Writing a Winning Request for Proposal
Posted on 06/04/2010 in Sales Management
What Are the Three Most Critical Success Factors When Writing RFPs?
Consider how much time and effort you and your sales team spend preparing RFPs (Requests For Proposals). What if you could do this faster and improve your success rate?
I think that three of the most important success factors can be summarized by these questions:
- How can you write the most powerful executive overview? The executive overview can make a huge difference in terms of your success rate in winning more RFPs. Many decision makers will only read the executive overview, and will ignore the rest of your RFP.
- How can you set your company, service/product, and yourself apart? In other words, what differentiates you? State your differentiators as concisely as possible, for example, "The breadth and depth of our offerings allows you to reduce the number of your suppliers."
- What information should you include, and what should you purposely leave out? A simple guideline to follow is "If in doubt, leave it out”.
When writing and responding to RFPs, if you keep these three questions in mind, you’ll end up winning more RFPs and spending less time on actually writing them. Win more, work less is a great outcome.
If you’re interested in learning more about the RFP process, please visit our Writing a Winning Proposal workshop page.