When bidding for new business, you need to convince prospective clients that your firm has the knowledge, skills and experiences to more than meet their requirements.
A key factor in this is showcasing your reference projects.
What is a reference project?
A reference project is a past project that, ideally, shows how great you are at what you do. It’s typically presented as a case study - an essential document used to highlight your teams’ past experiences and successes to external stakeholders.
The key data to highlight when creating a reference project includes:
The project challenge - a summary of the brief set by a previous client and the challenges involved in delivering on it
The project solution - the skills, experience and solutions your company employed to complete the project successfully
Client outcomes - details of how your organisation managed to achieve project objectives and the benefits this provided for the client
This format gives you the opportunity to tell a story to the prospective client, and clearly detail working methodologies, ingenious solutions and impressive performance metrics. In just a few short sentences you can provide ample evidence of your company’s ability to get the job done.
A great reference project should achieve two objectives. It should:
- Convince a client of your knowledge and expertise
- Demonstrate your company’s ability to translate that knowledge and expertise into successful execution and client satisfaction
How do I create a winning reference project?
Many companies still rely on Word, Google docs or InDesign to create their reference projects, and use SharePoint or other shared drives to store them. While familiar, these methods are often inefficient. Documents buried in complex folder structures are hard to find, they can’t be tailored to the proposal easily (and if they are, there is versioning issues), and they’re often not in a format that’s fit for the bid. Flowcase has a dedicated reference project interface that allows you to easily get around these challenges:
- Easily store data: Input project details effortlessly, in a standardized format.
- Find projects in seconds: Via an intuitive search interface.
- Tailoring capabilities: Customize project content to meet specific RFP criteria, without compromising the underlying data.
- Professional templates: Export projects into branded case study layouts, or bid-specific formats. Learn more about Templates.
One of the key benefits of using Flowcase for reference project creation is that your projects are linked to the team members who worked on them. This not only improves discoverability of talent, it also improves data consistency. Every team member's profile will adopt the project details, meaning each CV or resume will have the same project description, the same dates, the same client name, and so on. This improves the professionalism of your presentation, and mitigates errors across your proposal.
Additionally, if you already host project data elsewhere, such as in a CRM or ERP, you can easily use our REST API to pull information into Flowcase. This helps to maintain a single source of truth for project data, while still allowing you to benefit from Flowcase’s tailoring and templating features.
How to use the reference project library
Each time you win a project, add it to your reference project library. Keeping up with the data in real time makes life easier in the long run. Even if the project has not yet been completed, storing it in Flowcase means you can easily reference the team who won the bid, and show others in your organization your firm’s work in progress.
When wanting to find a relevant reference project, you can use intuitive filters and search parameters to find the most suited option. You can search by category tags, industry type, skills, and more. You can even filter on dates, costs, sizes, and more.
Once you’ve found the right reference project, you can simply add it to your proposal pane. From here you can customise reference project content, perfectly tailoring it to your current client.
The end result? A simple but super effective process for bids and tenders.
Get started with our own reference project database
Don't just tell potential clients what you can do – show them with compelling reference projects. Request a Flowcase demo today to explore our reference project capabilities and other CV management features that can transform your bidding process.
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