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IN THIS CHAPTER

Delivering on a proposal request

Initiating a proactive proposal

Looking at the difference between small and large proposals

Creating proposals in different environments

Business proposals come in two major flavors: reactive (or solicited) and proactive (or unsolicited). Reactive proposals, also known as RFP responses, are the way most mid- to large-size businesses acquire new products and services; these companies know precisely what they want and have the clout to formally ask suppliers to deliver on these requirements.

Proactive proposals can work for any size of business (some large companies run proactive campaigns for particular industry or solution sets) but are more suitable for midsize and smaller companies. Bidders write them on their own initiative with no guarantees that their efforts will succeed.

In this chapter, you discover the differences between these two major types of proposals and some other considerations that can complicate the primary differences. You also find out how to develop strategies and tactics for writing proposals in each situation.

Responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP)

You write a solicited proposal when a prospective buyer formally requests solutions from you and a number of other bidders. This type of proposal is also known as a reactive proposal because you have to react and respond to the customer’s topics and specifications rather than prescribe a solution in the manner you may prefer (see the section “Writing a Proactive Proposal,” later in this chapter). Your goal with this type of proposal is to get “out in front” of the request – to be collaborating with the customer so you know when a problem is about to reach a breaking point and force the customer to seek a solution – and not be scrambling to pull together a response under duress. To win this type of bid, you need to know as much as possible about the customer as you can and as much about the specific opportunity before your competitors get wind of it.

You normally write a reactive proposal in response to a Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFP identifies the buyer’s current problem and needs in specific terms and requires you to solve the problem in whole or in part. Think of an RFP as a game where the buyer sets all the rules. The buyer may already think you’re the right company to solve its problem, but it may not be able to legally give you the business without you meeting the requirements of an RFP. You have to abide by the buyer’s rules if you’re going to win the business.

An RFP is sometimes known as an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Invitation to Bid (ITB) depending on your location.

In the following sections, we take a look at the RFP, some of its sibling request types, and ways for you to stay ahead of the curve and play within the ever-changing rules of the game.

Joining the game: The invitation to bid

An RFP is an invitation to do business. Some are open invitations, posted publicly so any company can respond. Some are private invitations, sent to a select few providers. And some require that potential bidders prove their mettle by meeting strict requirements in a qualification step before being formally invited to submit a bid.

RFPs can be simple and small – a few pages that identify a need and ask for a solution in relatively broad terms – or they can be complex and large – hundreds of pages of precise requirements, often in the form of nested questions. Bidders must read the RFP carefully and be on the lookout for requirements meant to disqualify careless, would-be suppliers. Bidders must answer each question thoroughly, preferably in a consistent manner, and read between the lines to discover unstated requirements that can mean the difference between winning and losing the business.

RFPs are not for the faint of heart. In some cases, they can mean future employment of participants or even the long-term viability of a company.

RFPs are the standard way of doing business for many industries for several reasons, including the following:

❯❯ They establish a supportable and repeatable rigor for procurement.

❯❯ They create tangible and comparable views of alternative approaches to solving a business’s problems.

❯❯ They quickly weed out the pretenders from the viable providers.

RFPs are a way of business life throughout the world. What was once a staple of doing business with only the largest companies and government entities is now a recognized standard throughout all industries and markets.

Sometimes, the RFP isn’t the first stage of the process. You may need to work through a Request for Information (RFI) or a Request for Quote (RFQ) first. You may even find that you have to undergo a pre-qualification step before you can move forward. In the following sections, we outline these possibilities in more detail.

Understanding requests: RFPs, RFQs, and RFIs

As you gain experience in business development activities, you may run across some relatives of the RFP. Table 2-1 lists the different types of requests that potential customers may have, listed in the sequence they normally follow, and what they mean to you.

TABLE 2-1 Common Types of Customer Requests

We provide some examples to guide you – see the appendix for more information.

