Improving Sales Proposals

Creating winning proposals requires a sales team to rapidly evaluate each opportunity, manage complex documents, coordinate work among multiple contributors, access standardized content, and archive completed proposals. A proposals management solution built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system uses Microsoft Office technologies such as Microsoft Office Groove 2007, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, and Microsoft SharePoint sites to provide these capabilities and enable teams to compose more winning proposals with greater speed, effectiveness, and quality.

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  Situation
  Solution
  Benefits

Situation

In today's business-to-business sales environment, companies need to streamline sales processes to remain competitive. A proposals solution built on the Microsoft Office System uses familiar technologies to improve processes and can help sales teams respond to opportunities faster. Gartner Research indicates that a proposals solution can "allow a sales organization to deliver a greater quantity of accurate, timely and well-packaged proposals and quotes so that opportunities are not missed because of an inability to generate a response."

When responding to requests for proposals (RFPs), some of the common challenges sales organizations face include:

	Time-consuming processes: Proposal teams spend significant time searching for and re-creating content, assigning and coordinating tasks, and sharing documents. These processes are often inefficient and can lead to slow response times and missed deadlines.
	Erroneous, outdated, or ineffective content: Proposal teams need current and accurate content, but locating approved and proven content can be difficult, whether it comes from past proposals, recent industry regulatory documents, or company databases.
	Time wasted on low-value opportunities: Requests for proposals are not effectively evaluated up front to ensure that sales teams focus on the projects that will yield the highest return on investment (ROI).
	Difficulty tracking and managing project status: In the absence of an easy-to-use central access point to store and share proposals securely, teams usually manage proposal projects through e-mail, which can lead to long review cycles and confusion about which version of the proposal is the latest.
	Need to switch between applications: Proposal authors often need to switch between applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, and line-of-business applications such as customer resource management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The need to work in multiple applications can be frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming.

Solution

With a proposals solution built on the Microsoft Office system, sales organizations can address these challenges. An Office-based solution can:

	Streamline the proposal process by eliminating the need to manually initiate, author, and assemble proposals.
	Ensure high quality by creating a content library that proposal authors can use to search for, view, and import content from successful proposals. A content library also provides a single location for maintaining and retrieving the latest approved and standardized content and data.
	Compare opportunities by using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to analyze the costs and benefits of potential projects to determine which have the highest ROI.
	Help teams meet deadlines by setting up Microsoft SharePoint sites to share and store documents, manage roles and responsibilities, assign tasks, track status, facilitate collaboration among team members, and decrease the number of review cycles.
	Speed up content creation by using the Office Word 2007 task pane to perform all operations within a single application, including accessing content and sending notifications to team members.

Benefits

By adopting a sales proposal generation solution based on the Microsoft Office system, organizations could realize the following benefits:

	Decreasing proposal turnaround time by 20 to 50 percent: Eliminate repetitive manual tasks; reduce time required to find and reuse the best information from company databases; prevent the need for proposal authors to switch between applications; use a collaborative portal to decrease the number of handoffs between authors.
	Reducing costs by more effectively deploying resources: Deploy fewer resources in a streamlined proposal development process; avoid duplication of efforts by retaining critical expertise; rapidly integrate the solution with deployed Microsoft technologies.
	Growing revenues by increasing win rate and participation: Create highly compelling, accurate, and up-to-date proposals; submit a greater number of proposals with fewer resources; focus efforts on the most promising leads based on systematic evaluation of risk and return; author proposals compliant with your customers standards and government regulations

If you have a solution based on the Microsoft Office System, learn more about opportunities to showcase your solution with Microsoft.

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