SharePoint Is Not The Answer To A Proposal Database

Microsoft has done a great job in pushing its ten-year old technology for centralized file sharing.  Yet very few people understand that the demo they saw was really the product of a highly customized solution.  Yes, there is a huge IT component in building and maintaining a SharePoint.  That’s great for IT, but not so much for a proposal organization that must maintain a compliant database.

Organizing a proposal database is a daunting task.  It requires an intelligent segmentation schema.  And, it also requires a huge commitment from the data content owners (we called them Subject Matter Experts or SMEs) to review and sign off on the veracity of the information.  And that’s before the marketing folks take a whack at bringing it into the company’s brand-speak and the lawyers comb through it to ensure no one goes to jail for misrepresenting the facts.

So on opening day of any new proposal database in any tool, SharePoint included, the proposal team is in great shape.  But the half-life of any proposal database is pretty severe as information about a company’s products and services must adapt to ever changing conditions.  So what was accurate last quarter may not be accurate right now. But how does anyone really know for sure?  Many default to looking at the last proposal that went out the door.  “It was correct just last week…right?”  Or they bombard the Subject Matter Experts with the same questions over and over again, until everyone in the process glazes over.  So where’s the due diligence?

A good proposal process has to make all the stakeholders winners, meaning the proposal writer, the SME, marketing and of course compliance and legal departments. As soon as one side in any organizational equation gains advantage by compelling another to do something, productivity as well as teamwork degrades.

It’s why when we first designed PMAPS (the Proposal Management and Production System) in 1994 we focused on the workflow first, and then designed the software.  Since then, it has been continuously validated or changed to reflect improvements in the workflow.  Creating a successful relationship between the SME’s content contribution to the database was centric to the success of our model.  By permitting every SME to designate the appropriate time when his or her next review of the data was necessary, and automating that process, insures that the proposal team will have compliant data at its fingertips every time they conduct a search.  And the SME knows that when a record is being returned to them for review, it’s by their own permission.

SharePoint can’t do something as critical as this out-of-the-box and quite honestly not without a lot of customization.  So don’t fall victim to the argument that the company ‘already has SharePoint’ without understanding the tradeoffs and cost consequences.  There’s a reason why the best software is designed as products ensuring they best meet the intended use at the lowest cost, supporting by many users. As an independent proof point, here’s what one seasoned proposal professional said to a forum of proposal colleagues.

“We use SharePoint for a lot of different things and actually have some brilliant SharePoint programmers on our IT staff. Our SharePoint sites have more capabilities than average SharePoint sites but we could no way use it for RFPs. It would be like going back to the dark ages of cut and paste. I have spoken to several people that got stuck having to use SharePoint (for their proposal activities)t. They really hate it. We scrambled to get proposal software in our budget so that wouldn’t happen to us. It (SharePoint) looks like a good solution to the people who don’t actually have to do the RFPs because of the search and collaboration features, but it just doesn’t work for a heavy RFP workload with fast turnaround times.”

No Respect

Today, global B2B commerce is rapidly adopting more and more formalized procurement methods — meaning more Request for Information (RFI), Request for Proposal (RFP) and Request for Quotes (RFQ) are being received than ever before.

It may be that our sample size is too small, but it’s pretty clear from where Proposal Software sits in the equation that the proposal professionals responsible for orchestrating intelligent, cogent, and winning responses are not getting the internal support, tools, or even the respect they deserve.

All too often, we find proposal teams saddled with antiquated technology e.g. Internet Explorer 6, or Word for XP, while their colleagues in other parts of the same organization enjoy the latest technologies. We’ve known since we entered the proposal management space in 1994 that proposal teams are also at the bottom of the IT support food chain.  It’s why we have always engineered our PMAPS product line to have the smallest IT footprint possible.  But even today, the simplest of IT support requests becomes a major issue, requiring multiple meetings, approvals, and weeks and weeks of time. We wonder if anyone realizes that this lack of attention potentially places the company’s new business pipeline is at risk? And to ask for a modest expenditure to make the process of keeping the company’s new business pipeline reliably working is next to heresy.

