For professional services firms in today's competitive landscape, having an efficient system for managing employee and project data is critical when producing new proposals. However, many organizations still rely on manual, piecemeal processes involving static Word documents, shared drives, and siloed data sources. This outdated approach creates several key challenges, leading to inconsistent and outdated resume information, difficulty finding qualified individuals, arduous manual tasks, formatting and branding issues, and ultimately, lost time that could be spent on higher-value strategic initiatives.
The costs of these inefficiencies can be substantial, from missed opportunities to perceptions of low quality that impact your firm's reputation and brand. This guide will walk you through the process of identifying the need for a dedicated resume (CV) and reference project platform, evaluating potential solutions, building a business case, and successfully implementing a new system.
Step 1: Creating Awareness
The first step when considering a new tech platform is to foster awareness around the challenges and limitations your firm currently faces when managing proposal processes. Do any of these problems sound familiar?
- Resumes are stored across various formats, templates, and folder structures
- Resumes quickly become outdated, and there's confusion over which is the correct file
- It's difficult to source individuals with specific qualifications across the organization
- Teams tailor static resume docs to meet the bid, leaving version control issues
- Bid teams waste a huge amount of time copying, pasting, and reformatting content
- There is no centralized oversight over your company's skills
Getting stakeholders across different teams aware and aligned on these issues early can be incredibly useful. Not only will they help secure buy-in later, but their different viewpoints will help you understand how a product could benefit your wider organization, not just your team.
After all, a resume automation platform can go beyond helping just Bid Managers; it can benefit Marketing, Sales, HR, IT, and more - as the linked pages explain.
Step 2: Understanding Available Solutions
With the challenges identified, the next step is gaining an understanding of how a resume management platform can solve those inefficiencies. There are a few ways firms can approach this and most typically opt for one of the following:
- Stand-alone resume management platforms
- Proposal management suites with resume functionality
- Internally built solutions
Immediately, we would advise against moving ahead with an internally developed solution, with our reasons outlined in this blog.
This leaves you with the choice of going with a best-in-class niche tool, an all-in-one solution, or both. If you feel confident with your wider proposal processes but struggle with the art of compiling team resumes, then a specific resume management solution would be best. If you struggle with many of your proposal processes, then you may want to consider an all-in-one solution. Alternatively, a mix of the two might be your best option. Many of our existing customers layer a specific tool (i.e., Flowcase) on top of an all-encompassing solution, to ensure they have general proposal productivity alongside the specialist capabilities of a resume tool. Of course, if you go this route, you need to ensure your solutions integrate with each other seamlessly.
Once you uncover the type of tool (or tools) you need, you can start to narrow down your options.
Step 3: Narrowing Down Your Options
Whichever type of solution (or solutions) you opt for, you should start to narrow your search down taking into account the following factors:
- Required features and capabilities. First and foremost, does the solution do everything you need it to? Consider creating a feature matrix to check software against. Browsing vendors' websites will give you some indication whether the tool fits the bill but often you will need to delve deeper in a demo.
- Ability to support your company's size and future growth. As you grow, will the tool grow with you? Consider where you want to be in 3–5 years and whether the tool will still be suitable for you then.
- Integration capabilities. Does the tool integrate with your existing systems (and future systems), and are you able to create custom integrations via a flexible API?
- User reviews. How does the tool rank on software comparison sites, such as G2 and Capterra.
- Company size. Is the vendor too small or even too big? Partnering with a company of <10 employees may be a risky proposition as their own future may not be secure, while partnering with a huge company means you may not get the support you need.
This groundwork should result in a list of 3-5 tools that you want to demo later. However, before you go into the time-consuming process of demoing multiple tools, it makes sense to build your business case and gauge the general feasibility of investing in a new tool.
