Privia's bid capture and proposal management tools are designed for companies handling RFPs / RFIs in the public sector. Privia offers both SMB and Enterprise products and pricing starts at $29 / month / user.
$29
per month
Seismic
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Seismic is a recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement. The vendor's value proposition is that their solution equips global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. Additionally, the vendor says powerful content intelligence and analytics enable marketers to prove and improve their impact on the bottom line, revealing what is really driving revenue and what needs to be…
It is VERY important to make sure you think through the map for how your system should be configured. Time spent carefully determining exactly how you want it laid out and how you will use the system will make your implementation and roll out much more successful. You should understand how your process currently works and determine any preferred process changes before your implementation.
Seismic excels at being a one-stop shop for all content that is relevant to salespeople and the deal cycles they work through. It does a great job not only making content and training readily available but also at distributing the right content at the right time/for the right scenario. Based on my experience with the tool, this was a go-to for many reps (myself included) because it saved us so much time. Rather than sifting through documents and collateral, we could easily find what we needed in a matter of moments.
Document Repository with standardized Folder Structures: Privia has the ability to create customized & standardized Privia workspaces with set training documents and folder structures as a foundation for each project. This helps assure that the process remains intact without jeopardizing quality throughout the lifecycle of each project / proposal.
Customized Workspace Permissions: Privia allows the Workspace owner to maintain control over who is able to view, edit, add / remove documents, add / remove additional users, etc. This is particularly helpful when dealing with classified information such as financial data, as well as ensuring that corporate strategies are protected when it comes to subcontractors. There are many instances where subcontractors would like to share certain information with the prime, but would like to keep their data separate from other subcontractors also working on the same project / proposal.
Commenting / Editing and Lock Feature Tools: Privia has the ability to allow multiple users to comment and edit upon the same document simultaneously. This is highly useful when it comes to proposal review teams. At the end of each review team, the comments are consolidated and the document lead can lock the document for editing so that no changes may be made while the comments are taken into consideration, accepted, or rejected.
Seismic allows for one location to store all relevant content so that associates are not having to spend as much time searching for what they need.
Seismic provides the ability to fully customize content such that one template can serve many needs with the simple ability to answer questions that drive the customization in the content. This customization can range from simple to quite complex depending on your level of expertise with the tool.
Seismic provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to organizing your content and how to make the experience of accessing that content unique to the needs of each user in the system.
When using the pure web version of Privia (that is, without installing the thick client on a PC), the comment feature is null and void. This is because without the thick client installed, the pure web platform cannot interact with MS Office products. This creates hassles during reviews when users show up with a laptop and don't have permissions to install software.
Privia has proved, uniformly, to be an asset. I look forward to my next experience with it. While, as I stated, users can feel advance trepidation when using Privia, those problems evaporate immediately when Privia is activated.
It is very intuitive and I found it very easy for my decidedly non-technical users to work with. Training was quite easy even for technophobes or complete newbies. I have a team of about 500 users on this system who are primarily writers and project managers, frequently not computer savvy at all.
We rarely, if ever, had unplanned outages when we were using Privia. When we did, our support staff were attentive and quick to resolve the problem no matter the hour.
Each company is assigned an account manager whom you can contact directly with any questions, comments, and/or concerns. You may contact them directly via email and they will submit a ticket via their system for you or you can submit a ticket through their system and they will contact you immediately. All issues are resolved in a highly timely manner, and the customer service is impeccable. All accounts folks are well-trained from a customer service and technical standpoint and will escalate the issue as necessary depending on their expertise - though, that is rarely a necessity. Should they be unavailable, you will be notified prior to their leave / departure and assigned a secondary contact in the meantime. Overall, I was beyond impressed with Privia's customer support services.
Seismic's support team has been exceptional at providing support when an issue has come up, or when we have had questions regarding the platform. They have responded quickly, and I feel as if they truly try to find a solution to the quickest of their abilities. My team and I truly feel supported when it comes to reaching out to Seismic.
It is critical to plan your implementation carefully and take the time to understand the product. You have to make sure you get the initial set up and design correct so that the tool supports your business practices. If you do this up front, you can have a very successful and easy implementation.
Its been too long since we did our due diligence, I don't even remember the names of the competitive products. Privia stood out at the time and meeting users at their annual conference was a strong reference for the product.
Savo, Google Drive, Shared folders Savo - was best in class a long time ago (and has since been bought by Seismic) - but required a lot of administrative work to setup and maintain. I had three people working on it full time to create pages and managing content. Shared folders and google drive are good to share content, but terrible at searching and tagging (not fully indexed and no tagging)
Increased employee efficiency is #1. For example, without having to manage cumbersome piles of separate, track changes comments and revisions, Privia saves time and money in the review process.
Improved reporting. Privia's web interface and pipeline management capabilities allow for generation of customizable reports to garner greater visibility and insight into business development activities.
Overall the product is a bit expensive and robust for some smaller businesses, though the functionality is definitely worth the cost.
We can quickly generate product-specific proposals.
We've experienced repeated frustrations while trying to edit/update the LiveDoc.
Errors in LiveDoc coding have occasionally produced errors in the generated proposals where certain fields (Customer Name, for example) should have been automatically completed but were not.
