Accelerate your “hits on goal” to increase your proposal win rate

Increasingly, proposals and RFP responses have come to take the place of in-person sales meetings. Digital transformation was already making this happen, but now with remote work becoming the new normal, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the way companies build relationships and learn about the solutions they need to buy.

More than ever, your company’s proposals and RFP responses need to showcase how competitive and innovative your company and its solutions are.

Unfortunately, the mere thought of putting together a coherent proposal or RFP response can induce feelings of nausea, anxiety, and general career dissatisfaction among even the most optimistic employees. When an RFP is officially released and the proposal team starts firing off emails, those feelings can evolve into full-blown existential crisis.

Countless tech companies, law firms, ad agencies, and organizations of all kinds face the same obstacles when attempting to win new business.

Common challenges include:

• It takes too much time to prepare proposals
• It’s hard to find the right content that meets customers where they are within the buying cycle
• Proposals need to be customized to each prospect
• Outdated content is not archived, making it difficult to ensure the sales teams are using the most recent versions
• Branding on proposals isn’t consistent and a lack of process delays a faster turnaround in documents
• Manual document processes need to be automated

Poor systems, inefficient software, and scattered or outdated content make the RFP process even more overwhelming.

There’s an app for that! Technology can streamline proposal and RFP management

To craft a truly compelling proposal, you need access to the latest approved RFP content, you need to be able to personalize and customize documents, and you need to collaborate with SMEs no matter where you’re working from – and it all needs to happen quickly.

If you can achieve all this, you will find that your proposal quality improves, and you are able to score more “hits on goal” to increase your win rate. This can help you achieve sales growth and grow your bottom-line revenue.

Qorus is the proposal management and sales enablement platform that helps you do just that. Here’s a quick overview of some of the best features for RFP teams (with quick video introductions).

Locate the best content for proposals.

Create proposals with pre-approved, well-thought-out content.

Collaborate with Subject Matter Experts to ensure accuracy.

Here’s how it helps

We recently asked the bid and RFP teams who use our software to tell us more about how it helps make their jobs easier. Here’s what we found:

• 100% have increased speed to market with their sales and marketing efforts, and enabled sales growth
• 95% have increased their proposal and RFP win rate
• 93% have improved their proposal and RFP quality
• 91% are able to respond faster to RFPs
• 90% use Qorus to automate manual document processes

In a recent webinar, one of our customers, Neill Wilkinson, Head of Strategic Bid Management at Hitachi Vantara, had this to say: “During the nine years that I have been in Hitachi’s bid management group, I have seen what it takes to close deals. Experienced people, quality content, and the right tools all form part of success. Using Qorus enables our users to find high quality, up-to-date and verified proposal ready content in seconds and minutes instead of hours.”

You might also like: From setting teams up for success to the $2.5m in savings Hitachi Vantara has seen using Qorus globally, we chat all things strategic bid management

Commit to winning

Developing winning business capture processes takes time and a commitment to change, but it’s a goal that’s absolutely worth pursuing. Most companies can’t afford to redirect significant resources away from serving existing clients in order to focus on an RFP response. This means that proposal teams are often working overtime to craft a customized response that meets the RFP requirements and highlights innovative solutions.

More often than not, this formula leads to stressed-out employees and missed opportunities (potentially worsened by spread out, remote working team members). Ignoring the problem can be detrimental to your company culture and your bottom line. Getting proposals right, however, saves the company precious time and money – and takes the dread out of the process.