Writing a compelling and persuasive proposal can significantly improve your chances of winning. In this series we will provide some tips professional proposal writers use to make sure their proposal has the best chance of winning the contract.
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of times that you should focus your proposal on the customer. One way you can do that is through using the customer’s terminology and key words. You can do this by carefully reviewing the RFP and ensuring your proposal uses these same words to discuss your approach. It’s simple, but you’d be surprised how many proposals fail in this area.
We recently supported a large business who was developing a proposal for research and development. They had already identified their “win themes” and outlined their proposal response. The Performance Work Statement included (as an example), the following:
• The contractor must be able to rapidly and effectively recognize and characterize operational deficiencies…
• This involves the rapid deployment and sustainment of these forces in remote and austere locations.
• Offeror must demonstrate the ability to surge when necessary to support rapid response efforts.
As you can see, the PWS emphasized the requirement for “rapid” response. In fact the word “rapid” appeared 13 times in the PWS and the evaluation criteria. But when I reviewed the “theme statements” the client had drafted, there was not one reference to rapidly doing anything! Of course, one of the first tasks we accomplished was to go back through and identify all of the key words in the RFP and make sure that each section addressed the client’s ability to provide the required services “rapidly” through our technical approach, their ability to manage the contract and “rapidly” respond to customer requirements, and how our past performance reflected their ability to rapidly provide high quality services. Without identifying and addressing this key word, their proposal would have totally missed the mark. (By the way: they won this $800 million contract!)
Another important step toward making your proposal more customer focused is to use the terminology used by the customer in the RFP. No matter what you might think of the terminology used by the government, or how strongly you prefer to use other terms, using the customer’s terminology says that your company is in synch with the government, that you speak the same language. It also makes it easier for the evaluator to see where you have addressed each of the requirements, and the easier your proposal is to evaluate and to determine it deserves the highest evaluation score, the easier it is for you to win!
Coming next in Part 3 of the series: Help the evaluators find what they need to prove compliance.