Don’t submit generalised, boiler-plate material in any qualitative section of a submission – ever, stresses Jordan Kelly, bid strategist and coach.
Bidders should hotly avoid the tendency to recycle sections from previous EOI and RFP responses. She says it’s dangerous, obvious, and makes for second-rate content, even if that content is intended “only” as base material and is otherwise “customised”.
A less obvious reason to avoid recycling is that customising a previous response sufficiently to produce a high quality “new” document generally takes longer than starting from scratch. And it still turns out a lesser article, she says.
If yours happens to be a technology bid, you’re on especially dangerous ground with a boilerplate approach. Your product is being procured not in its own right as a piece of technology, but rather for its ability to enable the satisfaction of a business requirement – and preferably for its superiority in doing so. It’s both tricky and highly inadvisable to take the application of your product in the context of one organisation’s underpinning business need and overlay it directly on that of the next customer’s.
