Reporting Your Success

Susanne Taylor

Which reports or what data are you sharing with your leadership to show the importance of having a quality proposal management system?

Tara Kolinsky

Some of the major reports I liked to report on to show the value of my team:

• Shortlist Rate (How many of our RFx responses took us to the next step in the process- I think arguably a better metric to evaluate proposal team performance than win rate)
• Win Rate - (Of the opps that have closed, how many were won and lost - often I would break this down by opp close date, submitted date, and product/business line)
• Win Rate by level of qualification - (how does the level of qualification affect our results?)
• Net Revenue of Won Opps by month and/or year
• Number of completed RFPs/In Progress/Pipeline for current year and compared to prior year
• RFP Counts over a longer period of time (usually three years to show trends - are volumes going up, are we responding to more, etc.)
• Open RFPs by stage with total value - the goal here is to spot stalled opps as well as opps that are in the wrong stage
• Opps with RFP vs. Direct sale (how many of our sales come through RFP channels)
• Average question count of RFPs (meant to show size/complexity of typical RFPs)
• RFP Count by size (I used standard groupings based on question count - small 0-100 questions, 101-250 medium, 251-500 large, 501+ large but these could be customized for each business) - helps to gauge complexity and the evolution of that complexity over time
• Average turn around time of RFP
• Level of qualification of RFPs for current year (again helps understand how level of qualification impacts performance).
• Average time spent on project by project size
• Go/No Go Decision on opps with RFPs (helps to evaluate how many poorly qualified opps are using resources as well as understand reasons we are not bidding/reveal gaps)
• Time from RFP release from issuer to time rec'd by RFP team - are there delays internally that are shortening our response window
• Bid submission method - what are the submission methods are most common, are we seeing changes in those trends.

I also put together a spreadsheet on these with additional details which I've attached.

Top Reports Proposal Teams Need_Use.xlsx