How to complete your RFP response within deadline

In this post, I am going to speak about a 293 page RFP response that I had completed with 2 of my associates supporting me in the effort. It was not very long back, just in June 2019! I got this request from a new client that there are 3 RFP’s that needed to be responded all in a period of 45 days sequentially. I am making this 293 pager, the protagonist of this article because this is one of the longest that I have ever written. I will structure this post into different sections, so that readers can understand the challenges, process and final wrap-up well and can implement them to respond to any RFP.

Challenges

The challenges that I faced in this RFP was understanding the domain. It was not in my core areas and the client clearly told me that I can support with materials but the entire technical section of the response will have to be completed by our team. The sections that I faced challenges are as follows:

·         Health and Safety at Work

·         Contractual Mobilization

·         Quality Control

For each of these sections, we had to curate the content to make it appropriate for the response. The way to resolve this is to understand the situation very well by reading the RFP and also referring to material provided followed by aligning the responses to the queries put in the RFP. These 3 sections were around 50 pages of the response.

How to respond effectively within timeline

Managing these 3 sections and getting the client approval turned out to be the most crucial aspect of this proposal. These 40 pages were responded within a timeline of 7 – 10 days time. The team structure should be 2 people full time and another who can shadow the process and provide the necessary input when required.

Ideally, completing this section in 8 days is ideal because you still have a good 7-12 days before the submission considering the overall timeline for submission is between 15 – 20 days. Once this section was done, the rest of it was primarily documentation work wherein you need to work on the Executive Summary, Company experience, Licenses, resource CV’s etc. These sections also take up a good amount of time because small issues related to formatting a table, putting an image in the right size and similar mundane activities. You can keep a good 5-7 days for this work keeping it on a rigorous schedule.

While starting work on a large RFP, I cannot reiterate more the fact that the team element is crucial for success when you write the response to the request for proposal. Even when you know everything that should go into your proposal, getting it all down on paper before your deadline can be a big challenge. However, there is a difference between knowing the kinds of things that should go into a proposal and having a list ready to go for this particular proposal. The best way to accelerate proposal writing is to accelerate figuring out what to write and have the team understand how to write from the RFP requirement perspective. Once the process has caught pace within 2-3 days, a team meeting to check the progress of the response is absolutely essential. Any slipup should be immediately highlighted and the team should respond adequately fast to ensure that the response progress is back on track.

Separate wish list items from the actual response required. It may be that you would love the evaluator to know certain offerings that you have but it is not necessary to plug it into the core sections. Include these items in the Appendix Section and provide a link like “If you want to know more, please refer to Appendix”. This in all probability will lead the evaluator to know about the extras that you have on offer.  

Wrapping up the proposal Response

In this phase, your team should focus on incorporating client reviews, making the final quality checks in terms of grammar, flow of the write-up, adding or omitting sections as deemed necessary and touching up on the look and feel of the document. It is important that you should focus on winning when you figure out your bid strategies and offering, before the writing starts. The pre-RFP stage should be driven by what you will need to know to close the sale.

There is no perfect way to construct an RFP, but we need to plan very well to create a great response to a RFP. Take the time to correctly structure from the beginning. Your responses will not only be of higher quality if you plan well, but you will also have a better chance of ending up being the winner.

Finally, it is ideal to target to complete the RFP response atleast 2 days before the submission date and complete the submission a day before the submission date.