6 reasons why one proposal review is worse than none

I know a lot of companies that consider it a big achievement to have a major review of their proposals before they submit them. You might think it is if you compare it to not having any review. But having one review can actually provide less quality assurance than having none. Having one review can do more harm than good. Consider:

Would two reviews be better? Not really. It’s still an exercise in what you want to give up. Do you want to give up making sure you’re ready before the RFP release? If you have a plan and a draft review, will it be an early draft or a mature draft? Are you still overloading the reviewers? What about a final review at the end? What about separating strategy, offering, pricing, and draft reviews? It’s not the number of reviews that matter. It’s what you validate as a result of having your reviews that matters. 

Instead of one big review, have lots of little reviews that validate specific aspects of proposal quality.

The way you figure out how many reviews you should have is to start by thinking about what you need to validate. What you need isn’t a set number of reviews. It’s validation of specific attributes and criteria. You need a list of things to validate, that get allocated to a number of reviews. And the number of reviews might change. Some may be formal, some may be informal. But the result is that you validate your decisions and results.

So after Proposal Content Planning, the final piece of the puzzle was to add the list of all the things you need to validate into the process, but we built the process to customize that list around what it will take to win a particular bid and then provide guidance on how to allocate the criteria to specific reviews. It resolves the problems we had doing reviews the traditional way for years. You can use it in combination with the Readiness Review and Proposal Content Planning methodologies to provide a total solution, or you can use the criteria from our Proposal Quality Validation methodology to enhance your own review process.

Whatever you do, if you don’t change from having a single review you will continue to be stuck. Making the change will involve changing your vocabulary and corporate culture. As long as people expect there to be “a" proposal review they’ll tend to fall back on old habits. That’s a key reason why we started focusing on validation — we needed people to look past “the" review and focus on what they really needed to “validate.” It ends up being an effective way of getting people to actually think about what drives proposal quality and that alone makes the effort worthwhile.