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How Proposal Management Software Helps Your Tech Company Be More Competitive

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Kris Sæther

10.01.2022

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4 min

Complexity, uncertainty, and new opportunities. This is what characterizes the new business reality that has emerged in the wake of the pandemic. To adapt and thrive, organizations must become more resilient and agile.

Despite the market disruptions caused by Covid, however, one industry is booming: The technology sector. 

As a result, competition is fiercer than ever before.

If you run a tech company today, chances are you have to compete with existing players and new entrants not only locally but globally. You're expected to rapidly bring a wide range of new products and services to the market at ever-increasing speed.

Basically, it’s a survival of the fittest environment, where your ability to respond quickly determines whether you stay ahead or fall behind.

In this article, we will discuss one specific business decision that can enhance your company's competitive edge in 2022 and beyond.

How Does Your Proposal Creation Process Look?

In the tech industry, more than in any other sector, agility, flexibility, and innovative strength are key aspects that drive and maintain growth. Your company's ability to position itself for opportunities in the market is crucial, too. 

Companies in a booming tech sector are flooded with requests for proposals (RFPs). If this is the case for your company, a content creation process that sets you up for success means the difference between being swamped or delivering winning proposals on time.  

What is your company's ability to respond to RFPs professionally and promptly?

Do you have a streamlined and efficient proposal creation process that allows you to put your focus on what goes into the proposal?

Or perhaps your proposal process looks more like the following?

  • As opposed to actually contributing to the content, you spend more time manually compiling multiple pieces of content into one consistent document...
  • Content typically arrives at the last minute, and you must track people down to find out how their contributions are going...
  • As a result of team members working in silos, generating several different document versions, you often spend a day and a half to get the formatting, graphics, and layout right…
  • Before you can print, it takes you hours upon hours of resolving issues...
  • Only a few hours before the deadline, you still can't find out which are the latest versions...

If this is how proposal creation works at your technology company, then the Darwinian nature of your market is not in your favor. More often than not, competitors with an organized proposal process will steal your business.

How Can You Win More Business, More Often?

We recently published a customer success story about our client Nordic Unmanned. As with so many other technology companies today, they are experiencing incredible growth at a rapid pace. Moreover, like many other companies, the file-based approach they used to respond to RFPs did not work. The process was cumbersome.

So what did they do?

The company adopted a cloud-based proposal management software solution - a strategic business decision that allowed them to create bids much faster and with better control.

Read more here about how proposal management software helped Nordic Unmanned become a stronger competitor in its niche.

Here's the big takeaway: If you use generic content management software and/or spreadsheets to generate RFP responses and sales proposals, the process will quickly become unwieldy and off track, making it difficult for your team to submit the proposal on time.

This will result in your company missing out on business opportunities – and revenue.

Getting an edge over your competition and closing more deals requires you to step up your RFP response game.

How to Create Bids and Proposals in Tech in 2022

Although generic content management software allows for version control, professional proposal management software streamlines your workflow and enables greater team collaboration.

Streamlining the document creation and management process from start to finish is the key to creating a winning proposal – up to 70% faster. With good proposal management software, you can manage the process and create your document at the same time.

What Exactly is Proposal Management Software?

Proposal management software is designed to improve the productivity and quality business teams need to compete efficiently. Designed specifically to facilitate the proposal management process and to help teams synchronize and collaborate, it makes submitting high-quality, stand-out proposals faster and easier.

The best proposal management software is built with the proposal process in mind, by experts who know what is necessary to easily create a winning proposal. There is a built-in workflow, which lets you assign writers, reviewers, and approvers. Writers can then begin work in their section at any time and from anywhere. 

  • Everyone will know their tasks and deadlines, and what has been completed at any given time. 
  • Formatting, layout, and numbering are all handled automatically, so you can focus on getting the content right.
  • You'll know exactly what's happening throughout the entire process.

Related: Create proposals faster with proposal software

Conclusion: Out-Compete Your Tech Market Rivals with Proposal Management Software 

Whether you’re a start-up or an established company, if your business is booming and you’re increasingly submitting international proposals, you should consider implementing proposal management software.

When your team works on complex, time-sensitive projects regularly, an enterprise-grade proposal management solution can help them not get lost in a quagmire of manual tasks and inefficient processes. They can instead focus on the value of the content and its impact on the business.

By utilizing the right proposal management solution, you can produce winning proposals at a faster rate and organize your projects more efficiently. In this way, your business gets the agility and revenue it needs to survive in a competitive market.

 

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Kris Sæther

Kris Sæther is Chief Commercial Officer of Xait. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Graphic Media Studies, and has worked in financial communication in London and Frankfurt prior to joining Xait. He has 20+ years experience from the information management industry. Kris is an avid runner and skier, and a passionate fan of the world’s coolest soccer team, Tottenham. If he is not working or running you will find him cheering for his two daughters on the handball court.

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