their varying degrees of complexity. You need an efficient way to make your way through the questions. The following four sections break down this process into stages – from easiest to most complex and strategic – so you can take purposeful steps toward developing a complete, compliant, and responsive proposal.
Getting the easier questions out of the way
Answering a customer’s questions properly is hard and tedious work, especially if you have hundreds to answer with a short turnaround. To be successful, you have to allocate to each only the time it warrants. To help you work your way through the questions successfully, use the following strategy to classify the questions by degree of importance and difficulty.
1. Place the customer’s questions into your proposal template so you’ll have a familiar framework for responding while still adhering to the customer’s prescribed structure.
Number the questions exactly as in the RFP. Create visual distinctions between sections, using descriptive headers, color schemes for contrasting between questions and answers, and theme statements so you can echo and highlight your win themes and your solution’s benefits. Using a standard template will also let your contributors see the proposal take shape as the process unfolds (to access a sample reactive proposal [RFP] response template, see the appendix).
2. Answer the easy questions first.
Identify the questions that you can address without too much noodle-baking (just worry about getting in the answers at this point; you’ll fine-tune the content later).
To identify and assemble your answers to the easy questions:
• Scan through the questions.
• Highlight those that you can answer easily and directly.
• Insert bullet points beneath the easy questions to collect ideas for your responses.
• In your first bullet point, state how you comply with the requirement, echoing the question’s language as much as possible.
• In the next few bullet points, list the main ideas and themes that you want to express in the order of their importance to the reader.
• Follow that with a bullet entry identifying your proof points (proof points are facts that prove your claims: statistics, documentation, testimonials, and so on).
• If appropriate, include a bullet item describing any imagery you want to support your answer.
• Finish off your answer with a key takeaway or point statement for your reader.
3. Distinguish between the least and most important questions.
Run through the questions again to decide where your priorities lie:
• Identify the questions that will have the most influence on the evaluators who assess and score your proposal. Set them aside for now because they will take more thought and effort.
• Respond to questions of lesser importance by using the bullet point method that you used in Step 2.
• Classify any question that directly relates to the customer’s hot buttons or to your key discriminators as having high priority (for more on this, refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness”). Your answers to these questions will usually require more research (or reliance on your subject matter experts) to craft your strongest proof points.
Working with more challenging questions
Time now to plan content for the difficult and most important questions that you identified in the preceding steps, such as those that directly relate to hot buttons.
A question may challenge you for several reasons. For example, it may
❯❯ Be one you’ve never answered before
❯❯ Require official documentation or other hard-to-find proof
❯❯ Ask you to calculate or analyze some data
We recommend that you answer the difficult questions in reverse order of importance. Distinguish which of the difficult questions are less important than others, and take the following steps to deal with these questions:
1. Approach the less important questions by using the bullet point approach outlined earlier in this section.
Refer to Step 2 in the preceding list in this section.
2. Determine the most minimal response that complies with your customer’s requirements.
Refer to the earlier section “Following instructions: Compliance and the case for responsiveness” for more information on what you can do to maximize compliance.
3. Figure out how much time you need to get the minimal response.
Your minimal response can be one of only three possibilities: “We comply,” “we do not comply,” or “we partially comply.” You may need to contact someone else for a definitive answer (for example, an engineer, a lawyer, or an executive), so quickly determine what expertise you need to fully answer the question, and either add the expert to your response team or email the expert (so you can get a written response). Send them the actual question from the RFP and a statement describing the context of your response and your win theme strategy. Ask the expert to reply by a specific date and time (“ASAP” is not specific!).
4. Lock down your sources and finalize the content as early as possible.
No answer is final until you sufficiently explain why and how your solution is better than anyone else’s on this particular requirement. Never simply say, “we
