When your organization responds to a request for proposal (RFP), the main challenge is to produce a complex collaborative document by the submission deadline.
If your current process and tools are inefficient, it’s hard enough to throw the content out there and hit a deadline. That’s not enough to win the RFP. By improving your proposal process, however, you gain more time to produce targeted, creative proposals that stand out from the competition.
Typically, the marketing or business development team leads the charge. But they may also need to collaborate with others in the organization, and must be able to locate and reference a variety of content and data, such as your project team member profiles. SharePoint is an ideal tool for this type of large, complex document collaboration, especially when you extend the platform with an experience management solution.
Here are four ways SharePoint helps increase efficiency when responding to RFPs and generating proposals:
- A searchable content repository: When producing an RFP, it’s important to have easy access to assets used in prior proposals, such as a library of the project team member profiles. SharePoint is ideal for creating a searchable library of content, allowing the business development team to quickly find relevant information that could be reused.
- Versioning and co-authoring: SharePoint offers versioning and document collaboration tools that increase efficiency and help ensure proposal data accuracy. Everyone involved in the process works from the same document that’s stored in a central location, called “co-authoring.” Consolidating all revisions, comments and changes in this way tends to improve the proposal quality by reducing errors, and it’s more efficient than team members sending multiple copies back and forth over email. Since the document changes are automatically tracked, your staff has confidence that they’re using the most recent version.
- Integrated corporate-branded templates: You want your proposals to be consistent with your corporate branding, but also don’t want your staff to spend lots of time formatting and designing each one. Fortunately, it’s easy to embed your branded templates into SharePoint and create the proposal documents within the site. This is a great way to improve efficiency and accuracy. When your templates are pre-formatted, an employee just needs to select the right content and move it into the appropriate areas in the template.
- Streamlined processes: By combining the three functions already mentioned, SharePoint offers a number of ways to streamline the proposal process, such as through an experience management solution. When you have SharePoint’s robust search function sitting on top of all your proposal assets, it cuts out a lot of time spent manually searching for the right content. It’s easy for an employee to select the right elements for a proposal, automatically consolidate the content into your template and output the proposal as a Word document, PDF file or PowerPoint presentation.
Let’s say you’re developing a new business pitch, for example. You would go into the SharePoint site, select specific case studies, team member profiles and other content you want to include. From there, it takes a few mouse clicks to assemble all of these components and automatically output them as a highly customized, tailored and professional proposal.
What About Creativity?
Using SharePoint and experience management tools is a great way to improve efficiency and streamline processes. Since these tools help your team be more productive, it gives them more time to develop creative, targeted proposals.
True, much of an RFP response consists of responding to standard questions and certain requirements, but even then, there’s often a chance for creativity. For instance, you could use the executive summary to communicate with the organization and present specific ideas that wouldn’t come up in the standard RFP.
With the time you save through greater efficiency, you could create data visualizations that help get your point across and make a favorable impression that helps you stand out from all the other responses.
To learn more about improving your proposal process with SharePoint and experience management tools, contact Withum.
