Proposal Automation - Can It Really Increase Sales?

Proposal automation is a buzzword in many organizations these days...

16:27 19 July 2019

Thanks to the manner in which they help companies close more deals and boost sales by streamlining business processes, generating killer sales content and maximizing productivity. 

Problem: 

Handling a large volume of RFPs (Request For Proposals) and building proposals is a key task of sales departments in several organizations, but it is often tedious and can get stressful at times. Some RFPs in particular are more important than the rest because of the size of the deal involved, and need more focus and attention for obvious reasons. The tried-and-true method of opening the recent document and making necessary changes relevant to current situation may not be useful all the time. And this underpins the importance of having a streamlined process for tackling RFPs at scale. 

Although there are several indicators related to how a sales team utilizes that process to deliver good results, RFP response time is a key performance indicator for determining the impact your sales team’s overall revenue. 

If there is a way to cut the RFP response time by a significant margin that improves the overall efficiency, that would spell great success for sales organizations. Is there one?

Solution: 

More Sales Wins at Better Efficiency by Answering More RFPs.

This is where modern day proposal automation solutions come in handy.

With certain RFPs having over a couple of hundred questions, deploying an automated proposal solution becomes fairly indispensable. Not only does it shave 30% to 40% time off your proposal building time by automating repetitive tasks, it also improves workflow efficiency at different stages in the process of preparing RFPs. 

And that means your sales staff now have the power to avoid having to do labor-intensive tasks and rather spend their quality time responding to more RFPs thereby sharply boosting their odds of closing more deals and bringing in more revenue across the board.

Many organizations report that using proposal automation to increase sales has allowed them to gain a better understanding of the needs of a customer without having to go through many iterations, as it has given them more time to spend on enhancing the quality of their documentation and presentation.

How is it done? 

Proposal automation software tools typically come equipped with a content library that serves as a repository where all contacts and varieties of sales content can be stored and maintained in one place in a desired language and format with clear version control and other features. They have role-based access to users and provide your team members an instantaneous access to the content they’re looking for without them having to spend time digging into the archives or sifting through documents or exchanging mails back and forth with other team members. And, perhaps most important of all, users can access their content anytime from everywhere on all kinds of devices.

Boasting intuitive user interface, these tools are easy to access, let users create templates and canned responses that they can revisit and reuse as needed, and offer intelligent search functionality to get desired results in a snap. What’s more, they have a great scope for integration with popular CRM suite of applications and other software packages such as Microsoft Office etc.

Automating proposals with a software can positively affect your sales. It can really increase sales. Summing up, a good automated solution gives sales teams an intuitive and efficient way to process RFPs, bid proposals, improve the quality of documentation and presentation, and more importantly, hit their numbers without worrying about anything else. It returns to sales staff the time they tend to lose during the course of the day, allows them to be more productive, and gives them a real opportunity to sell- and that’s exactly how a good proposal automation system can impact sales and revenue positively. That is all it takes to put up some good sales figures, quarter after quarter.