Enhance Your Sales Process with Sales Proposal Automation for Animal Science

How to create outlook signature

the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on proposal technology the lightning round we've called this the lightning round because we only have about 50 minutes to discuss and answer questions about a very important topic that could take us days i am mallory price marketing manager coordinator for this webinar and shipley's online learning courses thank you for joining us and investing your time with our panel today we received a lot of questions from you as you registered we're going to address as many of those as possible during today's session you may also ask questions during the during the webinar using the questions tab in your control panel i will personally monitor those throughout the webinar we are recording this webinar as well and we'll post it on our website for replay or for you to share by tomorrow we have an experienced panel with us today to share thoughts and ideas about technology and its role in proposal development we have paige frame president of mckinnon mulherin a communications consulting firm experienced leader and writer with expertise in applying various technology tools in proposals and other document driven projects josh ellers is owner at patri josh has developed software solutions that help companies evaluate opportunities and manage their probability of winning lisa puckerin is our shipley team lead of a global team of experts lisa is a highly proficient team is highly proficient in team leadership and has practical experience adopting and applying several proposal support software solutions kimberly balfour is a microsoft proposal manager who brings several years of experience managing and writing proposals of all types including international proposals she is familiar with many software applications that support proposal professionals we also have patrick ryan and kyle peterson with visible thread to help our proposal technology discussion and brad douglas is our executive vice president of global strategy at shipley brad manages our global network of offices supporting clients in various regions of the country brad will moderate our panel discussion today so we have a great panel with us lots and lots of experience um for today's agenda first up we will talk about proposal technology guidelines what those are and how to follow them then we will talk about some examples of solution providers then we'll go over technology solutions including opportunity qualification rfx parsing and compliance matrices and so on and when we get to the end of the webinar we will answer any questions that we um still have time to answer and like i said before we will get to as many questions as we possibly can during the webinar so without further ado brad the time is yours okay thanks mallory and i again thank you to the panel and and all of you for carving out a little time i need to take just a minute um to pay tribute to one of my dear colleagues and mentors who passed away a week suddenly and unexpectedly he was our chairman here at shipley chairman of the board steve shipley he passed away a week ago friday and uh he has been a huge influence on me professionally and personally and so just want to acknowledge that i know as i look through the registration list today i know many of you probably know steve or know of steve and his contribution to the proposal development profession so thanks for steve to steve for all he did uh for our profession in our community so uh let's let's go onward and uh josh ellers has joined us and thank you josh for doing that josh and i have facilitated a couple of sessions or participated in a couple sessions similar to this through apmp and other other channels and josh has shared on these panels off a couple of of interesting facts so josh i'm going to click these next couple slides wondered if you would just briefly uh just talk about how important this topic is this topic of of competitive proposals and and possible solutions could you just address some of these facts of course brad yeah thank you again for having me great to be with you and the team here today i find it really interesting as you look at the breadth of this industry and the revenue produced through the competitive proposal process this we're estimating by 2023 will crest about 15 trillion dollars of revenue and a lot of us work in these industries working really really hard to win business and if you go to the next slide brad one thing to note is because these opportunities are so competitive and they're much more involved than a traditional sales opportunity typically our estimates show that these proposal heavy red tape opportunities cost five to seven times more than a traditional non-proposal non-rfx opportunity and the the downside of that is because these opportunities cost so much when we lose the opportunities and the costs associated time and money in aggregate our numbers show that this cost is a 200 billion dollar cost globally and if you run up to the next slide brad one thing that's going to be super interesting is you know as we talked through today and and brad'll cap this off but i find it super uh useful to consider technology but not just technology but vetted and proven processes to ensure we can win more to ensure we can dedicate the time and resources to the right opportunities and more importantly learn from our mistakes learn from our wins learn from our losses so with that i'll turn it back over to you brad you know i hope this sets the stage for the team here to really talk about how technology can facilitate improved win rates improved efficiencies lessons learned etc so with that if there's anything you'd like me to cover brad in addition would be happy to jump in uh further great thank you thanks josh and uh you've done some tremendous research and you work with a lot of different companies and a lot of different industries so setting this stage of how important these competitive bids are and and then