Proposal management
In the proposal management tab, you can manage the financials, actions, research and approvals. Request approvals for proposal qualification and proposal submission.
Financials
Click on the i icon to see a popup with information on the financials for the proposal.
Actions
There are many steps to the proposals workflow. In order to manage these steps, advaise.app facilitates creating and assigning actions. There are a number of standard actions already created. You can update or delete these as appropriate.
Creating and managing actions against a proposal has two main benefits:
- It creates, assigns and tracks actions that need to be completed.
- It creates a record for future reference. This way, any staff member in future can see details of previous actions related to this proposal.
Click the +add button to create and assign new actions specific to your organization or proposal.
Actions are assigned a category. These categories can be used for filtering actions.
Assigning an owner will notify them and add the action to their dashboard.
It's a good idea to set a due date and enter any comments that will help the team to understand what they need to do. The comments field is also used to capture the results of the action once it's completed.
The status defaults to "In Progress". When the action has been completed, update the status to "Completed" or "On Hold", both of which will remove the action from dashboards. Use the comments box to capture the outcome of the action.
Click on an action to update it. Ensure that the status of actions are kept up to date and any comments on the action are captured here.
Research
Research for a proposal will help your organisation to gain an in-depth understanding of the client's needs in relation to this proposal. This will drive your proposal strategy and help determine what services to offer.
advaise.app has created a number of proposal research questions to guide you. You can update or delete these as appropriate.
Click the +add button to create and assign new questions specific to your organization or proposal.
Use this screen to create a new proposal research question and assign a category and owner. The category will allow you to track and filter questions by theme. Assigning an owner will notify them and add the proposal research question to their dashboard.
Once you have created a question, save it. You can then select it from the list to edit it.
Once a proposal research question has been answered, come back and change the status from Researching to Resolved or Not applicable and use the comments field to capture the results of the proposal research question.
Click on the question to update the status and record the answer.
Approvals
Obtaining approvals is an essential part of the proposal process, as it ensures that proposals meet the organisation's standards and requirements. It also provides a record of who has approved the proposal and when, which is important for compliance and audit purposes. By obtaining approvals, organizations can reduce the risk of errors or omissions in proposals, increase transparency, and improve the overall quality of their proposals. It also ensure the team are focusing on quality opportunities with a high chance of success.
In advaise.app, approvals can be obtained for:
- Qualification: This involves obtaining approval to pursue an opportunity based on specific criteria, such as strategic alignment, ability to successfully deliver or probability of win.
- Submission to client: This involves obtaining approval to submit the proposal to the client.
The submit for approval status defaults to "Do not submit". This is to ensure approval requests are not prematurely submitted. Please remember to change to "Submit for review" to send this request to the approver.
The Approval Process Creates an Audit Log of Approvals
When approvals are obtained in advaise.app, an audit log is created, which captures who approved the proposal, when they approved it, and any comments or feedback they provided. This also records the fact set as submitted for approval. This provides a record of the approval process, which can be used for compliance and audit purposes, and for future reference. The audit log also provides visibility into the status of the proposal, so that stakeholders can track its progress and take action as needed.
The approver can see all their approvals, including pending approvals on their dashboard under Actions. A decision log containing all approvals, not just client proposal approvals, can be found in the organizations module in the governance section.
When the proposal management section is complete, move onto the proposal qualification tab.