Proposal Management for Professional Services Series: How Can Your Firm Benefit from Proposal Management Software?

As an accompaniment to our four-part Proposal Management Software for Professional Services video series, this blog series explores how professional services firms are using proposal management software to simplify and accelerate the response process—while increasing the quality, accuracy, and efficacy of proposal documents and, ultimately, driving client acquisition rates higher. 

This third installment in the series examines the role of AI-powered proposal management software in simplifying, streamlining, and accelerating the proposal process. Learn how and why your organization will benefit from automating your proposal process.  

[Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the blog series to discover the must-have features of proposal management software and learn how the tool can be used across your organization to generate proposals, pitches, and RFP responses that consistently win client business.] 

Are you wondering if your organization could benefit from proposal management software? How will automating your proposal process translate to efficiency and cost benefits? Where does a proposal automation tool fit into your daily operations? Read on to find out. 

Keep pace with RFP and pitch volume 

At some point in their growth, most organizations hit an inflection point where they're receiving so many requests for proposals and so many RFPs—each in need of a response—that the team simply can't cope. And don’t get me started on the overwhelming number of pitches for prospective clients waiting to be generated! Under such a heavy burden, bid and proposal teams are unable to keep up with the volume of response documents required to keep the funnel moving and revenue flowing.  

Has your professional services firm experienced this kind of backlog? Automating your proposal process using a proposal management tool enables your team to scale further and cover more ground when it comes to responding to complex, detailed RFPs and pulling together compelling pitches for prospective clients. 

Get to first draft quicker 

Time is a precious commodity in the world of proposal management. By taking advantage of the features and capabilities of proposal management software, you’ll be able to spend less time on the admin work associated with generating response documents and more time on the review and personalization aspect of the process.  

AI-powered proposal management software helps you quickly get to the first draft stage of your proposal or RFP response, eliminating the heavy lifting involved in sourcing and writing content from scratch. Instead, you can spend your time reviewing, polishing, and personalizing the document to reflect the unique needs of your prospective clients (and generate more wins!).   

Collaborate in real-time 

RFPs can include thousands of questions across multiple areas of expertise. As you’re working your way through an RFP, you may face questions that you’ve never encountered before. Or perhaps you’ve received questions that are presented in unfamiliar formats and styles or are being asked in a different way that adds a new level of complexity to the question?  

Thankfully, you can rely on the subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization for their expertise and input to help you respond to complex questions. And even if you’ve previously answered some of those questions and established your baseline, you’ll likely want an SME to review the response to those specialized questions to confirm their accuracy and relevance. 

Indeed, SMEs play a key role in putting together an accurate pitch or responding to an RFP. The catch is that you need to find a way to seamlessly bring SMEs into the response process and provide a way for them to contribute their input. Proposal management software tracks and disseminates your query requests and ensures the responses flow back into the document, helping you collaborate and coauthor efficiently and effectively with SMEs in your firm to produce engaging, accurate documents. 

Gain actionable insights  

A sophisticated proposal automation tool (like QorusDocs!) offers data-driven reporting that gives you a view into how clients engage with your response documents. You can access built-in measurement tools to track how long a reader stays on each page, what they click on, and what they share. These detailed insights enable you to tailor targeted follow-up communications and select the best content to create future winning proposals, pitches, and RFP responses.  

Rich, integrated reporting also helps you identify any bottlenecks slowing down your response time and evaluate the overall health and efficiency of your proposal management process.  

Reuse content 

The top challenges impacting the proposal and RFP response process involve generating and managing content. In fact, our latest proposal management benchmark research survey found that creating content from scratch was the most common challenge facing organizations. 

Proposal management software stores reusable content in a designated library, saving you and your team from having to create original content every time you respond to an RFP or put together a pitch. And with generative AI, saving original content means that the software has an up-to-date baseline to start from and reference in order to generate the best answer moving forward, while driving efficiencies across the proposal process.  

Master project management 

Project management for strategic bids can be a huge challenge—and nearly impossible to manage effectively without automation. You need to know who your team is, what their tasks are, and how they're progressing through those tasks; you don’t want to be left in the dark wondering who’s working on what, how far you’re through a 2,000-question RFP, or when due dates are approaching.  

In addition, you need to be aware of any risk elements introduced through the process as a result of a task running long or late, someone’s absence, or a specific piece of information not being available. 

The goal is to automate the response process with proposal management software, helping you manage your projects with a holistic view of the team, evaluate their progress with assigned tasks, and spot risk elements to stay on schedule. Streamlining the process with an automated AI-powered proposal management tool translates to a higher number of RFP responses and pitches out the door—without overburdening your team—to drive a higher win rate.  

In fact, when the proposal process is automated, we’ve seen organizations save up to 50% of the time that they would typically spend producing and managing proposals. They’re able to translate those time savings into revenue generation potential by responding to a higher volume and broader range of proposals that come through the front door.  

By streamlining and simplifying content management, proposal management software boosts the efficiency and efficacy of your response process, while providing data-driven analytics to help you continuously improve, grow, and develop as a proposal organization. What’s not to love?! 

To gain additional insights into how professional services firms are using AI-powered proposal management software to transform their response process—and how you can reap the rewards in your organization—check out our new Proposal Management for Professional Services video series.