Narrowing the field: The infrequent pre-qualification step

Although some RFPs are open to all bidders, some companies whittle down the competition by requiring prospective bidders to fill out a pre-qualification form. These forms are usually questionnaires – some actually call them PQQs, or Pre-Qualification Questionnaires – but they come in a variety of sizes, formats, and structures, and you can count on them requiring the following:

❯❯ Information about your company, including its size, location of offices, scope of resources, type of company, and how long you’ve been in business

❯❯ References and evidence of how well you’ve performed on similar jobs in the past

❯❯ Human resources data, such as minority ownership and sustainability programs

You need to always be ready to respond to qualification questionnaires, because they’re gatekeeping devices designed to reduce the number of bidders and they tend to pop up at the most inconvenient times. If you respond quickly and thoroughly (and with the least amount of effort), it may offer you a competitive advantage – the less time you spend dealing with these pre-qualification forms, the more time you can spend crafting your solution and responding to the RFP itself. If you receive a lot of qualification questionnaires, consider building a customer-facing website that provides pre-approved, standard questions and answers. While your customer may not use the site, simply publishing the questions and answers will give you a legup on responding.

Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness

To win with your RFP response, you must comply with your customer’s requirements. If you fudge, hedge, or dodge, you lose. It’s that simple.

A compliant proposal is one that clearly and directly

❯❯ Meets the customer’s detailed requirements

❯❯ Follows all the customer’s submittal instructions

❯❯ Answers the customer’s questions

The most important aspect to responding to an RFP is that you carefully read it from beginning to end, note all statements and even hints of need, and build your proposal to clearly respond to every one of them.

To maximize your chances, you need to

❯❯ Respond to and meet every requirement your customer identifies

❯❯ Structure your proposal exactly as your customer instructs

❯❯ Adhere to all the formatting and packaging guidelines that your customer specifies

❯❯ Stay within the page limit your customer sets

❯❯ Build a compliance matrix to show your customer where in your proposal you respond to a requirement (see Chapter 4 for how)

And then there’s responsiveness. Being responsive does compliance one better. Responsive proposals address overarching goals, underlying concerns, and key issues and values that your customer may not spell out in its RFP.

Responsive proposals help customers achieve their business goals, not just their solution needs or procurement objectives. Examples of responsiveness include

❯❯ Understanding and addressing your customer’s stated and implied needs

❯❯ Describing the benefits your customer will gain from your solution

❯❯ Pricing your proposal within your customer’s budget

❯❯ Editing your response so it reads like your customer talks

Your goal as a proposal writer is to comply with all your customer’s requirements and express how your company goes beyond those requirements to help meet its business goals. Compliance alone won’t win in an increasingly competitive marketplace. You have to work with your customer before the RFP is released to understand its hot buttons. Hot buttons are singularly important issues or sets of issues that are likely to drive customer buying decisions. They’re emotionally charged, and your customer will repeatedly bring them up because they inhibit success. You can think of hot buttons as benchmark issues – issues that ultimately determine whether the customer selects your solution. You must clearly address them in your proposal – and doing so is what we mean by going beyond compliance and being truly responsive. So while compliance can prevent your proposal from being immediately eliminated, responsiveness edges out your competition in the long run. For more about hot buttons, see Chapter 3.

Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs

Most RFPs consist of a series of questions that you must answer thoroughly while wrapping a story line or set of messages around the answers. A question-and-answer (Q&A) style of RFP provides specific directions on how to structure your response: You follow the organization of the RFP to the letter and answer each question one by one as it appears in the text. Deviating from this approach can cost you business.

Q&A-style RFPs often have short deadlines and are notoriously demanding. Procurement organizations and consultants use Q&A-style RFPs to develop line-by-line assessments for comparing each bidder’s capabilities and solutions. Q&A-style RFPs not only ask many direct, compliance-oriented questions but also ask challenging, open-ended questions that you really can’t answer satisfactorily without a consistent win strategy. A win strategy is the collection of tactics you use to help you win a specific opportunity – written and dispersed to everyone on the proposal team. Clearly defining your win strategy and its components ensures that your contributors consistently echo your main messages throughout your proposal.

To devise a consistent win strategy, you must understand the entire scope of the opportunity (which is why you read the RFP cover to cover) and be able to answer every question with an eye to how it relates to all your other answers. A win strategy is something you’ll create early in your process for every opportunity (see Chapter 6 for a full discussion) and includes the following:

❯❯ A succinct statement of your overall solution and benefits so all contributors think about your strategy as they write their answers.

