Professional Services Insights from 8th Annual Proposal Management Benchmark Survey
Sales
Mar 07, 2024
If content is king, data is emperor of all the content kingdoms. Without strategic metrics and powerful data analytics at their fingertips, companies are left spinning their wheels, wondering how to replicate success or rebound from a bad quarter. Proposal, bid, and sales teams need to measure what’s working in their critical sales response process in order to make improvements…but the sheer volume of data can prove an impediment to discerning which data is useful, leading to overwhelm and inefficacy.
Don’t panic! To clarify the data analytics confusion, we sat down with proposal and RFP expert Olivia Hardy, the founder and owner of Catalytique Consulting, to find out how to access analytics around content usage, collaboration, content share and QorusDocs pre-built Microsoft Power BI dashboards to help drive efficiency and propel more wins for your business.
Getting started
The path to reaping the rewards from your data begins with:
- Taking an agile approach and focusing on one priority business goal at a time.
- Getting consensus around the metrics that matter—the data that will indicate, clearly and objectively, whether you’re on track to reaching that goal.
Most (successful) companies—and the proposal, RFP, and sales teams within those organizations—have short-term and long-term goals that serve as an action plan to push the business forward. Some factors help you reach those goals, like increased win rates, while others may hinder your progress, such as longer turnaround times. By measuring and keeping a watchful eye on the key metrics impacting your response process, you can make better decisions based on fact, rather than relying on a gut feeling or anecdotal evidence from the loudest voice in the room.
QorusDocs offers valuable digital content and collaboration analytics, plus powerful reporting capabilities, to help you optimize the day-to-day activities of your critical sales response process, while informing long-term planning decisions to bolster sales and accelerate growth moving forward. Let’s review the two broad categories of QorusDocs data insights and analytics: Tactical Insights and Strategic Insights.
Tactical insights: Data at your fingertips
Tactical insights are analytics you can access directly from within QorusDocs while you work, to help inform day-to-day decisions and follow-up activities. For example, when you’re using content, you can view content usage insights for that specific piece of content. If you’re collaborating on a proposal and want to create an assignment for a colleague, you can view insights into their current workload.
When you’re working on a pursuit, you can view the overall completeness of the questionnaires which you’ve used Auto Answer to populate and determine whether you need to step up your efforts. If you’ve shared a proposal or piece of collateral with a prospect, you can view the “Share and Track” analytics to see if, and how, they’ve engaged with your content. These tactical insights are incredibly valuable for optimizing the response process in near real-time.
Strategic insights: Making sense of the data
Strategic insights are derived from the QorusDocs comprehensive data feed (includes all the raw data used to produce the tactical insights) that can be compiled to give you access to a wealth of valuable information to guide your critical decision-making process. By connecting this data feed as a data source in Excel, or in your favorite analytics software like Microsoft Power BI, you can create custom reports and visual dashboards on whatever metrics are most relevant to your business goals.
You can report on most popular content, terms with the most searches, most useful templates, your best closers by deal value and by win rate, the number of active bids, or top collaborators. You can even track how adoption of QorusDocs is progressing within the organization, based on the number of licenses you’ve purchased compared to the number of licenses actively being used.
You can export the raw data and configure reports to suit the exact needs of any team that interfaces with your sales, bid, and proposal process—from marketing and content managers, sales operations and business development to bid and proposal managers.
While the idea of manipulating copious amounts of data to create insightful reports may sound complicated or overwhelming at first, don’t worry. If you understand pivot tables in Excel, then you’re already more than halfway there. And if you use Microsoft Power BI, as many QorusDocs clients do (it’s a simple add-on to your Microsoft 365 subscription), you can take advantage of our amazing Power BI report template with over 20 pre-built dashboards ready to use or customize.
QorusDocs built-in measurement tools = better decisions
QorusDocs built-in measurement tools provide powerful insights and reports that help improve the decision-making process for proposal, bid, and sales teams on both a daily and long-term basis. For proposals and sales teams, QorusDocs provides quick and easy access to analytics around content usage, collaboration, and secure proposal and document sharing to increase efficiency and help close more deals. For managers, the pre-built Power BI dashboards and access to the rich underlying data can be used to analyze a vast array of metrics impacting the response management process to help you better understand what’s driving success.
One more thing: Data security
We recognize that when dealing with data collection and analysis, you want to be confident that your data is secure. At QorusDocs, we take data security very seriously. We’re GDPR-compliant and have implemented over 240 different security controls to ensure your data is well protected. QorusDocs takes advantage of measures like state-of-the-art encryption, multi-factor authentication, strict access controls, and around-the-clock security monitoring. Your data belongs to you—and now you know how to make it work for you!
To learn more about QorusDocs content insights and analytics tracking, join Olivia as she shows you how to:
- gather daily insights and analytics around content, collaboration, and content sharing;
- help managers chart the data they want to see with Power BI; and
- set up data capture from Pursuits with QorusDocs smart fields.
Want to accelerate your business with a wealth of valuable data insights? Watch the webinar!
