Bid Management Lingo

RFP - the most commonly heard word around Bid Management circles. Stands for Request for Proposal. Some people mistakenly (minor sin compared to what else goes on!) also refer to their response as the 'RFP' as in :- 'We submitted the RFP yesterday'. As you know, you don’t submit an RFP, you submit an RFP Response or better still, you submit a Proposal in response to a customer's Request for Proposal.

Proposal - You have to unlearn what you thought a proposal is, when you first came to Bid Management - this proposal won't require a ring or flowers! A proposal is an offer from a vendor to a customer. Sometimes this has commercial details and pricing information and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does not contain many details because the vendor does not know what the customer wants and rarely, because the customer has not yet said what he wants. So, when you see that a proposal is missing several major sections like a Price and even a precise Solution for a requirement, you could modestly and correctly call it an Approach Note.

Approach Note - Is a proposal without the filling! It is then up to the customer to visualize the missing elements! 

What a proposal DOES contain - Most proposals contain a cover page made in psychedelic colours, followed by several pages about the company peppered with internal terms and acronyms, made up of imprecise data, all in unchecked grammar, then the all important solution hidden on the fortyseventh page laced with lots of jargon, then the assumptions list which copies verbatim many of the requirements from the rfp, finally the climactic commercials section with pages-long fine print, not to forget the annexures which are embedded in the word document like leeches, and finally the absence of section numbers and page numbers giving the customer an infinite blue ocean kind of feeling...will the customer read on or curse their luck...
 

What a proposal MUST contain - A brief introduction about your company (one short para, no more), an Executive Summary, a recap of your understanding of what the customer wants or needs - not cut-and-pasted from the rfp but your articulation of what you think they want based on customer stated facts and your interpreted requirements, then the solution, the assumptions, the commercials and annexures listed in a table. The annexures go as separate documents. 

Executive Summary - It needs to be simple and without jargon. It should not make bombastic and evidently untrue statements like 'we have the most outstanding and respected enterprise consulting practice in the world', it should make the customer want to read on, and it should truly summarize the rest of the proposal. A simple structure of an executive summary could be,
•    Who You Are (a brief para about the company),
•    What you think the customer wants (a summary of what you have understood to be the customer need),
•    What is the solution you are proposing (a brief description of the solution including details like the timeline to implement the solution and the cost - only where RFP rules allow the cost to be mentioned in the main proposal),
•    What is different about your solution, and then finally,
•    Why your company for THIS project

 
Often, your solution highlights are mixed up with your credentials as a company and this is no good. First, explain why your solution is great (Solution Differentiators) and then explain why they should select your company to deliver the solution(Company Differentiators). So, sell the solution first and then the company. 
 

So, basically,  the executive summary should only have 5 sections,
 

1.    Who you are
2.    What the customer wants 
3.    What you are proposing

4.    Why your solution is great and 
5.    Why your company is the right one.
 

Most people tend to cut and paste items 1, 4, and 5 and sometimes even item 3 from old proposals, with little modification. The key is to make these sections relevant for the specific opportunity in question. 

For example,
 

•    If the customer requirement is a global roll-out of an application in obscure places like Timbuktu, then what you must highlight in the Company overview is your global presence.
•    If the solution will be built on a product like SAP, then item 5 above should contain something about Your company's relationship with SAP. The key is to not do this vaguely, but precisely. So, instead of saying 'We have a great relationship with SAP and we are strong partners who can leverage each other's strengths' it is better to say 'Our company's relationship with SAP will be utilized to validate the Blueprint for this project with SAP, the product vendor'. Of course, saying it is one thing; you need to be able to deliver what you said in the proposal once you get the order. So, say only what you will do, do your homework at the proposal stage so you will be able to make this commitment with conviction. So, if you want to use the above SAP commitment example, you should check with SAP first if they will validate the Blueprint you will make for your customer and you should ensure that you provide for it in your plan and estimates. 

So much about the holy executive summary.
 

One final note, don’t make the executive summary more than 3-4 pages long. Don’t set yourself artificial page limits but more importantly, make sure every sentence in the EXEC summary is saying something relevant. If a sentence does not do its job, kill it and you will automatically end up with a powerful and yet short executive summary!!!