3 Key Challenges in Proposal Writing Processes and Team Management

There are many challenges that one would across when it comes to the whole proposal writing process and proposal management. It is tedious and often, causes many teams to have sleepless nights just before the deadline 

3 Key Challenges in Proposal Writing Processes and Team Management

 Out of the many challenges, we identified that there are three key challenges that seem to be common across industries and organizations. 

• The ability to quickly and accurately identify the scope of the RFX.
• The ability to find and build upon relevant boilerplate content.
• The ability to manage the end to end proposal writing and approval process 

The common aspect of these three key challenges is that they create a huge wastage of time in the proposal process and are considered “unfixable” because no one has time to fix them. Wherever you go, these are the key items that are identified as the most difficult things to do. While these challenges may be seen as easy hurdles in small proposals, in the case of larger government proposals, they take a lot of effort and demands the inclusion of proposal management tools.

•  At the heart of any proposal writing process is an effective and complete compliance matrix. A thorough compliance matrix allows the team to understand what the customer’s needs and underlying needs are. Creating the compliance matrix for large RFPs takes a lot of time and is very cumbersome if there is no tool being used.
•  Secondly, we’re often told that finding boilerplate content is an ordeal. Even with dedicated teams meant to handle information and identify boilerplate content, proposal management teams find it hard to get what they want when they want it from them. They would rather have a tool to manage it rather than collaborating over email. Without an effective proposal management tool, proposal writers end up spending more time sending out emails and less time writing strategically. As a result, the end product can be clumsy, unclear and irrelevant- thereby decreasing the possibility of a win- even if the solution is amazing.
•  Finally, the entire proposal management process- which includes daily cadence calls, the calling out of action items and the tracking of pending activities take a lot of effort. Following up with various proposal contributors is a continuous hassle that does not allow proposal managers to do anything else. Their contribution to the proposed strategy as well- becomes limited. Every proposal manager wishes that they had a proposal management tool that would make life easier. And all of them agree that spreadsheets don’t do enough. 

 This brings us to a few conclusions. 

1. The proposal writing process requires a proposal management tool that can extract relevant information from the RFP and help ease out the response process. 
2.  The proposal management tool must also help the proposal authors spend less time searching for and entering boilerplate content or templates. Instead it must help them spend more time writing strategic content. 
3.  Finally, the proposal management tool must also act like an end to end project management tool with dashboards and analytics to assess progress and take quick and deliberate actions to meet deadlines. 

 That is why we built Zbizlink. Zbizlink is a proposal management tool built by proposal management specialists for proposal managers, writers and teams. You can easily solve the issues faced across the world by proposal teams through the many features that Zbizlink has. What’s really good about Zbizlink is that has all these features under one umbrella. That way, you will not have to purchase different proposal management tools to handle different aspects of the proposal management process. Contact us know more.

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• Signs you need a proposal management software