We recommend that you answer the difficult questions in reverse order of importance. Distinguish which of the difficult questions are less important than others, and take the following steps to deal with these questions:
1. Approach the less important questions by using the bullet point approach outlined earlier in this section.
Refer to Step 2 in the preceding list in this section.
2. Determine the most minimal response that complies with your customer’s requirements.
Refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness” for more information on what you can do to maximize compliance.
3. Figure out how much time you need to get the minimal response.
Your minimal response can be one of only three possibilities: “We comply,” “we do not comply,” or “we partially comply.” You may need to contact someone else for a definitive answer (for example, an engineer, a lawyer, or an executive), so quickly determine what expertise you need to fully answer the question, and either add the expert to your response team or email the expert (so you can get a written response). Send them the actual question from the RFP and a statement describing the context of your response and your win theme strategy. Ask the expert to reply by a specific date and time (“ASAP” is not specific!).
4. Lock down your sources and finalize the content as early as possible.
No answer is final until you sufficiently explain why and how your solution is better than anyone else’s on this particular requirement. Never simply say, “we comply” and leave it at that. Make the bullet point method from the previous section your mantra: Comply with the requirement, echo your win theme, provide concrete proofs for your claim, illustrate your solution if possible, and plant a key takeaway in your reader’s mind. You can’t do this unless you have sources who will supply the proofs and benefits, so locking down your sources, if they’re not already part of your proposal team, is crucial.
Responding to the most important questions
After you’ve handled the less important of your challenging questions, use your win strategy (see the earlier section, “Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs”) to build answers for the most important and strategic questions:
❯❯ Focus on determining levels of compliance. A Q&A-style RFP will (usually) provide a numbered series of questions by categories identified through main and subheadings. Be on the lookout for nested requirements (one or more customer needs buried within the sentences that comprise a numbered question), signified by the verbs will, must, should, and could. Make sure you respond to each of these trigger words. To make sure you respond to them all, search for these terms by using the Find or Search function within your word-processing software.
❯❯ Highlight your key discriminators. What makes your company the best-right choice in this particular matter? What do you offer that no competitor can or will? Highlight these attributes and tailor them to fit the specific question being asked.
❯❯ Establish how you understand the customer’s needs, goals, and issues. Keep your customer’s hot buttons in mind as you respond. Every word you write should pertain to your customer’s hot buttons and what your solution brings that others’ don’t.
For more on hot-button issues, refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness.”
❯❯ Illustrate your responses first, and then write what you see. Sometimes proposal writers find it difficult to understand a highly technical or overly complex response provided by a subject matter expert. In these cases, a picture is not only worth a thousand words but can also launch a thousand words (well, hopefully not a thousand for a single response!). One way to get a clear description of a technical concept is to have a subject matter expert sketch the steps making up a process or draw the components of a solution in relation to one another. Use this effective technique to get highly technical content from subject matter experts and then create a more professional version of the drawing for the proposal to make that content more accessible to less technical evaluators. Discover more about this technique in Chapter 11.
❯❯ Prove your assertions. Demonstrate your capabilities and support your claims with brief, pertinent examples. If you’ve installed a similar solution recently, one having a similar or even greater scope, cite that experience and supply enough detail to ensure that the reader sees the similarities.
❯❯ Remember to be responsive. Think hard about what you’ve learned about your customer through close reading of the RFP and visits with the customer. Echo the customer’s own language to indicate your empathy and understanding.
Fine-tuning your responses into a narrative
Gathering the information for and drafting your answers may seem like the hard part, but turning thorough answers into effective responses and compiling them into a coherent and compelling proposal narrative is just as challenging and even more important.
Consider the following advice when writing your responses:
❯❯ Outline your content before finalizing it. Before you start writing or ask others to write, build an outline to direct your response. In other words, think before you write!
• At the macro level, your customer’s RFP structure supersedes your preferred proposal outline. Follow that structure to the letter unless the customer says otherwise. Still, many RFPs allow leeway in organizing some proposal sections (such as executive summaries, pricing sections, and reference sections), so prepare an overall outline to your response that adheres to the customer’s structure and guides writers through the more flexible sections.
• Develop your outline within the first 24 to 72 hours, depending on your deadline. Share it immediately with your response team.
• At the micro level, populate the outline with visuals, bullet points, and notes. (You’ll have accumulated this information as you gathered the relevant materials for your answers – refer to the earlier section, “Getting the easier questions out of the way.”)
Assign every question to your writers (or yourself) with clear, firm deadlines for all content – answers, images, forms, and attachments.
❯❯ Use lean and concise content. Evaluators appreciate clear, factual, and concise content, even if they haven’t set page restrictions. Remember that your bid is only one of many, so your most conscientious evaluators will be pressed for time. Also be aware that, based on their evaluation criteria, evaluators may be more interested