Guidelines for an Effective RFP Response
RFP responses come in many shapes and sizes, the successful ones compete on more than price. Here are the elements of your RFP proposal on which to concentrate effort towards a winning bid.
Executive summary
An especially juicy request for proposal may have hundreds of responses. Individuals (and more often an individual) is responsible for screening the possibilities from the distant misses. Your executive summary will be the basis of this judgement. It is nice to think that the amount of effort put into your RFP response will be returned (courteously) via the reviewers time. This is an unrealistic expectation when the reviewer has a stack of RFP responses and a short time to review them all. Your RFP proposal should have a single page summary highlighting all of the reasons why you are the best choice. This summary must also refer to specific requirements in their RFP.
Short is sweet
Your RFP response may not be the first RFP proposal the reviewer has read in that session, it may even be the last. Filling a document with buzzwords and extraneous information acts as a deterrent to the reader, actively working against your winning bid. Do not make the review of your RFP a chore, follow the philosophy that less is more so long as the requirements are addressed.
Examples
There is no substitution for work samples to assure a potential customer of your abilities. Seeing is believing, threfore remove all doubt concerning capability by shows three to five examples of work performed closely aligned with the requirements of the RFP.
More than price
Pricing is a necessary item in a RFP response. Understand that you will most likely be underbid therefore your value must be the differentiating factor in the RFP proposal not your price. Do not fall into the trap of offering the price you believe competitors are bidding. Price the proposal properly and move focus from price to performance. Repeatedly show why you are the right choice for the project and have the reviewer leave thinking "they would be perfect" rather than "they are the cheapest."
Frame all portions of your request for proposal response as an answer to the question : "Why are you the best fit for my project?" Doing this ensures you write a response about the project and to the issuer: the greatest steps towards a winning bid.