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.

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.

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 sponsored: The value of customer concern

Without a concerned or invested audience, preparing and submitting a proactive proposal has about the same probability of success as a mass or bulk mailing — near zero. However, your success rate for proactive proposals rises far above those for reactive proposals (your response to an RFP) when one or more of the following conditions are met:

• One or more people who work for your customer, especially decision makers or influencers, have expressed interest in your proposal (these are potential sponsors).
• You have confirmed your customer’s hot buttons, and your sponsor has confirmed that addressing them in the proposal with your customer’s decision makers and their influencers is appropriate (recall that hot buttons are those emotionally charged, key issues that compel your customers to buy).
• The value of obtaining a prompt solution outweighs the cost of soliciting solutions from others and the savings that may come from competitive bids.
• The customer’s purchasing guidelines permit awards without competition. You should already know if this is the case through your preliminary fact-finding discussions with the customer (see Chapter 3), but as a rule, the smaller the company, the more flexible the purchasing guidelines.

Proactive proposals can also be a good, long-term sales strategy. Proactive proposals can improve your win probability on subsequent bids with the same customers because they

• Create opportunities for building relationships with key decision makers
• Demonstrate your ability to solve your customer’s problems
• Show that you truly understand the customer’s business, almost as well as an employee

The higher up your sponsor, the better chance you have of selling a proactive proposal. An executive sponsor can introduce you to key subject matter experts and ensure through that introduction that you have an ally in the trenches.

The best proactive proposals are those where you have a sponsor — an insider in the company coaching you toward success. Gaining a sponsor — preferably a highly regarded voice in your customer’s company — is like being on a date and having your date’s best friend in your corner, pointing out your good traits, rationalizing your mistakes, and downplaying your inability to choose the right fork at a restaurant.

Supporting a strategy: The proposal as a means to your long-term goals

The overarching objective of a proactive proposal is to advance a sale. But to develop the most effective proactive proposal possible, you must define your objectives more precisely. Do you want to persuade your customer to

• Agree to a subsequent meeting?
• Issue (or not issue) a bid request?
• Reconsider its purchasing process?
• Enter negotiations without further competition?
• Issue a purchase order?

Your specific objectives determine how you develop your proactive proposal. Here are two of the aforementioned scenarios and strategies for each:

• If your objective is to persuade your customer to meet so that together you can qualify the opportunity, don’t propose a complete solution. Your proposal should define the problem, create interest in solving it, and define your solution only to the extent that the customer knows it’s feasible.
• If your objective is to persuade your customer to forgo competitive bidding, focus your proposal on the cost of delayed implementation. Your proposal should clearly illustrate the amount of money the customer is losing each day, week, or month of inactivity, and suggest that delaying the decision may cause further damage and cost.

Building a win theme: Motivators, issues, and hot buttons

After your meeting with the customer, you’ll know who will read and evaluate your proposal. With this knowledge, you create a win theme that matches the priorities of those key decision makers (for more on win themes, check out the earlier section “Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs”).

A good win theme statement contains need, a pain statement, a feature, a benefit, and a corresponding proof point. While a good proposal has a single, overarching win theme, it can also have supporting win themes that reinforce other key messages and address multiple hot buttons. Here is an example of an overall win theme statement — a single sentence that summarizes the main message — and a supporting win theme:

• Main win theme statement: “Our transaction monitoring software will reduce your online revenue losses from fraudulent charges by an average of 34 percent, based on installations similar to yours.”
• Supporting win theme statement: “Real-time notices integrated with our monitoring software relieve your card holders’ concerns and reinforce your ‘Always on Guard’ brand messaging.”

Win themes may be even more important in proactive proposals than in reactive ones, because proactive proposals are essentially narratives. A proactive proposal is a story: a story of how you (the hero) will save your customer (the person in peril) from the villain (the problem or need the customer faces). Narratives of all types — novels, screenplays, and, yes, proposals — need theme statements to consistently deliver key messages across multiple structural elements (chapters, scenes, and proposal sections). Creating win themes and corresponding theme statements is crucial to your proposal’s coherence and its success.

