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.”

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.

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.

Concurrently, Supply Chain or Strategic Sourcing is coming into its own as a management discipline.  Fortune 500 companies that don’t have formal sourcing departments established, are doing so in record numbers. In addition, the amounts requiring a formal RFP are as low as $100,000 for multi-billion-dollar enterprises.

Add to it 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 as well.

During a recent trip to Australia, where I visited with 15 Fortune 1,000 size companies, it was an accepted fact that if they were to engage in a Software-as-A-Service (SaaS) arrangement, the supplier would in most cases be a U.S.-based vendor using a U.S.-based datacenter.  So, there is a huge discussion going on in the Australian legal community as to whether an Australian company’s data — sitting in a U.S.-based datacenter — is subject to the U.S. Patriot Act potentially making their data accessible to law enforcement agencies under a variety of circumstances beyond their control.  It may not appear to be a big deal to us here in the U.S., yet the IT due diligence involved around just this one issue for an Australian-based company most likely increases the size of a standard software RFP by 50%.

Waiting for RFP volumes to materialize is also a very dangerous thing.  First of all, finding experienced Proposal Writers is getting harder as demand for them exceeds supply in almost every major market we serve.  Couple that with the need for technical expertise in a particular industry, and throw in a sharp increase in proposal requests, and you have a proposal ‘fire drill’ of herculean proportions.  And despite our unique ability to on-board a new PMAPS proposal software user in 30 days, establishing a compliant database, which is the necessary fuel to any proposal software tool, takes time to season the content.

We believe that only one in ten companies that could benefit from a proposal management tool actually have one.  For those in the ‘cut & paste’ mode, waiting to see if their pulling the occasional late night/weekend proposal bender is an exception, is going to come to the realization that it’s the new normal.

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 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.

While the Proposal Team is at the epicenter, the SME ‘stakeholders’ in the proposal process are spread all across the enterprise and include product specialists, lawyers/compliance officers, marketing and sales colleagues who all contribute to the process by either originating or reviewing/approving content.  Making them all winners was our original intent, for we know that in changing behavior (workflow), there has to be something in it for everyone to succeed.

In fact, the inspiration for our proposal software solution PMAPS (Proposal Management and Production System) came in a very stark meeting we had with a very senior officer of a Fortune 500 company.  When asked about where he found/kept the answers to inquiries, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a clipped pile of email messages he had printed out – all containing previously sent replies!  This, of course, was in the early 1990’s when the personal computing tools were crude by today’s standards. Throwing it into my lap from across his desk, he said that anyone or any process that prevented him from getting asked the same @#&*%$+* question a dozen times a week was going to be a ‘winner’.

This was the spark that led to our designing a relational database where every single record permits an assignment (we call them ‘Attributes’ but they are technically data or record meta tags) to the content owner and by his/her election, a review date.  In this way, when the document is returned to the SME for its scheduled review it’s by permission.  And in between the expert’s review, unless there’s a good reason to think the question being asked might not fit the answer on hand, you don’t reinvent the wheel with each RFP.

However, proposal databases always seem to be out of compliance. The excuse given more often than not is that the proposal team ‘doesn’t have the time’ to update content.  So it’s like trying to teach drowning people how to swim! They can’t stop to learn or they’ll drown yet they are nearly drowning most of the time anyway.

That’s where database technology becomes your savior.  With the right relational database and proposal tool, you can automate most of the data management activity.  It doesn’t eliminate the need for intelligent people to look at content on both ends of the relationship — from SME to Proposal Writer — 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 and also retain things like the editing history. Phew! Automation, therefore, is the lynchpin to creating an efficient workflow.

But like seatbelts, if you don’t wear them they don’t protect you.  It is also true for any database; particularly one as important as your proposal database.  If you don’t have the discipline to set it up correctly the first time, and use the tools you’d find in a product like PMAPS to maintain it, you are going to find yourself drowning the majority of the time. What’s worse is that you continue to wear out your welcome with the SME community to a point where, like ‘Chicken Little’, your last-minute pleas for help are going to fall on deaf ears.

There are still many people in the proposal management world today where they have their proposal databases organized in folder trees; each folder containing duplicate sets of sub folders by each and every category. That’s OK if you are the person who put it all together.  But if, you are a first time user of this data store, you have to click through a lot of places to find what you are looking for.  Interestingly, just about the time desktop folders were fast and inexpensive the rage, a newer technology was beginning to emerge; namely relational databases.  This multidimensional ability to relate many attributes to a single data record gave the person searching for information many ways by which to find what they were looking for.  So it’s not surprising that Google, Yahoo and most all of the Internet search engines grabbed hold of this approach, which today, drives the way the entire world searches.

