Preparing proposals is a necessary part of doing business. Yet organizations of all shapes and sizes often struggle under the proposal “pressure cooker”. So much time is lost pulling together standard proposal content and reformatting at the last minute, instead of focusing on understanding the prospective customer needs and building the relationship to win them over.
Business users typically start by saving a copy of their last proposal, change the names, then copy and paste in content from a wide variety of sources and formats.
Not only is this inefficient, it often leads to poor quality proposals that compromise the brand and leave the organization exposed to unnecessary risk with incorrect, out-of-date content – or worse, content intended for another customer.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to introduce some simple automation to make proposal drafting more efficient using Microsoft Office, where business users are comfortable working?
Automating proposals using Microsoft Office
MacroView ClauseBank is an easy to use add-in that streamlines document preparation in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.
It provides users access to a menu of approved content conveniently managed in Microsoft SharePoint (either on premises or online) and is ideal as a proposal and/or presentation builder solution to:
- Significantly improve user productivity – our customers regularly report productivity gains in excess of 500% when preparing proposals
- Improve brand compliance and the quality of proposals produced using your standard document styles and templates
- Ensure compliance and risk management.
How does document automation work?
Content is presented to the user via a simple user interface available from the Home ribbon (refer Word screenshot below). It can include Word documents (i.e. a single sentence/paragraph or a 20 page document depending on how granular you want it to be), PowerPoint slides and even images.
Content can be neatly organized into folders, searched for by name or content and is presented with a fully formatted preview including a description or guidance notes.
Document automation in four easy steps:
- Create a new and/or open an existing document and select the Insert Clause button at the desired cursor position.
- Search, select and preview relevant content in the ClauseBank window.
- Drag and drop content into the Selected Clause pane and re-order as required.
- Select OK to insert the content into your document or presentation.
MacroView ClauseBank supports multiple languages (including double-byte characters) and its Automatic Expiry Alert feature allows you to set an expiry date for content that requires periodic review (e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) to ensure that content is always up to date.
In addition, because content is centrally managed and does not reside on local machines, it can be updated in “real time” without IT assistance.
More Information
For more information on how you can use MacroView ClauseBank to automate your proposals, please visit MacroView365.com or contact MacroView Services.
Check out this YouTube video that shows how MacroView ClauseBank improves the efficiency and reduces the risks associated with generating proposals:
