EP098: How to Plan for an Effective RFP Response Timeline
Everybody assumes that the majority of an RFP response timeline should be devoted to the writing.
And yes, of course, the writing is very important. But there are many other pieces of the puzzle that contribute to a win. Pieces that take more time than we realize.
So, what does an effective response timeline look like? How much time does the proposal team need AFTER the first pass of technical writing is done?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I share my best practices for planning a successful response timeline, explaining why it’s crucial to get started right away—even if you decide not to bid.
I describe the challenge of compiling a response with multiple contributors, discussing how many days to build into a response timeline for strategy reviews, editing and formatting, final look and submittal.
Listen in for insight on building weekends, holidays and vacations into a response calendar and learn how to position yourself for a win by making sufficient time on the back end to finalize an RFP response.
Key Takeaways
Why it’s crucial to start on a proposal ASAP (even if you decide not to bid)
The challenge of compiling a response with multiple contributors and what to do about it
How many days to build into a response timeline for strategy review
My rule of thumb around how long to devote to editing and formatting an RFP response
Why I recommend building in an extra day for a final look and submittal
Why you need 10 to 14 days after the first pass of technical writing is done to position yourself for a win
How to work weekends, holidays and vacations into your response calendar
The importance of assigning a backup for every key person on the response team
What leaders can do to hold people accountable for meeting deadlines on a proposal response
Why we underestimate how much time it takes to finalize an RFP response
RFP Success Show EP98 Transcription
You're listening to the RFP Success Show, with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30, and even 50%. And, meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hello everybody, and welcome to the RFP Success Show. I am your host, Lisa Rehurek, Founder and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Today, I'm going to share with you some best practices, but really lessons learned in how to plan for an effective response timeline.
Lisa Rehurek (00:42):
Here's what happens. You get the RFP. You sit on it for a few days. You talk internally about whether you should respond. You see a due date out into the future. No one necessarily has a huge sense of urgency, maybe a little, but not quite enough. And in fairness, everybody has jobs. Everybody's working on other stuff. There's either other RFPs on your plate because you're a proposal person, or you're a business owner, a business leader that has a to-do list a mile long. And so, this gets added to the list, but nobody is right on top of it a lot of times. Not saying that that doesn't happen, but a lot of times people are just not right on top of it.
Lisa Rehurek (01:23):
And so, what happens is that days go by and people are still having sidebar discussions, and people are still trying to decide, should we bid on this? But, that will bite you in the patootie later down the line. So, I wanted to share some best practices with you, because we do see this all the time with our clients who come to us and say, oh, we've got an RFP that's due three weeks. It's like, okay, only three weeks. Well, we didn't get it for a couple of days, and then it's taken us a couple of weeks to figure things out. You've got to be working during that time.
Lisa Rehurek (01:57):
So, let's talk about what these best practices are. Number one, the very first thing is that you have got to get on this ASAP and start working on it. Get the writing assignments out. If you sit on it for more than a day or two, again, that loss of time is going to bite you in the ass later down the line. Even if you don't know if you're going to bid, start pulling together a response template. Start getting organization of how the response will go. Put those writing prompts in. A lot of times we'll put tables in to guide the writers on what information is needed, or we'll do writing prompts. Get all of that set up.
Lisa Rehurek (02:38):
I know it's a bummer if you end up not bidding and you put that work in, but it is a million times of a bummer if you do bid and you haven't started the work. Even if you don't know you're going to bid, you want to start pulling together that information. Put together a response calendar. And again, it might need be for nothing if it's a no bid, but it's going to buy you at least a day, maybe not two. And I know, it's like, eh. How good is that? You need that day or two. We're going to talk about that at the end here, or a little bit later. But, you're going to need any time that you can get, you're going to need, if it's a go. So, start working. Start getting the wheels in motion, and spearhead getting that decision made so that you can know one way or the other what's going to happen. All right. So that's best practice number one. Do not let it sit there. Get on it ASAP and start working.
Lisa Rehurek (03:35):
Number two. Everybody assumes that writers need the majority of the time. We think it's all about the writing, the technical writing. Super important of course. That is absolutely very important, but it's just a part of it. And there are so many other pieces of the puzzle that we forget, or we don't realize will take time. If you are a leader in your organization and you have never been deeply hands on in a proposal managing it from start to finish, I'm here to tell you, you do not know what it will take. In fact, one of our big clients, many years ago, we were working on a proposal for them and the timelines just kept slipping and slipping and people were not taking it seriously. And, at the end of the day, a subject matter expert and a proposal person flew out to the State in which we were bidding on a proposal on an RFP. And they had to be boots on the ground there, getting the production done, because we weren't going to have enough time to ship it.
