Businesses with complex solution sales are commonly required to submit a formal proposal or response to RFP to win new business. Most of these organizations manually build these documents by searching and copying/pasting content into the next proposal from previously written proposal content. The process is sluggish, inconsistent, and riddled with errors. The use of proposal software removes these manual measures, allowing writers to build business-winning proposals and RFP responses more efficiently and reliably.
“Expedience Software solves this problem by bringing proposal software to the application that all proposal writers use – Microsoft Word,” stated Melissa Mabon, President and CEO. “The use of Word ensures strong user adoption and simplified training for users. Content may be selected, formatted, and inserted into proposals without ever leaving the Word environment.”
Nearly every company that manually creates proposals knows that there is a better way. Historically, many of these organizations were able to convince themselves that the challenges of adopting this technology were too burdensome or that they were too busy to advance this critical function. Remote working during the Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the risks associated with manual proposal processes. In addition to proposal efficiency and accuracy improvements, Expedience Software helps customers scale their team and become more capable of working remotely.
Before adopting Expedience Software, it is common for organizations to have a chaotic proposal process and have proposal content spread across many files and locations. As a part of the implementation process, the Expedience professional services team helps customers formalize a scalable and efficient proposal process fueled by a well-organized, up-to-date content library. Because the content library stores native Word content, it can store anything that can be inserted into a Word document, such as images, charts, resumes, and even videos, and can be saved with formatting completely intact.
The Content Portfolio is a Microsoft Word ribbon containing dropdown galleries of user’s reusable content that can be searched, previewed, and inserted into the user’s RFP or proposal. A complete set of finishing step tools ensure that proposal documents are completed correctly with names, addresses, and other fields replaced appropriately before releasing the document.
The Style Palette allows the creation of consistently branded, beautifully formatted proposals every time. Using the Style Palette, users can embed the corporate style guide inside of Microsoft Word. Users centralize styles and core proposal elements into a simple and intuitive ribbon directly in Microsoft Word. The Style Palette also houses standard design elements that wrap around a proposal, such as cover pages, headers, footers, table styles, and other essential proposal elements that are always readily at hand.
Expedience Software has successfully improved the proposal process for organizations in multiple industries of varying sizes and languages. In the example of their client intelligence, the global bid team sought to simplify complex data using Expedience.
itelligence Enhances Proposal Creation
with Expedience
For more than 30 years, as an SAP Global Platinum Partner, intelligence has helped companies optimize and enhance their IT environments.
The Global Managed Services Solution Design and other proposal teams generate several 100 proposals a year with an order value of 100,000 euros up to 2-digit million euro amounts.
A key challenge in the proposal process was incorporating extensive data from a sophisticated Microsoft Excel-based pricing tool for Managed Cloud offerings into their Microsoft Word proposals while maintaining careful and consistent formatting throughout.
“Expedience Software solves this problem by bringing proposal software to the application that all proposal writers use – Microsoft Word”
In addition, the intelligence bid team produces proposals in both English and German and needed a solution that would support the delivery of high-quality proposals in both languages as well as content development and content management in multiple languages.
Expedience delivered an automated proposal solution that integrated fully with the bid team’s internal calculation tool. The team no longer loses time by manually entering, checking, and rechecking figures from the calculation tool. Now, data is automatically inserted into the proposal, with the client-specific Microsoft Excel information and pricing tables created through Expedience without any additional manual effort.
Due to Microsoft’s significant investment in the Office 365 platform, Microsoft Word’s evolution has set the stage for the unique new features of the Expedience proposal automation solution. These advances include much more comprehensive and unified task coordination, collaboration, and planning capabilities.
With over 25 years of experience in proposal automation, the Expedience leadership team originally founded Pragmatech Software, suppliers of The RFP Machine. The team combines extensive experience in sales and proposal processes with a deep understanding of Microsoft Office automation.
Expedience Software helps sales and proposal teams create simple, precise, and beautiful proposals directly from Microsoft Office. Users can easily automate RFP & RFI answers (even Excel RFPs!), FAQs, DDQs, SOWs, Questionnaires, PowerPoint, and more. Expedience is the trusted solution for financial, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and technology organizations worldwide.
