Ratchet Up Your Internal Reviews and Win More Bids: Part 2

Ratchet Up Your Internal Reviews and Win More Bids: Part 2
By Harley Stein, Partner, Tenzing Consulting

Part 1 focused on the people aspect of reviews, and it addressed three of the six elements that will give you more bang from your reviews:

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

Part 2 focuses more on process as it addresses the last three critical elements:

4. A good review process elicits valuable, crisp feedback that doesn’t simply tell teams what they have done poorly, but rather offers recommendations and solutions to improve the proposal.

A key aspect in any process is ensuring that the reviewers are prepared; nothing slows or impairs a review more than spending the first few hours reading the pertinent material and ‘getting up to speed.’ Prior to the review, all reviewers must be given a read-ahead package of the pertinent material: RFP, SOW, Industry Day briefing, etc. – and they must read it!

The administrative aspects of the process are straightforward: Review leader establishes the agenda, time frame, and objectives, as noted previously. The leader then makes reading assignments based on areas of expertise, ensuring that all sections of the proposal will be reviewed by multiple reviewers.

Some time is devoted to individual reviews; less time is then devoted to rolling up the comments, both section by section as well as general impressions. The debrief itself is focused on these top-level comments; the proposal manager is provided with the written, more specific comments from reviewers, to be distributed as the proposal manager sees fit.

How long should the debrief be and how high level should the comments be? There is no definitive answer. If the proposal is very short – less than 50 written pages – you might be able to address all comments in an hour or so.The greater the complexity and length of the proposal, the more you have to concentrate on rolling the comments up to a reasonable level.

There are several good ways to achieve valuable, crisp feedback. A few examples follow.

Provide the reviewers with a review form that clearly shows what is expected. Proposals should ultimately be evaluated against the evaluation criteria, but to get to that score first requires addressing a different set of factors that might include the following:

Win themes/discriminators
Strengths/weaknesses
Compliance
Understanding requirements
Quality of the proposal
Addressing customer hot buttons
Benefits of approach

What the form is asking of reviewers is simply this: How well are we addressing these bullets? Each of the previous bullets is often further broken down into sub-factors. For example, the sub-factor ‘addressing customer hot buttons’ might include these questions:

Have customer concerns relating to management, cost, experience, transition, staffing, etc., been addressed?
Are there any perceived customer concerns that have not been addressed?
Is performance criteria properly addressed? Is it credible/believable?
Does past performance relate to this program?
Have technology shortfalls been addressed?

This is simply one good set of process objectives; another way you might slice up an evaluation is to identify deficiencies or attributes:

Weaknesses

Fails to follow Section L

Fails to address Section M

Assumes customer has prior knowledge of our company, capabilities, and experience

Fails to show understanding of customer and environment

Fails to present benefits of our approach to the customer

Fails to cite our relevant experience

Etc.

Strengths

Demonstrates our insights into the customer environment and the customer hot buttons

Correlates with Sections L & M and SOW requirements

Complies with all the RFP requirements

Provides sound arguments supported by proof, as well as citing where we have done this before successfully

Etc.

5. A good debrief requests members of the proposal team to evaluate if the reviews – and the reviewers – helped them draft a better proposal.

This questioning can be done live in the context of a larger proposal debrief. It can be addressed by answering questions in a form. Whatever method you choose, it is important for the success of future proposal efforts to identify the people within your organization who can actually help you win more bids.

6. The sixth and last element speaks to all of the above: if it is true that review teams have the second-most impact on proposals, then as organizations it is as important for us to train reviewers to help us as it is for us to train proposal teams to write winning proposals.

How do we train reviewers? The same way we train proposal writers. A brief seminar, a longer course, and then hands-on experience with a mentor, ideally sitting in reviews as observers where they can learn what constitutes good, helpful comments.

Address these 6 elements and you will tap an untapped resource in most organizations: a consistent set of the right participants, under the guidance of a strong leader, using good guidelines and process; leveraging what we learn from proposal debriefs and reviewer training. And most importantly, you will submit more winning proposals.

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.