$280.25 billion. That’s the dollar amount the health technology sector is expected to reach by 2021. In the 2019 Global Healthcare Outlook report, Deloitte revealed parallels between the decline of healthcare profits and the rise of new organizations redefining fundamental aspects of the health care industry.
Healthcare organizations are reacting to these industry shifts, searching for ways to optimize their financial and operational performance. As a proposal manager working in this rapidly evolving industry, your role has become increasingly important. Responding to healthcare RFPs is your primary job function and successful outcomes fall right on top of your shoulders.
Now is the time to level up your healthcare RFP game. Using proposal graphics is one of the most effective ways to stand out and one-up your competition.
RFPs in healthcare don’t have to be boring
“I’m a proposal manager at a healthcare organization. How am I supposed to jazz things up when I’m responding to RFPs exactly?”
That’s a fair statement. RFPs? Not the most exciting content. Healthcare? Not the most exciting industry. Which is precisely why infusing your healthcare RFPs with visuals gives you an edge.
Unlike hi-tech companies, healthcare hasn’t been fully revolutionized by technology…yet. Proposal graphics are a great way to stay ahead of the curve in your industry. On top of that, using visuals is actually a game-changing strategy in proposal management as a whole.
Bringing design elements into proposals is a much less mature practice. It’s crazy to think about, considering that marketing has been using visuals for the better part of a decade to enhance communication efforts and user experience.
In recent years, visuals have started to creep into proposals across industries. Healthcare RFPs can especially benefit from graphics as a way to break up long narratives, make content more dynamic, and engage prospects.
“Graphics really help! We understand there is a lot of information to report, but long narratives can be cumbersome and make the RFP response feel daunting. RFPs that convey information in a creative way are more dynamic, and therefore, the reader is more engaged in the actual content.” – Caitlyn Helsen, RFP Issuer
Finding success with proposal graphics
In a recent RFPIO webinar, Picture Perfect: Turn Words Into Graphics That Win RFPs, Mike Parkinson from renowned proposal creative services firm 24 Hour Company brought many useful proposal graphics tips to the table.
A few of those takeaways are below, but you can watch Mike’s entire webinar on our YouTube channel…
Be clear
Does the confused mind say yes or no? The goal of your sales proposal is to paint a clear picture of why their team should choose to work with your team. Using visuals in your healthcare RFPs is a huge differentiator…as long as you’re communicating clearly. Choose your design elements wisely—when in doubt, simple is usually better.
Be strategic
Select graphics and design elements that help you tell the most compelling story. Rather than burying stats and data within a paragraph, create a graph or chart. Rather than using bullet points and numbered lists to show steps in a process, build a ladder or stairs diagram.
Be scrappy
You don’t have to be a designer with a Photoshop certification to pull off proposal graphics. Even if you have a design team in-house, you may not be able to use them as a resource. There is a world of reasonable (and free) graphics solutions out there for you, from Canva to PowerPoint. Embrace a DIY design spirit and see what happens.
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Simplifying proposal graphics in healthcare RFPs
Now that you have proposal graphics figured out, you need an easy way to include them in your healthcare RFP responses. Due to formatting limitations, trying to insert imagery manually can quickly become a roadblock. A response management platform like RFPIO simplifies the proposal graphics process.
RFP software makes it easy to repurpose proposal graphics, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time an RFP lands in your inbox. You can create a set of graphics by catalog, by product, by action, or by value. Once these graphics are uploaded in your Content Library as a Q&A pair, you can continually recycle them.
Since you already spent time creating proposal graphics AND RFP responses, you want the formatting to be as stress-free as possible. The alternative is a lot of manual effort, where you’re recreating graphics in PowerPoint or hunting down previous versions in Google Drive folders. RFPIO is flexible, allowing you to insert images into various types of responses with a quick search and a few clicks.
You have the technologies and resources to create customized visuals for your healthcare RFPs. It’s pretty easy to do simple designs in a scalable way, without investing a lot of expertise, time, and money. Proposal graphics will become your secret weapon, one of the most powerful ways to differentiate yourself from your competition.
RFPIO makes proposal graphics easy to include in your next healthcare RFP. Give it a try.