❯❯ Expressions of your solution’s most important, overarching benefits (these are sometimes called win themes and must contain a need, a pain statement, a feature, a benefit, and a corresponding proof point). You need to echo your win themes at every opportunity within a proposal (see Chapters 6 and 7 for more on writing win themes).

❯❯ Clear descriptions of your customer’s hot buttons (those compelling reasons to buy). Including your customer’s hot buttons in your win strategy ensures that you consistently address your customer’s most pressing and emotionally charged issues. Check out the preceding section for more about hot buttons.

❯❯ A SWOT analysis of your and your competitors’ products and services (SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). A SWOT analysis will help you align your solution with your customer’s needs while evaluating how well you stack up against your competition (see Chapter 5 for more on SWOT).

❯❯ Your company’s key discriminators. These are the things that matter to the customer that you can do that your competition can’t, or things you do better than your competition.

Win strategies are easier to create and implement when you know as much as possible about your customers, their needs, and your competitors before an RFP is released. If you’ve had a meaningful dialogue with your customers before they release an RFP, you have time to gather the right people, exchange knowledge about the customer’s hot buttons and how you’ve solved similar problems, craft meaningful win themes by using that shared knowledge, and hit the ground running when the RFP is released.

If you haven’t talked with your customers, you have to do the same strategic preparation during the time you should be honing your response, and you’ll be in what we call reactive mode – you’ll be reacting to new information instead of acting to shape the outcome of the opportunity. Industry research bears this out: You win more when you start early.

The nearby sidebar “Getting ahead of the curve” points you in the direction of some useful advice for avoiding reactive mode.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE CURVE

So how do you stay ahead of the curve and avoid falling into reactive mode? A lot of this book is devoted to answering that question, but in brief, you should

• Find out as much about your customer as you can. See Chapters 3 and 4 for ways to do this, but the idea is to establish a relationship long before the customer releases an RFP.

• Create a comprehensive, repeatable process for responding to RFPs. Having a documented, proven approach for your responses gives you a better chance of assembling the resources and people you need to win. Chapter 15 offers ways of putting knowledge and resources on standby for a rapid response.

• Tailor your standard proposal processes to meet the deadlines and unique requirements of each opportunity. Chapter 6 also addresses this topic.

• Create a standard template for responding to RFPs. Your customer may require that you use its template, but often you have the liberty to plug in the customer’s RFP within your response template, so you can distinguish your response from your competitors’ responses through branding, textual, and visual elements. We have lots more about this in Chapter 11.

• Gather as much information about your likely competitors as you can, using insights from salespeople who have competed against them before. Chapters 5 and 7 help you do this.

To craft the ideal Q&A-style RFP response, you access all the information you need to answer your questions and then write a dazzling persuasive document around these answers. A customer’s Q&A-style RFP can be daunting because of the sheer number of questions and their varying degrees of complexity. You need an efficient way to make your way through the questions. The following four sections break down this process into stages – from easiest to most complex and strategic – so you can take purposeful steps toward developing a complete, compliant, and responsive proposal.

Getting the easier questions out of the way

Answering a customer’s questions properly is hard and tedious work, especially if you have hundreds to answer with a short turnaround. To be successful, you have to allocate to each only the time it warrants. To help you work your way through the questions successfully, use the following strategy to classify the questions by degree of importance and difficulty.

1. Place the customer’s questions into your proposal template so you’ll have a familiar framework for responding while still adhering to the customer’s prescribed structure.

Number the questions exactly as in the RFP. Create visual distinctions between sections, using descriptive headers, color schemes for contrasting between questions and answers, and theme statements so you can echo and highlight your win themes and your solution’s benefits. Using a standard template will also let your contributors see the proposal take shape as the process unfolds (to access a sample reactive proposal [RFP] response template, see the appendix).

2. Answer the easy questions first.

Identify the questions that you can address without too much noodle-baking (just worry about getting in the answers at this point; you’ll fine-tune the content later).

If you aren’t responding on your own to the RFP, assign “owners” to each question and a due date (see Chapter 14 for a method to track your assignments). Many questions will require subject matter experts to answer them.

To identify and assemble your answers to the easy questions:

• Scan through the questions.

• Highlight those that you can answer easily and directly.

• Insert bullet points beneath the easy questions to collect ideas for your responses.

• In your first bullet point, state how you comply with the requirement, echoing the question’s language as much as possible.

