Proposal software should help you win and not just assemble a document

Proposal software that focuses on assembling documents from reusable parts may just help you to lose faster. Instead, proposal software should help you discover what it will take to win and build a proposal around that. Proposal automation will get a bad proposal done more quickly, but you will achieve a better ROI by winning more of what you bid than you will by taking shortcuts to complete your proposals.

Win more of what you bid by using proposal software to better understand the RFP

MustWin Now is an online RFP tool that enables you to make sense of the requirements so you can focus on winning your proposals. Instead of spending hours page flipping through the RFP and clicking on hundreds of spreadsheet cells while you look for where to put the RFP requirements to build your compliance matrix, MustWin Now enables you to build your compliance matrix online using drag and drop.

The RFP tools in MustWin Now enable you to:

• Build a proposal outline with all the RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them
• Quickly cross-reference RFP requirements to your proposal outline
• Add, delete, and move things by clicking buttons or just dragging and dropping them. No more RFP page flipping or constantly clicking cursor keys
• Split long requirements into pieces that can be separately mapped to your proposal outline
• See any requirements that haven’t been linked to the proposal outline
• Categorize RFP requirements by type
• Take notes regarding issues 
• Validate your compliance matrix quickly with a checklist-driven interface

Proposal contributors often don’t know how to read and use a compliance matrix, and sometimes simply ignore it. Even if they do, the compliance matrix is a spreadsheet — all the proposal writing is done in Word and has to be cross-checked. 

With the RFP tools in MustWin Now, the relevant RFP requirements just show up in the proposal content plan sections, so proposal contributors might never have to see the matrix. Without having to study the arrangement of cells in the compliance matrix, MustWin Now simply tells you which requirements are relevant. You can still download the matrix as a spreadsheet if you want, but you might not need to anymore.

Win more of what you bid by using proposal software to figure out what you should say in your proposal

Once you’ve got the RFP requirements linked to your outline, the next thing MustWin Now does is make it easy to capture what to do about the RFP by entering instructions for your proposal writers. In the same way you can put the RFP requirements in front of proposal contributors while they write, you can put in all of your ideas, strategies, and ingredients for winning the proposal. Instead of waiting for a draft of the proposal and then trying to edit and rewrite your proposal over and over until you run out of time and submit what you’ve got, you can shape the proposal before the writing even starts. And then you can see whether any reuse material you have is still applicable, and how it needs to be tailored.

MustWin Now saves you time because people spend far more time thinking about a proposal than actually writing it. When people jump into proposal writing or start from something already written, they spend all of the time available working furiously to try to turn it into what it will take to win. MustWin Now reverses that so you start knowing what it will take to win and can nail your proposal on the first draft. Although most of you will spend some time making it even better. The point is that MustWin Now helps you win more of what you bid, which is what you need to make the effort worthwhile.