The enemy is time

When engaging on an RFP, the number one culprit to a positive outcome is time.

But who's time are you managing?

1. Sales Person
2. SME
3. Legal/contracts
4. Bid desk/proposal writing team
5. Professional Services
6. Customer

Each of these teams have unique contributions to most proposals, and each bit of output is necessary to making sure things come out right.?

Being able to conduct a proper kick off call to engage all of these individuals or teams can really go a long way for you to having a stress-free bid engagement.

What should you be planning?

The salesperson should probably contribute to a cover letter, as a connection gesture with the customer. The executive summary should be drafted by the Salesperson, the SME's and the Professional Services teams. When everyone agrees what the solution for the customer's problem is, then the writing can begin. This means that the team must build a bill of materials, validate it against the customer requirements, and vet that it is the right offering.

What is built out in the bill of materials will point to the solution content, service content, and response efforts. Once you have landed on the right solution, then your SMEs can contribute to the Q&A that is probably sent with the RFP. This is important because in many cases, if you sell multiple offerings in a similar domain, you could be answering with the wrong product.

As an example, if you sell identity and access management solutions, you may have:

• Web single sign on
• Desktop single sign on
• Zero trust requirements
• Adaptive or risk-based authentication
• Multi-factor authentication

Solution Clarity is Critical

As a practitioner answering an RFP, all of these have similar nomenclatures, and overlapping feature sets. As such, if you answered certain questions with one product, but the customer need a different product, you may answer incorrectly, even though the question sounds perfectly reasonable for any one of those products.

Kick Off Call and Timelines

Once you have your solution understood, and you are sure you are satisfying the correct problem, you can schedule out the work. The kickoff call should get the entire group on the call up front, after everyone has reviewed the RFP first, skimming it at minimum. Once you have done this, on the kickoff call, you should hopefully be getting commitments from your team to attend or produce to the deadlines you set.

1. Meetings - This is a periodic review of progress and decision points. Only a few, and only with the right folks. (Example, executives may not need to attend SME discussions, or legal doesn't need to be there for early draft reviews.
2. Milestones - These are the content creation times that you expect deliverables to be submitted by the team. Completing price quotes, getting statements of work, and completion of responses should all be defined. Doesn't mean these are meetings but should be on calendars.
3. Deadlines - These are for the hard deliverables. Must have dates for things like redlines to agreements, signatures, and finished content being sent to print, should you have to do that.
4. Submission dates - These are dates that must be met, they are the highest priority. Sales will probably need to own these because they are the customer relationship managers.

All of these elements can be standardized and planned out. There are methods for creating timings for each of these tasks as well that will be discussed in future sections.