• In the next few bullet points, list the main ideas and themes that you want to express in the order of their importance to the reader.

• Follow that with a bullet entry identifying your proof points (proof points are facts that prove your claims: statistics, documentation, testimonials, and so on).

• If appropriate, include a bullet item describing any imagery you want to support your answer.

• Finish off your answer with a key takeaway or point statement for your reader.

Using this approach to assemble your answers anticipates our recommended four-part response model, which we explain fully in Chapter 9. You can review an annotated template for this response method in Chapter 13.

Make each answer stand on its own merits by stating supporting proofs within the response. As a rule, avoid cross-referencing. For example, instead of responding to a question about your financial stability with “see our attached annual report,” provide the pertinent proof point in the body of your answer: “As proof of our financial stability, Standard & Poor’s verifies that our company has had 20 consecutive profitable quarters. No other bidder can match this record of stability.” This tactic does two important things: It helps you consistently echo win themes (such as financial stability) with specific proofs (20 profitable quarters) while making your response easier for readers to evaluate (no jumping to another part of the bid for proofs).

3. Distinguish between the least and most important questions.

Run through the questions again to decide where your priorities lie:

• Identify the questions that will have the most influence on the evaluators who assess and score your proposal. Set them aside for now because they will take more thought and effort.

• Respond to questions of lesser importance by using the bullet point method that you used in Step 2.

• Classify any question that directly relates to the customer’s hot buttons or to your key discriminators as having high priority (for more on this, refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness”). Your answers to these questions will usually require more research (or reliance on your subject matter experts) to craft your strongest proof points.

Working with more challenging questions

Time now to plan content for the difficult and most important questions that you identified in the preceding steps, such as those that directly relate to hot buttons.

A question may challenge you for several reasons. For example, it may

❯❯ Be one you’ve never answered before

❯❯ Require official documentation or other hard-to-find proof

❯❯ Ask you to calculate or analyze some data

We recommend that you answer the difficult questions in reverse order of importance. Distinguish which of the difficult questions are less important than others, and take the following steps to deal with these questions:

1. Approach the less important questions by using the bullet point approach outlined earlier in this section.

Refer to Step 2 in the preceding list in this section.

2. Determine the most minimal response that complies with your customer’s requirements.

Refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness” for more information on what you can do to maximize compliance.

3. Figure out how much time you need to get the minimal response.

Your minimal response can be one of only three possibilities: “We comply,” “we do not comply,” or “we partially comply.” You may need to contact someone else for a definitive answer (for example, an engineer, a lawyer, or an executive), so quickly determine what expertise you need to fully answer the question, and either add the expert to your response team or email the expert (so you can get a written response). Send them the actual question from the RFP and a statement describing the context of your response and your win theme strategy. Ask the expert to reply by a specific date and time (“ASAP” is not specific!).

4. Lock down your sources and finalize the content as early as possible.

No answer is final until you sufficiently explain why and how your solution is better than anyone else’s on this particular requirement. Never simply say, “we comply” and leave it at that. Make the bullet point method from the previous section your mantra: Comply with the requirement, echo your win theme, provide concrete proofs for your claim, illustrate your solution if possible, and plant a key takeaway in your reader’s mind. You can’t do this unless you have sources who will supply the proofs and benefits, so locking down your sources, if they’re not already part of your proposal team, is crucial.

You should spend 80 percent of your time and allocate 80 percent of your proposal’s strategy on the important questions. This may sound obvious, but people tend to go all out on every response, and that approach simply won’t work for Q&A-style RFP responses. It’s why we recommend getting the easy and least important questions out of the way early and quickly. You have limited time and resources, and you must allocate them to the responses that will mean the most for a successful outcome.

Responding to the most important questions

After you’ve handled the less important of your challenging questions, use your win strategy (see the earlier section, “Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs”) to build answers for the most important and strategic questions:

❯❯ Focus on determining levels of compliance. A Q&A-style RFP will (usually) provide a numbered series of questions by categories identified through main and subheadings. Be on the lookout for nested requirements (one or more customer needs buried within the sentences that comprise a numbered question), signified by the verbs will, must, should, and could. Make sure you respond to each of these trigger words. To make sure you respond to them all, search for these terms by using the Find or Search function within your word-processing software.

