Why you are probably doing your pink team proposal reviews the wrong way

If you are treating your pink team review as a progress review to see how the proposal writing is going, then you are doing them wrong. And you are setting yourself up for a bad experience at the red team review. You are missing a vital opportunity and will suffer a lower win probability than a company that has a better definition for what a pink team review should be.

A pink team review should be a blueprint review prior to the construction of the proposal. The blueprint for a proposal is called a content plan. If your first review of a building construction was to see if it’s 75% complete or not and on track to be 100% complete at the next review you’ve got some problems. Is the design of the building correct? Is it being built to fulfill the right goals? Will it be better than any other comparable building? Will it stand or will it fall? Do you build it 75% before you try to check these things? A pink team review is a test to see if you know what the proposal should be before you waste time on creating it with the deadline clock ticking.

A pink team review should not be a draft review at all, let alone a draft that isn’t expected to be complete, but is expected to be far enough along to see how the proposal is shaping up. Whatever that means. 

Instead, a pink team review should enable you to validate that:

• You know what should be written and how to present it
• The proposal, when written with this guidance, will fulfill the customer’s expectations
• What you intend to offer is what the company wants to offer and can be delivered below the price to win, before you commit to that offering
• The proposal reflects what it will take to win

Going straight to a partial (or even a full) draft won’t enable you to validate any of these things.

A pink team review should be of your proposal content plan, before a draft is even written. When you review a draft at pink team, people review your win strategies to determine if they sound good. This is a poor criterion to use for assessing proposal quality. Lots of self-praise and beneficial things can sound good, but unfortunately, do more harm than good in a proposal.

It also sets the proposal up for red team failure. This is because:

• You still have no defined criteria for proposal quality or the means to measure it without a proposal content plan to define them or compare the draft proposal to.
• The foundation that everything is built on remains unsound. The proposal writers, who lacked guidance during the first draft effort, have now been sent in a different, but equally subjective, ambiguous, and unverified direction. They are being asked to repair and complete a building built on a shaky foundation. That might be achievable, but not with a high win probability.
• The draft delivered to the red team is simply based on better guesses rather than a validated plan.

Is it better to write poorly and try to fix your proposal through infinite revisions until the deadline clock runs out, or is it better to take a little time, figure out what the proposal should be, and validate that is what the company wants the proposal to be before you write it? Expecting proposal writers to trip over the right proposal copy through revisions is high-cost and high-risk. For proposals, this translates into an expensive proposal effort with a low win probability. 

When you make your pink team reviews a draft review to check in on the proposal and make any changes in direction needed, you institutionalize a low win probability.  This is not what a professional proposal organization should do.