What do you mean when you say “review” a proposal?

Most people approach reviewing a proposal the same way they approached reviewing papers in school. They think of the task as reading and commenting. Unfortunately this is only one way to review a proposal, and it is far from the most effective. Consider:

• What are reviewers supposed to be commenting on?
• Are reviewers following a checklist or compliance matrix?
• Will reviewers complete a form or have questions to answer?
• Are reviewers even working from a definition for what proposal quality is? Are they all using the same definition?
• Do reviewers have written proposal quality criteria to validate?
• Are reviewers sight-reading or being formal and deliberate?
• Will reviewers provide subjective opinions or is effort being made to be objective? How?
• What are reviewers trying to accomplish via the review? What are the goals for this review?
• Are they being asked to "review" the proposal without any guidance, and assuming they know what to do?
• How are the reviewers going to cover everything that needs to be considered?
• Are reviewers going to be divided up to focus on different things?

There are so many things that need to be considered and factored into proposal writing. There are so many requirements and trade-offs. There are so many sources of input. And there are so many strategies. This also makes a proposal hard to review. How do you consider and double-check everything during a review? 

The answer is, “you don’t.” It’s not possible, unless you want your review to take nearly as long as the writing took. Don't set your reviews up for failure by being open ended with expectations.

Do you really need to double-check EVERYTHING? My answer is to prioritize attention based on the impact each thing has toward winning. You are not trying to submit a perfect, flawless proposal. You are trying to submit a winning proposal. The distinction is important. It drives how proposal quality should be defined.

When your reviews complete without reviewers getting through the whole document or providing the validation required, it usually means you've over-scoped the reviews. In one sitting, it's not possible for a single person to review:

• RFP Compliance; and
• Bid strategies; and
• Messaging; and
• Level of detail and completeness; and
• Writing, style, consistency, and grammar; and
• Graphics, layout, and presentation; and
• Competitiveness

A partially completed review is not better than nothing if it misses something that results in a loss. That defeats the purpose of having reviews.  

This means it’s not so much a question of “what should I look for” during a proposal review, but rather how to structure your proposal reviews so that you can check EVERYTHING that impacts WINNING (and nothing else matters).

What do you mean by "proposal review?"

When you review a proposal, should you be looking at whether you followed the instructions, whether it is optimized around the customer's evaluation criteria so that it gets a high score, or whether you have the right solution? Should you look at compliance or value? What about whether it's compelling, tells the right story, and has the right positioning and messaging? What about whether it's competitive? Or if it contains differentiators, win strategies, proof points, experience citations, etc.? Most companies want their reviews to consider ALL of that.

You should realize is that you’re not going to review EVERYTHING in one sitting. This means you’re going to need more than one review. In fact, it’s vital to have more than one proposal review. 

If you have multiple reviews, then each review should have a different focus, and you need to define the scope of each review. Reviews of "a draft" that consider EVERYTHING are a good way to lose. A proposal review without a defined scope is a safety net with holes, relying on luck to catch the problems.

The best way to define the scope of your reviews is to start by defining what “everything” means. Identify “everything” that needs to be validated. Then allocate those things to as many reviews as it takes. There is no reason why you can't validate things in parallel, and most quality validation does not require the proposal to be formatted the same as for submission. How many reviews should you have?

The only answer, if you want to win, is all of them. For some proposals, covering everything you want to review may require a large number of small, manageable informal and formal reviews. For others, it might be just a few major reviews. The number of reviews does not matter. What you are reviewing and whether your reviews fulfill their goals matter tremendously.

Along the way, you’ll find that the things you need to validate fall into categories and phases of the proposal’s development. But don’t make the mistake of organizing your reviews around moments in time. Organize your reviews around what you want to validate.

Whatever you do, don’t look at the calendar, decide to have a certain number of reviews, and then decide what they should focus on. This tends to result in multiple un-scoped, inconsistent, and ineffective reviews. 

How do you define the scope of a proposal review?

Start with what you need to validate. What you review is far more important than how you review it or when you review it. You might have multiple teams validating different things at the same time. You might even have some things that can be validated while the proposal is still being written. Some things need to be validated before others can start. Some things can be reviewed by someone working on the proposal, while others might require some distance and objectivity. There are many ways to conduct proposal reviews and none of them is best for all the different kinds of validation you require. If the proposal is small, you might have one person validate an item. But if the proposal is valuable, you might require a team of people to validate the very same item.

Start with what you need to validate. Then allocate it to reviews, reviewers, and the calendar. This enables you to make sure that everything that needs to be validated gets addressed, and that you do it at the appropriate level. This becomes the scope for each review, giving your proposal reviews specific purpose, greater accountability, and more reliability.

When you reach this level, there are several benefits that result. The first is that you can define your review criteria before the writing starts, so your writers and reviewers are on the same page. You can also turn the process of identifying criteria and allocating them to reviews into a forms-driven process that not only makes it quick and easy, but also enables you to review how you are going to review the proposal. This enables you to tailor the review to the needs of the proposal, while validating that it still meets the needs of your company for oversight. This takes you to much higher levels of proposal quality and improved win rates than simply having an un-scoped, un-defined proposal “review.”

To accomplish all of this, we created a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation. This formalizes how to identify proposal quality criteria, allocate them to reviews, use them to define the scope of reviews, and even how to validate that you have sufficient validation.