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( votes)Your AEC firm’s money, time and efforts can be exhausted due to the complex nature of responding to RFPs. Because proposals only hit about 40% of the time in the AEC industry, crafting key pursuit strategies about determining which proposals to pursue can be crucial to a firm’s survival. Analyzing and considering the right data and posing the right questions can assist your firm in determining which projects are worth pursuing, optimizing your pursuit strategies to put your hit rates on top and maximizing revenue.
Going after projects that are right for your firm
Your AEC firm may have an informal proposal decision process or may opt for a more streamlined go/no go process protocol. Despite your firm’s strategy, it’s important to systemize pursuit approvals and secure explicit pursuit standards to ensure that you are pursuing viable projects, allowing you to follow this data over time and optimize your firm’s rate of success.
Posing the right questions such as the following can assist your firm in determining whether a proposal is viable and aligns with the firm’s objectives in the current moment:
- Is this an existing client with which we have an established relationship?
- How was the previous experience working with this client for all parties involved?
- Which firms are competing?
- On which proposals have we lost or won deals against this competing firm?
- How does our history against a specific competitor look for this kind of project?
- Does this client typically prefer a specific AEC firm, or do they adhere to a clear selection protocol?
- Does our firm have adequate resources to leverage towards both the proposal and project?
The no/no go process can be digitized and streamlined using tools such as aec360 CRM, supporting your firm in making data driven decisions. By building up a rich, data packed history about your successful and unsuccessful proposals, your firm can make more informed and efficient decisions when responding to RFPs in the future.
Uncovering project history insights using aec360
Developing an understanding about similar projects that your firm submitted proposals for or worked with on projects by having visibility can help your firm decide whether it is viable to go after a certain project.
aec360 stores the proposal history of your firm in an optimally searchable and navigable manner, bringing insights and visibility into previous proposal and project history, as well as performance. Marketing teams can leverage aec360 tools by analyzing proposal histories to weigh the odds of having success on a project in question.
Leveraging existing experience and relationships
When it comes to increasing your proposal wins, tapping into your firm’s previous relationships and experience can get you far. Having previous connections or history with a client or key project stakeholder can make or break whether your firm will win a project proposal. If you have limited relationships with parties in a deal and do not have experience working with a certain client before, then your odds for securing the project may be restricted, meaning that you should invest your time and money on a more viable project.
aec360 has pursuit strength indicators, which analyze the history that your firm has with a client to provide pursuit scores that reflect your chances of winning a certain project proposal. Furthermore, the strength indicators can support your marketing team in deciding whether a proposal is feasible in terms of resource investment.
Tracking wins and losses
Enabling data feature insights that evaluate your previous wins and losses, including explanations for specific outcomes offers insight about your weaknesses and strengths, stratified by certain markets, services and clients, and weighed against competitors. Analyzing data from lost opportunities can yield informed perspectives on how to optimize proposals and show up better in the future.
Using aec360, your firm can keep track of proposal wins and losses, along with respective details and feedback to assist with synthesizing proposal outcomes. By understanding why you might have won or lost a proposal, your team can implement more informed pursuit strategies to optimize resource engagement and customize an approach to a certain project type or client.
Delivering proposals that win
After your team has made an informed decision to pursue a certain proposal, it is key for the firm to be presented optimally to the client. Your firm can be showcased by referencing relevant team qualifications and highlighting related project experience. To easily collect this information, it’s important to use a platform that allows you to have visibility of project history, as well as other key project characteristics.
By using aec360 CRM, you can take advantage of a central archive which houses information regarding your project and proposal history, in addition to your team’s qualifications, skills and experiences. What’s more, aec360 CRM generates proposal documents, such as employee resumes and project information sheets that help bolster project proposal applications.
A powerful strategy to win more proposals and increase your firm’s revenue
When it comes to bringing in more firm revenue and winning projects, quality of proposals should be prioritized over quantity. By leveraging key data, your firm can go farther by making informed pursuit decisions and going after projects that are more likely to succeed. Furthermore, having key information about project history details and employee data can make or break the outcome of a proposal.
Learn more about how you can optimize proposal outcomes with aec360
The post How AEC Firms Can Win More Proposals appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.