I’d like to think that the people we run into are not doomed to a ‘cut & paste in haste’ world forever.  Of course, much also has to do with the issuance side of this equation.  Sending out Excel spreadsheets that don’t have enough space to insert complete answers, or the use of online systems that really force you to work offline in Excel or Word or both before uploading the required information, is not a very good use of today’s technology.  In fact, using web services and XML, we demonstrated five years ago how a consultant’s database — and that of a potential supplier — could be effortlessly synchronized.  So, procurement officers are also behind the curve as well.

As stated in early missives, the proposal tsunami is only getting worse.   It’s time for senior management to recognize this before a major opportunity — worth more than decades of the cost of the required technology — is lost to something as controllable as meeting a deadline or ensuring compliance of the information in a key proposal.

Fire Prevention or Fire Victim?

Fire prevention is less expensive and less dangerous than fighting actual fires.  The same holds true when dealing with managing a new business pipeline that is increasingly driven by formal B2B RFPs.  Better to be ready than to be caught in a situation where you can’t respond, only to lose the opportunity to those better prepared.

Conventional wisdom suggests that Requests For Proposals (RFPs) only increase in good economic times. Yet, the last recession has proven that wrong. What we saw then, and even now, are two phenomena at work simultaneously. They both drive RFP volumes. First, the realization that staying ‘lean’ requires full-time attention in any successful 21st century company’s future, not just as a reaction to a downturn.  Therefore, bidding and re-bidding anything that can be bid, plus ever shortening contractual cycles, are driving up RFP volume. Concurrently, formal Supply Chain or Strategic Sourcing disciplines are being adopted by more and more organizations globally.  Add in any growth in a company’s economic activity, (or an improving economy) and you have a trifecta of RFPs flowing out to suppliers.  In addition, the flattening global economy is expanding sourcing opportunities across traditional geographic boundaries, particularly for services but also for hard goods as well. These long distance relationships require a lot more due diligence than ever before, and hence require larger RFP requests (for more supplier information) as well.

That’s where today’s database technology becomes to the rescue.  With a centralized relational database, driving the right proposal software platform, you can automate most of the proposal data management activity. You can also control content, formatting and branding, bringing it down to any ‘SmartPhone’ or ‘Tablet’ device 24/7/365 anywhere in the world in real time. Technology doesn’t eliminate the need for intelligent people to work at the content your sales organization requires to bid, but it can keep track of when a document is coming up for review, send it back to the right person for review, and keep track of the request on both ends. Database tools can also remind or follow-up on overdue requests, retain things like the editing history and insure that deadlines are not missed. Phew! Automation, therefore, is the lynchpin to creating an efficient new business development workflow.

See it in action at Booth #25 via the PMAPS^® WebProMobile APP or go to www.proposalsoftware.com to learn more.

‘Up’ and ‘Down’ Markets – Both Drive Proposal Volumes

Conventional wisdom suggests that Requests For Proposals (RFPs) only increase in good economic times. Yet, the last recession has proven that wrong. What we saw then, and even now, are two phenomena at work simultaneously. They both drive RFP volumes. First, the realization that staying ‘lean’ requires full-time attention in any successful 21st century company’s future, not just as a reaction to a downturn.  Therefore, bidding and re-bidding anything that can be bid, plus ever shortening contractual cycles, are driving up RFP volume.

Disciplined or Drowning?

When first jumping into the proposal management pool back in 1994, it became very obvious that the ‘fuel’ to any successful workflow (with or without software support) was directly tied to the quality of the underlying data.  Proposal Teams are supposed to be knowledgeable about the products and services they are ‘writing’ proposal responses for.  Yet, the Subject Mater Experts who originate the content are the ultimate arbitrators for what is and is not a correct response to an RFP question.

What Drives What? Workflow or Software?

