Surviving the Proposal Tsunami

find the article at: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?articleid=5472

Surviving the Proposal Tsunami

This article, by John Laurino, was published in October 2005, and describes what is facing today's proposal manager. Today's professionals are plagued by a flood of RFPs and RFIs that seem to be growing in volume and complexity every day. And responding to these RFPs involves many cumbersome tasks that must be performed under extreme time and resource pressures. For example, assembling and compiling content into hundreds of pages of text from various documents and files, collecting pricing, costing and engineering details, and making that mad dash to delivere the final proposal to meet the customers unmoveable deadlines. It's a wonder that more of these proposals don't end up as disasters.

And management doesn't seem to care that proposal teams are stretched to the limit. Despite the fact that RFPs are the lifeblood of business, and that responding to them is one of the most critical components of the sales and marketing function, many proposal managers feel like Rodney Dangerfield, they get no respect. And the pressures can only get worse, as the customer responds to better results with even more unrealistic expectations.

This artical lays out a series of seven (7) prediction on the future of RFPs, and what companies need to be aware of.

However, we (ISSG) have been working in this area for quite a while now, and have done a few projects where we have worked with customers to extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM into the engine that drives the whole RFP envirionment.

By making use of CRM, extending it with things like Microsoft SharePoint Services and InfoPath, along with the key values for collaboration in Microsoft Office System, many of these pains can be addressed, if not eliminated.

Microsoft SharePoint, as a key collaboration tool, can be used to deliver templated proposals to the RFP team, even though only a few might even be CRM users. Using the versioning capability and area security capability of Microsoft Word and Excel, with the check-in and check-out capabilities of SharePoint, the entire team can collaborate on the development of the RFP, and the final result can be reviewed by Sales and Management before delivery to the customer, and then tracked in CRM.

Not only that, Microsoft even delivers a free "quick template startup" tool, that users can download and use to kick-start their own Proposal Management project. You will need some help linking all of the pieces together, but the basics are there to work with.

Bruce McIntyre