You derive your win themes from three elements:

• Motivators: These are things that compel your customer to act. They may be corporate (reduced costs or improved customer service) or personal (advancement by demonstrating thought leadership).
• Issues: These are the things that worry your customer. They stem from the problem you discovered in meetings with your customer, such as potential out-of-service conditions or production delays.
• Hot buttons: These are a combination of issues and motivators. Hot buttons are the singularly important issues that are likely to motivate your customer to act. (You can find out more about hot buttons in the earlier section “Facing the third degree: The challenges of Q&A-style RFPs” and even more in Chapter 3.)

In your proposal, cite the origin of your customer’s hot buttons to provide context for evaluators other than your sponsor and your main contacts. If you found out about a critical need from the head of IT operations, say so. This will not only show unfamiliar readers that you clearly understand the present situation but also validate the theme statements that you sow now and again throughout the proposal.

Here’s how you might set up your discussions of customer hot buttons:

• In our recent meeting, you mentioned that your key requirements are …
• In your quality circle, several workers complained of …
• Acme Vice President Mary Jones recently said …

You want to echo your win theme throughout your proposal but especially in these sections:

• Transmittal letter: Use here to grab attention!
• Executive summary: Include here to reinforce the value of your proposal with decision makers.
• Recommendation: Share here to address the why that supports the what and how of your solution. Win themes add “sticky” reminders of the pain and urgency related to factual descriptions and make the proofs more persuasive.
• Pricing: Add here to reinforce your solution’s overall benefits when your reader is evaluating the cost.

Organizing your proposal: A repeatable structure

Most proactive proposals are highly structured documents with standard major sections. You may find the following sections in a typical proactive proposal:

• Transmittal letter: Every proposal needs a cover letter to introduce the proposal and associate it with the opportunity. It’s also a good place to start selling your solution.
• Executive summary: Aimed at executives with short attention spans, this section reduces the entire proposal to a single page.
• Current situation: This section shows your reader that you’ve done your homework and that you understand the reader’s business, industry issues, operations, and the needs or problems you’re addressing with your proposal.
• Recommendation: This section identifies your solution, explains how it works, describes the benefits of implementing it, and shows the future state after the solution is implemented.
• Pricing: This section summarizes the cost of the solution with a particular focus on value and the rationale for choosing this solution over others.
• Implementation plan: This section clearly depicts who will do what and when. This is sometimes referred to as the statement of work, or SOW.
• Qualifications: Sometimes referred to as the “Why Choose Us” section, this provides brief bios or résumés of the people working to design and install the solution and provide support after installation. Use this section to express the advantages of doing business with your company.
• Next steps: This section launches the project, pushes for a contract if necessary, or expresses follow-up actions for the customer and solution provider.

You don’t have to follow this structure, but you should aim to establish a repeatable model, or schema, for all your proactive proposals, so a customer who receives a second, third, and fourth proposal — even if they’re for different solutions and months apart — knows what to expect and where to find what they seek. This way you’re subtly training readers to conform their way of thinking about proposals with yours.

Persuading others to get on board can be difficult, even when they’ve already expressed interest. In the nearby sidebar “Persuading your readers: A lesson from antiquity,” we look at some timeless persuasion tips that help you to sell your proposal. Check out Chapter 10 for more techniques for writing persuasive proposals.

If your customer contact requests a particular proposal organization, make sure that you understand the structure and that you comply with the request! Ignoring instructions or requests projects a noncompliant, arrogant tone.

Scaling the process: Modifying to meet the opportunity

The key to scaling the process you use for a given opportunity is knowing your audience’s expectations. Every industry has its traditions and special requirements. All governments have their own set of rules. For example, United States procurements are governed by FAR, or Federal Acquisition Regulations. Even commercial opportunities may take on complex and rigid requirements, especially those managed by consultants.

