RFPs & Proposals
We don’t make money if we don’t effectively and truthfully sell our products and services.
We use business intelligence tools and cold-calling to develop business leads. At some point, we have to “pitch” ourselves using formal proposals and presentations.
The Process
We know the process of a business proposal:
- Either
- Marketing develops a new business lead or
- A potential customer approaches you with a project
- You submit a proposal to deliver the project
When you submit your proposal, you probably include these sections in the document:
- Cover page
- Executive Summary
- Statement of Work
- Management Plan
- Corporate Qualifications
- Staffing Plan
- Contracting Costs & Pricing (Financial Plan)
I’ll concentrate on those sections of a Proposal where my help is most productive.
Executive Summary
The Executive Summary is supposed to be just that: an overview by the company briefly describing how they will accomplish the mission. Ideally, the Executive Summary is drawn primarily from the Statement of Work.
However, all too often we find that the Summary repackages either the System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) or Agile methodology as the company’s own, unique project development tool.
Statement of Work
This section describes in detail the technical methods the company intends to use to accomplish the mission and deliver the project. Particularly critical with responses to government—federal, state, & local—proposals is to organize these data according to the format specified by the agency in their Request for Proposals.
Agency staff “score” your response by comparing your submission to the order envisioned by the agency in its RFP.
I help you with your RFP response by translating the engineerese and acronyms used by technologists into English.