Lisa Rehurek (04:49):
And in that process, changes kept coming through. People kept taking things out and adding more content, and it was eye opening for that subject matter expert who had never experienced that before. And he promised going forward, he was never going to miss an RFP deadline again, because he saw, oh, we'd print a copy of it and then somebody would come in and say we need to change page eight. Well guess what? You can't just change page eight because it shifts the content everywhere else. We had to reprint it all. Or, it changed the formatting. Or, it messed with the page numbers. There's a million things that can go wrong in that process. If you don't know, you don't know, and please stop taking for granted the people that are doing this, they do not have magic fairy dust that's going to show up in the middle of the night. They can sprinkle it on this RFP and it magically gets done. No. There is a ton of stuff that has to happen once the first pass of that technical writing gets done.
Lisa Rehurek (05:50):
So, this leads me to my next point. You have got to build in time for edits, reworks, more edits, more reworks, sidebar conversations, version control, all of that stuff. Not to mention final edits, editorial peer review, final formatting, final look. And then by the way, production, which thankfully in this day and age, we haven't had to deal with as much anymore, but it still exists out there. Let's hope it doesn't make a comeback after COVID. Let's hope that everybody stays on the bandwagon of submitting via email. Fingers crossed there, because that of course takes even more time. So, we forget about all these things and here's a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to dump on you that you need to be considering.
Lisa Rehurek (06:39):
First thing. If you have multiple contributors, things will be going back and forth. Questions are going to be asked. Questions are going to be left hanging. Nobody's going to take ownership. Loops will need to be closed. That all takes time and effort, and somebody has to be assigned to be on point to shepherd all of this through. And, it's got to be somebody that isn't afraid of pushing back. That isn't afraid of saying to some high level leader, hey, we need your answer to this. Or, hey, somebody put this question in here, but who is on point to answer it? And, then what will happen is more conversation is going to ensue, or people will say, well, I think that maybe we should approach it this way. What does everybody think? And then somebody else will say yes, but I think we should also kind of add in an element of X, Y, and Z. And still, nobody is actually answering the question so that it can be put into content.
Lisa Rehurek (07:35):
This happens a lot on the larger RFPs, more complex RFPs, where you've got multiple contributors. But, this all takes time and effort. Again, somebody's got to be on point. And that whole process alone for an RFP can take anywhere between three and five days. I'm not joking. It sounds crazy. I know you're thinking, well, it'll never take us that long. It will. It will take that long for these back and forth things. And again, it depends on how big your response is, but if we're talking about an average 100-page response with multiple contributors, it's going to take two, three days for those things to flush themselves out. Okay.
Lisa Rehurek (08:16):
Also, those contributors are likely to sneeze the ones making sure the content is right. But then, you also have to have somebody with the strategy piece, making sure that we're really looking at are we adding in our differentiators? Have we included good positioning statements?
Lisa Rehurek (08:34):
BY the way, a whole other big review piece is, are we answering the questions the way that they ask the questions? Have we organized our response? It's going to make it easy for the reviewer to follow along. All of that stuff can't happen until there's a solid draft. It's not effective. It takes time and is not effective until there's a solid draft. You should expect a day or two, again, if we're looking at a multi-contributor, 100-page response, we're probably looking at a good couple of days for this piece of it to happen when there's already a solid draft. If there's not a solid draft, it's going to take longer because there's going to be things floating in and out. So again, you should expect a couple of days just for this part. And if it's bigger than 100 pages, you've got to anticipate that it can take up to three to four days just for this process.
Lisa Rehurek (09:34):
Now we're up to, you know what, anywhere between five and nine days for these two parts of the process to start taking shape. And I will tell you right now, very few people build that in, because we assume here's the writing deadline, and then here's when the reviews can start. And we maybe give a day in there, if you're lucky, for whoever's compiling all of this to pull it all together and to make sure that all of the loops are closed. It's just not enough time. You've got to build in more time there.
Lisa Rehurek (10:11):
Then, by the way, now it goes into editing and formatting. And this is the piece that I feel that people take the most for granted. I don't know if it's a disrespect thing. I don't know why people think this can happen so fast, but it takes time. And, it takes more time than most people realize unless you've been the one ever doing it. And I always say, man, we need to assign an RFP to edit and format to somebody in a leadership role, just so they can see what it takes. Because I'll tell you what, as much as I love the Microsoft products and Word works well 95% of the time, there are these quirky things that happen where the formatting is buggy, or changes that you've just been making for the last hour are auto saving. There is all sorts of stuff that can happen because it's technology and it can break down. Computers crash, all sorts of things happen, so you've got to build in time for editing and formatting.
Lisa Rehurek (11:14):
Here's a rule of thumb. Every page, okay, one page, one page will take anywhere from 15 minutes on the low end per page, to 45 minutes or even sometimes an hour on the higher end to edit and format. If you have a 100-page document, again, every page is going to take you, I'm emphasizing the heck out of this because it's so important. Every page will take anywhere from 15 minutes on the easy side to 45 or 60 minutes on the high end.
