What are the right words to use when responding to an RFP?

The right words to use in a proposal are the ones that the customer needs to hear to reach a decision in your favor. This can be hard to figure out. Luckily, when the customer releases an RFP, they give you those words.

Before you put pen to paper, proposal writing requires you to interpret and understand the RFP. This skill has more to do with your ability to win a proposal than your writing skills.

Where to find the words you need to use

When a customer writes an RFP, they identify the things they want vendors to address and the things that their evaluators will assess. When you read an RFP, you can see when they are indicating these things by the words the customer uses. For example, they may identify sections of the RFP as providing instructions, evaluation criteria, and a statement of work identifying what they require.

Within those RFP sections, they often use words like "shall," "will," and "must" to indicate their requirements. In fact, a lawyer specializing in procurement will tell you that terms like “shall,” “will,” and “must” have precise meanings and that certain words should be used for things that the customer believes are mandatory and certain words for things that are optional, facts, etc. But while this might be how RFPs should be written, proposal writers must deal with how proposals are written. Often the person writing the RFP doesn’t understand the subtle nuances. This can make interpreting the RFP more challenging. 

Words like “shall,” “will,” and “must” usually indicate things the evaluator will be looking for and assessing. They may indicate things like customer requirements, instructions, terms and conditions, or facts, depending on how precise the customer is with their terminology. This is where interpretation becomes important. What you can rely on when they use those words, and others like them, is that they are indicating or identifying things that matter. 

The customer may be doing this to bring things to your attention, to the attention of their own evaluators, or both. It may be necessary to acknowledge them to be considered compliant with the RFP. The evaluator may be tasked with accounting for whether you responded to them in your proposal. The words that follow "shall," "will," "must," and other similar words are telling you what words to use in your proposal. You want the evaluator to be able to easily find the indicated words. They are what the customer will be looking for.

You should also look for lists, bullets, numbered items, and things put in tables. When the customer itemizes things, they make it easier to account for them. You should make those lists easy to find and just as easy to account for in your proposal. Using the same bullets, numbers, table formats, etc., that the customer used can help.

You should make your proposal checklist-simple to evaluate. Whether it's true in reality or not, it can help you write your proposal by picturing the evaluator looking at your proposal and checking off on a list as they find each keyword indicated in the RFP.

Sometimes lists are simply words separated by commas. If the customer is looking for three things separated by commas, you need to decide how important those three things are. If they are the essence of what the customer is looking for, then you might want respond to those requirements with a bullet for each, with a run-in heading that uses those words. Or a table with those words as headings. You might even want a graphic that shows the relationship between those three requirements (are they a sequence, parallel activities, equally important (or not), goals/results, things that have prerequisites, etc.). When the customer looks at the section they should easily see those key words, see that you've responded to them with what they need to evaluate, and also see that you've shown some insight about them that goes beyond the RFP.

Once you figure out what words they have indicated are important and that the evaluators might look for, you should write your proposal  based on those words. Pay particular attention to the words used in any evaluation criteria provided. If there will be a formal scoring or decision process, it will be based on the words in the evaluation criteria. Those words may very well determine whether you win or lose. You should use their words when you write to fulfill the RFP requirements, but in order to win you should also do write in a way that adds up to a superior score against the words of the evaluation criteria.

Turning their words into your proposal

The job of a proposal writer is not to simply present the offering in a way that "sounds good." It’s to present the offering in a way that maximizes your chances of winning. Part of doing this requires using the language of the RFP when you write about your offering. When you are looking for what words to use, use theirs.

What you don’t want to do is repeat the RFP exactly. This makes it harder for the evaluator to determine whether you understand what you are saying and can be trusted. Instead, take your offering design, bid strategies, and the points you wish to make, and articulate what differentiates them using the words from the RFP. Think of the words of the RFP as providing a structure. Your words describing your offering need to fit within that structure.

You should review your proposal by making sure that all keywords indicated or identified in the RFP can be found in your response. You should read the proposal and evaluate it the same way the customer will. If you have trouble finding any of the key words in the RFP, even if you eventually do find them, it’s a safe bet the evaluator will also have difficulty finding them. And they may not even try that hard. Companies have lost proposals because the customer couldn't find things that actually were addressed in the proposal — they were just hard to find or didn't use the same terminology as the RFP.

A few words about page limitations

If the RFP contains several times the number of pages they limit the length of your proposal to, it may be physically impossible to include all of the keywords in the RFP and stay under the page limitation. The words you should use are the ones the evaluator will be most likely to look for. This means you must look past what they have indicated are keywords to consider what words they need to perform the evaluation. This requires correctly interpreting the RFP.

Understanding which words the evaluator needs to see

This also requires understanding the customer's evaluation process, right down to the forms they use. Sometimes helping the customer reach their decision comes down to helping them complete their forms, and sometimes that comes down to matching the words in your proposal to the words on their forms. This is not being trivial or nit-picky. In a page-limited proposal, doing this can be vital, since any words that do not impact your evaluation are extraneous, even if they are in the RFP. Every word you put in your proposal should be measured not by how important you think it is, but by how much it will impact the evaluation made by the customer.

Before putting pen to paper, pause for a moment to consider what the evaluator needs to see in order to perform their task. Proposals do not get read. They get evaluated. Evaluators don't read proposals. They score them. 

The customer may not read your proposal at all. They may search for evaluation criteria keywords and then score what they find, bouncing all around your carefully articulated narrative without any concern for "how it flows." Knowing how your customer performs their evaluations is critical for achieving a high win rate.

What the customer needs from you

Customers who go to the trouble of publishing an RFP typically need to assess certain things about each proposal and bidder:

• Have they met the qualification requirements that were in the RFP?
• Did they follow the instructions I gave them?
• Does what they propose match what I said I needed?
• Did they accept all the terms and conditions that will be part of the contract?
• Which proposal best fulfills our requirements at a price we can afford?

They often ask these questions before they ask which offering they like more. If they have written evaluation criteria, they may not even consider which proposal they "like." They will consider how the bidders compare on the basis of the evaluation criteria. How the evaluation criteria are worded, and how your proposal stacks up against them, will determine whether you win.

When well-liked incumbent contractors lose, it is because their proposal did not get the highest score against the evaluation criteria. Being "liked" did not help their score because they wrote what they thought sounded good instead of what the customer needed to award them the proposal.

At each step, ask whether you have used all of the words from the RFP that matter. If the page limitation means you can’t possibly address every RFP keyword, then think about the information the evaluators need and their evaluation or scoring process, and give them the words they need to make a decision in your favor. No matter how attached you are to a particular way of articulating things, you should make sure you are using the words the customer needs to hear in order for you to win.