Why proposal reviewers are the most difficult cats to herd

Proposal reviews are notoriously difficult to optimize. Part of the problem is that no matter how mature your process, it’s difficult to keep your proposal reviewers in sync with it.

The nature of the problem

I’ve found that at a lot of companies, it can be difficult just getting your reviewers to show up prepared. When reviewers show up without having read the RFP, the results of their review will be more subjective and less relevant to increasing win probability.

Reviewers tend to be executives and senior staff. Their schedules can be difficult to work into a proposal schedule. Even if they are available, the amount of time they are available may be limited. Depending on the size and complexity of the proposal, the effectiveness of the review can be undermined by reviewers who simply don’t have enough time to diligently read the entire portion of the proposal assigned to them.

It doesn’t help when they arrive thinking that a proposal review is the same as reading the document and telling people how to make it better. This may be part of a proposal review assignment, but there are other parts that may be even more important. Or you may have specific aspects of the proposal that you need validated. 

Timing matters

It can also be a problem when at different phases in the proposal process you need reviewers to focus on different things. During early drafts you need to confirm the proposal is heading in the right direction. However, as you get closer to the finish line, you need people to stop trying to rethink the proposal and instead focus on identifying defects. 

It is rarely a good idea to delay shipping a product because after manufacturing you decide it could be better if it had different features. When you absolutely must ship by a deadline, trying to retrofit changes after manufacturing introduces more risk of failure to ship a working product than the potential reward of increasing customer satisfaction. This is just as true for an intangible product like a proposal as it is for a tangible product. Quality is best designed in from the beginning. Reviewers who don’t understand this can be difficult cats to herd indeed.

Why guiding proposal reviewers is like herding cats
The combination of these is especially difficult. If reviewers show up unprepared and not available in sync with the proposal, especially during early-stage reviews, those reviews can pass without incident. Then if the reviewers engage more thoroughly in the late-stage reviews, they produce change against the deadline instead of change when you had time and resources readily available.

Another challenge are reviewers who want to see everything in final form. Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals. Editorial considerations come near the completion of the effort, after the completion of a full draft. Reviews that confirm the proposal is heading in the right direction are needed long before this. 

Late-stage corrections are far more difficult to make than early-stage validation of decisions, strategies, and direction. Waiting until the finish line to make changes like these is a great way to ensure you submit a hot mess instead of a refined proposal. Last minute reviewers acting as heroes trying to save proposals are more trouble than they are worth. They increase proposal risk instead of decreasing it. I’d rather have professionals instead of heroes working on a proposal any day. Unfortunately, executive and senior staff reviewing proposals tend to believe that they are intrinsically professional.

Balancing the size of the assignment and the number of reviewers

If later reviews are catching things that should have been caught in earlier reviews, it’s a sign that:

• They didn’t validate everything they were asked to validate, they weren’t given instructions regarding what to validate, or they didn’t follow the instructions
• They ran out of time or the assignments were too large

At some point, you have asked for so many things to be validated that it can’t be done in the time you have allocated for the review. And speaking of that, how much time are you allocating? Is it measured in hours or days? Are your reviewers available for that?

If you are making a tradeoff between the length of the review and the availability of reviewers, you don’t have enough review resources to do the job. You need smaller assignments and more reviewers. You also need your reviewers to follow directions regarding where to focus their attention to maximize the time they are available. 

How level of effort and accountability makes reviewers difficult cats to herd

This is where herding the cats becomes challenging when you are trying to focus reviews and improve the effectiveness of reviews. Proposal writers have to pass their reviews and will take some guidance because of it. Reviewers don’t take guidance nearly as easily. They aren’t assessed on their performance and lack accountability feedback.

What you can do to improve reviewer effectiveness

1. Give them more than just an RFP for guidance. Don’t assume they know what the proposal needs. Tell them. Turn it into a tool like a checklist. 
2. Have different reviewers focus on different areas (compliance, strategy, presentation, graphics, etc.). Hint: You don’t have to schedule all of the topics at the same time. You can have a strategy review early, an early review of compliance for the outline and production plan, a later review of compliance for fulfillment, an early review of solutioning to identify gaps, a later review of solutioning for competitiveness, very late-stage reviews for editorial considerations, etc. Lots of smaller but tightly focused reviews are more effective than big review-it-all-at-once reviews.
3. Tell the reviewers where they should focus their attention and what you want them to validate. Checklists and score cards can help. Hint: The purpose of the score card isn’t quantifying quality, it’s a way to get them to follow the checklist and direct their attention.
4. How many things do you need the reviewers to validate? If they can’t hold the list in their head while reading, they are going to miss things. Hint: You can cover everything with short lists unless you split them across multiple reviewers.
5. Schedule your reviews for how long it will actually take them to validate what you’ve asked for. If you are too accommodating to your reviewers, you encourage them to take shortcuts. If you compromise on the schedule, you are a party to compromising the effectiveness of the review and reducing the quality of the proposal instead of improving it.
6. Hold reviewer training. If you want to be political, don’t call it that. But do get the reviewers into a meeting before the review to manage expectations. Explain what you need from them. Make the session mandatory and review participation contingent on attending.
7. Staffing, staffing, staffing. Don’t allow people to claim a seat at the review who aren’t available to do what is needed or can’t focus on the proposal’s validation needs at the time of the review (early-stage vs late-stage). Make sure you staff your reviews to cover the skills needed to validate everything that needs validation. Recruit enough people so make the size of the review assignments manageable. 
8. Accountability. Accountability does not always have to be based on authority. Think about feedback cycles. How will your proposal reviewers be aware of whether they are doing a good job? How do you enable them to be aware of this during the review? Reading and commenting isn’t very tangible. What tangible actions must reviewers take during the review?  Ultimately, if nobody can hold the reviewers accountable for their performance, then they must do it themselves.

If it truly is important to win the proposal, then the company needs to act like it and invest the time required to validate that the proposal is what the company needs it to be. Showing up and just reading and commenting is not enough. Staffing your proposal reviews with whoever is available is not enough. Proposals have specific validation needs that change over the lifespan of the proposal, and the effectiveness of later reviews depends on the thoroughness of earlier reviews. Reviewers are senior staff. The way they show up and the behaviors they model have as much impact on the success of your company’s proposals as their review comments do.