Crack The Proposal Time-Saving Nut, Part 4: Use Your Team Time Wisely

We conclude our series of time-saving tips with the fourth part. Whether you use proposal writers or not, your subject matter experts are a critical component of your proposal development process. They design the solution and they build the product or provide the service. Their expertise provides insight into how to develop and successfully deploy. 

Yet, as we all know, their time is limited. With full-time responsibilities on other projects, you need to use this time wisely. 

• Stop emailing capture plans. Instead, centralize and secure this information and maximize your team’s time. Instead of searching email when it’s time to write, they’ll find everything they need with their assigned tasks. 
• Skip the blank page. Get to your first draft fast by centralizing appropriate reusable content. Experts can browse, or better yet, search, filter, find, and copy and paste from the results pane. Now they can spend their time tailoring the proposal to your capture strategy. 
• Eliminate review confusion. Save your reviewers, and your team, time with a real-time feedback loop. Review documents and graphics together, comment, discuss, and come to consensus, while protecting compliance and versioning, tracking activity. 
• Stop renaming files. Save your team time with a single file version and automatic version control. Your team works in the current version, while previous versions remain available, and you eliminate duplicate records, record comparison, and serial document renaming. 
• Stop merging review documents. When you centralize review documents, reviewers provide feedback on the centralized version. This means you skip the review documents merge step and your team jumps back in to revise.

Bottom Line: Don’t let lack of collaboration slow down your proposal team when proposal-specific tools can make your proposal time more efficient.