Way back in the day when personal computing was just gaining ground, it unleashed a plethora of internally developed ‘applications’ designed to make a non-systematized activity more productive.  These nascent software solutions most often copied the existing processes in place.  So if you put a piece of paper in a filing cabinet then you created the same routine but within the software.  If your desktop had a folder tree (and 99% of them did circa 1995 when Windows dominated this space) then that’s how you wanted to organize your information.  But it was a trap, in the sense that this approach — while fast and inexpensive — codified what was already in place.  It rarely challenged conventional wisdom about whether there might be a better or more effective approach.

What is a Proposal?

As I travel around the world, the most confusing term I run across is actually in our name ‘proposal’.  Everyone I ask has a different definition of the word, mostly depending on what type of company and/or their role in the organization.  After some reflection, I think there are basically three major categories with one sub-set.

 One-of-a-Kind ‘Infrastructure or Defense’ Bids
To very large companies like GE that builds power plants or Boeing that makes everything from commercial jets to satellites, a proposal is really a Bid being made on a very large, one-of-a-kind opportunity.  So, while there may have been a ‘Request for Proposal’ (RFP) issued, it’s for something like the landing gear on the next fighter jet on the drawing table. Or, it could be a nuclear power plant in a very specific location with very unique requirements.  This makes finding the appropriate answer(s) impossible, as nothing done previously is applicable. The overarching need for a software tool falls much more into the ‘project management’ arena. This is where a Project Manager assigned to spearhead the company’s response to the RFP might involve dozens, even hundreds, of individual contributors and could take up to a year to complete.  The Project Manager may or may not know or ever meet these contributors face-to-face, yet has to orchestrate this complex request into one comprehensive document that effectively responds to every single question asked in the RFP.  Customers who work on these government bids have told me that the responses sometimes fill an entire van when delivered!  It’s a tedious and intensely time-consuming task that requires incredible attention to every detail – any one of which can tip the decision in or away from your favor.

Observations From ‘Down Under’

I recently spent a week visiting with over a dozen of Australia’s largest corporations.  Despite our sluggish economy, Australia is on a tear with the explosion of commodities they provide to the rest of the world, most notably to China.  So, business is booming for everyone in every sector ‘Down Under.’

Yet, despite the size, sophistication, and reputation of these firms, they were all struggling with how to handle the onslaught of Request for Proposals (RFPS), which in that part of the world and also in the UK, they call bids or tenders.  The fact is that only one out of ten organizations whose business is driven by the formal bidding process actually have a formal workflow to handle it. Consequently, they are jammed with last-minute scrambles or ‘fire drills’ as we call it in the States, to respond to new business opportunities.  Some have tried to adopt the standard Microsoft toolkit to solving this problem, such as setting up a SharePoint, but none that I visited with has found a satisfactory answer.

The Perfect Proposal Storm

The Perfect Proposal Storm is definitely brewing across the globe!
In the 17 years of supporting proposal management activities for some of the world’s largest companies, we have never seen more interest surrounding the need to make the proposal process of responding to major account Request for Proposals (RFPs) or Request for Information (RFIs) more streamlined, yet brand and legally compliant.

In some parts of the world – mostly the UK and its colonies – these are sometimes referred to as Bids or Tenders.  Generally speaking, it’s a very formal and well-organized request for information from a potential buyer of your products and services.

Why a Blog?

We never thought there would be either a product like PMAPS (The Proposal Management and Production System) or a company like Proposal Software to create it, when in 1994 we were challenged by a Fortune 500 corporation to double their number of consultant driven major account proposal responses… without increasing headcount.  Considering their existing process (seemingly akin to the wiring diagram of a modern commercial airliner) was so convoluted, at the time, we were far from certain if we could meet their goal.

So, we started at the very beginning, by tracing every step from receipt of an RFP, to delivery of the completed proposal, interviewing every stakeholder along the way and then ultimately reorganizing their process workflow.  In doing so, we would advocate much greater control for each individual proposal contributor, and recommended employing a “relational” database to further increase efficiency. However, within a month, our prospective customer notified us that while they were pleased with our analysis, there was no commercial product yet available that would faithfully execute our changes (remember, this was 1994), and perhaps more importantly, that their IT personnel were far too busy to undertake the project. Sound familiar?