The benefits of a cloud-based bid proposal solution

Producing professional proposals that set you apart from the competition isn’t easy, especially when you need to do it quickly. The good news is that a cloud-based proposal solution can help you speed up and improve your document creation process.

In this post, we're going to look at 6 key benefits of using cloud-based bid proposal software.

1. Seamless access to a central location

Round-the-clock accessibility is by far the greatest benefit of a proposal solution in the cloud.

Imagine that you need to make some last-minute additions or changes to your proposal while you are out of the office. Cloud-based proposal software gives you access to the system from anywhere – in the office, on a train, in a café, at home, and on any device – be it a desktop, a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet. All you need is an Internet connection.

Cloud bid proposal software allows you to store everything in one central, cloud-based location and access it from anywhere you get online. You can assign access to multiple team members as necessary, at any time, and collaborate in real time.

By always staying connected to the central database, a cloud-based proposal solution gives you the flexibility and freedom to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.

Templates and previously submitted proposals can also be accessed from a central location, massively reducing time and effort spent on searching for and re-using content.

2. Streamlined proposal process

Creating, collaborating on, approving and distributing your proposals in one user-friendly solutions eliminates the need for complicated processes that depend on disparate systems.

• You can allocate tasks and contributions to team members, track and report on their progress, and push their responses through reviews before being presented back to you.
• Your team members and external SMEs can co-author a single version of the proposal to reduce the risk of using multiple formats. This increases collaboration and avoids local versions of the same document.
• You as a bid and proposal manager can track throughput of proposals, identify bottlenecks and see the progress of allocated tasks. As a result, you’re able to manage ”the whole process more effectively and have complete deadline control.

Every bid or proposal helps to enlarge and refine the cloud-based corporate content library. Consequently, the next bid or proposal will be even easier – and faster – to create and deliver.

Furthermore, automating and streamlining your process enables you to zero in on the strategic parts of your bids and proposals.

3. Enhanced compatibility

In today’s and tomorrow’s business environment, information exchange between already available technologies is essential. Thus, stand-alone products, lacking compatibility with other systems, will soon become obsolete.

Cloud-based proposal software can be easily integrated with other applications or software, including CRM (i.e. Salesforce), contract management, ERP or project systems.

It is this compatibility, ensuring that one central pool of data is used across the organization, that makes cloud-based proposal software an even smarter choice for your business.

Read more: Discover the possibilities of a good proposal software solution

4. A foundation for your applications

A market-leading bid proposal solution is also an Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) solution, serving as a foundation for building and launching applications quickly and easily.

An aPaaS solution can be used as a platform for any document or information centric processes, just as Salesforce is to sales processes.

A key benefit of an aPaaS is the ability to run, develop and launch applications all from the same platform. This gives you better visibility into your applications and makes it much easier to maintain them, as opposed to using disparate systems.

5. Reliability

Business documents such as bids and proposals consist of vast amounts of graphics, images and lines. The bigger they are, the more unwieldy they become. Nobody wants to imagine the possibility that a business-critical document can crash just before the deadline… but over the years, this nightmare scenario has played out in many businesses using ‘lightweight’ document management tools.

A heavy-duty cloud-based proposal solution is built to handle bids and proposals of any size, making document crashes a thing of the past.

6. Security

Today’s global collaborative work environments, where dozens of employees and contractors could be working on a single deal or document, are fraught with risks. Data stored on corporate networks is now more accessible than ever, since employees need to communicate, share and collaborate.

By offering a secured database-driven content repository that allows access to only those who are authorized to access it, a cloud-based proposal solution safeguards your confidential information.

When you are set free from unnecessary worries, you can focus solely on creating a winning proposal.

Conclusion

Moving to a cloud-based proposal solution helps you work smarter, safer and more efficiently, by removing the obstacles to effective co-authoring.

When your teams can access, edit and share documents anytime, from anywhere around the world, they’re able to do more together – and do it better.

This enables you to act quickly when the business opportunity happens, so you can respond as early as possible. Being the first one across the finish line – with a rock star proposal – gives you the competitive edge you need to win more business.