What can proposal professionals learn from self-made billionaire Bobby Axelrod?

Surprisingly, quite a bit. 

"First I figured out where the sharp action was, where the guys who had a plan were, the guys who grinded. Took the guesswork out of it."

In the power politics world of New York high finance, ambitious hedge fund king Bobby Axelrod outmaneuvers the opposition by understanding his competition. What do the most successful people in their fields do? What do they do on a regular basis? What’s their edge? By adopting these as best practices, he commits to a process, not just a goal, to increase his chances for success.

The same strategy is true for the competitive world of sales and proposal management. While any one of Xait’s co-authoring, RFP and intelligent pricing solutions will contribute to your revenue entablement, it’s your process, how you work and how you improve, that guides your outcomes.

You designed your process to help you win by avoiding the missteps that can easily derail your efforts. But outdated, inefficient, and unclear processes are revenue reducers and obstacles to growth. By combining process, technology and the right metrics, what gets measured gets done. For example, improve sales and proposal management efficiency by:

• Identifying “smaller” more targetable KPIs to identify what today’s process delivers. Did you submit more proposals last year than the year before? Using technology to automate manual process activities keeps you on track for growth without adding new staff.
  
  
• Prioritizing KPIs to identify adjustments for incremental efficiency improvements. How do your experts spend their proposal time? Searching for content or responding to requirements? Leveraging technology to improve how your experts interact with each other, and the content, throughout your process reduces response time so you can bid more.
  
  
• Targeting KPIs over time to better focus and hone what contributes to the win. Take a few moments and read your last submitted proposal. What your proposal may be telling evaluators about you may be undermining your sale. Using technology to maintain your content library as part of your process will increase the accuracy and quality of your content.

The most successful organizations in the industry know that process and technology go hand-in-hand. What do they do on a regular basis? They commit to measuring their process, adopting best practices and leveraging innovative technology as their enabler and force multiplier. By adopting this mindset, your organization will be poised for success and growth – and anything else the competitive world of business proposals throws at it.

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