what we want to talk about for like mallory said unfortunately we only have about 50 minutes you know to talk about a topic that is so relevant so important it's ever-changing it's it's not static and so josh perfect job setting the stage of just how important winning and competing for business is and anytime we can create efficiencies and streamline this the the process the methods the approach our submissions anything we can do to to streamline efficiency is is valid and we're going to talk about the pros the cons things to watch out for some possible solutions we're not doing a deep dive into any one solution i want everyone to understand the intent of this webinar today is not to be promotional uh for any one or two or three solutions it's only to talk about and share what are some tips some ideas that could help us and then hopefully it will maybe prompt you to go forward and look into some of these technology solutions that can help all of us so thanks josh that was a perfect setup just a couple guidelines here and i won't dwell on these these are pretty intuitive but one thing about technology and bid and proposal management is we can't let the tail wag the dog what do i mean by that we can't get so dependent on one solution one technology one method that it's dictating everything else we do we've got to be open-minded and we've got to look at the big picture and understand where proposal development fits within the whole life cycle of of our businesses so be careful that we don't let one simple tail one simple technology dictate how we do everything else because that's dangerous use the best of the best there is no one-size-fits-all technology solution i promise you that we're all in different circumstances situations environments markets there is no one-size-fits-all solution and i think the panelists will will follow on and address that we cannot eliminate the human side of proposal development it's still critically important peer reviews color team reviews you know kickoff meetings all of those things that make us agile and flexible in how we compete you can you can lead a horse to water okay so yeah we can buy glitzy technology we can buy solutions off the shelf they can tailor them but unless we can apply it and actually drink it does us no good we've got to be able to implement so we got to know up front when we're looking at technology solutions how we're going to execute and implement that solution because you know you can lead a horse to water but you can't necessarily make them drink we've got to be able to execute and then test test test test everything try it make sure it's going to do exactly what you need it to do before you determine what solution is best so based on your questions that you submitted when you registered for this webinar these are the buckets if you will the topics that we're going to have our panelists address opportunity assessment tools how that those can help us content management and reuse libraries there were a lot of questions about that proposal workflow and proposal management in general desktop publishing editing proofreading technology tools readability is a huge thing and there are some great technology solutions that can help us there and then any other topics that you you put in the question box and we have time to address okay now and this is clearly and you all will know this this is not representative of all the solutions out there this is just a sampling of some of the proposal development and readability technology solutions that you all are probably familiar with maybe not so much we're familiar with several of these this is a place to start you know if you need a menu of some tools that might be helpful here's a guide when we get into opportunity identification there's different sets of tools you know and subscription services but technology solutions that can help us on the opportunity assessment opportunity identification part of our businesses so again very much a partial list of potential solutions so let's get on with it let's get on to that first bucket we talked about of of topic uh and that is let's start with the beginning of an opportunity opportunity assessment solution so here are three questions three of them several that were submitted uh upon registration what functionality should we look for to help us identify and pre-qualify opportunity uh bidding potential bidding opportunities good question and josh by the way i'm going to ask you to address these so when we get these three up if you'll take over how well do technology solutions filter opportunities for example to our aec architectural engineering construction market okay good question can any of these tools help us assess competitors interesting questions so josh would you just take a shot at addressing these three absolutely now keep in mind with my background as a former head of proposals uh capture leader a sales leader i have bought a lot of these technologies i've leveraged them on the market and now as a vendor you know we have we have positions in terms of what what is best and what is not and i want to address this from my position as as a former practitioner here as we're looking for functionality for these assessment solutions and identification solutions you really number one have to align to the market that you are pursuing and there are a lot of really strong market specific identification and assessment solutions out there with public sector for example there's deltek govwin there's bloomberg there's uh gov tech navigator there's govspend and for others that are more in construction or architecture or engineering or supply chain manufacturing manufacturing there are very interesting subsets of assessment solutions out there so based on your company type you know you're going to gravitate to those market specific solutions and as you look on the market i think it's going to be really interesting to be able to check out for example if you're focused on public sector there's a company called govspend that by the way we're not a