For proposal, capture, and business development teams in government contracting, mastering the RFP response process is crucial to securing contracts and growing your business. But what exactly does the RFP response process entail, and how can you navigate it successfully?
You need a strong RFP response process to give your team the best chance of winning a contract. Using VT Docs can help you respond to RFPs faster and with greater accuracy. You can use it at all stages of the RFP response process to help you win more bids.
There are many opportunities for organizations in government contracting. But the RFP response process can seem overwhelming. And if you’re a smaller business, you may feel that you can’t throw your hat in the ring. Meaning businesses that could be enjoying long-term, profitable relationships with a reliable government customer lose out on potential opportunities.
But there is hope. Are you new to government contracting, want to improve your win rate, or gain more lucrative contracts? The secret to pitching for and winning this business is to create an excellent RFP response process.
What is an RFP response process?
The RFP response process is a defined, repeatable, streamlined set of steps you follow. It can help you determine which RFP you’ll go for and how you’ll prepare your submission. Once you have standardized the process, anyone who steps into the role of proposal manager can follow it. This scalable solution can improve your chances of winning your next (or first) government contract.
Having a defined process in place can also ease the pain of that first encounter with the RFP. Whether it’s in a draft or final form. RFPs can run to hundreds of pages with a vast array of requirements. But with your RFP response process in place, you can quickly identify the requirements and timelines that you’ll need to meet
Understand the 8 basic steps in any RFP response process
To get started, here are eight key steps to take to craft a solid RFP response:
1. Is this RFP worth a response?
First, you’ll need to qualify this opportunity. There’s no point in wasting time and resources on a bid you can’t win. If you can’t meet compliance requirements or the capabilities of your subcontractors, or if it holds other unacceptable risks. Resist the urge to make a quick assessment based on gut instinct.
Have dispassionate scoring criteria to hand that you’ve agreed with colleagues. Use them consistently to make a bid/no-bid decision. These criteria may include:
- a past relationship with the issuer,
- similar successful work in your track record,
- delivery timescales,
- any red flags that may indicate there’s a preferred bidder already in pole position to win this contract.
2. Assemble your team and begin
The next big step in your process is to gather your proposal team. You’ll need buy-in from senior management so make sure their support is visible. You’ll need to identify your Subject-Matter-Experts (SMEs) whose help you’ll need to write the various drafts of the proposal. Have your roadmap and delivery timeline ready and make sure everyone is focussed on it. An RFP response process flow chart is useful for teams to follow to keep everyone on track.
3. Assign segments of work to SMEs
How will you put meat on the bones of your first draft proposal? You need to divide the document into sections that you’ll assign to your SMEs, pricing, recruitment and HR team. This division of labor lets you get the best from all contributors as they focus on their area of expertise.
Two organizational tools that will help are:
- The compliance matrix. A table that you’ve built based on the RFP, listing each requirement it lays out.
- The responsibility matrix. A table that states who’s responsible for different parts of the process or inputs.
Generating a compliance matrix early in your RFP response process helps keep your focus on the customer’s requirements. You’ll also use the compliance matrix later on, to double-check you’ve delivered everything the RFP requested.
4. Write a first draft of the RFP response
The first draft of your response will give a sense of how capable you are of meeting the requirements. You can then begin assigning tasks and sections to relevant proposal team members. Even at this stage, your draft proposal should give a sense of your win themes. These are compelling reasons why your organization should be awarded this work over any other bidder. Those reasons will be a North Star for your team, so everyone remains consistent and focused on why you should win.
5. Complete a second draft and ask for reviews
At this point in your process, the input you’ve gathered from experts means you have a second draft. This should tell a clear, cohesive story about why you should win. But is it compelling enough? Does it really comply with the customer’s requirements? Have you given a complete response without any verbal padding or mysterious acronyms that could make the proposal difficult to understand?
Your review teams will help you answer these questions. You’ll be able to improve the proposal using their feedback. Including a reality check on whether the pricing for this job is both realistic and profitable.
6. Write the final proposal
Your final proposal is complete, compliant, and compelling. It provides all the material required by the RFP. It tells a clear story about why choosing your organization will deliver the best outcome.
You’ve cross-referenced your final proposal with your compliance matrix to ensure you have not missed any requirements. The matrix shows the reader where in the document they should look to see that you’ve met these requirements.
Your completed RFP response also contains a list of acronyms used. The final read-through shows that all acronyms are easy to understand in context for any outsider who reads your document for the first time.
7. Submit your RFP response and think of the future
Submitting your RFP response isn’t the end of the process. Keep a copy of your response and use it, along with other RFP responses your team has written. This creates a knowledge base for the future. You should store each RFP response in a way that you can consult the content you spent so much time creating at a later date.
From profiles of subcontractors to pricing models, your proposal contains highly polished nuggets of information. They might need refreshing if you intend to re-use them. But they can still save time and make it much faster for you to reach the first-draft stage for the next proposal. This content library will also help you to make future bid/no-bid decisions faster and in a more informed way.
8. Learn from the past, including rejected proposals
The content you create for an RFP response has significant intrinsic value. Not just because you can re-use it for a future proposal. But because you can analyze it for insights if you don’t succeed in winning this contract. Failure to secure the work after so much effort can be disappointing, but it’s a chance to learn. Each bid is also a chance to improve your RFP response process itself. Where were the gaps in your process? Are there manual tasks you could automate to save time and meet the next deadline more easily?
Automate the RFP response process for greater efficiency
Tools that can automate parts of the RFP response process are the best friend of any time-pressed proposal manager. The deadline to answer an RFP is never quite far enough in the future to let proposal teams be confident of meeting it. So how can you save time without sacrificing quality in your response? VT Docs integrates into every step in the RFP response process to automate tasks and improve your focus.
Using RFP software like VT Docs can greatly improve your RFP response process. It can help streamline the creation of proposals by automating repetitive tasks and enabling collaboration among team members. Proposal software can improve the quality of the response by ensuring consistency and accuracy and mitigating risk. With proposal software, RFP response teams can work more efficiently, saving time and resources. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of winning the business.
Using VT Docs in your response process
Make bid/no-bid decisions faster by using VT Docs to compare current opportunities to past responses to find reusable content. Have you read a draft RFP before the final was published? VT Docs does a line-by-line comparison to allow you to see the differences between the draft and final solicitation.
Once you’ve decided to go for an opportunity, VT Docs can rapidly analyze the full content of the RFP. It generates a compliance matrix––one of the most time-consuming parts of any RFP response process. VT Docs can shred a proposal and generate a compliance matrix in a matter of minutes. This close, accurate analysis of the document can make it easier to generate your responsibility matrix. You can then send relevant sections of an RFP to the right people responsible (pricing, subcontractors), saving everyone time.
Do a faster, more efficient copy edit of your RFP response with VT Docs. It lets you pinpoint long sentences, passive voice, undefined acronyms, or other readability issues. Any reluctance or pushback from review teams about their writing style can also be easier to manage. This is due to impartial and objective feedback from solutions like VT Docs. It highlights areas of poor readability and makes suggestions on how to improve. A clearly written response helps clients understand your proposal on the first read and makes you look more professional.
Responding to a proposal request can be challenging. But with proposal automation software, like VT Docs, and a structured approach, you can streamline your RFP response process and improve your win rate.
You need the right software to create compelling proposals. Shred your first doc in VT Docs and find out first-hand how VisibleThread can enhance your proposal process.
