Ratchet Up Your Internal Reviews and Win More Bids: Part 1

Ratchet Up Your Internal Reviews and Win More Bids: Part 1
By Harley Stein, Partner, Tenzing Consulting

A winning proposal is one that gets more things right than our competitors proposals get right, from the right people to the right solution at the right cost. How hard can that be to create?

Pretty darn hard. So many things have to go right, many of which may be out of our control.

There is, however, at least one element of the proposal process that is under our control, but which most organizations typically do not do well: reviews.

You can argue that review teams have the second-most impact on the quality of the final proposal; only the proposal team typically has more impact. (If you are saying to yourself, hey, in my organization, it's the boss who has the most impact, then you really need to implement a better review process!)

Tell me if this sounds familiar …

You walk through the office until you spot a warm body: "Jack, are you busy this afternoon? Great. I need you to review this ABC proposal. Just a few hours. No, there's nothing you need to know." And ten empty cubicles and 5 filled cubicles later we have our luckless review team.

Have they read the RFP? Not yet. Do they know the customer? Not really. Have they ever had to write a competitive proposal? One or two of them, long ago and in a galaxy far far away. Do they understand the technology? Some of them can spell IT.

And yet … This team of reviewers will spend a few unprepared hours reading your proposal and telling you, with a great deal of confidence and in no uncertain terms, exactly where you went wrong and exactly what you need to do to fix it – and we'll take their advice! Then they will disappear back to their cubicle existence.

There has to be a better way. And there is. Unsurprisingly, it's about the right people following the right process.

There are 6 key elements:

Participants with the right qualifications
A strong review leader implementing a set of guidelines/objectives addressing what must be accomplished and what the reviewers should evaluate
Consistent review teams
A process that will elicit good, crisp feedback
Debriefings to determine good/bad reviewers
Training to develop good reviewers

People first.

1. Good review teams typically mix and match participants, with emphasis on solid qualifications:

Business development expertise, meaning they know that proposals are selling documents not technical papers, that features and benefits and value win proposals
Proposal expertise, meaning they know that win themes and discriminators that add up to customer value are the key ingredients of winning proposals
Subject mater expertise and/or customer knowledge/insight, meaning they bring an expert's knowledge of the topic and/or they have an insider's understanding of what this customer is like today, what they want to be tomorrow, and what their hit buttons truly are.

And good reviewers are available after the review to help proposal teams put their ideas into action.

2. Good review teams have a strong leader who sets the ground rules, distributes assignments, and sets the agenda and objectives.
All reviewers ought to know what they are supposed to accomplish, how they are supposed to accomplish it, and how long they have to complete their tasks. This leader must be a good listener to hear and understand the feedback; and must be decisive to keep the discussions moving in a time-constrained environment.

They know that they are not helping the proposal team if they provide conflicting advice, so they walk the fine line between driving toward consensus and airing strong opinions. Strong review team leaders often come from business development, with a background that includes time as a program manager and lots of time working proposals.

3. Good review teams are consistent.
The typical proposal cycle includes several reviews by full review teams: an early review of the outline; another early review of storyboards or a 1st draft of the proposal; a mid-cycle review of a 2nd or 3rd draft; and a final review of the near-production-ready proposal. It is critically important that these reviews all include the same set of reviewers so that your proposal team is given good, consistent guidance. It is tempting to add new reviewers to the end of the cycle. Don't! (And you won't need to if you follow these guidelines.)

New reviewers, who haven't been part of the evolution of your thinking and your proposal – an evolution that has been guided by your review team – inevitably will tell you to take some significant aspect of your proposal and shift in a different direction. If you find 5 really smart people in your organization and ask them to review your proposal, over the course of several reviews they will stay consistent in their guidance to you, and if they are the right people (as noted earlier), this guidance will be valuable.

If you swap those 5 people out halfway through the process and bring in 5 equally smart but different people, we have all experienced what will happen: inevitably, they will tell you to set off in a different direction – it may be better, it may be worse, but it will definitely be different. Odds are that all it will be is different, a review team version of changing ‘happy' to ‘glad.'

In my experience, keeping consistent reviews is both the most important guideline as well as the hardest one to manage. Schedules for reviews are often in flux, which means it can be hard to get and keep the same reviewers. You will find that your are better off with fewer reviewers, but the same ones, than if you add new personalities to your review team because the review now fits into their schedule.

In Part 2 we'll talk about process.

Harley Stein is a professional oral presentation coach and Partner of Tenzing Consulting, specializing in strategies, proposals, presentations and coaching. Contact Harley at hstein@comcast.net or 302-593-6718. Visit www.tenzing-consulting.com.

If you don’t have your own FREE subscription to Bid-Winning Proposals, sign up now at http://www.24hrco.com/ezine.shtml. Join more than 1000 other proposal professionals who get answers to their most pressing issues and challenges from recognized industry experts—every other month. Plus you’ll have access to all back issues and our growing library of proposal resources.