partner or sponsor sponsor for this is more for information gov spend like some other solutions out there can actually help you identify public sector opportunities but also assess competitive wins based on foia requests so they can proactively reach in and see how much your competitors have won with certain customers you know super interesting stuff and i think across the board here it's really important to reference the fact that you know back back to the original comment on you know what what's really best for my company i would really promote a market-centric approach for your company to buy technology that that aligns to your market i would say from an opportunity assessment standpoint you really want to make sure that you have something organically that can allow you to see where you're strong and where you're weak on the opportunities and that could be that could be sector agnostic and then finally i i you know especially with the work we do today you need to have something that allows you to number one assess your company's risk profile and your ability to win an opportunity and align all of that info with financial data can you be profitable with this opportunity how much how much money and resources will you be expending to pursue it and can you can you still be in the green if you will and finally one thing i'd say to really kind of tie this off is you know one thing that companies like ours and like others on the market are doing are are creating assessment opportunities pre opportunity you know should we pursue and the debrief post opportunity and leveraging that data to inform the front end assessments right that's the virtuous cycle that every company really needs to get to regardless of the solution you're using so hope that answers the question but my assessment again is a proposal capture sales mix of of experience on my part there's a lot that you can do you know one word of caution before we jump into the next section that brad takes be really careful and i i want to double click on what brad said be really careful to not let the technology dictate what you do technology is a facilitator to the company's mission and if your mission is a proposal manager capture business development whatever you're in if your mission is to close more business if it's to boost efficiency if it's to improve the company's brand and all of the above you know leverage the best technology that gets you there and really leave the rest behind so with that happy to jump into more of this brad but that's really where i stand in terms of what to look for with these types of solutions thanks josh and and uh you know these bullet points here that we're looking at you're you know everything from the financial data the qualification data when when we're making those bid decisions you know those pursuit decisions you're right these are great tools and points if there's something that can help us do this better more completely we ought to we ought to be looking for uh technology that can help us in this way streamline the process save time so thank you thank you for uh sharing that and um notice this this answer specifically one of one of the questions yes there are products including josh's solution that can filter opportunities you know by by markets and owner and value and so forth thanks uh thanks josh let's move into um uh a next area and that is uh proposal uh workflow and management questions um here are a few of those questions that were submitted that we want to at least address kind of quickly um how effective are some of the tools that claim to parse out you know strip out rfp requirements from solicitation documents what should i look for when comparing these types of solutions can a software solution streamline the tedious task of building a compliance matrix great question how about an outline is there something that could help me build an outline more effectively so i was wondering if ryan if your team is on with this uh kyle if you could address some of these questions from you know a practitioner view knowing what you know about helping manage workflow parsing out rfps building a compliance matrix and so forth any any thoughts on these these topics yeah thanks brad um so there are definitely some novel solutions and tools out there uh to parse through rfps particularly once you get into you know hundreds of page solicitations um kind of maybe narrowing down onto the next two questions really you need to understand what you're looking for in an rfp so it's kind of similar to the first topic but what themes do we need to pull out so generally you know your high level ones price schedule delivery compliance type information you can't miss that because if you do you're not going to win the business or if you do the win the business you might not have priced something ingly you get yourself into a bit of a compliance uh morass so to speak so understanding what you want to pull out of an rfp will kind of direct your search into what kind of tools you're looking for and that's just kind of a natural transition then into the third question yes uh there are solutions out there that essentially you know traditionally uh contractors would and i i've had to do this myself as a practitioner in the past you take you know a pdf and you're copying and pasting into excel and it's really kind of a soul-destroying process where you haven't even really gotten into the important work of understanding the requirement when you're spending so many hours simply getting the requirements into a usable format so there are definitely tools that can help with that process where you can actually get into that commercial value-add decision-making process understanding what am i being asked to do and then you know from there you can tailor the parsing to pull out those themes that are really important to you into your business and then just reiterating josh's point you know highlighting those themes uh that your business does a good job of addressing to win business and then you know either mitigating