In the proposal process, Bid Managers, Sales teams, and Business Development Teams are often at the forefront, managing timelines, client relationships, and project details. However, another role that is crucial to a successful RFP is Marketing. Tasks such as bid presentation, content customization, and proposal branding all come under the umbrella of 'Marketing', and all are key to the proposal's effectiveness.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the common RFP-related tasks that often fall under Marketing (or roles that support marketing functions), the challenges these teams face, and how technology can help streamline these efforts for faster, more effective proposals.
Note that while some firms have a dedicated Marketing function, in other firms these marketing-related tasks are absorbed by other roles, such as Bid Teams, Operations, or Sales. Regardless of your firm’s structure, the marketing-related challenges in the proposal process are universal, and understanding where improvements can be made is essential for all teams involved.
Common Marketing Tasks in the RFP Process
Some of the most common tasks that are completed by marketers (or roles closely associated with marketing) are highlighted below:
Bid Presentation
Bid Presentation is one of the most crucial aspects of the proposal process. The way a proposal looks and feels can make all the difference when a client reviews it, especially when competing for high-value contracts. Marketing teams are typically responsible for ensuring that the proposal is visually appealing, consistent with the firm's brand, and formatted in compliance with any specific requirements. A well-crafted bid presentation helps convey professionalism, clarity, and attention to detail, making a positive first impression. Bid presentation typically involves the following elements:
Document Design
- Creating the overall layout: The marketing team typically designs the proposal layout, including things such as margin sizes, line spacing, content within headers and footers, the structure of key sections, etc. The goal is to optimize for clarity and readability.
- Using visual aids: Where applicable, marketing might add graphs, charts, infographics, or images to help break down complex data or highlight key points.
- Including interactive elements: For digital submissions, marketing teams may incorporate hyperlinks, interactive tables of contents, or other interactive features that allow the reader to navigate the proposal seamlessly.
Brand Consistency
- Implementing brand guidelines: Marketing ensures that all visual elements (logos, colors, fonts) used in the proposal align with the firm’s brand guidelines, ensuring consistency across all client-facing materials from timelines and finances, to resumes and case studies.
- Maintaining tone and language: Marketing teams make sure that the language used in the proposal remains consistent with the firm’s tone of voice, whether it's formal, conversational, technical, or client-specific. This helps maintain the firm’s identity in every piece of communication.
- Quality control of visual assets: Ensuring that images, graphics, and other visual assets are properly sized, high-quality, and consistent with the firm's visual style.
Bid-Specific Formatting
Certain proposals, especially in highly regulated industries or for specific clients, require bid-specific formatting to comply with the instructions outlined in the RFP. Again, this task typically falls to marketing teams:
- Reviewing RFP formatting guidelines: Marketing begins by thoroughly reviewing the RFP’s specific formatting requirements, which may include prescribed templates, document size limits, word counts, and other formatting rules.
- Adapting the proposal to fit the template: Once the requirements are understood, the marketing team adapts the proposal’s structure and formatting to fit within the prescribed template - ensuring compliance at every step.
Leveraging Case Studies, Resumes and Experience Data
Another important role for marketing is to source and showcase case studies, resumes (CVs), and other experience data that is relevant to the proposal. These documents build trust and demonstrate relevant capabilities. Here’s how the marketing team plays its part:
- Selecting the right case studies: Marketing teams choose case studies that are most relevant to the client’s industry, needs, and objectives, emphasizing successful projects that mirror the challenges the client faces.
- Adapting case studies for clarity and impact: They then ensure that case studies are edited and tailored to the proposal, focusing on key successes and metrics that align with the client’s goals.
- Gather team resumes/CVs: This role often falls upon the bid team, but sometimes marketing may be in charge of sourcing and tailoring the project team’s resumes (CVs). This involves searching the extensive HR or CRM database (or ideally resume-management tool) for the best talent for the project, ensuring that the content is customized to the client’s needs, and that each resume is presented in a unified manner.
- Incorporating other experience data: Where relevant, marketing teams should gather and present the firm’s holistic experience data, including relevant certifications, awards, and qualifications, ensuring that it directly supports the firm’s suitability for the project.
Tailoring Proposal Content
Tailoring proposal content involves customizing the proposal’s messaging to align with the client’s specific needs, objectives, and the RFP requirements. In many firms, marketing plays a critical role in ensuring that the proposal content is client-focused and relevant.
- Aligning content with client goals: Marketing ensures that the proposal content highlights how the firm’s offerings align with the client’s needs, ensuring the firm’s strengths are positioned as the best solution. This includes, but is not limited to, crafting a personalized executive summary, adapting case studies to speak to the project’s requirements, and tailoring resumes to highlight relevant experiences.
- Prioritizing most relevant content: In addition to tailoring text, marketing may also rework the structure of a section, or sub-section to ensure the most relevant content is shown first. By drawing attention to the firm’s most prevalent certifications, past projects, people, and more, the client is more likely to engage with the wider proposal. Meanwhile, small details like this indicate to the client that their needs have been fully understood and addressed.
- Adapting language and tone: The marketing team might even adjust the language to align with the client's preferences, making sure the tone is appropriate for their industry.
