Optimizing your agency's proposal delivery process

Optimizing your agency's proposal delivery process

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  Optimizing your agency’sproposal delivery process. Embrace agile concepts to measure, improve, and automate your proposal creation process. Created by Jeffrey Nolte for Union A Feb 13th, 2019
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  About Me Founder ofNolte Jeffrey Nolte Me ● Started as Designer / Developer ● Lead Strategy for Nolte ● Passionate about Product, Agile, Mgmt ● Manage Sales & Marketing team ● <3 Mezcal, Cycling, Yoga Nolte ● Agile Product Development & Support ● Started in 2006 ● NYC & Mexico City ● 22 Team Members
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  wearenolte.com Contents Why Optimize? Measure &Define Guiding Principles Workflow & Tools Iterate & Improve 1 2 3 4 5
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  Why Optimize? By removingwaste in the process you enable your team to do more with less, faster. Move Faster, Save Time, Delight Prospects Move Faster ● Meet market demand quicker ● Ability to process more sales Save Time ● Ability to focus on other things ● Team time savings result in cost savings ● Reduce overall sales cycle time Delight Prospects ● Impress prospects with quick turnaround and a thorough proposal
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  Measure & Define Knowwhat needs to improve In order to know how to optimize a process we must first measure it’s deficiencies and then define what to optimize. Prerequisites 1. A loosely defined sales process. 2. A Proposal Template in Google Slides 3. A CRM (Trello will suffice) Measure: Value Stream Mapping ● Map proposal process & stakeholders ● Identify bottlenecks through cycle time and process efficiency time Define: Identify & Prioritize bottlenecks ● Look for long wait and process times ● Identify areas that can use automation
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  wearenolte.com Previous Value Stream SalesRep Prospect Production Team Discovery Call 30m Discovery Call 30m Input CRM Info 15m Prepare Proposal 240m Send Proposal 15m Estimate Design 30m Estimate Engineer 60m Prepare Estimate 60m Receive & Review 0m Value Stream Map Used to identify current state of any process and design future state of a process. How Exercise which involves all stakeholders, times are estimated by all parties. Cycle Time 104.5h Process Efficiency 13.93% 30m 1440m 1440m 1440m 1440m 30m 0m Reference
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  Peter Drucker “What getsmeasured gets managed”
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  Guiding Principles To ensurethe solution is going to work long-term we must apply some guiding principles to ensure it will meet current and future demands. Flexibility, Modularity & Efficient Flexible ● Ability to handle a range of many different types of projects ● Can be used with other custom elements or aspects as needed (due to specific RFP or similar) ● Process is flexible enough to change over time as business/proposals changes. Modular ● Components of the proposal can be used in other documents (kick-off, etc). Efficient ● Eliminate waste in the process ● Search for opps to continuously iterate and improve
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  Workflow & Tools Thereare several tools and workflows that have been created to ensure smooth delivery of the proposal and meet the projects guiding principles. Bringing it all together HubSpot HubSpot CRM is what we use at Nolte, We’ve built out custom fields to store the data needed for the proposal. Google Slides We deliver all of our proposals and presentations in Google Slides for the collaborative nature and web-based access. Google Forms Essentially middleware to store and inject the data needed for the proposals. Chrome Google Form Publisher Chrome plugin used to automate and inject the data into our Google Slide proposal.
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  wearenolte.com Current Workflow Hubspot “Presentation Scheduled” Deal stagetriggers an automated task with a constructed url with relevant data Google Forms Based on the url from HubSpot data, form is pre-populated with data and simply needs to be submitted. G-Form Plugin Upon submission of the form data, the plugin will inject data into the Nolte’s Master Proposal template and create a PDF. Google Slides A copy of the proposal template is created with all variable data from the data in HubSpot/Google Forms. Rea Note: Final stage requires minor cleanup of formating for timeline and other visual elements
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  wearenolte.com Proposal Components Templated ● CompanyInfo ● Development Process ● Support Process ● Appendix Customized ● Case Studies ● Timeline ● Technology Specs ● Services Variable Data (CRM) ● Client Name ● Date ● Product Vision ● Project Overview ● Costs & Timing ● Sprint Overview ● Summary
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  wearenolte.com Current Optimized ValueStream Sales Rep Prospect Production Team Discovery Call 30m Discovery Call 30m Input CRM Info 15m Prepare Proposal 30m Send Proposal 15m Prepare Estimate 60m Receive & Review 0m Cycle Time 52.25h Process Efficiency 17.33% Time Savings 52.25h Efficiency Increase 3.4% 30m 1440m 1440m 30m 0m Reference
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  Iterate & Improve Oneof the principles of agile is to consistently improve. We’ve identified additional areas of improvement in this process. Identify Opportunities Optimize Other Documents ● Identify other process to use VSM ● Legal contracts using PandaDoc ● Kick-Off Presentations ● Onboarding Presentations ● Audits Leverage Other Tech ● Newly released Google Doc API ● Remove production from estimation ● Break down 2 levels of estimation
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  New York Chinatown, NYC 169Canal St. 3rd Floor New York, NY 10013 Mexico City Torre Reforma Latino Paseo de la Reforma 296 Colonia Juárez, Mexico City, 06600 ©2018 Nolte Inc. All Rights Reserved wearenolte.com Thank you. Jeffrey Nolte jnolte@wearenolte.com @jeffreynolte
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  Iterate & Improve Thefollowing are resources referenced during this tutorial. Email me with any questions, comments or concerns. Resources Tools & Processes ● HubSpot CRM (Central data store, any CRM will do) ● Value Stream Mapping Overview ● Google Sheets (used to measure process efficiency, reference) ● Google Forms (to pass info to Google Form Publisher) ● Google Form Publisher (Creates Google Slides Proposal) ● Google Slides (Used for proposal template)