Streamline Your Sales Process with Sales Proposal Automation in United Kingdom

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it's nice to meet everyone this morning at least have a chance to chat about today's topic which is proposed automation understanding kind of when where and why um it might be right for your business I I have a little slide here just to introduce myself I don't know if I've met anyone or everyone that might be on the session today so just as a quick introduction I am Jason I'm my background is in proposal writing and proposal management is as an internal proposal proposal Champion or as a consultant to organizations later in my proposal career um so as a proposal person Beyond being a champion it's a lot about understanding how to Wrangle the subject experts and understand how to run that last leg of the relay race so I shared this one slide to say for sure um this topic is near and dear to my heart it's one that I've I've had to advance myself with in previous lives around how how again how tools might help us do our job more efficiently and it's not an easy discussion topic and that's why I'm excited to to uh to bring it up and to chat about that so let's dive in um I really want this to be as as informational as possible a lot of what I'm I'm going to share are what I've used myself in previous lives to advocate for and uh successfully advocate for for investing in in software that can help us do our job more effectively let's start with this topic to say Hey listen not everything wants automation we have this little funny Dilbert clip that I pulled out that says we're very good automating things that we shouldn't be doing in the first place that's a funny haha but that's true sometimes we do you know technology for Technology's sake exists so so when I talk to customers or companies or individuals with organizations that that are brand new to proposals they come to me and say Hey I want to automate our proposals so we can be good at it um and I have to share with them this idea that says no proposal automation really is about taking those assets that you've gathered and developed and you've determined to be part of your secret sauce or your approach to proposals automating those elements making sure they're more readily available and bound more quickly and more consistently used Etc if you're brand new to proposals you're probably not ready for proposal automation um not probably you're not ready for proposal automation you need those assets to really make this uh this tool to fuel the tool if you will likewise if you're doing very few proposals if you're very low demand it's tough to to cost justify any investment for a business and any investment in time and attention and money and everything else if it's if it's just done once a quarter proposal a month and we we just don't have a lot of throughput of these proposals it might not be ready you may not be ready to um to automate proposals yet and likewise if you're a one of one and the only person that's touching the proposals is yourself it may very well again not be in your best interest to or may be able to be cost Justified or uh you know it's easier to have a process a very consistent process if it's just me doing them every time I can do them the same way but when it when the number of people grow the the um the need for proposed automation grows as well so these are sort of the big levers I wanted I wanted to start with and say there is um there is a reason to consider when uh when it might not make sense but but if this is your normal process right now when you have an RFP or you have some new proposal opportunity where you're just going back and forth like some sort of a child's board game um in in weird zigzag uh six I don't know in a weird fashion well then then obviously this is this is a bad deal right and if you've got the opposite of those other levels saying no we have a throughput of proposals that we do this again and again and we all know that proposals are important proposal documents themselves the stakes are high right so I I got into proposal automation specifically and I will not skip that number it was almost 20 years ago when I lost a major opportunity that we were at the at the absolute uh 11th Hour ready to be awarded the business and they pointed back to the proposal right and they said Hey listen with the proposal that's that poor how if that's how you treated your stuff how would you treat ours it was a really good point they made that I I had to learn in the worst possible way so the document itself The Proposal document it's important it won't win the business for us but it it definitely can lose it for you believe me they are likewise deadlines are tight and time is against us right whether it's whether it's just meeting the ultimate deadline or those those deadlines leading up to the ultimate deadline feels like we're always under the Crunch and and that that creates again other other challenges and of itself just the timeline and the last bullets probably I don't know they're all pretty important but the last one's certainly important is that having a manual proposal process right now you hear your organization carries risks that cost money you know risks that when things when things go wrong it costs the organization money so any risk can be um can be assessed to understand what's the impact to our to our bottom line that we're carrying with this risk of of of proposals that might be inaccurate or might be um again with less than the most accurate or or most proper content involved these become these elements I'm describing now regarding the throughput and the and the and then the the challenges of of of proposals become sort of the framework for the business case where it makes sense to like dig in deeper so let's talk more about that business case let's talk about um the the costs that are that are likely uh in your existing process today I don't know if you remember these Febreze television commercials I don't know I don't watch much TV they may still be going right now I doubt it but but I always thought they were kind of funny where they would make these points that says you know you grow noseble nose blind to certain spells right and they had the picture of