While a law firm’s marketing team or business development department may be in charge of putting together proposals, for example, they also need to involve the firm’s attorneys for the review and approval stages.
For your staff to be effective in this complex environment, it’s essential to streamline processes and ensure proposal data accuracy.
Another factor that contributes to the complexity of proposal management is the variety of platforms used in professional services organizations, from financial systems and marketing databases to the matter management systems used by law firms. Matter management is generally from a financial perspective, while legal case management systems add an operational or marketing aspect. But these systems are often isolated, resulting in data silos that duplicate efforts and increase the risk of errors.
Experience management solutions offer a number of ways to streamline the proposal process, starting with making sure that your company’s past experience is catalogued effectively and readily available to anyone who needs that information. Experience management tools consolidate information from all of your systems, improving efficiency and ensuring that the data you’re relying upon is accurate and up-to-date.
As a result, marketing or business development personnel have a better understanding of what type of work your firm has done for specific clients, helping them to effectively describe the firm’s relevant experience in proposals and pitches.
In addition to compiling information, an integrated experience management system includes capabilities for bringing people, data and workflows together in ways that improve the proposal process. First, you need to define the process that allows personnel to capture your experience. From there, the system helps route this information to the right person for review, further streamlining the process through business rules and automation.
When you automate the generation of your proposals and pitches, it’s very easy to pull up the necessary information and use it to quickly generate a proposal. An employee opens the experience management solution and after selecting the desired content, your proposal is ready to go, with staff bios and your firm’s experience assembled in a branded template or pitch book.
The result is a proposal process that’s faster, more accurate and always up-to-date, giving your firm a competitive edge. And since an automated proposal process uses business rules that restrict access to sensitive business data, it also helps you maintain confidential information and ensure compliance with regulations.
In the end, proposal management is a complex and often inefficient process for many professional services organizations due to the variety of people and technologies involved. Streamlining your processes with experience management increases your firm’s ability to bring in more business. It arms your marketing and business development teams with powerful tools for conducting research and mining data for insights that help you win new business while generating timely, professional pitches and proposals.
To learn more about streamlining your firm’s processes with experience management, contact Portal Solutions.
