Case of studies
Client interview
We interview Romain NOYERE, Project Manager – Proposal Templates in the Innovation and Marketing Solutions Department
What led you to implement a Proposal Management tool ?
Romain NOYERE : At ENGIE Cofely, 400 employees are involved in drafting business proposals. In total, our agencies send out 8,000 proposals each year. When we put out a request for proposals to get help in this area, we were looking to improve the quality of both the form and content of our proposals.
Why Jack in the Box ?
Romain NOYERE : By the end of the selection process, we had shortlisted 3 candidates. Jack in the Box was chosen because of its tool, which is ahead of the competition and is ideal for proposals with a lot of written content. We also particularly liked Jack in the Box’s methodology and its Proposal Management expertise.
ENGIE Cofely’s goal was to capitalise on collective intelligence to generate business proposals that truly stand out
How did you proceed before Proposal Studio ? And what were your method’s limitations ?
Romain NOYERE : We had an internal web-based solution that contained Word and PowerPoint templates for each business activity, content blocks and graphic templates for proposals. It hadn’t been used for 2 years because for updates we had to rely on a single administrator who covered the entire country. On top of that, because content modularity was rather limited in that solution, our proposals were really long and lacked impact!
What do you think of the tool ?
Romain NOYERE : Proposal Studio is a recent tool with room to grow. It is modern and can be used by all types of profiles. It’s user-friendly so you can get started on it quickly, but to really get the most out of it you do need to be familiar with all of its features.
The methodological approach, in conjunction with the tool, helped our teams to improve their proposal creation
What do you think about the approach and method of the Jack in the Box teams ?
Romain NOYERE : The methodological approach, in conjunction with the tool, shows that Jack in the Box tackles the issue in its entirety. The preliminary proposal analysis that was performed explicitly highlighted where our proposal drafting was falling short and got us thinking about new ways to write. Proposal Studio lets you inject the company’s strategy into the proposal construction. In the structure, we looked for a way to highlight what sets us apart and any essential selling points.
How did your teams get started with the tool ?
Romain NOYERE : To make it easier for the 400 users to start working with the tool we ran some initial training sessions for each agency and each purpose. We offer refreshers in various formats (short sessions or video tutorials, for example) and as always in the end, by jumping in and getting started on an actual proposal.
The tool has been rolled out nationwide since March 2018. What are the results so far?
Romain NOYERE : We’re meeting our objective: we’re happy with the quality of our proposals. Feedback from clients and consulting firms confirms this: we’ve received excellent comments about our technical brief. To give you some figures, in the places where the solution is deployed, 35% of our proposals are created with it. Our goal is for 70 to 80% of the proposals we send out to be created in Proposal Studio.
Proposal Studio helps the teams to collaborate on proposal content. So our business proposals look and sound more professional
What is the impact on uses in-house ?
Romain NOYERE : The tool was eagerly awaited. We’d gone for over two years without a solution for creating our proposals.
The feedback is encouraging: Proposal Studio encourages people to report back information about content… and use best practices. One of the benefits of the tool is that it provides some structure to this collaborative approach. So far, we’ve set up the content and layout for two templates: one business proposal template and one administrative template for building bid packages. Others will follow.
What’s more, the 3-tier proposal structure (chapter/subchapter/topic) “forces” us to arrange our content according to a hierarchy. Our teams have gained more expertise in Proposal Management.
Another change: users think about what content to include, rather than duplicating proposals. Instead of working off an old proposal, our sales reps now use the questionnaire answers, which call up the content that matches the client’s requirements. Our business proposals look and sound more professional. As a bonus, Proposal Studio also allows us to structure documentation and annexes that are complementary to the business proposal. For example, it was very useful for creating 80 specific documents for a particular bid. Soon we’re planning to go further by using the new sales presentation module for our bid presentations, in order to increase our teams’ professionalism in this area too.
