4 Tips for Turning Your Proposal Management Team into a Revenue-Generating Machine

Proposal management in an enterprise organization isn’t easy. Proposal teams have to manage a lot of moving parts, and their RFP response processes can suffer because of that, plagued by logistical problems that can create costly bottlenecks. That is especially true when dealing with high volumes of RFP requests. Imagine manually managing an increasingly overcrowded assembly line: inevitably, response velocity and quality are compromised; win rates drop, and revenue declines. And no one is happy, least of all sales.

The good news is proposal management at an enterprise organization doesn’t have to be like managing a factory from the dawn of the industrial age. By addressing those pesky logistical problems with some strategic fine-tuning, your enterprise organization can turn its proposal management team into a well-oiled, revenue-generating machine. Here’s how.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

The problem

Let’s face it, a lot of RFP questions repeat from one client to the next, and your proposal team has to spend a lot of its time finding the same answers each time they receive a new RFP. With RFP deadlines shrinking, oftentimes just finding boiler-plate content can take days, and there isn’t enough time to deliver best-in-class responses tailored to the client’s needs.

The tune

Leverage an automation-powered tool to pre-populate as many answers as possible with content from your library. That will save your proposal team a ton of time, and that is key. Because your proposal team is no longer bogged down by repetitive tasks, it can now focus its efforts on more valuable tasks, like customizing RFP responses or creating new responses to complex questions.

Find out how PowerSchool increased its RFP success rate by 60%.

Empower the Team with Your Best RFP Content

The problem

Finding RFP content can be a wild goose chase for many proposal management teams, with the answers they need often scattered across past proposals, shared drives, and people’s memories. That is especially true within enterprise organizations. While facing high stakes and hard deadlines, proposal teams end up having to scramble to find existing content. When answers are tough to find, the quality of the RFP response suffers because the best and most up-to-date answers get lost.

The tune

Bring your best-in-class RFP content together and make it easily searchable and accessible through a centralized content library. Your proposal team can easily use these answers, and also iterate and improve upon them each time, leading to further improvements in proposal quality.

Bring Order to the RFP Response Process

The problem

Even with a great content library available to your proposal team, it will often still need to consult with SMEs across the organization during the RFP process to get answers that are out of its area of expertise and create the best, most informed content possible. Coordinating with multiple stakeholders can be a nightmare—receiving answers on time is a challenge in itself and can lead to missed deadlines (or at least a last-minute fire-drill on the verge of a deadline).

Once your team has all of the answers back from SMEs, compiling their responses into one coherent proposal creates yet another challenge, one plagued by version control and formatting issues.

The tune

Collaboration is key. Empower your proposal management team with advanced collaboration tools that will enable them to manage tasks and deadlines effectively, and even trigger reminders to SMEs. That will ensure that stakeholders don’t miss deadlines and identify any potential risks or red flags early on. Use these collaboration tools to create visibility across the team and automatically capture any updates or new answers in the RFP without having to manage multiple documents or versions.

Increase Team Capacity to Unlock Additional Revenue

The problem

Constantly bombarded with requests from sales while also having to contend with short deadlines, proposal teams often run into bandwidth issues. For this reason, many teams are forced to turn away RFPs, and only work on a small subset of requests. That creates a frustrating problem for sales teams because it reduces their ability to win deals, and ultimately hinders the organization’s revenue-generating potential.

The tune

With easy access to content and the benefit of automated processes, proposal teams can significantly increase their capacity, enabling them to go to market on a far greater number of RFPs and ultimately create a substantially higher financial impact (ROI) for their sales organization. Not only that, but you can also create capacity for your sales teams to easily respond to RFPs on their own, freeing up even more bandwidth for your proposal team to apply its expertise in creating standout responses to high-priority RFPs that will further strategic revenue growth.

Learn how Loopio helped WellRight automate 53% of their RFP responses and scale to bid on million-dollar deals.

The key to hearing any machine hum is by giving it more power. So, empower your proposal management team to turn down RFPs only for strategic reasons, not because it has to. That, ultimately, is how you can help it help you unlock additional revenue.