We designed our proposal process to help us win by avoiding the missteps that can easily derail this critical step in the sales process. So, if a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, why are we making so many detours between kick-off and submission? Technology eliminated our access and communication issues and increased efficiency. Where technology was found lacking, however, we naturally created detours to get us around the gaps.
All of those extra turns and pit stops steal time away from our process and make for a longer “drive” to our submission destination. Here are four ways technology innovations are driving detours out of today’s proposal process.
Accelerate Kick-off
We wouldn’t head out on a road trip without a full tank of gas. And we wouldn’t head into a Kick-off meeting without analyzing requirements, building a timeline and creating formatted “shells” for our contributors to write in. Time spent on compliance and deadlines is critical, but manually creating tens if not hundreds of “shells” is a time-consuming detour.
By leveraging our proposal outline, we skip several detours in the pre-writing process.
Because the technology automatically parses and serializes our proposal, we skip these process detours and accelerate our time to Kick-off.
Accelerate Writing
The last time we went on a road trip, did we bag up some snacks? Of course we did, it saves time not having to stop along the route. Our contributing contributors crave the same consideration; easy access to everything they need to make their route from Task assignment to Task completion faster and easier.
By improving contributor and content interaction, we skip several detours in the writing process.
Accelerate Reviews
We’re getting close to our destination now, but rush hour traffic is about to slow us down. I’m talking, of course, about reviews, where we evaluate our content and make course corrections. Although it’s important to make things easy for our review team, we must balance ease with the results the team needs; direction and a clear, quick roadmap for revisions.
By improving executive and content interaction, we skip these review team detours.
When we skip these review team detours, we make it easier for executives to provide faster, more productive feedback. They are focused on comment clarity and our contributors have more time for revisions so we get to our next review faster.
Accelerate Production
We can now see our destination, and we’re getting excited. Although we’ve made things easier for our experts and our executives, we’re faced with the monumental task of reformatting our entire proposal for submission. And time isn’t on our side.
By re-thinking the production process, we skip these production detours.
When we skip these production detours we eliminate the bulk of re-formatting time, buying more time to invest in another proposal. And there is always another proposal.
We designed our proposal process to drive efficiency. A new breed of collaboration tools is driving these time-consuming detours out of our proposal process and helping teams create and submit proposals 70% faster.