Step 4: Building a Business Case
With a better understanding of what your firm needs, it's time to start building out a formal business case. This will involve presenting your argument for new software to your manager(s) and financial decision makers. When creating this presentation, you should consider including the following:
The problem:
- Outline the key challenges that we covered in section 1 that made you start looking for a tool
- Use anecdotes from your daily work life that back up these challenges
- Use insights from your wider teams about how a solution can help them too
The solution:
- Outline your initial research into software vendors, and how their tools can boost your productivity
- Outline the key features you need and why you need them
Financial implications
Perhaps the most important part of the business case is outlining the ROI of a tool. This might take a bit of guesswork, especially without knowing exact vendor costs, but it’s important to provide a general outline of how this will benefit your company’s bottom line.
- Estimate the current cost of existing inefficiencies (e.g., time spent on manual resume tasks that could be automated)
- Model how many more bids can be pursued with this new efficiency, and use your firm’s win percentage to calculate how many more bids you can win per year
- Additionally, factor in that new tools can improve your win percentage by providing better quality bids
Note: Flowcase provides an ROI Calculator which we can present to you during your demo.
Additional strategic benefits
Lastly, you can outline the added benefits of a strong resume and/or proposal automation system. This might include things such as:
- Improved brand reputation from consistently high-quality proposals
- Ability to attract and retain top industry talent with modern tech stack
- Scalability to support future growth and increased pursuit volume
- Opportunity to get a better understanding of your employees' capabilities and therefore reposition your company’s value proposition in new ways
- Get a clearer picture of your employees' experiences to enable up skilling and improve culture and retention
After presenting this business case, you should have hopefully persuaded key decision makers that a resume management tool would be a worthy investment. If so, the next step in the process is demoing a range of options so that you can put forward your top recommendation.
Step 5: Demo Your Top Options
With your requirements solidified and the business case presented, it's time to demo the most promising solutions. Don't rush this process; investing sufficient time here ensures a successful implementation later down the line.
Tips for effective software demoing:
- Have a list of your requirements on-hand, and prepare any concerns/questions you may have from reviewing their website
- Have key stakeholders and process owners attend demo, or record the demo for them
- Ideally, ask for tailored environments to mirror your processes
- Provide real-world scenarios to be modeled during demos
- Vet integration capabilities with existing systems
- Assess training requirements and onboarding processes
- Get an overview of costs, including whether all features are included in the price
- Request follow-up demos if required to go into more detail on specific areas
- Establish clear criteria and scoring models to objectively compare the different options
This process might take a few weeks and a number of demo calls per vendor. However, it is more than worthwhile to make sure of the exact pros and cons of each tool and feel confident in making your decision.
Step 6: Presenting Your Recommendation
The final step is summarizing and presenting your findings to the key decision makers in the process. An effective pitch will:
- Quickly recap the current process challenges and impacts
- Provide an overview of the different solutions evaluated
- Clearly detail why the recommended product(s) are the best fit
- Reaffirm financial justifications and ROI from the business case
- Outline high-level implementation/change management plans
- Directly address any potential concerns or objections
To speak confidently to your recommendation, you should also come prepared with supplementary documentation from demos, pricing quotes, and your business case so you can comprehensively answer any follow-up questions. If all team members are on board, then this meeting should result in being given the green light to make the purchase.
Step 7: Making The Purchase & Implementing The Software
After signing the contract, you’ll need to formulate an implementation plan. This might involve the following:
- Form an internal project team from the very start, spanning key stakeholders and designate a product champion who can be the focal point for any internal questions
- Work closely with your chosen software’s customer success team, and align on a plan for rolling out the software to your team, including key deliverables and deadlines
- Allocate dedicated time for training your team members
- Define success metrics to measure against goals post-implementation
With some preparation and a strong partnership with your chosen vendor, the roll-out should be a smooth transition and it should position you to realize value from the tool as quickly as possible.
Summary
Following these steps will empower you to confidently select and implement the right resume management / proposal automation platform to drive efficiencies and win more bids. Let us know if you have any questions or want to kick off the process with Flowcase.
