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Why Proposal Software That Focuses on Collaboration is Better than a Template
Customers buy for different reasons. They use different terminology. And they have different priorities and expectations. You cannot persuasively customize a proposal by filling in the blanks. The entire outline and organization of the content should be built around the evaluation considerations of that particular customer. That is, they should if you want to win.
It seems like templates should make writing proposals easier, because proposals to different customers may be similar. However, the amount of editing it takes to customize a template approaches what it takes to write it correctly in the first place, only the end product is not as well tailored. You can pump a lot of effort into a template only to find out that:
- They aren't used because they start from the wrong premise.
- The level of effort to use them is nearly the same as if you didn't have them.
- They get used, but your win rate stinks.
Focusing on creating proposal templates is focusing on automating the wrong things. Since often customers specify the structure and format of the response to their requests for proposals, you don't want to automate the organization of the content. Even though proposal writing is sometimes tedious, you should avoid trying to automate it. You want a lot of thinking and effort to go into it. You might still be able to automate document assembly and final production, but it turns out that that they represent only 10-15% of the total effort put into developing a proposal.
Helping bring people and information together is a better and more efficient way of using automation; the result makes proposal writing easier. Facilitating collaboration, providing secure access to relevant information and online document reviews, and centralizing access to group contributions and research are the best ways that software can improve your proposals. Collaboration facilitates proposal writing without trying to replace it. Better collaboration efforts lead to better proposals.
Privia is an example of proposal software built for collaboration. It provides you with a proposal workspace (think virtual "war room") that people can access from the web. Your workspace can include folders for proposals, as well as folders for re-usable document fragments. You can even use it to store templates, because once a collaboration platform is in place, templates and boilerplates might make sense for standard corporate information and portions of documents that are nearly identical.
In testing Privia, here are some of the things that I found useful. You can:
- Manage document reviews and comments both online and offline. Look for a whole article on this topic alone in a future issue.
- Build a re-usable content library, including boilerplate, logos, resumes, past performance information and more. While this won't save you as much time and effort as you would expect, you've got to have a library, and Privia makes it both easy and accessible.
- Detect when team members are online. As a Proposal Manager, I love this. I can see how much work is being accomplished and whether we are going to make deadlines.
- Instantly communicate with team members who are online using instant messaging, real-time chat, mobile text messaging, discussion groups, and email notifications. If I have a question for a section author, I can ask it. It doesn't matter if they are thousands of miles away. We can compare notes and insert the results directly into our sections.
- Incorporate workflow, including approvals, reminders, and notifications, into your workspace. This is another topic that we'll do a whole article on in a future issue.
When you focus on collaboration instead of templates, you eliminate confusion and delays. You also reduce or eliminate expenses and inefficiencies associated with conference calls and face-to-face meetings. Privia's features can be used to conduct virtual Red Team and other reviews without the added cost of traveling expenses to have all members at the same physical location. By improving document editing and review cycles and shortening proposal completion times you simultaneously improve quality while reducing the amount of time required. This is how you win a proposal.
Another thing that I like about Privia is being able to see activity across proposals. I know a company where the business units can choose whether to use the central proposal department or do their proposals on their own. As a result, nobody can see all of the proposal activity going on at any one time. With a tool like Privia, the company would not only be able to see the proposal activity, but the central department could assist "as needed" without having to run the whole proposal. It becomes easier to perform quality assurance and implement standardization.
So where templates can make it quicker to produce a mediocre proposal, collaboration software like Privia makes it easier for authors to write by making it easier to find information, by providing instantaneous communications so authors can get answers to questions, and by eliminating barriers to writing. Because of its support for commenting, Privia also makes it easier for managers to monitor and reviewers to review, resulting in improved quality. By making it easier to track activity and allocate resources, Privia can do all this while lowering costs. And if you insist on using templates, it will even make them more accessible.
What's not to like? Unfortunately, it won't do proposals for you. It won't "automate" the process so that you only need one person whose job is to press "the button" that spits out a proposal. All it does is enable you to make better use of your people and take away some of the barriers that get in the way of preparing great proposals. That's "all" it does. If you are looking for a way to get out of doing proposals, keep looking. If you are looking for a way to do better proposals and win more business, it's worth a look.
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