right metadata, workflow and a platform to keep your documents all in one place, searching for your proposals and documents will be a breeze. A good platform will also provide you with the peace of mind knowing that only those people that have the permissions to view, download or edit will have access to your files.
Use templates for faster proposal creation
There are multiple parts of a typical proposal that you will keep on reusing, so having templated proposals ready can give you a head-start.
Using templates can guarantee that the flow and structure, terms and condition or default company profile used in the proposals are consistent and accurate. This will also ensure that the documents comply with your branding guidelines, minimising the need to keep re-formatting new proposals every single time.
It’s also not just proposals that you can put on a template. Even contents of email messages or presentation decks can be templated to improve your turnaround time with completing the necessary files you need to win your deals.
Collaborate right on the document you want to submit
Working on proposals is a team game. As the document goes around between you and your team members, mostly through email exchanges, you tend to get lost as to who has the most up-to-date version, who’s working on what or who’s responsible for which part of the document. By the end of the day, you’ll find yourself chasing people and come to the conclusion that you’ve spent an unproductive day running in circles.
Getting your team’s inputs and feedback does not need to be a long and painstaking process. Automating your proposal creation can help dramatically streamline your workplace content creation. There are tools available that allow you to co-author, track versions of the same file, have workflows for approvals, and more. Combined with other third-party add-on apps, you can even collaborate, assign tasks and put deadlines right on Microsoft Word!
Automate your proposal creation process
Are you an existing Office 365 user? If you are subscribed to the Business or Enterprise SKUs, then you already have the tools to automate your proposal creation process. Apps such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office, Teams and OneDrive for Business can help you get started with streamlining it.
Coupled with a simple and easy to use tool to automate the creation of your business proposals further, you can find your sales and marketing teams closing deals faster with less effort.
How would you like to see it in action? Contact us at 1800 126 499 to schedule a 1-hour consultation or sign up here.