Technologies like this are game changers, but they fit into a larger context of the best practices approach to creating successful software.  That is to challenge the current workflow first, and then build the supporting tools into the on-screen experience of the end user.  That’s what technology is all about.  If you need to be reminded of a request, let the software keep track.  And better yet, send the recipient of your request an ‘iCal’ that will also place the due date on his or her calendar.  If you are moving information from one source to another, automate the transfer and eliminate the extra clicks in ‘cutting & pasting’ back and forth.

All of these little things fall under the workflow umbrella.  And each and every one of them in their own right is a non-event.  But by approaching the software design task from a work flow perspective (in business school these are the Operations Management courses every MBA had to suffer through) you can accumulate enough of them to make a significant difference in the overall time it takes to complete any task; particularly complex ones like assembling a major account proposal.

That’s exactly how we first approached the subject of proposal management.  Not from a technology point of view but from taking a hard look at each and every step involved. And we considered all the stakeholders in the process of organizing a response to a major account commercial Request for Proposal (RFP), not just the individuals with ‘proposal’ in their title.  We instinctively knew that when effecting organizational change, there had to be something in it for everyone. One way ‘asks’ never succeed.

In our case, we were working with a Fortune 500 company and all the players involved were very intelligent and also very busy.  So each person had created their own was to responding to a request and/or in moving that request along in the process.  But it was like trying to build a plane from a dozen different uncoordinated factories.  Everyone had duplicative tasks in their routines because they 1. Did not have a holistic view of the entire process, and 2. Did not have sufficient confidence in the other players to ensure that their part would be correctly used in the final product being built.

When we finally got to all the people involved the entire process looked like the diagram below.  Pretty scary, if you ask me!

Our response was to re-design the workflow.  This streamlining of functions was no different than any assembly line.  And thankfully for me, that I stayed awake in graduate school to put those Operations Management techniques for ‘balancing an assembly line’ to good use.  The redesigned workflow ended up looking like this:

The ability to recommend this transition rested on our belief that a central, shared, relational database could keep track of all the bits and pieces throughout all the players within a large organization.  By sharing the information we reduced the overlapping activities as all stakeholders gained confidence in the new process.  And we let the software be the ‘cop on the beat’ by building in a myriad of ‘validation’ fields meaning if the value e.g. a date was not equal or less than a certain date to have the software trigger off the requisite warnings or prevented certain activities from accruing e.g. printing a final version of a document with a missing or incomplete part.

This all sounds so simple today, but in 1994 it was, at a minimum, ‘cutting edge’ technology.  If it wasn’t for the existing workflow being so dysfunctional and so painful for so many people, it would never have been adopted, less even tried. But the alternatives were even worse.  This Fortune 500 Company’s options at the time in continuing to soldier on were 1. Fail to respond to RFPs on time and correctly (a really bad idea when you are dependent on consultants in inviting you into these opportunities in the first place 2. Adding more people to the process (in this case a doubling of an already large proposal team) 3. Not responding to every RFP by triaging them in terms of their value or potential (again, not a great way to approach consultant relations).

We also learned that effecting a change in behavior particularly when it involves changing established technology is like dealing with alcoholics.  They have to hit ‘rock bottom’ before they’ll entertain changing how they do something or learn something new. Now all we have to do is help people let go of their 1995 folder tree database structures.  After all it’s 2011.

 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.

Commercial Proposals
The next level down in the complexity schema is what most people refer to as Commercial proposals.  These are RFPs being responded to in a much narrower category where there are relatively fewer variables to deal with.  A very good example comes from the asset management industry.  For instance, a Pension Plan sponsor, usually in connection with a consultant, decides that it’s time to reallocate $100MM from U.S. Large Cap stocks to Asia Emerging Market stocks.  So they scour their asset manager universe looking for firms that specialize in Asian Emerging Market stocks, applying other criteria such as the size of the firm, its published investment performance track record, etc.  Then, they issue an RFP to a select number of asset managers who have already been pre-screened against the macro criteria.

The RFP is designed to force a deeper dive into that organization’s capabilities.  The RFP may have anywhere from 100 to 400 targeted questions about performance, finances, people’s backgrounds, fee schedules, security policies, trading processes, etc.  But the interesting thing is while there are always variables in every commercial RFP, the bulk of the questions overlap, somewhere between 60-75%.  This happens for two reasons: 1. The consulting firms use a template for every one of their RFPs, which is adapted to each client’s situation, and 2. There are only so many questions anyone can ask about fundamentally the same type of activity.  We know this to be true because we see a natural ‘capping off’ in our customer’s proposal databases over time.  If it weren’t the case, we would see their proposal databases continue to grow exponentially with every proposal issued being added as unique content.

