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RFPs are open to all bidders, some companies whittle down the competition by requiring prospective bidders to fill out a pre-qualification form. These forms are usually questionnaires – some actually call them PQQs, or Pre-Qualification Questionnaires – but they come in a variety of sizes, formats, and structures, and you can count on them requiring the following:

      ❯❯ Information about your company, including its size, location of offices, scope of resources, type of company, and how long you’ve been in business

      ❯❯ References and evidence of how well you’ve performed on similar jobs in the past

      ❯❯ Human resources data, such as minority ownership and sustainability programs

      

You need to always be ready to respond to qualification questionnaires, because they’re gatekeeping devices designed to reduce the number of bidders and they tend to pop up at the most inconvenient times. If you respond quickly and thoroughly (and with the least amount of effort), it may offer you a competitive advantage – the less time you spend dealing with these pre-qualification forms, the more time you can spend crafting your solution and responding to the RFP itself. If you receive a lot of qualification questionnaires, consider building a customer-facing website that provides pre-approved, standard questions and answers. While your customer may not use the site, simply publishing the questions and answers will give you a legup on responding.

       Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness

      To win with your RFP response, you must comply with your customer’s requirements. If you fudge, hedge, or dodge, you lose. It’s that simple.

      A compliant proposal is one that clearly and directly

      ❯❯ Meets the customer’s detailed requirements

      ❯❯ Follows all the customer’s submittal instructions

      ❯❯ Answers the customer’s questions

      

The most important aspect to responding to an RFP is that you carefully read it from beginning to end, note all statements and even hints of need, and build your proposal to clearly respond to every one of them.

      To maximize your chances, you need to

      ❯❯ Respond to and meet every requirement your customer identifies

      ❯❯ Structure your proposal exactly as your customer instructs

      ❯❯ Adhere to all the formatting and packaging guidelines that your customer specifies

      ❯❯ Stay within the page limit your customer sets

      ❯❯ Build a compliance matrix to show your customer where in your proposal you respond to a requirement (see Chapter 4 for how)

      And then there’s responsiveness. Being responsive does compliance one better. Responsive proposals address overarching goals, underlying concerns, and key issues and values that your customer may not spell out in its RFP.

      

Responsive proposals help customers achieve their business goals, not just their solution needs or procurement objectives. Examples of responsiveness include

      ❯❯ Understanding and addressing your customer’s stated and implied needs

      ❯❯ Describing the benefits your customer will gain from your solution

      ❯❯ Pricing your proposal within your customer’s budget

      ❯❯ Editing your response so it reads like your customer talks

      

Your goal as a proposal writer is to comply with all your customer’s requirements and express how your company goes beyond those requirements to help meet its business goals. Compliance alone won’t win in an increasingly competitive marketplace. You have to work with your customer before the RFP is released to understand its hot buttons. Hot buttons are singularly important issues or sets of issues that are likely to drive customer buying decisions. They’re emotionally charged, and your customer will repeatedly bring them up because they inhibit success. You can think of hot buttons as benchmark issues – issues that ultimately determine whether the customer selects your solution. You must clearly address them in your proposal – and doing so is what we mean by going beyond compliance and being truly responsive. So while compliance can prevent your proposal from being immediately eliminated, responsiveness edges out your competition in the long run. For more about hot buttons, see Chapter 3.

       Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs

      Most RFPs consist of a series of questions that you must answer thoroughly while wrapping a story line or set of messages around the answers. A question-and-answer (Q&A) style of RFP provides specific directions on how to structure your response: You follow the organization of the RFP to the letter and answer each question one by one as it appears in the text. Deviating from this approach can cost you business.

      Q&A-style RFPs often have short deadlines and are notoriously demanding. Procurement organizations and consultants use Q&A-style RFPs to develop line-by-line assessments for comparing each bidder’s capabilities and solutions. Q&A-style RFPs not only ask many direct, compliance-oriented questions but also ask challenging, open-ended questions that you really can’t answer satisfactorily without a consistent win strategy. A win strategy is the collection of tactics you use to help you win a specific opportunity – written and dispersed to everyone on the proposal team. Clearly defining your win strategy and its components ensures that your contributors consistently echo your main messages throughout your proposal.

      To devise a consistent win strategy, you must understand the entire scope of the opportunity (which is why you read the RFP cover to cover) and be able to answer every question with an eye to how it relates to all your other answers. A win strategy is something you’ll create early in your process for every opportunity (see Chapter 6 for a full discussion) and includes the following:

      ❯❯ A succinct statement of your overall solution and benefits so all contributors think about your strategy as they write their answers.

      ❯❯ Expressions of your solution’s most important, overarching benefits (these are sometimes called win themes and must contain a need, a pain statement, a feature, a benefit, and a corresponding proof point). You need to echo your win themes at every opportunity within a proposal (see Chapters 6 and 7 for more on writing win themes).

      ❯❯ Clear descriptions of your customer’s hot buttons (those compelling reasons to buy). Including your customer’s hot buttons in your win strategy ensures that you consistently address your customer’s most pressing and emotionally charged issues. Check out the preceding section for more about hot buttons.

      ❯❯ A SWOT analysis of your and your competitors’ products and services (SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). A SWOT analysis will help you align your solution with your customer’s needs while evaluating how well you stack up against your competition (see Chapter 5 for more on SWOT).

      ❯❯ Your company’s key discriminators. These are the things that matter to the customer that you can do that your competition can’t, or things you do better than your competition.

      Win strategies are easier to create and implement when you know as much as possible about your customers, their needs, and your competitors before an RFP is released. If you’ve had a meaningful dialogue with your customers before they release an RFP, you have time to gather the right people, exchange knowledge about the customer’s hot buttons and how you’ve solved similar problems,

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