Expedience Software Offers Greater Flexibility In Its Updated Proposal And RFP Automation Product Suite

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Expedience Software was founded in 2012 by Melissa Mabon and Brooke Savage, the visionaries who produced the award-winning RFP and proposal automation solution called RFP Machine. Expedience was formed with the vision of extending the functionality of the software that proposal writers and salespeople already know and love – Microsoft Office – with a suite of powerful RFP automation tools and functionality. Today, Expedience Software helps clients fully win more business by automating the process of creating beautifully formatted, error-free proposals using MS Word, MS Excel, MS Outlook, and MS PowerPoint.

Below is our interview with Jason Anderson, VP of Sales at Expedience Software:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Expedience Software?

A: Expedience’s leadership team averages over 20 years of proposal experience and has helped thousands of companies reduce proposal development costs while increasing the quality, effectiveness, and branding consistency of these business-critical documents. Expedience’s clients reach across nearly every industry including high tech, financial services, professional services, legal services, marketing and advertising, engineering, and manufacturing.

While many of Expedience’s clients are automating proposals and RFP responses for the first time, a growing percent of their clientele are migrating from other proposal automation solutions. These clients have decided to migrate their RFP automation away from platforms that required the proposal writers to learn new, less flexible, web-based interfaces that gave them less control over the proposal’s format. These clients also reflect on the security benefits bringing their proposal content behind corporate firewalls and enjoy the ownership and control over this content that Expedience provides.

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Q: You’ve recently announced Version 2018 of your Microsoft Word based RFP and proposal automation solution; could you tell us something more?

A: With our 2018 release, we’ve been able to realize the full vision of our solution. It’s now the easiest to use and most flexible proposal and RFP automation software on the market. Our clients are thrilled that version 2018 made it possible for them to enable their sales people to create winning proposals on their own with far less support from dedicated proposal professionals.

Salespeople take to the software immediately because, being built into MS Word, it is familiar, easy to use, and helps them do their job better.

Q: Can you give us more insights into your features?

A: There are many new features and enhancements within version 2018. Some of the features our testers, initial clients, and upgrade clients have been most impressed with include: support for MS Excel-based RFPs, Proposals Done Quickly (PDQs), PowerPoint presentation automation, and extended workflow automation. Let me tell you about each of them:

• Excel Connect provides an automation solution for a universally disliked challenge – responding to MS Excel-based RFPs. Excel Connect automates the process of replicating an Excel RFP Workbook with multiple worksheets into a single MS Word document with multiple tables (each table representing a worksheet of the RFP), answering the questions using the same MS Word content library, translating any features of the content into an MS Excel ready version, and pushing these completed responses back into MS Excel.

• PDQ’s are automated templates that quickly create 100% accurate, perfectly branded, end-to-end document such as proactive proposals, statements of work (SOWs), master services agreements (MSAs), due diligence questionnaires (DDQs), contracts, etc. PDQ’s go far beyond simple MS Word templates, they provide an intuitive interface of smart checkboxes that streamline the process of selecting specific content to include or exclude in the automated document. PDQs are completely customizable and commonly include active links to MS Excel for pricing and/or tables as well as placeholders to personalize the document with client-specific information such as their company name.

• PowerPoint presentation automation features create a bridge between a completed proposal and MS PowerPoint. Once its been configured to do so, version 2018 can connect to a completed master MS PowerPoint template, push proposal content into the template presentation, and eliminate slides that are not required to support the proposal. With two clicks, a completed proposal has a companion MS PowerPoint presentation.

• Workflow support simplifies and automates actions and finishing steps to extend the reach of MS Word and integrate into other applications. These workflows are customizable and can greatly vary client-to-client but commonly include proofreading and error checking against user-defined rules, pushing the proposal to a CRM application, exposing proposal specifics to other applications, saving the completed proposal to a defined location with a defined naming convention, eliminating content controls, and saving the proposal as a PDF.

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Q: Why do clients choose your solution over the competition? Why not a pure-play cloud platform?

A: IT investments and sales enablement solutions have gotten a reputation of being costly and difficult to implement largely because they often require a radical departure from the previous solution or existing processes. Cloud-based proposal solutions suffer this fate for these same reasons and because they fail to make the salesperson or proposal writers life easier. Users revolt, refuse to use the solution, and jeopardize the return on investment and efficiency gains.

Living inside of MS Word eliminates all of this complexity and user pushback. Training is limited because the software works where proposal-writers and sales teams work and how they like to work. And user adoption is assured because Expedience just makes it easier and faster to make an error-free, beautifully formatted proposals.

Microsoft has made great leaps in collaboration and co-authorship with the latest version – MS Word 365. These advances have evolved Expedience client’s ability to seamlessly incorporate additional proposal contributors without emailing documents and reconciling versioning issues. But even this cloud solution has been met with mixed reviews and limited user adoption. For these reasons, while we love the reach of the cloud, we see many advantages of our cloud/shared drive/hybrid deployment model.

Q: You are recognized as a market innovator in the RFP/RFI automation industry; more generally, how do you see your industry developing, and where do you place yourself in the industry?

A: The RFP and proposal automation market is rapidly evolving. There are many challenges in the business development, sales enablement, proposal process management, and workflow management processes that clients need help solving. This range of issues has driven a wide range of solutions on the market today. While all of these problems deserve consideration, we remain focused on the success of proposal writers and sales teams. We have innovated and evolved our solution to help win more business in less time with less effort. Version 2018 is a testament to this dedication and vision.

Q: What are your plans for next year?

A: I can’t talk much about this yet, but our R&D team has been hard at work breaking new ground in PowerPoint automation and integration with cloud document sharing and collaboration platforms. This is really exciting stuff because it is furthering the impact of our proposal automation solution.