The Tremendous Cost of Lost RFPs
As a company that sells complex, customized products and/or services, Request for Proposals (RFPs) are the lifeblood of your organization.
RFPs routinely require the effort of your smartest, most talented individuals in engineering, sales, and management and are no small undertaking – the average RFP response can take hundreds of hours to craft, and requires a relentless commitment to precision and detail. Effectively managing the response effort is absolutely critical.
From scheduling resources to collecting the information required, any missteps can spell disaster. Inaccuracies, missed deadlines and poorly presented materials not only eliminate you from this race but from being invited to future ones. What’s more, not all RFPs are created equal but most companies operate under the premise of going after everything in hopes of getting something. That means each RFP gets the same amount of time and resources, which wastes efforts and leaves your team pressured and unfocused.
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There is a lot riding on winning RFPs in your organization, and without control, you expose yourself to greater and greater risk.
Risks such as losing the deal, submitting the RFP with errors or omissions you will now be accountable for, and missing the deadline altogether, which makes the entire effort pointless.
The negative impacts of a poorly managed RFP process permeate your entire operation. And without a structure to guide all the stakeholders and participants through each step and maximize your opportunity to succeed and win, you’re banking on hope.
You’re Creating Your Own Risk
The fact of the matter is, you can’t win every RFP you’re invited to. In fact, you can’t win most of them. But what’s important is that you put all your efforts into winning every single one you respond to.
Managing the RFP process in an ad-hoc way, following no set process and simply flying by the seat of your pants is unsustainable. Guesswork, emails, spreadsheets, multi-legged meetings and the ongoing search for materials wastes time and perpetuates risk. The RFP response process is complex enough, so approaching it without controls and checkpoints is just bad business.
Yet every day, that’s how it’s done. From small firms to large companies, the process of managing RFPs responses has grown into an exponentially risky practice. Success by accident can only carry you so far before you need to get serious about how you run your operation.
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It’s Time for Practical Proposal Management
Rand Group focuses heavily on helping companies like yours get their proposal management in order. We’ve built a best practices framework, designed through years of practice that allows you to leverage technology for business success.
Our Proposals Management Framework is the base of our solution, which we then tailor to work exactly the way you do business. A typical solution effectively routes proposals through a series of states:
- Evaluation
- Initiation
- Proposal Development
- Review
- Submission
And allows tracking through a status dashboard. We then add base sites, forms, workflows and dashboards to provide the optimal solution for your unique situation. To further augment this framework, we can integrate advanced analytics to help score opportunities and evaluate success criteria before your team even engages.
Effective Responses, Exceptional Successes
Our framework, built on SharePoint, K2 Appit, and Azure Analytics creates a comprehensive and consistent solution on a standardized cloud platform.
You will enjoy a powerful solution that guides proposals through an automated process and:
- Creates project sites that allow staff and clients to log-in to their designated site and view at-a-glance critical tasks, milestones, deadlines, and documents, as well as sharing and distributing information
- Enables opportunity scoring and evaluates success criteria
- Improves go/no-go decision making
- Increases your ability to receive and initiate the response process
- Promotes effective scheduling, allowing you to assign team members and tasks with associated due dates for timely completion, complete with automated reminders to keep resources on target
- Reduces the time it takes to build the response
- Construction can be automated and leverage pre-approved content insertion by utilizing InnovaWord for rapid and accurate response construction
- Team members can search past RFPs and related documents, and utilize work already completed to jump start the process
- Improves accuracy through the use of approval checklists, which provide accountability and risk checklists which aim to reduce errors and omissions
- Helps your team develop better quality, more consistent responses
- Provides rules management and intelligent routing for superior approval controls
- Enables better overall visibility into the response pipeline at all management levels
- Increases utilization rates for all resources associated with the response
