TCUP series: prioritising content when your review time is cut short

In this week's TCUP we debated what content should you focus on at the editing and reviewing stage, and what do you ignore, when you don't have much time?

"Focus and simplicity."

...Steve Jobs said that. One of his major mantras. And that pretty much sums up what we'd recommend you do when challenged with this common bid challenge...

You know, you've been working hard to get the proposal put together. You’ve put your best foot forward, but things have got delayed. Your time for reviewing at the end’s been cut from two days down to a few hours. What do you do?

You can't not review. But there's simply not time to cram in reviewing it all.

Why can't you do it all? Well if you're doing a detailed review of a document, best practice and experience says you can only review about 40 pages a day. So, say you have a hundred page document, and you've only got a couple of hours to review, and one reviewer, you’ve got two choices...

1. Do you do a lighter review of the whole thing and hope for the best?
2. Or do you do a more detailed review on certain aspects?

My recommendation is that you focus your review on the key parts of the proposal. Which bits? The bits that are higher up on the evaluation criteria of the client and the executive summary as well. Ignore the answers that you're comfortable with - perhaps the more hygiene type parts of the proposal. Hone in on the more important elements.

And then we recommend considering how you do the review. Here's a little template that you can use to keep the focus of the review simple. It's a statement David learned from Dr Randy Olson, a US scientist. His phrase is, “Nothing about this [whatever the topic is] makes sense, except in the light of [dot dot dot].”

Applying this to a bidding scenario, you could say "nothing about this bid makes sense except in the light of the client’s desire to cut costs." Or perhaps "the client’s desire to gain insights from our product". Or maybe "the client’s desire to deliver on time every time" - imagine if it's a logistics deal.

So, you narrow the review down to a simple and very specific narrative that you know is key to the client.

Therefore, to summarise... if you want to TCUP this topic you need to firstly, focus on the most important parts of the proposal (and do a detailed review of those, given the time you have). Then, keep it simple... hone in on what is the most important thing we need to make sure we're doing in the proposal, and review if you are doing that in the best possible way.

We hope that helps - let us know...

Take care everyone. We’re looking forward to more TCUPs soon. So keep your ideas of other challenging topics that you'd like us to discuss coming over to us.

Watch the TCUP video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8OVn5qolk0

And get more SP content on our website: www.strategicproposals.com...