Common Challenges Marketing Teams Face in the Proposal Process
On top of this heavy workload, proposal marketing teams also face a number of challenges that can significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of their work. From managing large volumes of content to meeting tight deadlines, these obstacles can make the above tasks even more complex and time-consuming than they need be. If you’re a marketer or in a marketing-adjacent role, then some, or even all of these challenges will resonate:
Challenge: Managing Content Across Disparate Systems
One of the biggest challenges marketing teams face during the proposal process is dealing with the large amount of content and data that must be gathered, organized, and presented. With multiple proposals running concurrently, managing and accessing the right materials quickly becomes a significant hurdle.
- Content fragmentation: Proposal content often exists in multiple locations (shared drives, emails, hard copies), making it difficult to gather and centralize materials for each proposal.
- Outdated or inconsistent content: Keeping case studies, resumes, certifications, and other content updated across different versions is time-consuming and prone to error.
- Version control issues: Managing and tracking the latest versions of content can be cumbersome, leading to confusion and mistakes when preparing proposals.
- Difficulty in quickly accessing relevant materials: With a large pool of content, finding the right piece of information that fits the specific proposal becomes time-consuming and inefficient.
Challenge: Tailoring Content is Cumbersome
Another major pain point for marketing teams is the difficulty of tailoring content for each specific client or bid. The process of tailoring a document - whether that be a case study, CV, resume, or other, traditionally takes place in a Word Doc or InDesign file. However, this is incredibly inefficient.
- Content formatting: Tailoring often involves reordering sections of the proposal, or proposal section, giving precedence to the most important roles or achievements. When doing this in a Word Doc or other document processor, there is a high chance of running into formatting issues. The document typically goes awry, and it’s a tough job to make the final document look consistent and professional.
- Duplicative work: Since previously tailored content is typically locked up in a past proposal, it becomes unfindable. Teams often know that the content has already been tailored for a similar use-case, but they can’t find it. This results in wasted time rewriting the same content.
Challenge: Ensuring Brand Compliance
Marketing teams are responsible for ensuring that every proposal adheres to the firm's established brand guidelines. However, ensuring brand compliance can be a challenge, especially when proposals involve multiple contributors or are being tailored for different clients.
- Inconsistent application of brand elements: Maintaining consistent use of logos, fonts, and colors across multiple proposals can be difficult, particularly when different team members are involved.
- Varying document formats: Proposals may need to be adapted to different formats (digital, print, or industry-specific templates), and marketing must ensure that the brand's visual identity is maintained in every format.
- Difficulties in enforcing brand standards: Without proper tools, enforcing brand compliance in every proposal can be challenging, and small deviations can occur, undermining the brand’s image.
Challenge: Complying With Bid Requirements
Ensuring bid compliance is another major challenge for marketing teams, especially when the RFP contains complex and highly specific requirements. Inaccurate or incomplete proposals due to non-compliance can lead to disqualification, making this a critical step in the process.
- Strict formatting requirements: Many RFPs provide detailed formatting instructions that must be adhered to, such as font size, line spacing, and section order, which can be time-consuming to implement.
- Missing or incomplete information: The marketing team must ensure all requested sections are included in the proposal and that they align with the client’s specifications.
- Compliance with legal and regulatory standards: Proposals, especially for government or highly regulated industries, require compliance with specific legal or financial standards, which may change from bid to bid.
- Tracking updates and changes: Ensuring that all team members are aware of the latest compliance requirements and have implemented them correctly across the proposal can be difficult without clear communication and tracking systems.
Challenge: Time Constraints and Tight Deadlines
The time constraints inherent in the proposal process compound all the challenges mentioned above. Tight deadlines create pressure for marketing teams to deliver high-quality proposals quickly, while still ensuring that everything is aligned, compliant, and on-brand.
How Technology Streamlines RFP Marketing
The good news is that technology is here to help. Proposal automation software, and specifically Flowcase, can enable marketing teams to overcome the challenges discussed earlier, making it easier to produce compliant, on-brand, and high-quality proposals in less time. Here’s how:
Solution: Creating a Source of Truth For Experience Content
As mentioned, one of the biggest challenges for marketing teams is managing the sheer volume of content—case studies, resumes, certifications, and experience data—that must be organized and kept up-to-date across multiple systems, for multiple proposals.
How RFP technology helps:
- Centralized Content Library: Flowcase provides a single, centralized repository for all proposal experience content, including case studies, resumes, and certifications. This ensures all materials are easily accessible, they’re easy to update, and they’re all in a standardized format.
- Search and Filter Functionality: With Flowcase’s advanced search features, marketing teams can quickly filter and find the relevant content they need, reducing the time spent hunting through multiple sources.
By centralizing and organizing content, Flowcase helps eliminate content fragmentation and outdated materials, making it easier to create proposals quickly and with consistent, accurate data.
Solution: Easy Drag-And-Drop Tailoring
Tailoring in static documents is an incredibly inefficient task. With dedicated RFP software, you can streamline this process.