or removing some of those weaknesses from your proposal i like i don't know how you said it you said something about soul wrenching or something soul destroying brad the tedious task of building a compliance matrix and uh you know we're familiar with with kyle's technology invisible thread and and some of their solutions and you know those those type of solutions can be huge huge time savers and efficiency gains so again we're not we're not in the business of promoting any specific solution however this is an area where it can bog us down as proposal professionals if we're trying to do all of this uh manual work you know um there are there are ways to streamline and and make it more efficient so thanks for that kyle what what about an outline have you seen anything that could help us more maybe this is just uh you know something we need to do as practitioners but can software or technology play a role in helping us build an outline from a compliance matrix yes i would kind of caution it by stating you know every context is different so your outlines might differ but in terms of getting requirements into a usable format you can at least get the documentation down the requirements separated and parsed and from there you can kind of slice and dice it and put together an outline but you know that's so context dependent that's where you know going back to those themes you highlighted brad there is still a human element and where software is so important and saves us so much time and can kind of help act as a force multiplier there still needs to be some thought behind what you're doing and i think that's where software can get you into that good fight faster but it would be a pretty powerful tool if you could you know parse and create an outline i haven't seen anything that goes into that extent but reducing that initial manual touch time up front gets you into that outline creation faster and ideally doing it more thoughtfully i love it yeah you know the outline is going to be driven exactly what you said and i just want to repeat it the outline is going to be driven by the context you know the instructions in the solicitation or the discussions we've had with the customer or you know if it's a u.s federal proposal you know the section l so you're right and thank you for clear clarifying that because i don't think there is a silver bullet you know that will build an outline for us but the software that parses out all the requirements and makes sure we're not missing anything and we're responding we use that to then populate the outline so that we just don't miss a thing everything every requirement ever is addressed so thanks for clarifying that uh uh ryan i'm sorry uh kyle i almost called you patrick ryan all right uh any final thoughts about this topic and just managing the workflow in general um kyle that you'd share with us uh no i think that's a good intro certainly can expand upon that if necessary ask any questions but i think that's kind of a good highlight of ultimately understanding within your context what's important to you that'll dictate the tool and then once you get into the tool um understanding once again that kind of proposal win context would then dictate the outline structure and there'll still be some work to be done there okay and then a couple other questions that surfaced that were kind of around this workflow proposal management are there tools that can help build a proposal management schedule um are there some ideas for facilitating virtual color reviews so um i'm gonna just this is unrehearsed so i'm going to ask um uh lisa puckerin who's with us lisa have you found any tips or tools that can help you build a a proposal schedule more effectively yeah i think uh you know a lot of the rfp management systems so rfpio rfp360 qvdn you know they you can you know you you can establish deadlines at a question level section level project level so i as a proposal manager they've really helped me corral the troops and make sure that everybody's on time uh color team reviews a lot of the platforms you can set up review cycles you can have uh an rfp uh excuse me in rpio you can set uh sequential reviews so you know one person reviews then another you know group of people so definitely those help kind of you know help keep the process going and and make sure that you have that all automated uh so yeah there are quite a lot of helps out there for that great does anyone else have any thoughts before we move on to content management about workflow management proposal management any of the panel okay well let's move on and and mallory please if there's questions being submitted that that fit into this topic please feel free to jump right in interrupt us and we'll we'll address those but uh let's move on to this next area and quite a few questions here uh this seems to be an area of proposal development that's that's gaining a little more familiarity in in popularity you see uh those of you familiar with apmp the association of proposal management professionals you see some groups starting to form and come together professional groups to talk about this area this area of how do we manage our content and get the most out of our content so here were some questions what's what is important to look for in a content or reuse library technology solution great question is there a typical wrap-up time to populate and configure a content management system interesting question what are some of the risks with using reuse library tools or platforms so i think i'm going to lisa i'm going to ask you again this is this is part of your responsibility you've had pretty broad experience with technology solutions here would you address these three questions yeah yeah you bet so i've kind of had a proposal life before rfp and content management systems then i've the last 10 years i've had um you know wide variety so i personally have used rfpio rfp360 which was recently purchased by rfpio kvdn which is now owned by upland and uh and chorus so that's obviously my frame of reference as