of the the young lady pulling the trash out of the bin and and it smells like this but we've all grown nose blind to it I always chuckled a bit on the things they showed I I think it's an interesting idea when it comes to the costs that are baked into our proposal process today um and I was just thinking about the idea to say what what areas of of that process might our business have grown noseblind too so what what needless costs whitening might we be nose blind too well and a real common one that just gets kind of sucked up as being normal right but those interruptions those repetitive interruptions to to others subject experts or or others Executives for for sign-offs and re-veting of content that's already been vetted um those repetitive interruptions and and and again time sucked from the team is a big area of cost right now uh likewise the time we waste ourselves as we're searching and stomping around through old proposals trying to find the latest content that's certainly an area of of cost and of waste I talked about the risks a moment ago but the cost of an inaccurate or an inconsistent proposal that's a real cost or poor proposals so again when we make mistakes silly mistakes or or we don't capture every compliance element because we didn't have a tool that helped us find all of those compliance elements within the RFP and we get a poor proposal score and our rfps are getting thrown out we're not getting higher win rates obviously that's cost that we didn't that's business we didn't win likewise I mentioned uh re-reviewing of existing assets that's that's a a real common cost or a real challenge to scale so thinking about scale whether it means how do we add another person to our proposal team that's a real Challenge and a cost associated with that likewise the scale to meet Peak proposal demands so at um we have five rfps at the same time and our team can only handle three and we end up kind of sifting and sorting and saying well these two will throw we'll throw away that's a real cost again a business we've never even properly chased after this is an important other consideration when it comes to the business case when again it makes sense for you to consider proposed Automation and you're thinking about how to cost justify or if we can cost justify that investment so this is almost the exact slide I use at my previous directly before joining expedience I was with an organization that we bought expedience right I get it inside almost exactly like what I'm about to show you now that says look what we're spending the bulk of our time on right now are administrative activities where we're just building a core document and searching for existing elements and binding and replacing and fixing and formatting it's a real low value high cost it's high cost because there's a lot of time spent there and it's a high cost because that's where our errors show up on those copy and paste so they I didn't find every abbreviation we use for that company name I left one of those abbreviations uh in that in that proposal content real high cost elements so but we spent so much time down there on that blue area that most of us um where we're doing them manually um just scramble through those most important wind theme and differentiators and customer specific content it's just sort of an afterthought or certainly rush to meet the deadline right so proposal tools or proposal automation software allows you to do three things I'll show you all three of them now number one is you basically eliminate that time we're spending in that administrative block so whenever a customer comes to me and says what should we expect if we automate our proposals using expedience what would we expect I'll talk to them about hey think about the time you're spending right now in that blue area and and I would I would guarantee you or at least probably guarantee I don't know if I could but I'd expect about a 95 or greater reduction of the time spent basically eliminating those administrative activities that gives you opportunity number one maximizing your scale so going back to the point of that Peak volume right we don't have to throw proposals away we can or qualified RFP over proposal opportunities we can we can submit in all cases to all of those opportunities that's an awesome thing the second thing is is this that I have the opportunity to also um just spend that time that same time really really differently meaning we had two weeks to create our our proposal we spent all two weeks anyway but look we didn't spend the time hunting around for where was that answer at and reinterrupting that subject matter expert again instead reusing it in ways that we're applying you know our real skills as proposal experts to uh to really increase our win rate the third is this it's really an important element it's sort of the flipping and flapping between those two right so instead of just saying is this a go no-go are we going to bid for this work it's there's another opportunity that that proposed automation software creates which is we can decide hey what path are we putting this deal on or this opportunity on is it going to to be our putting our our absolute best foot forward or is there some less investment that makes sense based on this particular opportunity Maybe we feel like we're just column fodder in that third column over so to speak and we've not had proper connection to this customer prior to this RFP or maybe it's not perfect perfect for us and when we are the next so we we don't we're not holding our breath to win this business but if we can really control our investment and put together a professional uh proposal in that timeline might it make sense to uh to still uh to still invest in that that opportunity and that's what proposal automation software really drives for you so this is my last slide on this topic of building the business case the key levers of these right so thinking in terms of what percentage of our business goes through a proposal what are the values is the values as the percent of the business goes up and the value of those opportunities go up or scale or cost of mistakes are increasing uh or the the costs of mistakes are really impactful likewise as we have more of those reusable assets where we