How RFP technology helps:
- Dedicated tailoring interface: With some proposal automation tools, like Flowcase, you have a centralized, easy-to-navigate space where you can quickly drag-and-drop sections of content, highlight important achievements, rewrite content, and more. This takes place before the document is generated, meaning you don’t need to focus on any formatting issues.
- Reuse previously tailored content: Again, with a dedicated tool, you have an overview of previously tailored content. This can then be easily retrieved and reused for new proposals, meaning there’s no need to recreate content from scratch, saving time and eliminating duplicative work.
- No versioning issues: Because Flowcase works with the master resume or content file, any changes made are stored as a tailored version. This eliminates the risk of versioning issues since the master file is never duplicated; only the tailored version is created.
Solution: Making Brand Compliance Easy With Repeatable Processes
Ensuring brand compliance across proposals is a time-consuming task, especially when managing multiple contributors and different types of proposals.
How RFP technology helps:
- Customizable Templates: Flowcase allows marketing teams to create custom templates that are fully aligned with the firm's brand guidelines. These templates ensure that all proposals—regardless of the team member working on them—are consistent in design, branding, and messaging.
- Brand Control Features: Flowcase helps enforce the use of approved logos, fonts, colors, and language style across all proposal content. With defined templates and brand standards, marketing teams can guarantee compliance without manually checking every document.
- Enforced Terminology: Proposal consistency isn’t just about your visual brand identity. Flowcase helps you to manage the language and phrasing your firm uses through Masterdata. For example, you can easily consolidate similar roles - eg. Consultant / Associate Consultant, or easily identify spelling errors, and clean these up.
Flowcase’s customizable templates and brand control features save time, maintain consistency, and prevent brand deviations, allowing marketing teams to focus on higher-value tasks while ensuring brand integrity.
Solution: Mapping Content for Easy Bid Formatting
Bid compliance is critical to the proposal process, and missing even one requirement can result in disqualification. Ensuring compliance across complex RFPs with various formatting, section, and content requirements can be overwhelming.
How RFP technology helps:
- Automated Content Mapping: Flowcase enables marketing teams to quickly push content into any template. For example, you could upload the SF 330 template, map resume and project content to the relevant sections, and then export tailored content directly into the correct layout. This removes the endless copying and pasting chaos and ensures that no section is overlooked. This is especially valuable when the proposal requires a large team.
- Content Compliance: Additionally, Flowcase has AI features that help to ensure your content is ready to submit. AI Proofreading helps to mitigate grammatical errors, while AI Text Reduction condenses resumes and case studies with a click, ensuring word-counts and page-limits are met.
Flowcase reduces the risk of missing critical compliance requirements, saving time on manual checks and ensuring that all RFP formatting and content standards are adhered to. This improves accuracy and reduces the chance of errors.
Additional Benefits
Marketers often have to juggle multiple tasks on top of their key responsibilities. Here are some additional ways that RFP software can help them stay on top of their work.
How RFP technology helps:
- Seamless Collaboration: Flowcase allows multiple team members to work on the same proposal, with tags indicating what stage content is at during the process. Marketing is often tasked with facilitating smooth collaboration, and this helps teams keep proposals moving forward without bottlenecks.
- Improved Data Security: Another challenge or concern for marketers is safe data usage - especially when dealing with team resumes and CVs. Flowcase ensures this by minimizing data proliferation across emails and shared drives - instead keeping it in one safe system.
- MarTech Integrations: A final benefit of using a proposal automation tool like Flowcase is that you can link data up from external systems. For instance, you can pull in data from your CRM or ERP, or you can push data from your Flowcase system to your website to easily create and update employee bios.
Conclusion: Streamlining Proposal Marketing with Flowcase
The proposal process is complex and filled with challenges, especially for busy marketing teams tasked with ensuring a tailored, on-brand proposal. From centralizing content to automating document creation and ensuring compliance, Flowcase provides the tools needed to streamline this workflow - helping them to save time, improve collaboration, and enhance submission quality in the process.
To learn more about Flowcase, book a personalized demo with us today.
FAQs: Common Questions About Marketing in RFPs and Proposal Automation
What is the role of marketing in the RFP process?
Marketing ensures proposals are visually appealing, on-brand, and tailored to client needs through content customization, case studies, and experience data.
Why is proposal branding important in the RFP process?
Branding helps create a professional, consistent image, builds trust, and increases the likelihood of winning the bid by presenting the proposal cohesively.
What are the biggest challenges for marketing teams in the proposal process?
Challenges include managing large volumes of content, ensuring brand and bid compliance, and the time-consuming process of tailoring content for each proposal.
How can marketing teams ensure consistency across multiple proposals?
Marketing teams can use templates, establish brand guidelines, and leverage centralized content management systems to maintain consistency across proposals.
What are the best practices for tailoring proposal content?
Best practices include aligning the content with client goals, prioritizing key achievements, and adapting the tone and structure for each proposal without losing consistency.
How do you manage version control in proposal content?
Using centralized content repositories and proposal automation tools can help keep track of versions, avoid duplications, and ensure teams are working with the latest content.
What are the key elements of a successful proposal presentation?
A successful proposal presentation includes clear document design, strong branding, tailored content, and compliance with all client and RFP requirements.
