In APMP and Loopio’s 2024 RFP Trends & Benchmarks report, it was found that dedicated RFP software allows professional services teams to submit, on average, 52 additional proposals annually versus using manual processes. That’s one extra proposal, every single week! With the average win rate at 43%, that works out as a whopping 22 more closed deals per year.
While no single solution can claim to provide all that uplift, by automating the most labor-intensive parts of the process, firms can put themselves in the best position possible to realize the most meaningful gains. If you work in bid management, you’ll know that one of those time-consuming areas is sourcing and presenting your personnel and relevant case studies. In fact, our internal study found that automating this part of the process can save bid managers over 50 hours per month.
In this blog we’ll dive into the three key workflows that Flowcase helps fast-track - enabling bid teams to push more winning proposals out of the door.
1. Sourcing your best team and projects
Equipped with a searchable resume, CV, and case study database, firms can eliminate the constant back-and-forth between colleagues trying to identify the optimal people and projects for each opportunity. Using sophisticated search parameters, your bid teams can filter employee skills, experience levels, past roles, and more to reveal the profiles that align closest to the proposal.
No more patchy communication across different teams and time zones trying to source that perfect match. Additionally, after sourcing your A team, bid managers don’t need to spend even longer searching for the selected team’s most recent resumes or CVs. With a single source of truth for employee data, everything is stored in one centralized, up-to-date platform rather than scattered across siloed systems and folders. Removing this friction around sourcing serves to massively accelerate proposal times.
2. Tailoring and reusing pre-existing content
A bid team’s next stop is to tailor profile content to match the proposal criteria. Unless you’re dealing with an especially niche RFP, chances are your firm has positioned the same personnel and projects for similar proposals in the past. Whereas before your bid team may have needed to hunt down past submissions to find that tailored content, or even recreate the tailored sections from scratch, with Flowcase they can simply access this content from the employee profile.
This is because tailored versions can be saved to the profile without altering the master resume. Previously adapted personal statements and project descriptions can be reapplied instantly, while profiles can then be refined further by toggling specific project roles on/off, or by reordering profile sections so the most relevant experiences rank first. All of these features mean your teams can stop reinventing the wheel and start creating tailored proposals faster.
3. Automated document formatting
Once your team has finalized editing the selected profiles and case studies, the final step is to export the content into the proposal formatting. Again, with Flowcase this can be streamlined. Tailored profiles and case studies can be pushed directly into custom Word, PowerPoint and PDF templates in a single click. These templates might be company-branded, ensuring consistent styling across your firm, or they might be proposal mandated templates, automating the effort needed to insert tens, or even hundreds of profiles into designated form fields.
This saves bid managers from countless hours of copying and pasting data between endless documents, reducing human error and inconsistencies in the process. Automating all of this formatting is arguably the biggest time-saving feature in our toolkit - especially when putting forward large proposals, such as framework agreements.
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Summary
In summary, it’s proven that RFP-specific software leads to increased time-savings and more time to focus on additional submissions, and Flowcase features can be crucial in helping you realize those efficiencies. Stop leaving potential revenue on the table and learn more about the benefits of Flowcase.