have more people involved in that process these are key levers that really again create the business case for investing in proposal Asian software so once we've gotten that kind of discovered right we know that um the proposals are important and our manual processes is uh is a leaky faucet and um and those are the kind of business elements that make sense to to justify the investment now it's out to discuss decide well what does a million software products out there which is the right one for you and I have this I don't know how to visualize this but I thought about it like this this analogy or maybe a metaphor of describing kind of going car shopping where you could go to one dealerships lot and have all of these options from the sports car to the massive 4x4 truck or what have you and everything in between those all are designed obviously for a different customer or a different need or maybe even both right so so those there used to be just a few when I the first time I bought proposed automation software I think there were three on the market at that time and now I just I don't know if there's over a thousand it seems I don't know there's hundreds at least I'm certain of that and the reason is there's what's a proposal to me and a proposal to you and a proposal to the next um organization sometimes even in the exact same industry in the exact same space are really different documents um and so so think about um this um this challenge is really kind of the next section here to understand what do we do we've decided we're going to make an investment we've got a lot of options to consider out there what might we look for when it comes time to to uh to invest in them or to select to run that selection process um of the different applications out there and these are just common areas I would I would kind of encourage you to start with considering these elements for instance what kinds of documents are you creating what is a proposal to you is it a quote or a questionnaire is it a is it a proactive proposal or a sales document is it a marketing slick is are they resumes are they bios are they statements of works these are all things that that go into this umbrella of proposal so considering across the business what are our Collective proposal needs what kinds of documents are we creating or proposals are we creating then digging into that proposal what assets are you using are you as a proposal just a bunch of text so if we had a tool that can automate finding that best text is that the right thing or is it more than that is are there branding concerns are there infographics or charts or other elements like video or or links to websites or what have you what are there other PDFs of insurance certificates that we commonly use are there um what have you timelines and Gantt charts and whatever they might be considering all of those elements because some proposal software out there can do this but not that right so knowing what kind of document we're making and knowing what kinds of things we need for those documents is really an important element to consider before going after deciding which of those cars on the car how to be buying likewise digging into the problem that you're solving the challenge is this sometimes when we've been living with the problem for so long we now decide we're gonna fix it you we end up trying to boil the ocean solve every problem out there I really advocate for you to consider what's our biggest challenge likewise thinking in terms of how you want to deliver proposals this may sound a little off of it the beaten path but there are tools out there now that are saying hey stop delivering it as a document don't deliver it as a PDF delivered as a website a link to a website give the customer their own little mini proposal website if you will what that's weird but maybe that is the the path that makes sense there are some opportunities that that creates for you and some downsides to that so thinking in terms of how you went to deliver the proposals is important and again I have this last but maybe not least or maybe last but should have been first is thinking in terms of what will we actually use what is user adoption what happens if we make this investment and no one uses the darn thing have we gotten anywhere obviously not right and so these are all important but the one I really want to dig on a little bit more about is thinking in terms of this what problem are you solving in my experience um and maybe even I've fallen victim to this myself in the past but certainly with customers that I speak with today they get again hung up on oh my gosh there's a million things um and so I like to really dig into this topic with them to say let's really think about the most common what are we doing most frequently are they questionnaires are they complex rfps where it's about sifting and sorting those requirements and making assignments and tracking is that the biggest problem is that the biggest most common document that we're creating or or are they more frequently again sort of template driven proactive proposals or sales proposals so let's think about that what's the most common proposal and let's start there within that document where are we spending most of our time is it just in that well I talked about that blue area of of gathering or is it in the the even still in that blue areas the fixing and formatting and and creating that final document but still or is it in the again uh again wrangling of subject experts or is it where are we where are the the roadblocks in our funnel of creating that proposal right that's a narrative another thing to really consider obviously likewise from the bang for the bucks so to speak right what elements are most important to drive the impact of the business case itself right so you're made you've made a business case around eliminating these areas of problems and pains and Challenge and really growing the scale and and other other benefits to the company we can all get sidetracked or enamored by those fancy wheels on that one other car that we were considering right but is that fancy wheel or whatever the side element might be that side feature is that the element that's going to make that impact and sometimes we can weirdly overvalue