How to Talk to Your Executive About Proposal Opportunity Qualification

Four Value Propositions that Demonstrate the Power of Proposal Qualification

Enhanced qualification of bid and proposal opportunities is the most effective way to increase your p-win and proposal quality, reduce stress, and boost employee morale. By reducing the number of low-probability opportunities your company responds to, you can not only improve your operations, you can return time to employees across the company to focus on their key initiatives. And perhaps best of all, you can reduce the late nights and weekends you’ve been working to spend more time with your loved ones.

While for you and your teammates, reducing stress and spending more time with your loved ones might be great value propositions, for executives, those reasons are less likely to move the needle. But that doesn’t mean that strong qualification doesn’t benefit executives too. Instead, it means that if we want our companies to improve their qualification processes we must learn how to frame enhanced qualification in a manner that speaks to executives’ priorities.

Below, we list value propositions that will best appeal to the executive’s point of view, helping to make the case for enhanced proposal qualification:

1. Enhanced Proposal Qualification Will Improve Employee Efficiency

On average, a proposal takes over 24 hours of collective labor and involves over nine team members, including team members from Proposals, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success/Service, Legal, and Finance.

As a result, every RFP represents a huge diversion of company energy, resources, and focus. Of course, for a high-probability opportunity, this diversion is worth it. But for opportunities that are fixed for a competitor all along, this diversion distracts employees from their key initiatives and styymies growth.

Enhanced proposal qualification returns dozens of hours to employees to focus on their key business objectives, improving company outcomes and helping executives meet their KPIs.

2. Enhanced Proposal Qualification Increases Win Rates

The most impactful way to improve proposal win rates is to eliminate pursuit of low-probability opportunities. In addition to removing many of the likely losses from the win rate calculation, it will also help free up the proposal team’s time, so they can craft better proposals to improve their winning percentage on the proposals you do choose to respond to. Which leads us to our third point: enhanced proposal qualification actually increases revenue.

3. Enhanced Proposal Qualification Increases Revenue Won

It might sound counterintuitive but generally speaking responding to fewer opportunities will actually lead to increased revenue. Winning proposals need to be customized to the customer’s specific pains and needs. When proposal shops have too much on their plates and are forced to churn out boilerplate language, their win rates suffer. Under-customized proposals are an easy way to lose otherwise winnable deals.

Similarly, sales and account executives can waste precious time contributing to low-probability opportunities when they could prioritize other, higher-probability opportunities, on which to focus their efforts.

By diverting energy from the lowest-probability proposal opportunities, enhanced proposal qualification not only improves overall efficiency and win rates but leads to increased revenue.

4. Enhanced Proposal Qualification Improves Data Tracking, Enabling More Precise Forecasting and Management

Proposal qualification software tracks basic and advanced proposal metrics so executives can make data-informed decisions about how to allocate their resources. Metrics tracked include proposals submitted, time spent on proposals, proposal win rate over time, revenue generated by proposals, and money saved by no-go decisions. With interactive dashboards that make tracking and reporting on proposal data simple, proposal qualification software gives executives the tools they need to effectively manage the proposals function.

In addition, proposal software helps executives make more precise go/no-go decisions. An advanced metric known as Opportunity Fit Score quantifies the relative fit of every proposal opportunity, so executives can make data-informed go/no-go decisions using a standard quantitative framework. Patri Score also calculates opportunity cost and projected profitability of each opportunity, so executives can make holistic decisions about pursuit.

Finally, by improving their understanding of opportunity fit and likely win rates, executives will be better able to forecast revenue, enabling them to have more accurate and informed conversations with other C-Suite executives and the board.

Putting it All Together

Strong proposal qualification 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 enhanced proposal qualification.

Download How to Sell Enhanced Proposal Qualification to Your Executives to learn how to talk to your executives about enhancing your qualification process 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