As Bid Manager, one of the most important things you can do to ensure the quality of your EOI/RFP/RFT response is ensure the reading and utilisation of the bid strategy blueprint (that should have been the detailed output of your bid strategy development sessions).
Studying the bid strategy blueprint (before putting fingers to keyboard) must be recognised by each member of the writing team as a non-negotiable requirement in the quest to produce a winning submission.
Without the benefit of this guiding document, section authors will revert to producing empty, generic “brochureware”-style writing. Submissions will inevitably feature unsubstantiated, self-congratulatory and illogically structured content.
And it will be a struggle to clearly identify and articulate compelling competitive differentiators.
Don’t Force Yourself to Compete on Design
What’s more, when a bidder struggles to have its submissions demonstrate any “stand-out”, strategy-based content, that organisation frequently reverts to visual presentation for differentiation. This is a dangerous space to be in: if the field of competition is reduced to relying on tabling the fanciest visual production, those players are creating constant, and constantly increasing, pressure to stump up with large design and print budgets.
Also, in the absence of a clear and comprehensive bid strategy document – or its embrace by the writing team – there will be no central strategy that holds together all the different sections of a bid.
So . . . before sending your contributing authors’ submission sections on to your appointed editor, ensure each had been guided and informed by your bid strategy blueprint. You should be able to tell just a few paragraphs in . . . if not from the very first sentence.
Strategy Informs the Response (It Shouldn’t Be ‘Edited’ In Afterwards)
Two final points:
1) It is critical for each contributing author to base his or her piece on the content of the strategy blueprint, not to simply overlay these or “weave them in” after they’ve already produced their first draft.
The strategy elements should be inherent in their writing: their writing should articulate the strategy in responding to the client’s questions.
2) A user-friendly strategy blueprint, and the diligent use thereof, helps establish a consistent base writing style and communication tone. This is particularly so where the strategy document features large tracts of reasonably readily reproducible content.
See the article, ‘Don’t Make Strategy Documentation the Writer’s Responsibility’, Bid Leadership & Strategy section of Pursuits Academy.