A good guess at a commercial proposal database is something like 2,000 to 3,000 individual Question & Answer (Q&A) records.  The smallest will fall in the 500-1,000 range and the largest tend to stop around 5,000 records; although I’ve seen one with 15,000!  So, since the responder is going to be asked a lot of the same questions, it makes sense to build and maintain a proposal Q&A database.  This speeds the assembly process and significantly reduces the amount of time spent asking the same internal experts (we call them Subject Matter Experts or SMEs) the same question every time it comes up in the next RFP.

When you are responding to hundreds of proposals annually, the time savings really add up! Of course, the Achilles Heel to a database like this is whether or not the Q&A records you have are correct and compliant; legally, technically and from a brand perspective.  Consequently, there is also a database maintenance function that goes along with this approach. But that’s true of ANY database regardless of its purpose.  However, it’s been proven that net-net the time savings on the assembly side more than offset the database maintenance time spent by a wide margin.

Sales Proposals
This is the ‘catch all’ phrase for just about any and everything a sales person gives to a customer or prospect.  Let’s say that I have lunch with a customer and a topic comes up and I say, ‘Hey we do that, let me send you a proposal’ and what I end up sending is more of a capabilities piece on a service we provide.  Nonetheless, it’s a proposal in my eyes.  I start it out by saying “Dear Mr. Prospect, we can help your company in the following ways, etc.”  So it’s unsolicited, most often not in response to anything formalized by the recipient, with a few variables thrown in.  In this category of proposal, it’s the ‘wild west’.  Some organizations are very strict about enforcing the use of templates by their sales organization. But on the other extreme, I recently had a chief marketing officer of a large global company look across the table and tell me he had ‘no idea’ what his large new business development organization (around 800 individuals) were handing out to customers!  So, he had both the content and the brand compliance at risk.  And, if you are not a PowerPoint or Word expert (even sometimes when you are), anything can go wrong when cutting and pasting content together.  Ideally, you want to repurpose your proposal database into the templates your sales organization is using so both ends of the sales cycle tie together using the same information being maintained in one place.

Pitch Books
There’s a subset in this proposal process usually referred to as Pitch Books.  It usually comes after the RFP process when the finalists in the selection process are identified.  They are then most often invited to come on site and make a final presentation or ‘pitch’ based on their proposal.  This is another case where you really need to ensure that what you said in your formal RFP response is what you are flashing up on the screen during your finalist ‘pitch’.  Remember, in most cases there is a consultant sitting with the potential customer, who’s principal job it is to pick up on any discrepancies.  So again, repurposing content from your compliant proposal database in creating your ‘Pitch Books’ addresses this potential landmine.  Similar to Sales Proposals, it also continues to leverage the investment required to establish and maintain the proposal database.

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 fact of the matter is that just having the information – somewhere or with someone – is simply not good enough. The information refreshes exponentially with the size of a company’s product line and market scope.  So, just knowing that an answer or say technical specification was correct last month no longer means that it is today.

Yet, the more formal Supply Chain methodologies being applied globally to all B2B transactions is now demanding total compliance.  If I make a decision based on some arcane spec e.g. ‘Oh good, they support Windows 2002 meaning we won’t have to upgrade 2,000 desktops’ when in fact your product requires Office 2003 (seems minor but trust me it’s not) then you the vendor are going to have to go backwards in supporting something you don’t do or compensate the customer’s expense in upgrading its technology.  Or worse, lose the business or even get sued in the process.  The days of ‘winging’ quotes or bids are long over.

Unfortunately, the layers of administrative personnel required to maintain control are also missing in most businesses today.  I saw a lot of reception desks with no receptionist, or even a secretary sitting outside someone’s office. I don’t think I saw even one.  Everything is now in real time and we expect everyone to be doing his or her own thing. Salesmen are impacted the most where most don’t even have offices and exist on mobile devices virtually. It’s frightening. I even had one senior executive confess that he really didn’t have any confidence in what his large sales force was handing out to customers and prospects!

My conclusion is that while the world is going flat, per Tom Friedman’s1 earlier predictions, it is also suffering from the same maladies.  The interesting yet sad fact is that the technologies available for solving many of these informational access and accuracy issues do exist; yet the adoption of them always

Following are a few predictions. First, I am confident that most sales organizations will be equipped with Tablets within the next two years.  Once you start traveling with an iPad vs. your laptop, you’ll never want to go back.  This assumes, however, that sitting somewhere up in the cloud is everything you need to access on the Tablet. All of the companies I spoke with confirmed this and are experimenting with the new technology or migrating to it. .  And, Apple looks like the horse most organizations are going to ride.  It’s not just their leadership position, but also the Tablet’s light weight and most important its screen size.  Anything smaller than a nine-inch screen and you are just not going to be flipping the tablet around and sharing the screen with your customer or client.  Every time I pulled out my iPad to show someone our PMAPS WebPro Mobile ‘App’ on screen, I was seriously concerned that I might have it taken from me!  One of my colleagues called it ‘the meeting candy’ and we are just at the tip of the iceberg with this technology.