just whatever some some fancy button or whatever it might be so just think about those areas that will make the biggest impact your business and the last element is I kind of over apply this probably but this idea of the Pareto Principle where 20 of the the of the challenge can bring eighty percent solving that 20 can bring 80 percent of the the value of the impact right but I do think there is a sense of that here that there's an opportunity for you to to to Really hone in on the area of greatest need um and and make sure that we're focusing there so that's that's the framework that I wanted to share with you regarding um regarding the the when it makes sense to invest how to go about that process of of advocating for um for um for for software advocating for building that business case advocating for tools to help you uh solve those problems uh as well as then kind of now once you're advocating how to how to consider what to think about right and so I just thought I would spend a minute now in showing you how our software works and how we do those things because I thought it might be most helpful for I would love everyone to see this and say oh let's go buy that but more importantly I think for the purpose of this discussion is is to to frame up sort of how our tool approaches it in a way that I hope can help you think okay well some of those are maybe good for me and others may not be who knows right so let's just spend I thought just a minute and just let me showing you show you more about our tools so we live inside of Microsoft Word it's a core to our approach um with proposed Automation and saying listen you have a process in place today you have tools that your team is familiar with today we don't believe that proposed automation would be should mean throwing everything away and saying let's start with something brand new and go to some website and upload and download and bring it back to word and what have you we feel like there's a real um a real benefit in staying within the tools that the broader team uses especially now with the advances of of all of the collaboration features that Microsoft has brought out with 365 and still continue to advance day after day with uh teams and others So to that to that framework of those tools um this is sort of our our thought process if you will starting at the top we have our tools really centered on the idea of having a trustworthy content repository of those reusable assets and those two those those assets should be easy to find um and having them easy to find and easy to use for my proposal itself brings that user adoption that I was I was talking about a moment ago and those those users are actually adopting it mean they're not interrupting others we're starting to have time savings and we invest those Time Savings back into our proposal tools this Content Library and the expedience framework and this becomes very um synergistic and and kind of self-fulfilling thereafter where where the content gets better and better and we get less and less interruptions and faster and more accurate but I will tell you the unlocking element here it's certainly I start by saying the importance of the trustworthy content and I can't I can't argue against that but it is around this idea of making the the content easy to find easy to use meaning as soon as the kind as soon as a proposal writer against a deadline finds it faster and easier to just go grab that one I did yesterday and copy and paste and find and replace that's faster and I can get this out the door that's what they're going to do they're against a deadline and you we would like to everyone think oh no no better content is out there if we spend more time or what have you they don't they won't right and that's what this is the um the the element that rarely are many of The Proposal tools out there talking about is the fact that again user adoptions Paramount so that's what we do and that's kind of our our Mantra if you will let me show you how that all works because I think that's going to be more helpful than anything else so here's Microsoft Word and expedience lives as a series of ribbons inside of word right so um this ribbon here that in My Demo World we call RFP content this is my Content Library what you call that would be up to you likewise how you present that content in these little pull down menus how it's organized and kind of presented to the user the thing you label these how you what icons you use it's entirely up to you but let me give you the idea right I could go if I needed Lori's resume for this um for this proposal that I'm creating I could go navigate to Lori's resume or to maybe that executive summary that we use again and again or maybe here's some recent find this is our standard Financial sort of starting spot for blah blah blah whatever that might be right or I'll just drop a few other items here because I want to make a point about the Content Library as well the elements that we store but but just around the idea here again these these these galleries of content are again presented in a way that's easy easy for your users to again navigate and find that thing that they need but the cool thing is this because we live inside of word anything that you could put in a Word document could be in this Content Library so for instance this is it looks like a regular image or a diagram this is actually an embedded PowerPoint slide I could go manipulate that PowerPoint slide stay within my document and really again be quite effective in in creating a very nicely customized element directly from PowerPoint within word this item the reason I grabbed it is that's the embedded Excel spreadsheet so likewise if this is our standard starting spot for pricing and I wanted to go do this and say so look like a word table it acts like a word table other than I can I can have Excel working like Excel within the content from the library um another thing that's important to to share with you is uh are these little spots of personalization right so the content of the library can be nicely staged and prepared for me to uh to customize uh again for that that specific customer's use my examples in My Demo World here mostly guys names short client's name lung but there can be lots of other