i answer these so what what is important to look for in a content management so in my experience when we're talking content management um i feel like most systems are the same they have you they can store your content they can organize your content you know in various ways and and it's very easy to reuse them where i think the the huge difference comes in is uh beyond content management so it's the rfp management side where the platforms really differ so i'll touch on that a little bit as well i think when when you're looking at systems if you haven't used one um i think that the first thing or even if you're using one but maybe not maybe not happy with it or you feel like you're maybe investing more time than maybe it's worth i think it's exactly what brad was saying earlier it's one size does not fit all so the first thing i would say is make sure it fits your team situation so if you have a small team maybe it's just you a lot of purple's all managers out there are running solo supporting a team um and when you when you're in us you have a small team you really need easy to manage tools and i you know i think tools like rp360 are great with that easy to manage easy to set up require really low maintenance if you're working on a large enterprise or global team um then you need a more sophisticated system and uh you know i found rfpio to be great for large global enterprise organizations the other thing to think about or what are the types of rfps you're looking at uh what rfps are you managing today are they in excel and do you have a wide variety of formats in excel and if that's the case then i think rpio rfpio and rfp360 do a great job with a wide variety of excels there it seems like companies just like to torture us proposal managers and uh they're always issuing in a weird excel and it's important to have that flexibility if you're heavily in excel i know in the tech industry where i've been the last while um lots of wide variety of excels if you're doing word i think you know the pressure's off a bit most platforms handle word quite well if you're doing powerpoint most of the platforms are still trying to solve for powerpoint so it's on roadmaps but uh you know they're still working on that the other thing to think about is project management um you know that's really for me where the huge time savings comes in um you know automatic assignments and reminders collaboration between authors and reviewers automated process status reviews no version control issues how many times as proposal managers have we had version control issues systems really help control that having guests be able to access and come in announce around an rfp a partner external somebody not your platform that's important too and i would say the last thing on that is a good customer service account management if it's your first time going out there make sure you you pick a company as great customer service because uh you know you'll need you'll need some help there typical ramp up time i would say if you have a simple database if you're maybe uh storing it in excel you've got some cabs you could spin up as fast as like a week if you have your content ready to go it's simple to import and get up and running start your first rfp and build from there if you have a large database maybe a global rfp team you know one two even maybe three months depending on the complexity again getting your data in is is quite easy it's uh making decisions that impact all your different groups some best practices i would say is get your content organized in excel if you haven't got it organized yet that'll make things go a lot faster and have it organized by categories figure out what kind of tags you think you might want and that goes along with categories and make sure your content is tagged or like i said organized before you upload it as far as risks i actually think the risks are super low i know it's scary when you haven't used a system and but i actually think your risks of being in word and excel and version control issues in google docs i remember one rfp i was in google docs and someone went in and deleted everybody else's stuff um so to be honest you're a lot safer moving to an rfp rfp and content management platform the sas model means everything's backed up in the cloud there's versioning uh that you can you know rely on uh the only other risk i think is important is if you um are using automated answering so almost all the platforms out there have some kind of version of automated answering where it'll answer your questions for you i have found it personally it's very effective on basic simple answers what's your address what's your phone number what's your tax id but if you get into long sentences or multiple questions on questions uh most systems i mean it's nearly impossible to be that sophisticated in technology so don't just rely on on it for things like that make sure you're you know you're checking your answers and then i would just say too if you're implementing a system for the very first time make sure that you have a strong advocate somebody who is going to pull the reluctant ones along and make sure you've got executive support to help uh back that up it's a huge change management for people who've never used systems before and and you need that advocate so those are my thoughts thanks brad great advice good uh good lessons learned and and uh i think you answered a lot of a lot of our questions uh that we had and again you know i'm sure lisa if if you reach out to her would would be more than happy to uh share insights and lessons learned as would i think all of our panelists you know and some of the panelists are solution providers and and offer free trials or demonstrations things like that so take advantage of that if you're joining us today and and have interest okay the though kind of the last area but it's pretty extensive so we're going to have to kind of go at lightning speed here that's the lightning round there were a lot of questions about not just workflow and opportunity assessment