How to Build Buy-In to Better Qualify Proposals

Strategies for Talking to Your Executives About Qualifying Proposals

Accurately qualifying proposals is one of the most impactful ways to improve your p-win, regain time to work on key initiatives, and reduce the stress of your team and your proposal contributors. But despite these powerful benefits, the rest of your company might not intuitively understand the power of accurately qualifying proposals as well as the proposal team does.

That’s why we’ve compiled a short overview of how to discuss enhanced proposal qualification with typical roles in your company.

Below we list the roles whose approval you would typically need to secure buy-in to purchase proposal software as well as some sample talk tracks that would appeal to the interests of each role:

C-Suite Executive (CRO, VP of Sales, VP of Operations)

Main Priority: Hitting revenue number efficiently

Second Priority: Promoting overall company health

Points of Emphasis: Enhanced proposal qualification improves company efficiency

Talk Track: Every RFP response is a significant investment, involving time and energy from contributors across the company. To promote efficiency, we must be judicious to which proposal opportunities we respond. Qualification processes and software that allow us to focus on the highest-value opportunities and avoid the lowest-value opportunities promote focus among employees, leading to better outcomes in nearly every function. Otherwise, we are wasting money and time unnecessarily.

Director of Sales / Director of Capture Management

Main Priority: Hitting the Quarter’s (or this Year’s) Revenue Goal

Secondary Priority: Sales Efficiency of Reps

Points of Emphasis: Enhanced proposal qualification increases revenue and sales efficiency

Talk Track: When we respond to too many low-probability proposal opportunities, the proposal team has to resort to templatized responses instead of detailed, customized proposals. By not pursuing the lowest-probability opportunities, the proposal team will be able to be more strategic about responses, increasing our win rate and increasing overall revenue.

Account Executives are wasting significant time working on proposals. Even though the proposals team does the bulk of the work, the sales reps must still be involved in strategizing, managing the customer relationship, attending oral presentations, and more. Every additional RFP they work on takes away time from doing what they do best: building relationships with prospects. With enhanced proposal qualification, we can return dozens of hours back to the Account Executives and boost our sales efficiency metrics.

Director of Proposal Management

Main Priority: Maintaining a competitive win rate

Secondary Priority: Producing high-quality content

Points of Emphasis: Enhanced qualification leads to higher win rates, gives more time to proposal team to produce high-quality work

Talk Track: Enhanced proposal qualification will allow us to identify and avoid the lowest-probability opportunities. Without responding to the wrong opportunities, our win rate should see immediate improvement. In addition, it will allow the proposals team to produce better work, which should further improve the win rate.

With enhanced proposal qualification in place, our team can work on some of the strategic content overhauls we’ve long discussed but rarely had the time to implement.

Director of Revenue Operations

Main Priority: Company efficiency

Secondary Priority: Team satisfaction with operations

Points of Emphasis: Proposals are costly, choose wisely. Reduce team tensions through intelligent pursuit of proposal opportunities.

Talk Track: Every proposal is a significant investment, requiring dozens of hours of time from contributors across the function. Before pursuing an opportunity, we should analyze the opportunity cost, the potential fit, and the potential profitability to make wise investment decisions with company resources.

By reducing the amount of time spent on low-probability proposal development, several efficiency metrics should improve, including the Magic Number, Sales Efficiency, RFP Win Rates, etc.

Putting it All Together

Accurately qualifying proposals is essential not only to proposal managers’ success at work but also to allow them to maintain a healthy work-life balance, avoid burnout, and work harmoniously with the rest of their company.

Armed with Patri’s quantitative data about Opportunity Fit, Win Probability, and Opportunity Cost, proposal teams can elevate their role, involving themselves in the strategic pursuit decisions that dictate everything from proposal win rate to captured revenue to team satisfaction.

But to access these benefits, you’ll first have to get your executives on board with the value of accurately qualifying proposals.

Download How to Sell Enhanced Proposal Qualification to Your Executives to learn how to talk to your executives about better qualifying proposals today.

This eBook will walk you through how to make the case for proposal qualification software to your executives using the language and frameworks that are most compelling to an executive’s mind. 

How to Sell Enhanced Proposal Qualification to Your Executives covers the following topics: 

• Why You Need Data-Backed Proposal Qualification
• Understanding the Executive’s Role
• How Qualification & Proposal Software Contribute to the Executive’s Role
• Value Propositions for Enhanced Qualification Software
• How to Make the Case for Enhanced Qualification Software to Your Executives

Download the eBook