"Socialtext lets us do rapid prototyping of proposals with a far-flung team." - Business development manager, international design consultancy
Socialtext serves a world famous consultancy specializing in product and service design. The design consultancy helps Global 1000 firms to innovate by providing design services that address all phases of development, from concept generation to final production. The consultancy's culture values iteration and collaboration, and Socialtext helps the company's sales team implement those values.
Socialtext helps the business development team create sales proposals more rapidly and with higher quality. The company's method relies on multidisciplinary teams. The team for a typical engagement includes a business development lead, a design studio lead, and an engineer. All of the team members contribute content drawing on their areas of expertise. Then the business development lead reviews the proposal and refines the language.
Socialtext has helped the design consultancy increase the level of collaboration in the sales process. Team members participate more frequently, and more team members participate. Warren describes how posting to the wiki attracts collaboration. "A colleague on another teams saw the proposal on the wiki and contributed to it. It was a wonderful surprise."
The company culture values rapid prototyping, and the sales process follows that culture. The development of a proposal is an iterative process, where each steps in the cycle adds relevant detail and improves the proposal's focus.
The Business Development Director at the design consultancy appreciates the way that Socialtext makes it easy to iterate rapidly, and manage the revision cycle. "In the past, a proposal would get revised once or twice. Now, we go back and forth rapidly, and have dozens of revisions in the time it took us to do one or two. I can keep track of the versions of the proposal, and see how it changed." Before using Socialtext, the team used to send Word attachments back and forth. Team members often had the wrong document versions and the team didn't have a record of its progress.
Socialtext helps the design consultancy create proposals from modular components. The team uses the wiki to keep standard chunks of content and compose them into a document. The Business Development Director appreciates the way Socialtext helps his team contribute to the proposal's content without being distracted by graphic design. In the customer's words, "When we're writing proposals, we want to lavish attention on the content, not the formatting. When given a lot of formatting features, the amount of time spent on content drops drastically."
The design consultancy's sales team includes professionals in five cities. Socialtext lets team members stay up-to-date on the salesprocess, and enables increased participation from an extended team.
Socialtext gives team members visibility into the team's activity. Team members post sales meeting notes during group calls, so the notes are visible to team members who weren't able to make the meeting. And meeting follow-up steps are visible to the team. Before using Socialtext, the group used a Windows directory tree to store documents. The wiki home page lets team members see upcoming meetings, see sales pipeline status, and reach intranet resources.
Team members travel often, and Socialtext enables team members to check in on the road, from customer locations or handheld devices. Says the customer, "You can get to it from anywhere. I can look at the wiki from my Treo, its out there and persistent."
Using Socialtext's hosted service, the customer has been able to accelerate the generation of proposals while enhancing their quality. This reduces their sales cycle and increases the probability of closing new business. In addition, team members are able to communicate without constraints and have communication contribute to lasting value.