In today’s highly competitive IT offshoring business, writing proposals that impresses your customers and considerably increases the chance of winning business, has become very crucial. Let’s look at some of the problems faced by software organizations in writing winning proposals and how we can solve them to create more business.
The Challenge
Before we get down to the details of creating a winning response to RFPs (hereafter, proposals), let’s look at some of the common problems.
Shortage of time – normally the RFPs find their way to the proposal team from the sales and top management team and precious time is lost during this transition. In many cases, clients provide an average of two weeks for the preparation and submission of proposals which the proposal team may find as a tight bargain
Lack of a good repository of case studies – even though companies have woken up to this fact long time ago and started putting together databases of customer case studies and project profiles, many a times the proposal team finds it difficult to pull out the right information at the right time
Difficulty in understanding the customer’s business problems and expectations – as backend people, the proposal team does not get adequate exposure to the ground situation on the client side, due to which the final proposal may end up not addressing the client’s key concerns
Lack of training/experience – as well as lacking the ability to present the information in-line with the customer’s expectations, articulating the objectives, scope and assumptions and presenting relevant success stories
The RFP Process
A customer issues a RFP when she has a specific business requirement and wants to know the solution as well as the capabilities of a potential vendor. An RFP is normally more comprehensive and exhaustive. More often, it includes an SOW (Statement of Work) and other details required to generate a response.
There are 3 distinct stages in the RFP process, namely, pre-RFP, Issue of RFP and Response to RFP.
Pre-RFP Stage
During the pre-RFP stage, as a vendor, you should spend adequate time and effort in investing in the relationship with the customer. Here you should try to get to know more about the customer, key decision makers, end users, etc, your competitors, and get to know about the customer’s constraints and the political dynamics. Most important of all, it will be necessary to have a GO/NO-GO meeting within your organization to decide if winning this RFP fits with your overall business strategy
Issue of RFP
During this stage, the customer issues the RFP to all the selected vendors and sets the pre-bid conference date. In some cases where there is no formal pre-bid conference, the customer provides a window for taking in questions from the vendors on the RFP and issuing clarifications. Since valuable inputs for the proposal are gathered during this stage it is important to plan properly. As a vendor, you have to make sure that the right people attend the pre-bid conference and these people have gone through the RFP beforehand. Some of the key areas to seek clarifications include customers existing technical infrastructure and its limitations, key stakeholders who comprise the customer’s team for this RFP, the internal and external interfaces, other partners/vendors who will be involved in the solution, implicit requirements on performance, quality, etc.
Preparation of RFP response
Finally the most important stage in the RFP process has arrived. Some of the most important sections in a proposal are Executive Summary, Introduction, About the Vendor, Scope, Proposed Solution, Approach and Methodology, Project Organization and Management, Deliverables and Schedule and lastly the Annexure.
Executive summary is the section that has to briefly and precisely capture all the relevant and important information of the proposal. You have to write this section keeping in mind the top management of the customer who may not want to go through the entire proposal. So write this section after the rest of the proposal has been completed. This section should cover the salient features of the proposed solution, what benefits the customer will get from the solution, important milestones and high-level schedule, deliverables, payment schedule, etc.
The Scope section is another important section which needs to cover ‘the work required and only the work required’. It also needs to cover what is ‘out-of-scope’. Sections like ‘Assumptions and Constraints’ are often overlooked so give special attention to these sections since during the RFP stage there will be several grey areas whose details get clearer only in the subsequent stages.
As a general guideline for writing proposals, follow the important points below:
Follow RFP guidance to the letter
Just don’t read the RFP and the SOW; study them
Give clear and concise message
Write a strong executive summary
Devise Win-Themes. This means presenting Unique Selling Points and key differentiators
Use hard-data to provide evidence instead of using phrases such as ‘extensive experience’ or ‘consistent performance’
Use simple and consistent language. Make sure there are absolutely no grammatical mistakes
Use diagrams, charts, tables and flowcharts diligently to explain concepts and methodology
Provide a proposal with all requested information in the organization & format required
Demonstrate an understanding of the customer’s key business needs or issues
Identify meaningful outcomes or results from meeting those needs
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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in March, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.
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—About our writer:
Vijaya Devi is an Engineer and a PMI certified Project Management Professional (PMP). She has worked with TCS and HP in various capacities such as programmer, project manager, program manager and business development professional. She has a passion for writing and has wide experience writing content for business reports, technical white papers, web content, presentations, online help and response for RFP's. She has been freelancing in this area for the last 2 years. She currently resides in Mumbai.
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