Second, more and more large organizations are going to recognize that SharePoint is not the panacea for storing information in a centralized area.  While it provides a starting framework, adding the customized workflow rules and controls becomes a huge IT project requiring constant ongoing maintenance.  It’s better to tap into a proven product and access it on a SaaS basis.  This affords lower costs, better functionality, and no IT overhead.

Lastly, whatever you can observe as best practices in one part of the world is going to quickly become the standard everywhere.  We get calls from almost all parts of the globe and with Internet access, most companies are willing to seek out and do business with the best providers they can find.  The cloud is making it possible to provide services anywhere so with the right infrastructure and security, it doesn’t matter where the two parties are located. Sounds like old news until you see a large organization put its most sensitive information into a datacenter eight thousand miles away with a vendor they have never met.

[1] Source: Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat

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 the uptick?
We can point to three phenomena that are driving this increasing demand for a better proposal workflow.

The first is that over the last decade the role of supply chain management has come to the forefront.  This discipline (formerly known as the purchasing department or the like) is referred to as a Supply Chain, or Strategic Sourcing, but the function has become more sophisticated.  A centralized group of professionals who assist the various business units throughout the organization focus on doing a better job in acquiring goods and services.  The goal is not always a lower price (that’s almost assumed when you create an organized auction of any sort) but also to ensure that legal uniformity is present across all contracts, and that the vendor or suppliers actually deliver on what they promise. We’ve seen how even companies as large as Apple are impacted when a supplier of a critical component falls behind in quality or quantity or is impacted by something like a labor issue or even a tsunami.

Understandably, these organized requests tend to be very exacting in terms of the information required, the level of detail, and even the format in which they are delivered is often dictated.  So I caution any organization that does not fully comply with this process. In addition, most are even time sensitive, meaning that if you miss the deadline for any part of the process, you will be disqualified from the bid, regardless of who you are or what your price or performance may be.  Public bids are entirely transparent and the rules, once established and published, are the rules with no exception. Couple this with the global recession where anything that could be rebid was rebid and the result has been an explosion of new RFIs and RFPs.

Hence, we estimate the volume of RFPs has been steadily going up by one-third!

Are companies really performing due diligence?
The second phenomenon is what I refer to as the Bernie Madoff effect.  A Ponzi scheme of global proportion duped some of the world’s most sophisticated individuals and firms.  Why, you ask?  Because they were not asking the right questions or accepting the wrong answers, and there was no independent checking of the facts.

As a result, most everyone (or at least their lawyers) woke up and started to add layers of additional information they required when doing any business with anyone.  This, in turn, has made the size of the RFP or RFI request as every conceivable question has now been thrown in if for no other reason than to get it on the record.

We estimate, again with supporting evidence from our global customer base, that this has increased the size of the average RFI or RFP by 50-100%.

Who does the work?
The global recession did an excellent job of squeezing down headcount, almost universally.  So the third phenomena is that many of the people who were responding to RFIs and RFPs are just not there anymore.  But if your new business pipeline is dependent on your responding to RFPs, and hopefully winning your fair share, somehow they have to be answered.  And the easy solution of hiring back the people that were let go is simply not feasible. Nor is the option of not bidding if you want to stay in business.

At best, proposal teams have been held flat since 2007.

Better Workflow is the Answer
While we are in the software business, it all started with designing a better workflow for managing the proposal process.  The software came after and was designed to support and enforce it.  You can only automate so much before intelligent people need to craft a winning response to an opportunity to hold onto existing and/or gain new business.  Our proposal management workflow first designed in 1994, has over the past 17 years, been refined from feedback from thousands of everyday users and has increased the productivity of a proposal team from a low of 30% to a high of >100%.  So when you do the math 1.3 increase in volume times a 1.5 increase in size, and you effectively get almost twice the amount of work. Yet, the people who to perform theses tasks have been held pretty much constant[1].

It’s not a pretty picture.  We expect to be increasingly busy ourselves as more and more organizations hit this wall and discover that working in ‘fire drill’ mode is not sustainable.

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?

In response, we realized the only way to ensure implementation of our methodologies with as little disruption as possible, was to simply build a product ourselves. Thus, we embarked on what became the first version of PMAPS. A revolution in software proposal production then, that continues to lead our industry today.

The rest as they say, is history. From our early, humble beginnings on the desktop, to modern web-based solutions and advanced mobile smartphone applications, PMAPS has grown to meet the growing needs of our customers no matter your size or budget. In future entries, we’ll share with you new and exciting product developments, as well as what we’ve learned by having the opportunity to work with thousands of the world’s busiest, and smartest, proposal professionals.

Welcome to Proposal Software.