How working from home can save 21% on your proposal cost without affecting your win rate

Hands up who thought COVID-19 would be behind us before the 2022 New Year? The pandemic dragged on far longer than any of us expected, and it’s worth pausing to ask: what have we learned? More importantly, how can we use those lessons to improve the way we approach capture and proposal work in a flexible, hybrid world?

The irony isn’t lost on me as I write this from a hotel room in Jakarta, halfway through a week of quarantine.

Instead of listing Salentis International’s many achievements in 2021, I’d rather look at the ‘new normal’ we’ve all been navigating since COVID-19 first reshaped our working lives two years ago.

There’s no shortage of excellent research on the wider social and business impacts. But here, I want to focus on one question: what did all this mean for capture and proposal development in 2021 and what comes next?

The Value of Hybrid Working in Proposal Development

Working from home (WFH) isn’t new to Salentis International, or to many other bid experts in our industry. For more than 15 years, we’ve operated in every possible format: fully onsite, fully remote, and hybrid. What the last two years have shown our clients is simple: you can build a winning proposal without everyone sitting in the same room

What the numbers say

“So what?” you might ask.

We decided to find out. In early 2022, we analysed five years of project data – from January 2017 to December 2021 to compare the impact of different working models.

Here’s what we found:

Hybrid projects (a mix of onsite and remote work) delivered an average 9% cost savings to clients compared with fully onsite projects.

If you add WFH projects to the mix, they showed even greater efficiency, achieving an average 21% cost saving over fully onsite work.

At first, some clients were cautious and understandably so. Many had always run proposals with everyone onsite and worried about losing collaboration or control. Common worries included: ‘My people won’t engage if we’re not all onsite together and ‘Why fix it if it ain’t broke.

But within a couple of weeks, most became comfortable once they saw that a well-managed hybrid setup could deliver both quality and engagement.

Of course, there’s still value in face-to-face time. But does being on-site full-time improve a bid’s compliance or compelling nature by 9–21%? That’s less certain. For some “must-win” bids, it may be worth the extra cost. For others, the savings and flexibility of hybrid working make more sense.

Why hybrid models work

Few people, whether from Salentis or our clients, want to spend three to six months away from home on the long defence proposals that are common in Australia. Hybrid working provides the balance teams need: enough onsite interaction to connect, and enough flexibility to maintain productivity and wellbeing.

Most teams still value some face-to-face time to:

• Put names to faces
• Establish IT and collaboration systems
• Test and refine solution details for completeness and accuracy
• Run strategy sessions (Blue Team, Black Hat, etc.)
• Hold a full kick-off and solution data collection session

WFH and hybrid models work best when:

• The client team is properly prepared before kick-off in terms of solutions
• The proposal team is engaged early
• Everyone receives quality training in proposal development before the project begins

Our recommendations

Based on what we found, here’s how we recommend approaching hybrid and onsite work:

1. For longer projects (30+ days): adopt a hybrid model with some onsite, but mostly remote. It delivers the best balance of cost, engagement, and quality
2. For shorter projects (<30 days): consider a mostly onsite approach, unless your client and team already have a deep working relationship and well-developed solutions. Bid & Proposal budgets may be a determining factor here.
3. Avoid always working 100% onsite. It increases costs by 9–21%, reduces motivation, and heightens the risk of team burnout and turnover. Let’s face it, who wants to spend months at a time away from their home/family?

Looking ahead

Across every industry, the pandemic forced change and revealed opportunity. Businesses discovered new ways to deliver excellent outcomes with greater flexibility and efficiency.

At Salentis International, we’re proud to be part of that evolution. Hybrid working isn’t just a cost-saving measure. It’s a smarter, more sustainable way to deliver high-quality, competitive proposals, wherever your team happens to be.

Article published: February 2022