Easing the pain of writing a SOW

One of the things that has always bothered me about being on the Technical Pre-Sales Architect  was the amount of time and effort  it takes to put together proposals.  There was a discovery phase with the customer then the time that you had to sit down and write out the proposal.  Once you write the proposal then you have to go through a costing exercise on how long all this work is going to take and then finally you send it for review. Then comes the revision process. Then maybe project management and Legal need to take a look at it.   Oh and by the way,  the customer has a time clock that they are looking at for when they need the proposal back.

In one of my jobs this could take weeks if not months to make it through all the processes.  I would say that this process (along with my 6 kids) have accelerated my baldness and graying condition that I am experiencing.  Finding a process to speed this along is essential.  Also simplifying the process for user can provide huge dividends. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Tipping Point talked about how changing relatively small things in an organization can make a huge difference.

I think the same can be said for proposal creation.  I always hated selling services because of how long and how much work was involved in "going through the process".  It was quite honestly painful and by the time I made it through the process I was exhausted.  What was even more frustrating is putting in countless hours on projects that never materialized or that we lost because we

1. Didn't define the solution well enough
2. Took too long to respond because of the process or
3. Were to expensive because of overhead on the project.  

That is why proposal automation strikes a chord with me.  I was recently reading through a white paper by Salesforce.com entitled 8 key plays for sales success and ran across a company called  Qvidian.  

This is obviously a company that has felt my pain. One of their software offerings looks to automate the process of proposal creation.  This software package geared to making a very painful process less painful.  In my game anyone that can do that is gets my attention.  By making little changes in process of creating proposals and selling services they are providing an enormous service to the poor grunts who end up putting in the hours to creating the documents.  I have not evaluated the tool but my interest is there because of my dislike of writing proposals.  And I am sure that I am not alone in my pain.  I hope to get the chance to see more of what the product has to offer.