DAY ONE
Revise or prepare a written Customer Profile that summarizes the customer’s overall requirements. Verify the date due of the proposal, and find out from the customer who will be reviewing the proposal for the customer—names are best, but titles will do. Try to get a general description of the review process.

Prepare a Strategic Summary — this documents the customer’s requirements and how your company is going to meet them with a successful solution. Highlight what you know of the customer, what the strategy will be. Describe the competition. Include any problems that may require special handling in the Strategic Summary.

Prepare an initial High-Level Timeline for the proposal development and production and do a sanity check against holidays and other factors. Show all of the major tasks and milestones. Prepare and distribute a Team Contact List.

DAY TWO
Read the written requirements. Carefully review the due dates for all of the deliverables. List the submission requirements (hardcopy, softcopy, format, preferences, restrictions). Prepare the RFP Outline. As you proceed, insert any questions that occur to you into the outline. You will use this outline later to prepare your storyboard.
Review each section of the RFP and use the Products and Services Checklist to prepare a list of products or services required. Flag any products or services that may not easily be provided. Make sure that the client has included all the information needed for the response. Determine your partnering strategy. Revise the Strategic Summary.
Fully analyze the customer’s RFP. Break down the paragraphs into an outline of specific requirements, removing the adjectives and adverbs—not anything needed to identify the requirement. This will become the Response Outline. Use the required response outline, or follow the RFP outline.

During the analysis, prepare a list of Questions. When you do not understand something or see anything of which you are unsure, insert questions into the Response Outline.

DAY THREE
Prepare a Requirements Matrix using your RFP Outline. Cut and paste this document into an Excel Spreadsheet for the Requirements Matrix and Assignment Matrix. Allocate each item in your Requirements Matrix to one person on the response team.

Prepare a Storyboard. Estimate staffing requirements and engage the rest of the support needed to produce proposal. Estimate the scope of production (numbers of sections, pages, binders, tabs, appendices, number copies, etc.) Estimate the production costs and obtain approval.

Prepare a Detailed Proposal Timeline. This can be an MS Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint document. Make sure that you have allowed for production, delivery, and Mr. Murphy.

Prepare a Bid/No-Bid Meeting Agenda, revise the Strategic Summary, and schedule the Bid/No-Bid review. You should have raw competitive pricing before the Bid/No-Bid meeting.

DAY FOUR
You are now ready to conduct a Core Team Review. Distribute the review documents well in advance of the meeting and prepare a written agenda. Make sure that everyone on the team understands the their roles and responsibilities. If possible, hold the Core Team Review early in the day. It is best to have someone keep Minutes and a list of action items. Cover each agenda item and the win themes, document all comments, questions, or action items. Get someone to take responsibility for each action item and set a specific due date.

Ask everyone on the team to provide additional questions during the kickoff. One person is normally responsible for compiling all of the questions into a single set for the account team to deliver to the customer.

Review the minutes, action item assignments, and next steps at the end of the call. Discuss next steps and deadlines for deliverables. Deliver the team Assignment Matrix and a revised Timeline to all members of the team. Distribute the Minutes immediately after the meeting.

Now that you have completed the Team Review and everyone knows his or her tasks and responsibilities, complete the Expanded Outline of the response. Begin with the Response Outline, inserting and highlighting all Questions. Finally, insert response outlines, comments, themes, and other text to help the writers.

DAY FIVE
Begin the process to obtain the costs of the solution. Obtain additional support where needed and brief anyone who was not able to attend the Core Team Review. Prepare and distribute the Writer’s Kits (Expanded Outline, Acronym List, Assignment Matrix, the Team Contact List, and all other appropriate documents.)
If you are teaming with another company on the proposal and contract, make sure that there is a valid non-disclosure agreement and a teaming agreement. Valid means signed, dated, appropriate for the specific task, and has not expired.

DAY SIX AND BEYOND
Sit back, relax, and follow through. The hard part is done. If you did it well, the rest will be as smooth as the weakest link on the proposal team permits. Get ready to crack the whip and conduct the team color reviews.