Writing a request for proposal (RFP) can be time-consuming, and it can be difficult to know how much to include. While there are plenty of RFP templates available online, it’s not always clear what part of the RFP actually helps your organization achieve its long-term goals.
To help you answer this question, here are eleven tips for getting the best bid out of your RFP.
Be selective It’s not worth your time to sift through a proposal from a vendor who doesn’t have the technical capacity to fulfill your needs. Likewise, you should only send an RFP to a vendor you know will be around to support you. Once you’ve identified the shortlist of vendors who have the capabilities you need, you can ask more interesting questions around creative solutions to the problem you’re fixing.
Look at the big picture While this may seem simple at first, it’s actually quite complicated. When writing a business communications RFP, you may be tempted to think in terms of physical needs. For example, if you..

Even with all of the advantages large enterprises have in business, inflexibility can hinder the company’s bottom line. But digital transformation is changing that, and large enterprises are in a better position than ever to take advantage of tools that help them be nimble.
In this video, we look at the transformation large enterprises have been going through in the digital age.

My name is Daryl Reva and I am the senior director of product marketing here at Mitel.
How do large enterprises choose communications tools? When you take a look at enterprise applications today, the gatekeeper in that process is typically IT. Whether it's an IT manager or all the way up to the CIO, they want to work with applications or even vendors of those applications that are currently in their basket of technology today.
One of the biggest drawbacks of that is that it's not coming from the user perspective. So what we see a lot is an application that may not fit with the work style, the mob..

There’s lots of buzz around the cloud these days and cloud communications is no exception. But buzz isn’t always an indicator of a business case for technology purchases. Smart businesses are asking what’s driving the rush to the cloud—and they’re getting solid answers. So why are so many businesses moving communications to the cloud today? Here are 10 real-world reasons.
1. Cost Predictable monthly costs. This may seem like old news, but many companies don’t realize just how much they can save by moving their communications to the cloud. By hosting a phone system over the Internet, businesses are charged on an “as needed” basis, paying only for what they use. That makes cloud-based communication systems especially cost-effective for small businesses—eliminating the need to pay for the installation and maintenance of a traditional phone system.
2. Management Outsource IT support to the provider. The management of an on-premise solution can be very expensive. Because of the complexity..

There’s lots of buzz around the cloud these days and cloud communications is no exception. But buzz isn’t always an indicator of a business case for technology purchases. Smart businesses are asking what’s driving the rush to the cloud—and they’re getting solid answers. So why are so many businesses moving communications to the cloud today? Here are 10 real-world reasons.
1. Cost Predictable monthly costs. This may seem like old news, but many companies don’t realize just how much they can save by moving their communications to the cloud. By hosting a phone system over the Internet, businesses are charged on an “as needed” basis, paying only for what they use. That makes cloud-based communication systems especially cost-effective for small businesses—eliminating the need to pay for the installation and maintenance of a traditional phone system.
2. Management Outsource IT support to the provider. The management of an on-premise solution can be very expensive. Because of the complexity..

Technology is changing rapidly. But, when it comes to unified communications and collaboration (UCC), there are easy steps you can take to ensure your investments are primed for the long-run. No matter what tomorrow brings, here are six steps to follow to make the most of your UCC investment and ensure a better path forward for your business.
1. Keep your communications seamless The mobile workforce is not a trend you can expect to fade away anytime soon – in fact, prepare yourself for the opposite. By 2018, it’s expected that 70% of mobile professionals will do business on mobile devices. But mobility should never hinder productivity. Your communications and collaboration tools should be designed with mobile in mind so you can have an in-office experience that’s consistent across all your mobile devices, no matter where you are in the world.
2. Boost your bottom line with significant cost savings Improving your mobile collaboration strategy now can save you big bucks year after year..

It’s vital to know what’s important to your superiors, whether you’re an employee who reports to the Chief Information Officer or a CIO yourself reporting to the ultimate boss, the CEO. And in a world rapidly evolving through digital transformation, you can bet changing technologies, from unified communications and collaboration (UCC) to Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices, are top priority.
As a CIO myself, people often ask me, “What keeps CIOs up at night?” It’s almost more accurate to say, “What's not keeping us up at night?” Today’s reality is that there’s a long list of issues and challenges that we deal with on a daily basis.
But before even we get there, I think we should look at how the role of the CIO has been evolving in the past 20 or so years, in terms of our day-to-day responsibilities and functional roles.
Let's get back to the 1990s. In the '90s, the CIO played really a functional role in his or her business – manage the back office, order and set ..

Public safety agencies and first responders have long used radios and other basic technology to communicate, which sometimes hindered their ability to keep people safe. By embracing digital transformation and unified communications and collaboration, first responders can seamlessly and securely connect over voice, text and using images. Tony Pereira shows how Mitel Secure Collaboration brought it all together at the Super Bowl®.

Hi, my name is Tony Pereira. I'm going to talk to you about a brand-new application that we're going to launch at this event. It's called the Mitel Secure Collaboration. So, what I'll do is I'm just going to talk to you about where we deployed it, how we deployed it.
This was deployed in a live big event. It happened in Houston on February 5. And the Patriots won that game, by the way. I can't tell you the name of the game, because we have to send them a big check if we mention their name. I refer to it as the big game in Houston..

When businesses evaluate their needs for unified communications and collaboration, often they’re thinking of ways to improve communications within their own business processes – how employees work together using tools for voice, video and messaging. What happens, however, when the customers, organizations or vendors you work with need to collaborate with you on a project? Traveling for in-person meetings is cost prohibitive in many cases, but phone calls and emails can only get you so far on a research project, new project bid or complex issue resolution.
To solve this problem, many businesses turn to their internal collaborations tools, in the hopes that other businesses will use them as well. With the number of collaboration tools on the market, working across organizational boundaries can get complicated quickly. Luckily, there are some very powerful ways to streamline that process, to keep your team focused on solving the problem or making the sale, rather than wrangling collabora..

If you’re looking to improve your customer experience, skills-based routing is a must-have in your contact center − but the concept has changed in recent years. Digital transformation has had a massive impact on today’s customer experience, expanding the application and efficacy of skills-based routing, and creating a new range of considerations for businesses to take into account before implementing. In this video, Mitel’s customer experience expert Matthew Clare explains how skills-based routing has evolved, how to decide on the skills your routing should include and how to define routing rules to take your customer experience to the next level.

From the video:
My name's Matthew Clare and I'm Mitel's Product Manager for Contact Center Solutions. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about how skills-based routing has evolved and how you can leverage it as a differentiator in today's businesses.
Skills-based routing has been around for a really long time..

Guests have never had more opinions, or more platforms available to amplify those opinions, than they do today. Travelers use review sites and ratings to choose which hotels to stay in, and that can have a real impact on a hotel’s bottom line. The key to exceeding guest expectations is ensuring that the many moving parts in a hotel are connected seamlessly.
Disconnected tools create disconnected processes and people How many different tools does the standard hospitality staff use to collaborate across a property? Many hotels still rely on manual communications, like clipboards, sticky notes and walkie-talkies, to communicate across shift changes and locations. Each of these methods, however, brings with it the opportunity for a communications failure that can leave your guest experience lacking. And this isn’t restricted to low-tech tools. Even having a phone system not fully integrated into a PMS system, for example, can lead to missed connections.
Better guest experiences mean bett..