As a professional services firm, your ability to respond to RFPs efficiently is key to winning new business. Proposal automation software is making response times faster than ever, and yet despite this many firms are still hesitant to adopt new ways of working. With new technology continuously leveling the playing field, slow movers are being edged out by more nimble, innovative competitors.
In this blog, we'll explore how Flowcase is empowering your competitors to automate a key part of their processes - resume (CV) creation, and we take a look at how those firms are using their newfound efficiencies to make their submissions even stronger.
How our clients (and your competitors) save time
One of the most manual aspects of the proposal process is compiling the resumes of your key personnel. Pestering your team to update their resumes, tailoring each profile to meet the RFP, and then copying and pasting content into bid-required formats are all time drains that bid teams contend with for every proposal they submit. In fact, the process is such an arduous, manual endeavor that when users switch to Flowcase, they save approximately 50 hours a month through automation. This time saving translates directly into more bids submitted and, ultimately, more contracts won. Here’s how they do it:
1. Streamlining candidate sourcing
With all employee data centralized in one platform, bid teams can access a searchable database of skills, experiences, certifications, and more. This allows them to quickly stack skill requirements to find the perfect candidate, eliminating the time-consuming back-and-forth trying to find niche skill sets manually.
2. Intuitive tailoring
Via a drag-and-drop editor, bid professionals can easily tailor content to meet the RFP. They can toggle specific project roles on or off, reorder sections, and edit text, all without worrying about formatting challenges. Teams can also easily reuse previously tailored sections from past bids that had similar requirements, mitigating duplicative efforts.
3. Automating formatting
Our smart templating feature allows data to be exported into submission-ready documents in seconds. With a single click, tailored profiles can be downloaded into custom Word, PowerPoint, and PDF templates that match either your company branding or the bid-required layout. This automation eliminates hours of manual copying and pasting, reduces human error, and ensures consistency across large proposals.
This last step around formatting documents is where we see some of the biggest gains from our clients. Exporting data directly into industry or federal templates, such as the SF 330, can be an immense time-saving. Grethe Milivojevic, a Senior Consultant at SopraSteria Scandinavia, where over 4,000 employees utilize Flowcase, attests to this: "The ability to easily change the look of CVs by using different templates has been a game changer."
Of course, our platform isn't just about speeding up processes; it's about making them more accurate too. By making resume updates intuitive and resolving version control issues, we help you to ensure every resume is current and error-free. This not only improves bid submissions but also enhances employee data quality across your organization. "Flowcase is a key player in our pursuit of streamlined excellence," summarizes Sherine Kerr-Stewart from RVA - a large engineering consultancy that submits over 600 proposals annually using the platform.
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How bid team repurpose their time
While crafting RFP resumes is only one part of the submission process, it's an incredibly time-consuming one and therefore being able to repurpose this time can be a game-changer. Many of our clients find that this newfound efficiency allows their processes to become more proactive than reactive. Instead of being on the back foot, struggling to keep up with incoming RFPs, they're able to approach submissions with confidence, knowing they're putting their firm's best case forward.
What this means in practicality is that bid managers are able to focus on other high-scoring activities. While your team might be bogged down in manual resume formatting, your competitors are spending their time crafting compelling narratives or conducting deeper market research. They might be perfecting their executive summary, improving their pitch decks, or tailoring content at a granular level. They could be refining their proposed approach, fine-tuning their pricing, or polishing up one of many other important outputs.
And for teams who are already putting their best foot forward, this boost in efficiency allows them to deliver more bids. Since proposals are a game of numbers, their ability to produce more submissions without sacrificing quality inevitably results in incremental wins.
In Ssummary
In today's proposal landscape, the difference between winning and losing bids often comes down to efficiency and agility. By streamlining your resume process with Flowcase, you can reclaim valuable time, allowing your team to focus on crafting more compelling proposals and increasing bid volume. As one client remarked, "When we saw Flowcase demoed for the first time, we realized that we had been working the 'old way'." Stop working the old way and embrace the tools that your competitors are already using to gain an edge in the bidding process. Book a demo today to learn more.