❯❯ Highlight your key discriminators. What makes your company the best-right choice in this particular matter? What do you offer that no competitor can or will? Highlight these attributes and tailor them to fit the specific question being asked.

❯❯ Establish how you understand the customer’s needs, goals, and issues. Keep your customer’s hot buttons in mind as you respond. Every word you write should pertain to your customer’s hot buttons and what your solution brings that others’ don’t.

For more on hot-button issues, refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness.”

❯❯ Illustrate your responses first, and then write what you see. Sometimes proposal writers find it difficult to understand a highly technical or overly complex response provided by a subject matter expert. In these cases, a picture is not only worth a thousand words but can also launch a thousand words (well, hopefully not a thousand for a single response!). One way to get a clear description of a technical concept is to have a subject matter expert sketch the steps making up a process or draw the components of a solution in relation to one another. Use this effective technique to get highly technical content from subject matter experts and then create a more professional version of the drawing for the proposal to make that content more accessible to less technical evaluators. Discover more about this technique in Chapter 11.

❯❯ Prove your assertions. Demonstrate your capabilities and support your claims with brief, pertinent examples. If you’ve installed a similar solution recently, one having a similar or even greater scope, cite that experience and supply enough detail to ensure that the reader sees the similarities.

❯❯ Remember to be responsive. Think hard about what you’ve learned about your customer through close reading of the RFP and visits with the customer. Echo the customer’s own language to indicate your empathy and understanding.

Fine-tuning your responses into a narrative

Gathering the information for and drafting your answers may seem like the hard part, but turning thorough answers into effective responses and compiling them into a coherent and compelling proposal narrative is just as challenging and even more important.

Consider the following advice when writing your responses:

❯❯ Outline your content before finalizing it. Before you start writing or ask others to write, build an outline to direct your response. In other words, think before you write!

• At the macro level, your customer’s RFP structure supersedes your preferred proposal outline. Follow that structure to the letter unless the customer says otherwise. Still, many RFPs allow leeway in organizing some proposal sections (such as executive summaries, pricing sections, and reference sections), so prepare an overall outline to your response that adheres to the customer’s structure and guides writers through the more flexible sections.

• Develop your outline within the first 24 to 72 hours, depending on your deadline. Share it immediately with your response team.

• At the micro level, populate the outline with visuals, bullet points, and notes. (You’ll have accumulated this information as you gathered the relevant materials for your answers – refer to the earlier section, “Getting the easier questions out of the way.”)

Make your outline-in-progress available for stakeholders and management to review, amend, and approve. This way you’ll quickly gain consensus on your strategy and raw content plan.

Assign every question to your writers (or yourself) with clear, firm deadlines for all content – answers, images, forms, and attachments.

Establish a systematic way for contributors to deliver content so you can keep track of what’s been done and what hasn’t and what needs to be revised or supplemented.

❯❯ Use lean and concise content. Evaluators appreciate clear, factual, and concise content, even if they haven’t set page restrictions. Remember that your bid is only one of many, so your most conscientious evaluators will be pressed for time. Also be aware that, based on their evaluation criteria, evaluators may be more interested in “checking the box” than in assessing the technical merits and details for responses to certain questions. So always aim to deliver the briefest yet most evocative content you can. This doesn’t mean leaving out words to save space, cramming processes into jargon that only you can understand, and listing your points in interminable bullet lists. Tell your customer that you can do the work, how you’ll do it, and why you think it matters.

For instance, evaluators may only care that you meet a particular quality standard, while quality processes may be something you think clearly differentiates you from your competitors. If you meet the standard and supply documented proof, you comply and that’s that. Going on and on about your quality team and processes may not help your score.

If you need to make your quality capabilities a discriminator, respond to the question with a visual and a caption that relays your strategic message, but keep the text as short as possible.

❯❯ Immediately and directly answer every question. The most important rule in Q&A-style responses is to ensure that the first sentence of every response directly answers the question. This rule isn’t always easy to follow, especially if compliance isn’t clear. But with a strong strategy and an understanding of which questions are the most important, you should be able to score well on the critical questions and establish enough separation between your company and others to remain competitive.

Following the advice outlined in this section, as well as using the steps in the preceding section to gather your raw data, will help you to continually improve your responses to Q&A-style RFPs.