VIPER & Ovation DMC
Enabling event organizers to respond to RFPs and deliver better proposals, faster


Background: Event operations is a multi-billion dollar segment of the travel industry. Every major travel destination has several Destination Management Companies or event planning firms that coordinate booking local venues and service providers and manage logistics for meetings and events in the area. Every event starts with a proposal process, wherein firms bid against each other to win the business. Industry standard turnaround time for a sales proposal is 3-4 days and requires a lot of manual desktop publishing drudgery. Our reference client, Ovation DMC, served several dozen major meeting & events markets in Europe and North America.
Problem: How can event operators speed this process up in order to win more business and outmaneuver their competitors?
Solution: We analyzed the processes that sales staff at event operators use to create proposals and applied automated tools to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the creative aspects. An online database holds the operator’s offerings and pricing, and a content management system allows for drag-and-drop authoring and instantaneous publishing of web-based interactive proposals that wowed clients. Average proposal creation dropped to 2-3 hours. Post-deployment, proposals were often created, received, approved, signed, and the program was started before competitors’ paper proposals arrived via Fedex.