applications and I'll show you a few others uh in a moment with another example I have to show you um the the formatting uh that's important to chat about the content itself isn't just Rich text and say here go get them and go format it to meet your branding standards we can store branded and formatted content in a way that any sales person or subject expert or whomever we might have involved with our proposal process as they're dropping in records from the content library or working within our templates that that we help you create word templates that is those can be nicely branded in a way that's very consistent we don't have to worry about these fonts and that font and paragraph spacing and those bullets here versus those elements down here same fonts same colors same font sizes all of those elements are getting locked down inside the Content Library itself as well so those are some key elements around the Content Library I could go in much more detail but I think for this framework or for this discussion that's probably appropriate for you to understand okay so so if you're using more Rich assets than just text like images like another recipe headed image or diagrams or a PowerPoint or Excel or Etc then then those things we do quite nicely in experience and if you're not doing those then that becomes less of an important thing for you to consider I would guess right so let me show you another idea so here is a very simple questionnaire and to show you how we approach questionnaires it's I called it an RFP in my example but it's not much of like most of our rfps look a little bit more complex than this more often than not but but if you had a question or maybe this is an outline that we created or you created after consuming an RFP you could search that Content Library instead of being like going through like I was showing you you can search the library and find what assets do we have one of the best fitting elements right based on those keywords that I just selected expediences using the full office dictionary and thesaurus to look for all of the different appropriate variations of those words that are saying Hey listen you might want to consider these elements these Assets in our library I could go preview that asset say oh oh yeah I know that that record well and I've used that that might make sense based on this context and maybe this is important and you might even do this right you might even say you know what I want because I want both of those those are both really good things for me to consider and use for this customer's question right so I've just selected multiple records from that search and dropped them directly in to this document right it's an awesome thing I could go through and say great give me that next question go nudge me along making sure I'm considering all the best assets which I can preview and drop again right along as I as I go through and responding to and framing up this response this is still a regular everyday Microsoft Word document I know that might sound weird for me to have to remind because you all see it's word but you know you start looking at these other ribbons and as I'm searching and you kind of can get lost like wait a second where does word stop and and in this document start I just want to really um remind you maybe by clicking on the Home tab anything you did in word whether they be track changes and highlights and what have you we're absolutely still in play likewise if I needed to collaborate with the subject expert for the best answer or best records to use from this inviting others to participate becomes super awesome right becomes super easy I should say I can just say one way might be an email message to the subject expert saying hey these three questions here's a link to the document can you jump in and help idea being that that if that proper way of engaging with that subject expert or that legal contact with that other individual that we need to be brought in to this if the fastest best easiest way of getting their actual interactions to email them directly certainly that option is on the table likewise if we're using teams we could post this word document to A team's channel so just just because I have these expedience ribbons that I just closed out when I told them to stop just because I have these expedience ribbon and I have as the proposal writer all of this automation at my fingertips doesn't mean that it's not so regular everyday word right so as we want to collaborate using again any of those common processes that we use today those are still absolutely in play let me show you another thing as well so I've given you the idea of I'm going to just it's myself from that idiocy that I just did anyway and I can do so nicely by changing gears and dig back into those placeholders as well Hereafter here's the idea if the documents that we're creating include other kinds of proposals not just question and responses if the documents that we're we're creating are driven by templates sometimes we'll have I see commonly that's sometimes commonly I'll see a customer share with me a master template document with all of these instructions and say remove this if that and add this to their if else and what have you that lots of kind of levers to pull to to again pull this down to the right content for that for that next proposal this is our answer to those documents where we might create a template that instructs the user the opposite to say just tell me what do you want to include for this particular proposal and you'll notice that these are service areas of my little pretend company as I've made these selections and this template of this tool can go ahead and get for me all of those um those areas of of need and those content records if you will for to build a proposal for that series of offerings I've made a selection maybe it brought in these resumes based on some rule or maybe um who knows right right so there could be all kinds of instructions that we can bake into this document directly in these selections to say this is how I want to price this this proposal out when I say go this is pretty super awesome if you're creating template looking doc template driven proposals this goes out to that Content Library and grabs all of the records