and qualification and all of that and content management but a lot of questions were around this idea of of our message readability and so what is readability how can we improve it is there some technology that can help us so some of this is going to be really kind of tactical about some tips and you ask for this also tips on using some of the tools we probably all probably 100 of us in this webinar today have access to some of these basic tools you know the microsoft office suite for example so uh one area of readability that comes into play we all know many of you have been through some shipley training or you're familiar with apmp best practices we have to be sensitive about the look the feel and the actual words grammar formatting of our proposals so some of you ask questions are there any hints to on using microsoft word to streamline formatting and building templates so we have page frame here to talk about that a little bit are there uh template software tools it's kind of the same type topic so these are the the topics now for the next little while in the webinar that we're going to go ahead and address some ideas on applying styles creating templates using keyboard shortcuts developing checklists and customize the quick access toolbar so we're going to have paige and kimberly talk about some some tips and ideas on using microsoft word and some of the other technology tools that will help us when it comes to readability i'm also hoping kyle will chime in here visible thread the company that that kyle is worth uh is with uh has some tremendous tools uh about helping us with this readability to make sure we're getting the best evaluation we possibly can from evaluators so paige would you spend some time just sharing with us some tips and tricks around microsoft proposal temple templates styles and other other tools that maybe we don't know about or we we forget about yeah absolutely thanks brad um i love i i know that there's so many cool tools out there in ways that we can put proposals together and a lot of the time we're going to be ending up in microsoft word and so i wanted to share some of those some good tips for making that process more efficient as you're um working in there and and one of the questions that we uh just went by was talking about how we could streamline building templates in microsoft word and i've been kind of mulling that over the last day or so and um i would i would say try not to streamline that process that you should take the time to build a really good proposal template in word so that when you are at the point where you're creating your proposal and putting content into it um that it's strong it's a really good template that you can trust um will work well for you so i would not try to streamline that part i would take time create your template up front something that you're really proud of that works well it's clean and then draft directly into that template from the very beginning so um putting your outline in there starting using the headings even at the outline phase and then in the prototype phase as you're just saying here's what i'm thinking of talking about putting that into the template is going to save you a lot of time in the end instead of you uh formatting everything from scratch and everything's just normal text you're going to have a pretty good start um to what it looks like and you'll just be cleaning up rather than doing the whole formatting from the base up so that's what my my main tip is to use a good template um and and then use those styles uh very carefully and consistently which goes into the next tip that if you are using your styles uh consistently accurately there are a lot of um there's a lot of automation already built into microsoft word so a couple of these you are likely familiar with if you go under the reference tab you can insert a table of contents that's pulling all of your heading ones and if you set it to include sub levels it'll have heading twos heading threes in there and automat automatically populates that table of contents gives you the right page numbers of everything some people might not be as familiar with inserting captions and this is just as useful as the table of contents that when you put in a table or a figure you can click insert caption it will use your caption style that you have identified and you can type in what your caption is and then as you're going along if you end up moving that to a different area or um add text or whatever you you need to do it's going to automatically number your figures from the beginning to the end so you don't have to remember what the last one was so you get the right number it's just going to automatically do that for you and you can do figures and tables and it'll number those uh separately as well even less known so that's under the references tab if you go into insert you can actually do some really cool things with quick parts in microsoft word so um i'm going to just cover a couple that i like the first one is referencing a heading with the style ref field so when you go to quick parts it's going to pull up what kind of field you want to include this style reference if you put that into for example your header and say i just always want my header to refer to the heading 1 style then in your header whenever there's a new heading one style that comes along it'll automatically populate that so when you're in the uh section the introduction section your header is going to say introduction because it's referencing your heading one when you get to company background it'll automatically update it to that section so again saving you some time on these things that we used to manually update and have to double check and make sure that they're right can be very helpful the other one that i think is pretty cool and this is not for your final proposal but can help you in the the drafting drafting phase of your proposal you can everyone knows how to check your page numbers your total page numbers but sometimes we're trying to track how many pages