Swish Maintenance

Introduction

Keeping up with demand for Swish’s leading janitorial solutions is no small task. With nearly 200 proposals or RFPs to manage annually and specific business growth goals, the company can’t afford cumbersome proposal writing and review processes.

Emily Tippins, Sales Administrator and Copywriter for Swish, sits at the center of the proposal process and knows firsthand how inefficiency can impact speed and quality of RFP responses.

“We have a goal of growing business by 5% through our proposals,” said Emily. “So we know it’s critical for us to optimize our existing proposals and allow our sales team to focus on growing business.”

In the past, Emily says she would be pulling information from multiple sources to write an RFP response—emails, phone calls, spreadsheets, Google Drive, SharePoint files and more. Proposal drafts were then sent off to the branch manager or the sales rep, which would lead to a lot of duplication of effort.

The collaboration wasn’t really possible, leaving everyone to work within their own silos. Once the responses came back and were compiled, there was inevitably missing information or mistakes.

Solution

Swish selected RFP360 to solve their proposal response inefficiency challenges. With RFP360, they have a centralized and systematic tool for organizing all tender content and documentation. As well as a single hub for cross-organization collaboration.

“(With RFP360), the good responses we want to reuse are all in one place. Sometimes we just need to provide pricing or a quick quote, and other times we’ll have to give a more detailed response. Now I can just go straight (to the Knowledge Base) and find everything we need,” said Emily.

The Knowledge Base lets her tag content, weed out duplicate information and maintain responses. “The library saves us from having to start from scratch with each tender,” said Emily. “I’d estimate we could be saving anywhere from 4 to 20 hours per tender … it’s a significant time-savings.”

Business Impact

Eliminating the lengthy search and piecing together of proposal answers, saves significant time and lets Swish identify additional RFPs for response, and complete more proposals overall. 

“A lot of the people I’m working with are remote. So RFP360 has allowed us to centralize our communication, and now we can more effectively work on a project together even with the time differences,” said Emily. 

There is great value in reducing redundancy and making sure you aren’t overwriting some else’s work.

“We can see if anybody else is editing a proposal at the same time,” remarked Emily. “The tool shows how many active users and what questions are being worked on, and we can refresh (the view) in real time. That has been amazing!”

“We trialed other proposal software, and we found that RFP360’s interface was the most intuitive and easy to get up and running,” said Emily. “There’s been a very minimal learning curve for us and it allowed our performance to increase almost right away.”

The ease of use is a big advantage in keeping proposals moving through review processes. Said Emily, “I can send (other team members) a link to a proposal, and if they’ve never used (RFP360), they can still easily figure out how to work it.”

And when she does have a question about the system? Support has been easy to find and quick to reply. “As I have more questions come up, the (RFP360) team has been super helpful and very responsive,” said Emily.

For Swish, bringing greater efficiency and collaboration to their proposal process offers a meaningful step toward growing proposal-driven business. With help from RFP360 solutions, they’ll continue to clean up versus the competition.