ProposalID - Benefits
From Proposal ID Wiki
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List of all the benefits of using the Proposal ID system.
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Benefits to Your Customers
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Most importantly, your customers will see the following benefits: | |
| Easy to read format, consistent style and structured layout | With all content consistently on-brand and with the overall proposal and each product deliberately defined for the audience, your customers will appreciate how easy it is to read and evaluate your solution. |
| Improved turn-around | Your customers expect that when they ask for a proposal or an update to a proposal that you should be able to deliver to their request in a reasonable time frame. The Proposal ID system dramatically decreases the time taken to produce quality documents. |
| More accurate information resulting in reduced need to ask clarifying questions | Every proposal is created fresh and new with the latest content ensuring that the customer is provided with the most accurate information to review. |
| Less post-sales discussions around delivery against the proposed solution | If sales are submitted proposals with out of date product content, then your customers have every right to query why the products implemented are not what were promised. By ensuring that every proposal uses the most up to date content, the number of post-sales issues should decrease. |
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Benefits to Marketing
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Full and independent control of template and branding | As your document template is separated from any content, it can be updated at any time with no impact on the content.
Branding of your template is simplified with a distinct list of style elements requiring branding. A suite of tests is available to test your branding to ensure the proposal author's documents will always be on-brand and consistent. |
| Multiple document types supported | Standard section definitions, front and back pages, dividers and headers and footers can be used to define multiple different document types. |
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Benefits to Content Owners
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Full control of configuration of the template | The Proposal ID is fully configurable. Marketing can control all of the content to be included in a proposal, including the standard, mandatory content such as descriptions of the company, legal disclaimers, and the products that are available to be offered for inclusion.
Images, tables and formatted text can be easily added to the content with confidence that, regardless of the proposal authors' skills in using Word, they will be accurately and completely inserted into the proposal. |
| Content can be re-used in different documents | As the Proposal ID system can be used for any company documents, not just proposals, content owners can set up content to be used by any number of different documents. |
| Pre-defined structure for content | Each product's content should use the same structure as the pre-defined structure of the proposal. Your content will then be automatically placed in the correct area of the proposal once selected. This ensures that the customer can review all content in a logical way. |
| Consistent method to publish content | Using your company's Internet, Intranet and/or Wiki, you can publish your content easily and consistently knowing that it will be able to be found by the proposal authors and automatically moved into a proposal once selected. |
| Reduces ad-hoc requests from Sales for content | Proposal authors will always be able to find the latest content that you have published and will appreciate that it is consistently structured and automatically inserted into their proposals for them. No longer will they need to call you to help them find, structure or format content for them. |
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Benefits to Sales Administration
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Full control of configuration of the template | The Proposal ID system is fully configurable. Sales Administration can control the layout of the template, ensuring that every proposal submitted to a customer reads logically and clearly. |
| Multiple different document templates can be defined | The Proposal ID system can be used to define multiple different company documents - from common business templates such as meeting minutes, internal processes, project management, procurment, legal, financial templates or just a good proposal template. |
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Benefits to Proposal Authors
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Content is easy to find and include in proposal | Your proposal authors no longer have to struggle to find the latest content (standard, generic content such as "About Us", etc or product specific content).
The location of all content is defined in configurable lists that your administrator controls. Whenever new content is added or removed by the content owner, the administrator modifies the lists and the proposal authors immediately have access to the latest information. In addition, whenever a content owner updates their content, the proposal authors immediately have access to the latest information. |
| Removes dependency on Microsoft Word skills | Microsoft Word can be difficult to use especially when importing content from different sources. Our unique Paste Wiki function ensures that your content when pasted into a proposal will always be converted to being on-brand, regardless of the style of the source document. The content can come from an Internet page, your Intranet or Wiki or from another Word or Excel document. Not only that, but all external styles are automatically removed so that your document remains clean and uncorrupted by any non-brand styles.
To see a full list of all the features of the Paste Wiki function, see the Features list. |
| Standard content is added quickly allowing more time to spend on customer’s solution | The process to create a generic proposal with the authorised section layouts, the correct and most up-to-date mandatory content and any solution and product descriptions being offered to your customers can be performed easily and quickly by your proposal authors.
Instead of spending time looking for content, formatting it correctly or battling with a range of common Word functions, your proposal authors can spend more time on the specific solution for your customer, creating more proposals or just having a better life. |
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Benefits to Training
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Removes dependency on Microsoft Word skills | Proposal authors, sales personnel, are always experts in verbal communication but not always experts in using Word. The Proposal ID system removes the dependency on having all but rudimentary skills in Word through its unique Paste Wiki feature. |
| Intuitive to use so simple to come up to speed | New sales staff will find the system intuitive to use so can quickly start creating professional-looking proposals with all the latest, complete and on-branded content automatically inserted. |
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Benefits to IT
| Summary | Details |
|---|---|
| Easy to install and maintain | The Proposal ID system's small footprint makes it easy for IT to install and maintain. As a single Word document of around 1Mb in size (for each brand), there are no issues with installation. |
| Standard SOE compliance | Most organisations' Standard Operating Environment (SOE) will support the Proposal ID system as only Microsoft Word (2002 or later) and Internet Explorer (IE6 or later) are required. |
| Simple integration with your other systems | The Proposal ID system is easily integrated with your other systems.
As the system is contained as a single Word document, it can be easily installed and downloaded from your internal Content Management System (CMS) or Document Management System (DMS). Users can upload draft or completed documents back into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or DMS. Being CRM system independent, your existing opportunity workflows can easily be modified to include the creation of the proposal. Your standard or non-standard content can be stored on any HTML-based system such as the Internet, your Intranet or CMS or a Wiki (Mediawiki, Confluence, SharePoint, etc). |
| Simple security built in | Security is built in to ensure that only authorised users have access to using the system. Sales people who move on from your organisation will not be able to take the Proposal ID system where they go. |
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