a proposal management process that’s fast, accurate and agile is essential in growing the business and driving revenue.
However, many firms lack the experience management tools necessary to be effective. As a result, the application process takes weeks when it should only take days.
If you’re running a small professional services company and managing only a few hundred proposals, you might be able to get by with tracking them in a spreadsheet. But if you’re a law firm managing proposals for thousands of cases, having the wrong tools is likely to result in lost business and countless hours of wasted staff time.
Not only do you need to find the right information to include in your proposals, you also need ensure that this information is accurate, up to date and accurate. In addition, you need to protect your organization from inadvertently disclosing confidential information.
Many law firms use some type of tool that helps them gather information that’s relevant to the current proposal, such as attorney bios and practice experience. You need to identify the best attorneys and resources for that proposal, and since many cases are specific to a certain jurisdiction or geographical area, these attorneys must be licensed to practice in that jurisdiction.
Since this data is typically stored in multiple locations and systems, many of these proposal management tools still require manual work. There’s a lot of data entry, manual research and document retrieval. This inefficiency tends to slow down the approval chain and produces a crippling backlog. As a result, it could take weeks to generate and approve a proposal.
Here are three signs that your current proposal management process is hurting your business:
- Increased workload for your business development team: If you discover that there’s tension and heavy workloads in your business development team, with people forced to work extra hours to complete proposals, that’s usually a sign you need to improve your proposal process. Proposals require large amounts of detailed information, and if you don’t have the right tools and data at your fingertips, there’s a greater risk of losing the proposal or not submitting it in time.
- Errors in your proposals: When your proposals include mistakes, that’s a sign you don’t have the right processes and tools in place, and this poor attention to detail may cause you to lose the business. You could waste weeks of work and still have mistakes that could be automatically prevented with experience management software in a fraction of the time.
- Applying for proposals you can’t win: Another common sign is that you’re spending staff resources applying for certain proposals, only to find that your firm doesn’t have the right experience to compete for the business. You may have thought you had attorneys with the appropriate expertise and licensing for a certain project, but your tools weren’t sophisticated enough to alert you early on that this wasn’t the right proposal to go after.
If you’re seeing any of these signs, your proposal process may be preventing your firm from achieving its true potential for growth and revenue. For many organizations, the solution to this problem is to adopt an experience management platform.
These powerful tools help large firms manage tens of thousands of proposals by consolidating information from multiple data sources into a central location, such as SharePoint, and use automation to reduce data entry and ensure proposal data accuracy.
In addition, experience management tools help maintain confidential information, using business rules and user profiles to restrict sensitive data access, preventing inadvertent (and potentially disastrous) disclosures.
In the end, every large professional services firm needs a way to manage this complex proposal process in a tight timeframe. The right tools and processes are key to meeting that challenge and growing your business.
Learn more about improving your firm’s proposal process with experience management by contacting Portal Solutions.