we've got in a section and you can include this quick part called section pages and it'll count the pages in that specific section so if you're using section breaks throughout your proposal this is just a quick thing you can put in while you're reviewing to see if you are within the page limits of that section and and use that as a quick guide rather than having to go back and count your pages each time as you're working through it one note with all of these the table of contents the captions any of these quick parts they do automatically update but they might not do it immediately as you're changing things so if the fields are not uh if they don't seem correct in the moment you may need to update them um and a quick way to do that for your whole document is to select all the text and the quick hand is ctrl a in in your pc and right click it and you can put update field that'll update all of these figure numbers table of contents any quick parts you have give you accurate numbers and really the biggest piece of all of this is you're going to let your proofreader at the very end focus on some higher level thinking mistakes so things that they really that we need a human brain to look at and understand your proofreader can focus on those and not be so worried about all the figure numbers being accurate or table of contents or things being spelled the same way in different sections if you're referencing your different headings boy paige i wish we had three hours i'd love to keep these uh these tips and tricks uh so thank you and there's one more that i think maybe we under utilize uh that that we thought important to talk about here would you address track changes for sure yeah i i hope everyone is using track changes it's a great way when we're doing um review loops to to know what's changed in that that review loop um it helps us with version control to see what's changed in that version and back before we had it when it was very easy to collaborate and all be working in the same document often we'd have a lot of these different versions and need to combine our our documents depending on how your organization works you might still be doing that and that's fine you can use that compare button and combine them so that all of your track changes are in the same document which you really want to do before you start accepting or deleting any of those uh new comments and one uh tip that i think is really helpful is sometimes you end up with a lot of different reviewers in your in your documents so um it is important to get them all in one place so that you can see what's changing um but you can go under show markup and pick just the specific people you want to view at once so you can have all the changes in there but just be viewing certain changes at a time and accept delete those and then go to the next reviewer but still stay within the same document so that's a good way to keep track of your versions and make sure that no comments are lost as you're going through great great counsel and good tip thank you paige and again feel free anyone to uh reach out to her for additional uh insight guidance on you know parts of we're all familiar with microsoft word but there's so much there that can help us and streamline our work okay let me let me keep this moving along this i'm just going to touch on this there were some questions here around this idea what are some cautions or tips for using links hyperlinks and proposals that are submitted electronic and so forth i'm just going to address this really quick and we're going to move on uh we need to be really careful and the key here is if we're responding to any type of request solicitation often in the instructions they will tell us whether or not we can use links you know links into websites or videos or graphics so just our counsel here is just know your customer know how it's going to be likely evaluated your proposal so that you're not including links if it's not possible for them to even get to them or you're not using motion graphics when they're not going to be functional for the reviewer so the answer to this question really is make sure we know as much as we possibly can about how our proposal is going to be reviewed and what will work and what won't work and what the customer has asked us to do or not do and this is these are often areas where when we have a chance to ask the question a question or two to the customer after we get a say an rfp or draft rfp these are questions sometimes we want to ask you know what about video links and what about motion graphics or use of qr codes to redirect so just know your customer is is the bottom line here okay we want to continue quickly on this readability which includes proofreading and editing are there software solutions effect that are effective at proofreading and editing of course there are uh which solutions have you found most helpful we're not going to try we don't want to be overly promotional on any but kimberly who kimberly works for microsoft she works on global proposals around the world and this is a simple tool that she's commented on before kimberly you want to just quickly mention this and then we'll i want to share one other uh tool that that addresses readability yeah so perfect it basically complements the grammar and spell check that's already in word and it goes a little deeper um by checking consistency on abbreviations you can see the list their hyphens and dashes bullets and lists and so it takes out the tediousness of editing those types of things so that as an editor you can get your document really clean with those consistency checks and then you can focus on the more strategic edits some different examples of how it goes beyond the microsoft word functionality you can see um it's smart enough to flag like inconsistent spelling is one uh typos that spell check wouldn't pick up um inconsistency in you know how you're spelling out or or not the numbering capitalization and again these are things that you'd word wouldn't necessarily catch you'd have to do