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If you haven’t talked with your customers, you have to do the same strategic preparation during the time you should be honing your response, and you’ll be in what we call reactive mode – you’ll be reacting to new information instead of acting to shape the outcome of the opportunity. Industry research bears this out: You win more when you start early.

      The nearby sidebar “Getting ahead of the curve” points you in the direction of some useful advice for avoiding reactive mode.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE CURVE

      • Find out as much about your customer as you can. See Chapters 3 and 4 for ways to do this, but the idea is to establish a relationship long before the customer releases an RFP.

      • Create a comprehensive, repeatable process for responding to RFPs. Having a documented, proven approach for your responses gives you a better chance of assembling the resources and people you need to win. Chapter 15 offers ways of putting knowledge and resources on standby for a rapid response.

      • Tailor your standard proposal processes to meet the deadlines and unique requirements of each opportunity. Chapter 6 also addresses this topic.

      • Create a standard template for responding to RFPs. Your customer may require that you use its template, but often you have the liberty to plug in the customer’s RFP within your response template, so you can distinguish your response from your competitors’ responses through branding, textual, and visual elements. We have lots more about this in Chapter 11.

      • Gather as much information about your likely competitors as you can, using insights from salespeople who have competed against them before. Chapters 5 and 7 help you do this.

      To craft the ideal Q&A-style RFP response, you access all the information you need to answer your questions and then write a dazzling persuasive document around these answers. A customer’s Q&A-style RFP can be daunting because of the sheer number of questions and 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.

      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).

      

If you aren’t responding on your own to the RFP, assign “owners” to each question and a due date (see Chapter 14 for a method to track your assignments). Many questions will require subject matter experts to answer them.

      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.

      

Using this approach to assemble your answers anticipates our recommended four-part response model, which we explain fully in Chapter 9. You can review an annotated template for this response method in Chapter 13.

      

Make each answer stand on its own merits by stating supporting proofs within the response. As a rule, avoid cross-referencing. For example, instead of responding to a question about your financial stability with “see our attached annual report,” provide the pertinent proof point in the body of your answer: “As proof of our financial stability, Standard & Poor’s verifies that our company has had 20 consecutive profitable quarters. No other bidder can match this record of stability.” This tactic does two important things: It helps you consistently echo win themes (such as financial stability) with specific proofs (20 profitable quarters) while making your response easier for readers to evaluate (no jumping to another part of the bid for proofs).

      3. Distinguish between the least and most important questions.

      • 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