Consistently effective proposal reviews must start long before the document is even written. They should start by developing review criteria that are based on how you define proposal quality and what it will take to win. If you wait until a draft of the proposal has been written and then review it based on “best practices” and “experience,” what you will get is a generic review. The same shallow review that any other proposal would get.
But many of those things are specific to the particular:
- RFP
- Customer
- Competitive environment
- Offering you are proposing
- Qualifications and capabilities of your company at the time of the bid
While what you need to validate will be similar on every bid, it will not be the same. With every bid, you should reconsider what you need to validate to ensure that the proposal reflects what it will take to win. This consideration, along with defining the series of reviews you need to perform the validation, should be at the heart of your review process. For the MustWin Process we created a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation that guides people through what their review criteria should be on each bid.
The result is that instead of a generic review, you get a review that measures the proposal against what it will take to win that particular bid. This is what leads to reviews that are not only worth the time and effort, but that consistently improve your chances of winning.
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