Jake Andre, Analyst at Xcel
“We cut our proposal creation time from about 2 to 3 hours down to 15 or 20 minutes.”
Xcel Energy serves communities and industrial customers in eight US states. The company strives to keep bills low, improve the customer experience, and lead the clean energy movement. They boast the highest portfolio of clean energy of any utility provider in the United States.
Jake Andre is an analyst on the corporate economic development team at Xcel Energy. He was looking to eliminate the frustration and time losses that territory managers experienced whenever they needed to respond to a request for information (RFI).
When researching a location for a new industrial facility, site consultants send RFIs to the appropriate state entity, which then passes that RFI along to the relevant utility companies and regional account development organizations to see who might be interested in supporting the development.
“We receive deadlines to respond to RFIs, and the last thing we want holding us up is actually creating the proposal. We want that process to be as streamlined as possible because we have more important fact-checking steps to do before we respond.”
The territory managers at Xcel Energy are tasked with responding to these RFIs and winning new accounts. They use proposals to share the company’s core value propositions, such as offering competitive rates and renewable energy. The goal is to showcase Xcel Energy as the best long-term partner. The team also provides important capacity and load details from the internal engineering teams to show the company’s ability to handle the energy requirements of the site.
The team at Xcel Energy had been using the same outdated process to put together proposals. Each proposal would take 2 to 3 hours to complete with Adobe Acrobat Pro.
“It took a crazy amount of time to create these proposals. Our content was organized in different platforms, so we struggled to keep those pamphlets up to date with the most current verbiage.”
Bugs caused the text to be formatted improperly, turning a lengthy process into an even longer one. The team would often have to redo an entire proposal just to work around these bugs.
Jake knew there had to be a better way. He started researching proposal solutions to help speed up what they were currently doing with Adobe. He was also hoping for more advanced features, particularly proposal analytics to provide some feedback in the form of customer activity.
After the first demo with Proposify, Jake knew it was the right solution because of how straightforward the proposal creation process was and the helpfulness of the Proposify team.
Xcel Energy has experienced major time savings and more streamlined processes.
The rollout process was smooth. Xcel Energy utilized Proposify’s creative services to get attractive, usable templates up and running. Jake also met regularly with his Customer Success Manager to learn new features of the platform. Jake would then strategize how to best utilise them and make them part of the Xcel Energy sales workflow.
While their proposal creation process used to take 2 to 3 hours, it now takes just 15 to 20 minutes (for a time savings of up to 1200%!).
The Xcel Energy team doesn’t have to duplicate their work anymore. With a few clicks, they can drag and drop pre-approved content into their proposal. The software itself is also much easier to use, with no obnoxious formatting issues to fix.
“With Proposify, we can house all of our templates and content in one system. It’s very easy to pull in the right data for each proposal.”
The team is also utilising our Unsplash integration to add imagery that appeals to the potential customer, based on their business type.
The corporate economic development team also uses Proposify for their newsletters. They send beautifully formatted, fresh content to help stay in touch with internal engineers and account managers as well as developers, brokers, and site selectors across the US.
“Another department reached out and said ‘That looks fantastic. How do we get in contact with those guys to do something similar for our team?’”
The territory managers can check their metrics in Proposify to find out which customers are viewing the proposals, and how many times. Managers can also benchmark their viewing and closing statistics to get a sense for where their monthly metrics should fall.
“The proposal analytics is an excellent feature. Now, we know which customers are engaging with the content.”
Xcel Energy uses Proposify to improve their internal collaboration processes. The brand and communications team can approve each content snippet and template, as well as the individual proposals before they’re sent.
This has shaved hours off of the process while ensuring brand compliance and accuracy.
“Our brand and communications team can review and approve our content much easier. They get a peek into the process from the get-go and offer their feedback regularly so that we can distribute these proposals on time and accurately.”
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