Privia As a Training Tool

One of the most frustrating aspects of business development is dealing with different operations staff on every pursuit. For many of them, it will be their first proposal. For those who have worked on proposals before, it may have been years since their last one. Instead of providing training, most people learn about business development and proposals on the job. Even critical must-win pursuits are often staffed by new and inexperienced staff.

The reason for this is that the training required would drive up the cost of sales, which is an overhead expense, which would ultimately increase a company's prices and offset the value of the training by lowering the company's competitiveness. It's a tough problem to solve. Even a training program that is conducted internally will be too expensive if it involves taking billable staff away from their work. Outside of CapturePlanning.com, there are hardly any web-based or self-help tools available. You have to think outside of the box to solve the problem.

That's where Privia comes in. While Privia is primarily a proposal development, document management, and workflow tool, it has features that can enable it to be used as a just-in-time training platform.

The simplest way to do this is to put detailed instructions and process guidance in a file and deliver it with each assignment sent through Privia's workflow system. This way users not only get told what to do, but get some guidance as to how to do it as well.

But you can go a lot further than that. You can use Privia to distribute your training materials. You can include any Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files with each assignment, even ones with embedded audio. In addition to including pages from your process manual, you can use this to provide more generic skills enhancement training.

You can even use Privia to deliver assessments or links to survey tools that you can use to determine the skill level of participants or their comprehension of the training materials. The workflow system embedded in Privia can be used to track who completed or responded to the assessments. With a little bit of effort, you could even build it into a tool to distribute and track the requirements for an internal certification program.

We normally think of Privia as a tool for a specific pursuit, or a portfolio of pursuits. However, if you think of each course as a project, with a workflow that consists of distributing training materials and collecting assessments, then it can also serve as a training program separate from a specific pursuit. You could use it to distribute annual or quarterly refresher training and track who completes it. This could also be used to provide a pool of candidates who might be available to support future pursuits.

So whether you are thinking of a specific pursuit where you need to get inexperienced staff up to speed quickly and able to complete their roles and assignments, or whether you are thinking of a broader effort to boost the skills of those involved in business development, you might want to stop thinking about Privia as a proposal software tool and think of it as a training workflow tool instead.

One of the things we like most about Privia is its ability to do double or triple duty. This makes it easier to justify a purchase and you get more value out of having it. In addition to using Privia to manage your proposals, you can also use it to manage your opportunity pipeline, prepare your business development reports, and manage your non-proposal documents. Now you can add managing your company's internal training programs to the list.

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