Project Proposal: How To Put Your Best Foot Forward?

Spoiler: Treat the preparation of a project proposal as a project!

In the previous edition of this newsletter, I described how to handle the tradeoff between winnability and profitability while making a project's pricing decision. My answer: junk the flotsam of spreadsheets and treat project cost estimation as an integral part of the opportunity-to-cash cycle. First, gain confidence in the project costing, make versions suiting different resource-mix if needed, and then decide.

What do you do after you are ready with pricing? You write proposals. Wrong. You build proposals. Configuring, estimating, and preparing proposals are projects themselves. However, most teams treat proposal preparation as an ad hoc activity.

Here is what usually happens.

You choose a template or use a previous proposal doc file as a base and edit. You have two or three people contributing to the document. Whether you use Microsoft Word or some other standalone type proposal builder, the collaborators must copy and paste pricing, intros, background, status, and many other sections of the proposals from different documents and edit.??

Someone may have edited the templates; someone else may have edited the terms and conditions section and the look and feel of the template used as a base. There is no control over who edits which section. As the proposal document goes through revisions, the errors multiply. With every project, you get proposals that look different and that include changed terms and conditions. Your proposal in the making will need more work before its approval. It's a waste of time!

Will you be able to put your best foot forward using such a proposal?

The situation above is similar to estimating project costs using spreadsheets.

The solution:

The solution is to realize that building? high quality project proposals is vital. You need to pull in the required information from the enterprise databases and have tools to edit and assemble its parts. It would help if you could pull in all the required information automatically and you had control over editing sections like pricing and terms and conditions.?

You need a proposal builder and writer integral to your enterprise-wide software.?

ProductDossier PSA's Opportunity & Estimation module has an inbuilt proposal builder and writer that ticks all the above boxes. You can assign different persons to prepare the sections of a proposal, while all of them can view it as a whole. The built-in tool provides a Word-like workspace with controlled access for editing pricing and terms and conditions sections. It has a workflow for collaborating, versioning, and approving a proposal. Integrating your digital signing utility into the PSA's proposal builder is possible.?

The advantage of ProductDossier PSA software lies in its tracking capabilities. It makes the entire proposal-making process visible. It controls various workflows. You stay on top of everything and ensure that you meet deadlines.

Building a project proposal for complex IT services is a project by itself. Treat it like it is. Make intelligent pricing trade offs based on reliable cost estimates and produce a professional project proposal. ProductDossier PSA platform lets you manage your proposals as projects.?

You get a ready-to-send professionally produced project proposal document.

You will see your opportunity conversion ratio going up.

Reach us at [email protected] for more information or a demo.