Lisa Rehurek (11:52):
If you have a 100-page document and each page takes let's say on average 30 minutes to edit and format, that's 50 hours just for a 100-page document. Even if you rush it and cut that in half, and now we're working off that 15-minute mark, you say, okay, we can get every page done in 15 minutes. That's 25 hours on a 100-page response. That's three days. I get that a lot of times you're not going to have that three days and you're going to have to make concessions for getting this done. But, it takes time is the whole crux of my message here to edit and format a document.
Lisa Rehurek (12:37):
What I've seen happen so many times, is the person who is left with that puddle of stuff that has been dumped on them, to say, hey, get this done in the next half a day. It's impossible. And then a subpar product goes and people are unhappy. Now, I don't believe it has to be perfect. I'm not talking about perfection here. We've got to let certain things go. If you've got style guides within your company, some of that's going to have to go out the back door. It's not going to happen when we're crushed for time on RFPs.
Lisa Rehurek (13:10):
But, you still have to understand that it takes a good amount of time to do that final editing and formatting, making the document look good. Making sure that all the headings are consistent. Making sure that verbiage is consistent. Making sure that bullets are consistent, and that it reads easy, and that there aren't typos in it. And that some languaging is similar all the way through. I might have said that one already.
Lisa Rehurek (13:38):
But my point is, again, a 100-page document should take three days. You shouldn't cut it down much more than that. So now, what, we were at nine days? Now, we're at 12 days to get this 100-page document out the door after all that first pass of the technical writing. Then, by the way, building in a final look to make sure nothing gets lost in translation. This is especially important. The bigger the RFPs are, because things can get lost more easily, the more fingers you have in the pot, the more important this is because things get lost in translation. We always build in a day for final look and submittal, assuming it's an electronic submittal. Final look and submittal can happen on the same day.
Lisa Rehurek (14:31):
We also always like to say this should be a day prior to its due date. Because again, you just never know what goes wrong with technology and you just build in that buffer. I swear it will save you someday, and it's really important. So now, we've added two more days and we're up to 14 days. We're up to two weeks. Well, 14 days is two non-business weeks. That's two weeks of everybody working seven days a week. And then, none of this takes into account if you have to produce physical documents and ship. That's another two days. That's another two days. Actually, probably another day added on to that. But hopefully again, the world is moving to us not having to do that anymore, but it's still a consideration when you're doing your response calendar.
Lisa Rehurek (15:20):
If you really want to position yourself for the win, you need 10 to 14 days after the first pass of technical writing is done. And I would argue that 10 is probably a little bit too, that's probably not enough. It's probably a good two weeks after all of the writing comes in to do all of the stuff that you need to do in order to present a really solid proposal that can get you the win.
Lisa Rehurek (15:46):
And, let me throw in another thing. Never, ever forget to account for weekends, holidays, vacation, people being out sick. You should always assign backup for everyone. Every key person on the team should have an assigned backup in case they are out unexpectedly. And it happens all the time. So, who's the designated backup? You should know who will and won't work weekends. Your initial calendar should include vacation days for key contributors, holidays, and everything that we've talked about. That all should be worked into your response calendar for everybody to see. And, if you've got things happening on the weekends, you've got to get commitment from people to do it on the weekend and you've got to show that on the calendar.
Lisa Rehurek (16:31):
I'm really fired up about this right now, because we work with a lot of companies and some of them are so good and really on top of it, and they adhere to the deadlines, and others are not. And it's not like they're trying to be assholes. It's just that they're busy with other stuff. But, this is a sales opportunity. It's probably a big revenue opportunity for your company, and you've got to get people, if you're the leader of the company, you're the one who has to hold people responsible, including yourself, by the way, from meeting those deadlines. Because you think, again, us or any of the proposal team can sprinkle magic fairy dust, wave a magic wand. It's not going to happen. We're going to have questions. We need to go back to you.
Lisa Rehurek (17:21):
And, I'm really passionate about this because I think people often, often, very, very much underestimate the time things are going to take on the back end. So, at least half of the time should be spent writing and getting everything done on the front end. But the other half of the time needs to be spent on the back time, making sure that the appropriate reviews can get done. Because those reviews, by the way, are not just reviews. They are adding value to the proposal so that it's going to make you shine more to the evaluators. And it's going to add value to the readability of the proposal that the evaluators really, really, really need.
Lisa Rehurek (18:03):
So, heed my warning. Go back and listen to this again, and write this down. Make sure all of these things are incorporated into your calendar. Have your leaders listen to this, whatever it takes. I've been doing this for over 25 years, and it's still prevalent out there that people do not understand the time that it takes to shepherd a document to finalization. So, let's all get better at the really making sure that our timelines account for what they need to account for, and that we all adhere and commit to those timelines.
Lisa Rehurek (18:38):
All right, everybody, thanks so much for being with us today. We're going to be back in two weeks, talking with two powerhouses who have really learned some secrets to creating partnerships that work. You will not want out to miss that.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
This has been another episode of the RFP Success Show, with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at Podcast@RFP.com. No matter your business size industry, if you have an in-house RFP team, or need outside support, the RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20, and even 50%. Learn more at the RFPsuccesscompany.com.