When the marketing team is struggling under the weight of responding to RFP after RFP, it’s tempting to narrow your focus and look for a slimmed down, silver bullet application for generating pitches and proposals. However, firms that take the time to research their alternatives inevitably find they need a more robust solution that includes easy access to comprehensive experience, expertise, and client information.
That’s exactly what happened when I was CMO at Sidley Austin LLP. What started as a search for a proposal generation solution, resulted in the seeds of Foundation Software Group’s Firm Intelligence platform. Why? Because we found that what we needed as much or more than the proposal generation itself was easy access to all the experience and knowledge we had amassed at Sidley to materially differentiate our firm between the cover page and summary.
It also turns out that the data that sets your pitches, proposals, and awards and rankings submissions apart has a significant overlap with the information the Knowledge Management team is interested in compiling, indexing, and leveraging.
While KM might use this data to feed strategic decision making, locate firm expertise, manage experiences, find relevant matters to support pricing analysis, or make enterprise search more efficient and effective, Marketing can also leverage the data to help integrate lateral hires, identify cross selling opportunities, and drive client development efforts, in addition to generating those proposals.
View the recent ILTA webinar entitled, The Latest in Pitch Generation, where I talk about how and why taking a holistic approach to knowledge management and business development solutions can ultimately result in not only better proposals, but also improve the business and practice of law at your firm as well.
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