You need a flexible proposal process — you may call it an accordion process — that expands like the bellows to encompass every possible preparation step and contracts to fit within the tightest of deadline time frames. Otherwise, you can’t hope to create a proposal capable of winning every time. Here’s how you can create such a process to accommodate opportunities of different sizes and degrees of complexity.

Constraining yourself: Overcoming the challenge of limited content

Having more steps in your process to consider than you have time for is just one of the challenges you face as a proposal writer. Along with time constraints, customers often set limits to the amount of content allowed in an RFP response. For instance, they may set specific page limits for executive summaries and past performance entries, and total page limits for volumes and entire responses. Automated response platforms may even set character limits by answer or section to eliminate long-winded sales pitches. And as for proactive proposals, this is the age of limited attention spans, so being long-winded is not a prescription for success. Your best strategy in all circumstances is to limit your content on your own.

Less is definitely more when it comes to content. Evaluators want a direct response to their questions: Full of meat, short on fluff. Consider creating a strict response model for all your content. Base even your proactive proposal content on responses to general and specific questions you know that your customers may have about your solutions.

Constrain the answers to these general and specific questions on a tight authoring model. You can use the following steps and the accompanying examples as a guide:

1. Start with a clear, short compliance statement.

   “We understand and comply with your requirement for three independent quality checks during the installation period.”

2. Offer a brief answer to the question.

   “Our installation process already includes two internal quality checks — one at the midpoint and the second at the end of the process — so adding a third and opening them up to an independent assessor will be easy, although we will need to add a new interval to our timeline to comply.”

3. Provide a description of method or example of proof.

   “As you see in the flow diagram, we can easily insert a third checkpoint either at equipment drop date or during offline testing. Again, the degree of testing you require will dictate the increase in overall implementation time.”

4. Confirm the key takeaway message.

   “Our flexible implementation process helps ensure your complete satisfaction with our solution. This flexibility extends beyond installation to system support.”

5. Use graphics instead of words.

   For example, you may be able to customize the standard process flow diagram to show callouts at the optional checkpoints proposed by the bidder.

Consider setting limits to the number of characters for each of your responses before you write or assign writers to work on the proposal. You may still have to whittle down your content to meet a strict customer’s specification, but using a tight writing model sets you well on your way to the clearest, most direct depiction of your solution.

Going global: Developing proposals outside your region

Global procurements teams, including public sector and large commercial organizations that frequently make large purchases, also follow a rules-driven process. All buyers want to make the evaluation process easier. Forcing standardized responses helps achieve this goal, whichever region you’re looking toward.

Going green: Electronic versus print

In recent years, commercial and government buyers have inclined toward running greener procurements, requiring that bidders submit proposals and follow-up documentation and discussions electronically. Procuring organizations use a variety of platforms and methods.

Examine the areas on the submission platform carefully and ask questions if you’re unsure about where to place documents and proposal artifacts. Leave plenty of time in your schedule for

• Converting word-processing files to PDF format
• Consolidating documents based on platform requirements
• Pasting individual answers into database fields

For electronic submissions, allow extra time for uploading your content:

• Avoid waiting until the last minute, because uploading usually takes longer than you anticipate.
• Remember that your competitors are uploading along with you, and capacity and network issues can affect the system’s performance at crunch time.
• Upload any documents that you consider final “as is” (for instance, standard policies and certificates) days or even weeks in advance to reduce work as the deadline looms.
• Get the required signatures on documents early on because you need to scan them, or convert them to PDF files, before submitting them.

Electronic proposals can also present a challenge because the system may restrict content precisely. Your responses must be tight, to the point, and with clear, direct proofs. Your ability to use persuasive techniques, even graphic depictions, may be limited or excluded. The goal of most of these systems is to turn your products and services into mere commodities, where price is prince and value a pauper. Use every communicative technique allowed to gain a competitive advantage wherever possible. (Turn to the earlier section “Constraining yourself: Overcoming the challenge of limited content” to find some tips for maximizing your word count.)