that I need to build up that proposal for example um this document included my cover page here um it included my sand cover letter here with lots of these little placeholders as well dig into that it has the headers and Footers and it built this table of contents based on whatever it was that I selected a moment ago so again it really builds for us um a great starting spot for us to to interact with this document and build sort of our first stab at that client facing proposal it's not just serving Rich text right against all of those assets embedded PowerPoints or whatever elements that might have been in that in that Content Library right it pulled from that library to build up this document well check this out here's what's asking us to say listen there's an instruction here within this document we want to build out our Narrative of our recommendation and this is where to do that at within the within the document obviously that can't be automated that that won't come from the library what we're doing specifically for this customer so they may very well just go and write content of course it being Microsoft Word we all know how to do that or by the way we saw that Content Library so for this proposal I wanted to find out what assets do we have that really talk to our payroll Consulting capabilities right I might just type in a keyword of payroll and see other elements that might just like I did when I was searching in the context of an RFP or a customer's questionnaire um here's a another type of a search that I'm doing now based on just assets what do we have what might be helpful here let's look at this oh wow that's spot on that's exactly what I need for this this element to really detail you know we know how important payroll is to you and that's what we want to explain to you whatever we might need to further tailor that so that's the idea behind um behind what we call our assembler and our pdqs these These are documents that can be nicely automated in a way that we can guide The Proposal writer into assembling all of the best standard assets for a specific proposal type beautifully formatted throughout these assets can be driven with rules that say hey when do you start a new page and when do you um how do you assemble this in the way that it creates a nice again client facing document um lots of interesting things that that can go into the more detail there but I think probably for now uh that's probably suffice to say that's the idea of of these um of these template driven documents I did want to show you more about these These are pretty awesome these little content control placeholders if I Define this as the client's long name and this is the client's short name you'll notice that throughout this document wherever client name long or client name short are used they're updated throughout the document so there's no more find and replace this beautiful but it's still word and I've just harped on and on about how great it is a word but there's some things that are word process today like find and replace that are just limited right we could we could miss things the placeholders allow you to to bake in spots of personalization where we prompt the user to to um to complete these um these elements to ensure that we don't ever send a proposal that says customer's name goes here uh what have you this placeholder form is an awesome way of completing those those elements of personalization as well if you're using Excel and commonly I've done that in previous lives where I had Excel as a big Master starting spot if you will or or a Master calculator for our proposals right I could go update these these um these placeholders as well as even in this particular document if I use Excel you might have noticed when I scrolled way down I had this element saying hey drop in the racy Matrix here if in my scenery here I actually this example I've created along the wet lines of some of my previous proposal proposals where I wanted to create and maintain those in Excel I didn't want them in this Content Library right here I wanted Excel to be the primary tool that we were using to uh again I might use up my engineering team I might use that with a broader group of people to gather all of our pricing elements that would have you if that were your process this can be beautifully automated in a way that says hey go out to Excel and go grab for us all of these elements including those updates to those um to those placeholder elements so I was going to have this queued up it's right here that's the one I want that's the original pricing document we've been using there should be no more mistakes for Jason look what it did though it brought in all of these charts and tables and graphs from Excel and right on the heels of that it brought in all of these values that I mapped from the Excel spreadsheet to my proposal process so a little bit in the weeds of an example but I just think it's such an awesome uh demonstration of how cool it is that we're we're still a thin word and and the word in Excel talks so beautifully together that if that were your process that we might use something like an Excel spreadsheet that looked like this one right maybe that has our standard blah blah blahs and selections and pricing tables and there's that Matrix I was talking about that I'd rather maintain or or create here in inside of inside of excel those things could be mapped directly to these placeholder values like they did right here all of those came in from that Excel spreadsheet so we we based our numbers of pricing based on this number of countries in scope and that number of languages in scope um back there in the Excel spreadsheet we could beautifully tick and tie that together to the proposal in a way that we don't have any risks of of again um mistakes copy and paste errors along the way so those are the big things I wanted to share with you um I'll I'll just allude to one last Point um because again I think it's part of the key why experience if we turned out to be the right software for you to consider further is that the process of I talked about way back here in this uh in this presentation I guess this is what it's presenting right here right this idea of trustworthy content is important a super important