it yourself as an editor and so it just speeds up the process it'll help you make your bulleted list consistent by checking the mismatched you know punctuation and inconsistent bullets and then it creates um an abbreviations and acronyms list at the end and it will tell you which acronyms you've used that you haven't spelled out it will tell you when you started using an acronym before you spelled it out it's pretty robust functionality there that helps it helps you do that best practice of quickly creating an acronyms list for your proposal great thank you thank you kimberly and uh again a good addition you know if this is an area where we need some help um this is this is one of many tools and then uh i would ask kyle again if he wouldn't mind spending just a few minutes on visible threads technology they have a visible threadrider solution and this i want to take us clear back to one of the early questions though about compliance and compliance matrix and so forth um this is part of their solution package as well is is helping build uh that compliance matrix and then monitor and track progress against that but specifically now kyle would you just address quickly um some of the readability functionality of this solution yeah sure brad i know we're coming up on time um i'm pretty passionate about this topic as a proud liberal arts graduate um looking at you know winning business you know you obviously want to make sure you're you're being consistent with just kind of your general proofreading and grammar but actually looking at the language itself avoiding long sentences avoiding passive voice jargon you know some jargon depending on your context is necessary but you shouldn't really be gratuitous with it because if you have an evaluator going through four or five hundred page proposals we want to make sure that the language is approached approachable moves the ball down the field and isn't overly embellished or complex the brain can only absorb so much information at a time and we want to avoid and this is no slight against evaluators or their intelligence but we want to avoid evaluators having to reread long sentences maybe not understanding who's doing an action there's your passive voice um you know even looking at acronyms particularly on the government contracting side it's alphabet soup so we want to make sure that we're being consistent in our usage of acronyms are we defining them correctly and consistently and so if you can avoid that ambiguity it makes the evaluators life far easier and then you can win business and maybe i'll just finish with a quick story less so from the proposal side but this readability is so important up and down stream in a past life we had a really complex aircraft maintenance proposal that was being audited due to the dollar value and once again no slight against auditors but they weren't aircraft maintaining maintenance experts and so when they were going through our cost volume and looking at our basis of estimates and explaining how did we reach that cost per flight hour number how are we building up our cost structure there were a lot of questions because these aircraft maintainers they're experts and what they do brilliant but you need to make that language approachable for someone who's not an expert in aircraft maintenance and so make you know avoiding some of that jargon and com and complexity can you can almost head some of those questions um off at the pass where we had to spend many hours kind of getting together and say you know i had the same thing i was a contracts manager like hey guys i don't really know what you're saying here either how can we answer the auditor's question so this readability topic is so important uh when you're winning business if you've got business in the door and we just want to respect our audience and meet them where they are and there are tools available that can go through and in real time it'll call out you know this is this is a complex sentence this is a long sentence provide suggestions hey guys maybe throw a period in imagine that maybe use a bulleted list things like that um and avoiding jargon to the greatest extent possible but obviously you know if you're delivering cancer research that proposal will just be more complex than landscaping but these tools get you to that point where you're kind of thinking about that eyes wide open and not simply just trying to get the proposal out the door because if it's not readable it might not be compelling exactly great thank you so much kyle and thanks to all of you um we we are at times so i apologize we didn't have more time to address the questions during the webinar but i hope you'll reach out and feel free to reach out to our panel but the we've talked about mostly technology solutions you combine that with industry best practice about basic proposal 101 you know these are things we need to remember as well and technology can help us leverage our lists group similar ideas together use headings to guide the reader this is all about readability and scorability for the evaluator use graphics that support our message be simple be concise in our words as kyle just said active versus passive is better most of the time avoid technical jargon and wordiness so thank you so much there are a ton of advantages to technology we just need to be sure we understand the pros and cons also make sure we have the necessary infrastructure support commitment to implement it does us no good to invest in technology and have it not function the way we expect it we've got to have the infrastructure the commitment we've got a test test test make sure it does what we want and be sure we're staying current there's always new solutions coming out there we need to be vigilant and looking and exploring and and have an open mind so thank you again thank you so much for joining um we're past our time and i hope you have a great rest of your day great rest of your week be safe and thanks again for joining us we'll hopefully have you again on on our next webinar take care you