Project Proposals Management
Irrespective of the industry and the size of your enterprise, I am sure you are always on the lookout for adding more customers to your clientele.
Why not? More the merrier!
Your company may have invested in pre-sales and supported by an equally competent project proposals management team to accomplish your organizational revenue objectives.
Considering the talented pre-sales and project proposals management teams, and their ability to collaborate well, you believe it is just a matter of time before new customers start flowing in continuously.
Maybe you just started to count the chicken before they hatch!
Are you wondering why? Let me expand.
There is a world of difference between B2C and B2B businesses.
If your product or service is thriving in a B2C environment, the credibility builds on itself to a large extent.
The scenario is very different and to some extent complex when we consider B2B businesses. The prospect-to-customer cycle time extends to a few months and in some cases, even more.
Let us shift the focus back.
Your pre-sales and project proposals management teams start to look out for potential customers through various means and may include some or more of the following channels.
- Industry associations
- Business journals
- Existing customer referrals
- Primary market research and analysis
- Secondary data sources
- Social media
In their eagerness to get customers, your pre-sales and project proposals management teams may end up running all over the place, and you may observe that they are super-busy.
Your staff may be moving from one business channel to another with incredible swiftness.
Additionally, they may be working on one customer proposal early morning, and they are pulled to some other proposal a few hours later.
The hectic pace of your pre-sales and project proposals teams might leave you with a great feeling along with a buzzing office environment.
Unfortunately, this ad hoc approach to getting new clients on board may not be in the overall interest of the enterprise.
An indication of some of the questions that you must ask when your teams undertake such an unstructured approach is below.
- Are the teams targeting the relevant customers regarding size and revenue?
- Are the teams focusing on potential strategic customers or not?
- Do we have the right mix of customer portfolios across industries, geographies, and other factors?
- How does the potential revenue compare vis-à-vis sales and marketing efforts?
- Are the team’s initiatives in the right direction?
- What is the level of risk associated with our prospects?
- What is the cycle time for converting a prospect to a customer?
- What is the efficiency and productivity of the sales and marketing teams?
- What is the overall cost of acquiring a new customer?
- What is the pre-sales and project proposals management cost vis-à-vis revenue generated?
I am sure it is amply clear that adding new customers is not child’s play! Moreover, organizations cannot randomly run pre-sales and project proposal-making.
While professionals and business leaders understand the laws of probability behind a successful deal, for sure, it can’t be left to chance.
So, how are organizations managing their pre-sales and proposal-making process? Industry research and our experience do not paint a rosy picture here.
It is surprising and to some extent even shocking to observe companies resorting to using Spreadsheets to manage this critical function of any enterprise.
With such an approach, inefficiencies, lack of focus and direction, and most importantly missed opportunities are what confront business leaders in their journey of profitable growth.
Is there a viable yet robust software solution that could bring sanity to project proposal management?
TouchBase® is specifically designed to capture and manage the end-to-end sales cycle coupled with advanced dashboards and analytics to aid management decision-making.
TouchBase® is one project proposal that you should not miss!
