Tim Davies explains how Project Rising automated its proposal process using meeting transcripts and templates to generate detailed documents instantly. They ditched PDFs for an interactive system that tracks when buyers open proposals, where they linger, and what confuses them, so sellers can respond to buying signals in real time.
Chapters
So we've been creating pretty detailed proposals for our customers. When we're about to commence a new piece of work, we use automation to understand what that company is currently doing, what their challenges might be. We use transcripts from the recordings that we have of meetings with them to establish a lot of detail about the proposal. And we then create a proposal document which starts with a, an explanation of what the project would be as a simple one liner, contains what their investment is, and then goes into quite a lot of detail around the company, background the problem space that they're operating in, the opportunity, what our solution would do, what the return on investment is, why somebody would want to work with Project Rising, how it works, what those phases are, our credentials, et cetera, et cetera. And up until recently we were presenting this, ideally in person to the customer, but often sharing a PDF and sometimes for remote businesses sharing a PDF by email. The problem with PDF is you don't know when anybody's read it, you don't know when it's been opened, you don't know which parts of the proposal are of interest. And I was having a conversation with one of our customers about management accounts and how that process of sharing and understanding of the company's financial performance could be better monitored. Had a bit of a oh, why aren't we doing that moment? And so we're now building our proposal automation process which we've been using internally to accelerate the creation of our proposals, to standardize our pricing into the toolkit so that any of our toolkit customers can also benefit from a proposal system that allows the rapid creation of accurate, hard hitting, high value proposals. We but also understands when people have opened that proposal, where they've hovered and spent their time within the proposal, over a heat map and notifications and triggers, so that if a proposal's being accessed multiple times and the customer hasn't got in touch, you can get in touch with them. Not in a creepy way, not to say we're stalking you and we've been watching what you're doing, but there's obviously a buying signal there if they're repeatedly interested and you can see over the course of your proposals which parts of the document are of interest, whether some areas are having a higher dwell time than others, and maybe that means that more detail is needed or it's not particularly clear in how it's written, but we think that this process of improving proposals so that you understand when a customer is reading it, which bits they're interested in and generally being able to act on that interest in a timely manner will dramatically improve the process of proposals for every small, medium sized business. And so we'll be delighted to share that with you through our toolkit.
