While a winning proposal is a result of a lot of pre-proposal work in shaping the requirement, identifying your discriminators, forming your team (where necessary), and understanding your competitors, the clock actually starts ticking once the final solicitation is issued, and your focus moves to the written document. Or it should. Too many offerors forget that all of the talk and previous documents (including the draft Performance Work Statement (PWS)), are no longer applicable and have been completely superseded by the final solicitation. Reality just landed on your desk. In your hands is the complete set of instructions (for better or worse!), that you must follow in preparing your proposal. Time to set aside your preconceived notions about what you “thought” would be in there (and what you “hoped” would be in there).
It can be daunting to look at the whole solicitation. The main document is often over 100 pages, and that might not include the attachments! So, where do you start? Have you ever heard the saying, “Read everything, before doing anything?” This is especially true in proposal writing where just the ability to be considered for award hinges on being compliant and addressing everything the government has stated in the solicitation is required. Here’s how I read the solicitation:
- First, I start on page one and do a kind of “overview” to get a feel for the overall solicitation, where things are, and identify anything that’s missing. I make notes of any due dates/times, and “pass/fail” criteria. For example, if the RFP includes a requirement for each offeror to submit a $2 million performance bond that may be a pass-fail show stopper for small businesses.
- Next, I go through it again, this time using my highlighters, sticky notes, pencils/pens, (or computer), you name it, to identify important information that we’ll need for the proposal. I make notes of questions that I have, areas that I think the client should pay attention to in particular (because it’ll cost them money, for example), and especially conflicting information or requirements. As you know there is usually a cut off for questions to be submitted to the government, so collecting these early on is a really good idea.
- The third time through is to check each note and comment to see if some of them can be removed because, after reading the entire solicitation, I no longer have a question, or the information is now clearer.
If you think reading the solicitation in detail “takes too much time” you have to ask yourself this: how much time are you willing to spend to win a contract? Whatever it is, I can tell you, it takes much, much less time to lose a contract by missing requirements, being noncompliant, or missing some “hidden requirements”, especially if your competitors are fully compliant.