ROI used to be pretty straightforward. A company would buy a machine, operate it, turn out so many products, and the profit from their sales would pay for the machine.
That doesn’t work in the Information Age. You can buy an application and use it. Where ROI crops up can be direct or indirect. Finding value can be almost as tricky as pulling a rabbit out of your hat. Accounting firm Wipfli once had that problem. The company had to generate proposals to land work. As a mid-sized accounting firm, Wipfli had many offices pursuing this same goal.
“Every time a proposal was needed, there were many hands in the pot,” recalled Gail Jackson, strategic project manager at Wipfli. “We didn’t have a system in place.” Sometimes paragraphs were cut and pasted from previous proposals, which increased the chances of making an embarrassing mistake. One time a client spotted the name of another company in the proposal they received, Jackson recalled.
Wipfli centralized its proposal process by turning to a software-as-a-service solution, in this case a company named Sant, which centralized and standardized the way Wipfli generated proposals. Sant eventually merged with Kandiant, forming Qvidian, which continues to provide Wiplfli with standardized proposal writing as well as sales books for the sales force. The benefits were there, but not all of them were obvious.
The first benefit was freeing up accountants to focus on helping clients, Jackson pointed out. This is a revenue gain as accountants bill by the hour. Then came the improvement in the proposals themselves. Cut-and-paste gave way to templates, which screened out some of the more galling errors. Proposals also became more client-centric, Jackson said. Qvidian also allowed users to keep reference material in the app, thus maintaining relevant information in one place for easy access and citation. “We’re not having that last minute scramble” looking for information, she added.
“ROI is direct and indirect,” said Amanda Wilson, director of marketing at Qvidian. For Qvidian clients, turning a proposal around faster means no longer lagging behind deadlines. This increases productivity level for sales teams by about 30 percent, Wilson said, based on customer feedback.
Secondly, Qvidian structures its proposal template to yield a proposal that informs and persuades, Wilson pointed out. “This is the point of sales.” she said. “We are seeing people getting better win rates.” Again, the gain is about 30 percent, according to customer feedback.
Qvidian will be delivering two more upgrades to its product later this year. The first, due next month, will add a data visualizer so that users can craft their own dashboards to analyze their own data, Wilson said. The second, due out in April, will enhance responses to requests for proposals (RFPs), by improving the accuracy and utility of user data needed to write the proposals, Wilson added. Better bidding should win more customers, she added.