to us I'll tell you that the way that we ensure trustworthy content is an important at least discussion topic I won't dive into it in depth here but to say these records themselves we can assign variables too we can assign keywords that help us search and find them you'll be able to sign them yourself and stack the deck if you will for whatever proper words or or keys that might be helpful to have people find this record when it's needed but we also can assign individuals to be involved with the review of the and the update of this content um you have up to five of those if I recall that you could have again flagged even in my case I've created a subject expert role and a reviewer role years kind of legal and product management or whatever was appropriate in your world but I as the administrator of this Content Library can know exactly who and how frequently to go look for updates that whole process is executed directly here from word um I told myself I'm not going to dig into it but I'll tell you I could just say give me this area piece part Etc I run a report that report becomes a Word document that's beautifully updated right there from that document and brought right back in to the system from that document so it's a beautifully automated this process centered around a super accessible Word document and that's that's worth digging too deeper so if you'd like to see that and learn more about that please feel free to absolutely please ping me and let's let's chat and get into uh to that in more details but I'll tell you it's an important element to consider how do we how do we maintain the content library and that's what I think we do quite nicely so I'll just pause now to see if there's any questions and so I'll be happy to to answer those just drop them into the Q a pain and I'm let's let's figure out this thing I can help kind of fill in uh blanks there okay so the first question is an awesome one it's the one that I struggled with the most every time I thought about you know automation how do you build the library where do you start how do you what it's I remember being sent to my room to clean it by my mom when I was a kid and I looked around and just thought this no it's hopeless content libraries or content and proposal worlds can look exactly like that uh where you feel like gosh there's a million things we use sometimes so so our the couple things I'll share with you the first one is that our um our offering includes some help from our services or Professional Services folks that will help you think through this process further but but I go back to that idea of the Pareto Principle and say it's not about taking everything we've ever done and putting it into the Expedia so whenever I need anything it's always going to be there the biggest value comes from the most readily most most regularly used assets start there um build a great framework for the country library that will anticipate all of those areas and will help you think through that our services team is excellent helping you think through that structure that that topology of your of your landscape of the content what what needs to be contained here let's make sure we've thought through that but then let's just grab the most common let's grab the last five or six proposals and look for those things that we use in all five or six proposals and bring them in um yes it's time consuming there's some effort there no doubt about it and that effort is really really important because I I know everyone's heard garbage in garbage out and no one wants to hear cliches but that's absolutely true here where you you know there are systems out there that would say just adjust everything take all of it there drop it all in there and when you search exec summary show them all 85 exec summaries that you updated and let them figure out let that proposal writer sift and sort through that and grab the one they think is best or maybe even promote the one that we've used most common give them that one um and even with all of its layers and problems uh with the wrong customer's name and other having the content scrubbed up front takes time but that having that scrubbed trustworthy content is the unlocking element that that um that that we would we would absolutely um want to achieve so so what do we do to Res so the second part of this question is it seems time consuming and there is a Time investment I don't want to dismiss that at all but I'll tell you we do have tools that help you that doesn't have to be done as um one by one as I might have inferred a moment ago you certainly can do these in batches and we have tools that can help kind of ingest batches of of kind of prepared content into the Content Library so we have helping elements that help keep can reduce some of that that burden and that friction along the way so I hope that helps happy to chat about this further around the content library and around I've got some cool videos there so if you'd like to to email me and say hey the videos on that I can we've got a little pre-recorded video content around getting started right how to how to start with proposed Automation and how to start with your Content Library to prepare your content for a library itself so feel free to shoot me a a note there gosh that's the only question I've gotten so I think that's probably a good place to stop before doing so let me share with you this um we handed out these stickers at the last apmp event and they just were the Rave thing so I printed a whole bunch more we printed a whole bunch more and um and I have those now happens in the little 4x4 vinyl stickers they're awesome on laptops and what have you um so if you if you have any any care or one for those just shoot me an email or if you have any questions about expedience or the other tools out there I'll tell you I haven't had as much um I've sent customers to lots of other tools besides our own where we're not the right fit we're happy to share with you who we think might be a better fit for you so I hope this was helpful thank you so much for joining in and participating and I'm happy again to to dig in deeper into any of these areas if I can be of any assistance please don't hesitate to reach out to me and with that I'll sign off have a great day