What happens when you need to scale the number of proposals your pre-sales team submits, but your tech stack can’t handle it? Read more to find out how a recent Enablix customer was able to ditch their folder system and respond to more RFP’s faster.
Problem: Too many proposals, always starting from scratch
Let’s set the scene: a multinational enterprise company selling primarily through responding to RFPs had a growing pre-sales team of over 70 people, each of whom was sending out multiple proposals to prospects each week. Previously, they used their Sharepoint file system to keep track of all their reference proposals and previous RFP responses, but they quickly grew to over 1,800 individual documents, creating a system that was far from helpful.
The problem occurs when creating a proposal for a prospect: Creating a proposal goes much quicker when reps can use a reference proposal for a similar recent client in a comparable industry as a model. Effectively, they make a copy of the old proposal and adjust the new response as needed, saving a ton of time – especially when customers are located throughout the world, which makes RFP responses time consuming to create.
Unfortunately, in this case, starting from scratch actually was quicker than trying to find a similar reference proposals. With over 1,800 recent proposals, and no good way to organize or find the recent RFP responses to model your proposal off of, their pre-sales team was spending way more time on putting together these documents than necessary.
The issue isn’t necessarily with folders themselves, but use cases with large amounts of rapidly changing data. Although the company had tried organizing reference proposals by industry, they found that companies in the same industry from different companies required very different templates. Likewise, prospects sharing the same country but of very different sizes had wildly different proposals as well. There wasn’t one singular way to organize the content that was going to work.
For the company to keep growing, they needed to find a different way to organize their reference proposals.
Solution: An Easily Searchable library of Reference Proposals and GTM Content
Luckily, they found Enablix.
The migration from Sharepoint to Enablix was simple – all that was needed was identifying which documents they wanted on their Enablix platform, and talking through the best tagging structure for their organization with members of customer success. Our team did the rest through our bulk uploading and tagging features, with all of their content available in the Enablix platform and ready to use within 2 weeks.
I’ve put together a quick walkthrough of how to update and search for reference proposals in Enablix – check it out:
There are a few key features I want to highlight that make Enablix such an easy fit for organizations struggling with proposals:
- Our Sharepoint Integration allows pre-sales members to easily link content within Enablix without needing to duplicate it
- Our flexible content structure means that reps can find reference proposals alongside related material like decks, past presentations, and training videos
- Our categories and labels allow reference proposals to be tagged in multiple easily-searchable ways, solving the issue of having many different proposals in one place
- Enablix Deep Search makes it easy to find effective reference proposals by searching through documents for individual text snippets in each file
With Enablix in place, the team was able to expand from reference proposals to begin covering all of their content management needs.
Benefit: Effective Proposal Planning Delivers More Revenue
With this new organizational system and tagging features in place, content and files became easy to find – So, now when new opportunities come up, their pre-sales team can quickly search for and find similar RFP’s to use for reference.
Without the need to start from scratch each time, this team is able to deliver RFP responses to prospective customers quicker and give more relevant information to prospects with each response.
And while I can’t speak specifically to how our friends have expanded their business thanks to more effective reference proposal management, I do know anecdotally that they are seeing an uptick in RFP’s ‘won’ due to their ability to answer quicker and more accurately.
These kinds of stories are exciting to me because we get to see the results in near-real time. This customer had outgrown their Sharepoint system and was getting frustrated daily with their lack of organization. The Enablix platform not only streamlines this process, but makes their sales content management scalable for the future.
You can find Jennifer on Linkedin or get in touch with her by emailing Enablix Support.
