Corporate Excellence 2019

CORPORATE VISION / Global Excellence 2019 11 CORPORATE VISION / Issue 1 2020 29 As Microsoft Word ribbons loaded with an organization’s formatted and approved content, Content Portfolios are ready for apply within new proposals, offering easy methods to browse, search, and automate proposal-ready content. Proposal teams have many ways to identify best-in-class content: navigate a ribbon, use thumbnails, or use the key-word search feature. The Microsoft Proposal Experts The agency’s bid team needed a customized template to ensure easy updating of content. Since going live with Expedience’s automated proposal solution that includes styles and content management, the travel agency reports that their bid process is much more efficient, and bid team members can now focus on the things that “really matter to the business.” “Expedience was the obvious choice for us. It looks great and is easy to use. Having a customizable template is very beneficial for us; it allows both the Sales team and the Bid Management team to control the content efficiently,” says Sara Nedelkoska, Commercial Bid Writer, QBT. Seamless Content Access Expedience also tackles the issue of accessing up-to-date proposal content, the most time- consuming and error-prone part of proposal creation. “No one has time to upload, download, and reformat content from an external database into a Word document, or weed through 40 possible answers to an RFP question. When up against a deadline, proposal writers resort to what’s familiar: opening old proposals and doing workarounds, leading to costly errors,” observes Jason Anderson, a seasoned proposal writer, and former Expedience customer. lives outside Excel, requiring under-deadline proposal teams to spend time entering responses manually from different software such as Microsoft ® Word. Formatting challenges and character count limits within Excel are commonplace, forcing you to crunch content into cells designed for numbers with very little flexibility, increasing the chance of errors. With Expedience, content is formatted automatically to be “Excel-ready.” Instead of copying and pasting content from Word to Excel, teams can access their Portfolio to answer questions from Excel-based RFPs, saving time and improving the accuracy of their final product. Expedience’s Excel Connect product allows bid teams to easily import an Excel RFP spreadsheet into a Word table, enabling them to leverage the Expedience Content Library as well as the complete functionality of Microsoft Word. The tool, built with client input from around the world, is “a game-changer for customers responding to Excel-based RFPs,” says Jason Anderson, VP of Sales and Proposal Strategy. Expedience’s software inspects the Excel RFP worksheet and data restrictions directly from Word, checks the character counts of RFP answers, and exports answers from Word back to Excel. Proposal writers can: directly in a team’s Word-based RFP. The company’s newest offering, Proposal Maestra, works on all these fronts – allowing proposal managers to flag bid/no-bid issues, make assignments, and identify and tailor win themes, making them readily available for viewing in Maestra as well as in reports to their team. “Whether you assign some or the entire RFP to just a few or many owners, you are able through Maestra to better manage the entire process,” says Loudenback. Maestra not only tracks these assignments but also generates highly customizable reports. Because these reports are created in Word, they can be preformatted with a company’s corporate styles and include instructions and win themes Microsoft Word or Excel, with the ability to customize it to meet all tracking requirements. As companies look to increase their proposal win rates in 2020, they need not look beyond the familiar Microsoft environment to create professional, compliant, and strategic proposals. Clearly, the Microsoft experts at Expedience are a smart investment for organizations that wish to step up their RFP game by leveraging the familiar Microsoft platform they already have at their fingertips. Contact: Sharon Coddington Company: Expedience Software Website: www.expediencesoftware.com Manage the Proposal fromWITHIN the Proposal APMP (Association for Proposal Management Professionals) recently noted in their U.S. Bid & Proposal Industry Benchmark Report that organizations that ‘win’ identify requirements against an organization’s capabilities, determine win themes, and develop and stick to a timeline. “There is no need to leave Word to access content in an external database. This means that Expedience Portfolios are remarkably fast and easy to use. All of Word’s sophisticated formatting and other tools are always available,” Anderson says. Excel-based RFPs Many proposal teams also struggle with how to respond efficiently to Excel-based RFPs. Existing proposal content usually • Search questions and insert content from your Expedience Content Library • Update Placeholders and Replacement Fields using Expedience Ribbon Automation • Activate Word’s Track Changes feature to support collaborating with SME’s and Reviewers Expedience offers a proposal management solution that works to guide the proposal’s focus, emphasis, and style. Once a team is ready to thoroughly analyze or ‘shred’ the proposal, Proposal Maestra provides unique ‘intentional shredding’ to let the proposal manager direct and control this function. Once tags and assignments are complete, Maestra creates a comprehensive tracking and compliance matrix in Aleksei - stock.adobe.com 2019's Leading Proposal Automation Software C mp ny - USA

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