How AEC Firms Are Leveraging Their Experience to Win More Proposals
aec360 leverages the capabilities of the Dynamics 365 CRM platform to offer comprehensive marketing and business development resources specifically designed for AEC firms.
Leverage Your Firm’s Experience to Win More Work
The relevant experience and qualifications, both of your firm and your team members, remains one of the greatest keys to business development success. Being able to put your best foot forward when presenting your firm’s experience can be what tips the scale in your favor when the award decision is made.
Rather than maintaining multiple spreadsheets or creating a complex folder structure that never seems to work quite right, an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can track your firm’s project experience, including the work performed, the client you worked for, and the team members involved in the project, along with their relevant qualifications. Having this information readily available to the marketing and business development teams helps them respond quickly and accurately to RFP requests.
aec360 leverages the capabilities of Dynamics 365 to offer comprehensive marketing and business development resources designed specifically for AEC firms, including tools to help you leverage your experience and qualifications to win more proposals.
How aec360 can help: Pinpoint the right experience for more successful proposals
Storing your project experience, staff resumes, and other qualifications information in CRM can help your marketing team stay organized and increase efficiencies. aec360 helps you quickly find reference projects, offering a variety of easy-to-use search tools to find the precise data you need quickly. These can include:
- What similar projects have we completed for this type of client?
- What markets have we performed work in?
- What other projects of this size have we worked on?
- When were the projects completed?
- What services did we provide?
- Who worked on the project
List of projects with filters
How aec360 can help: Integration, automation, and real-time data
AEC marketing teams cannot work in a vacuum. Developing proposals requires extensive collaboration with the firm’s leadership, project management, accounting, and HR teams. These interactions often take up a large portion of a marketer’s time, result in delays and inaccurate or complex data, and last-minute panic as you try to get the proposal out the door in time for the deadline. By leveraging the advanced automation and integration features in aec360, key experience data is accurate, timely, and up-to-date. aec360 helps maximize efficiencies in the proposal and qualifications preparation process through:
- Integrating data from your accounting, HR, and project management software to provide access to project financials; key dates, and project team. Moreover, aec360 ‘cleans up’ the data on the background, presenting only the information relevant to the marketing team, in the format that they need.
- Real-time data in one place – as the project evolves so does the data that marketers can see.
- Providing access to information on the fly (including on their mobile devices) so that business development and seller/doers can quickly respond to client’s requests
- Highlighting projects and experience that is truly applicable to the client and demonstrating their relevance to increase their HIT rate
How aec360 can help: Proposal document automation
AEC marketing teams can significantly reduce the time spent on the preparation of project cut sheets and resumes by generating those documents directly from aec360. Users can create and modify templates in aec360 and dynamically extract the most relevant project and employee information, presented in their choice output formats (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, even SF330). aec360 provides flexibility for outputs based on the style of the document and the template used. The marketing team can create multiple templates, so users can easily stay current and on-brand across all departments, offices, and regions.
How aec360 can help: Keeping the integrity of your data
Anyone can update project or resume data without fear of contaminating the database. The automation allows users to set up an approval process that sends a notification to the designated marketing person/team notifying them about the change and/or requesting them to review and approve changes before they are made permanent. In addition, employees can use a self-service portal they can use to maintain their information.
aec360 delivers the following benefits to help AEC firms remain competitive:
- Having your experience data centralized in one place helps take the proposal process from days to hours. The faster you can gather the essential information, the faster you can compile it and turn it around.
- Allows marketers to focus on marketing. Minimizes time spent asking SMEs for up-to-date project information.
- aec360 uses familiar Microsoft user interfaces. Its ease of use leads to faster user adoption.
- aec360 is customizable to meet the unique needs of your firm.
- Optimized for use by AEC firms. Designed for usability, security, and accessibility across any device.
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