For many professional services firms, producing proposals involves a balancing act: The business development team needs easy access to content to quickly produce proposals, while also maintaining confidential information according to strict rules.
When the proposal process isn’t streamlined, those two factors could work against each other. There’s a greater risk of violating confidentiality and your team may struggle to get proposals out the door in a timely fashion.
Confidentiality rules may vary depending on your industry and organization type due to different regulations for nonprofits, biotech, pharmaceutical or financial organizations. For professional services firms, the client’s name generally needs to remain confidential, as well as the type of work you performed for the client, the value of work and the team members involved in the project.
When it’s time for a law firm to generate a proposal, for example, it’s critical that the business development team knows exactly what information may be disclosed and what must remain confidential, maintaining a blind description of the case that would not reveal confidential information. If the proposal requires a disclosure, the business needs to have accurate information about the disclosure.
By using effective proposal management tools and processes, such as experience management software, professional services firms don’t need to sacrifice efficiency and ease of access to maintain confidential information.
First, your firm needs the ability to effectively track the amount of confidential information that’s available. Experience management software makes sure you’re aware of what information is confidential and helps you to review flagged data to determine whether or not it’s appropriate to disclose. If your system shows a list of cases with a description and no information about the level of confidentiality, those cases most likely need to be flagged and reviewed.
Second, you need a way to manage user access to the confidential data. When users have easy access to approved data and no access to confidential information, it helps drive efficiency in your proposal process. Experience management tools with rules-based security play an important role in the internal process of establishing and maintaining confidentiality, giving you the ability to hide sensitive information from people who do not have the proper security level.
Once you define who has permission to access certain information, the system uses these rules to create and maintain appropriate security levels for different types of employees. For example, you could use the system to make sure partners in a law firm are able to see everything, while attorneys only have access to their own cases. If you’re not a privileged user, you won’t even see the confidential information.
Companies have a great advantage when they’re able to quickly produce proposals that are accurate and make the most effective use of the firm’s experience. Using experience management software is a great way to reduce proposal time and ensure proposal data accuracy while protecting the confidentiality of your firm and your clients. Instead of sacrificing efficiency to protect sensitive data, you’re able to improve both aspects of your proposal process, making your company more competitive and successful.
Learn more about improving your firm’s proposal process with experience management software by contacting Portal Solutions.
