The previous installment discussed the problems associated with waiting until the last minute to tackle critical issues and providing overblown corporate experience and personnel chapters for federal proposals. We recommend following the steps outlined below to eliminate such problems.

The Keys to Success

• On the first day of the proposal effort, gather all of the (i) resumes, and (ii) past corporate experience summaries for possible inclusion in the proposal at hand.
  
  
• Assign the responsibility for drafting the personnel and corporate experience chapters to the appropriate staff members. We suggest that the Proposal Manager is best equipped to oversee the development of the corporate experience summary.
  
  
• Compare all collected resumes with the requirements of the RFP and determine what is missing from the resumes. Call staff members and ask questions such as, "Do you have more Oracle DBMS experience? Your resume only mentions it briefly. Please send me an e-mail describing every instance in which you used Oracle DBMS - - no matter how incidental you may think the experience may have been." Give the staff a deadline to provide the requested information and scream to management if the deadlines are not met.
  
  
• Follow the process described immediately above for every resume that doesn't meet or exceed the RFP's requirements. Revise the resumes based on the e-mail responses from staff members.
  
  
• Repeat the process for drafting the corporate experience summaries. Call project managers and ask questions such as "Did you use any asset management software in performing the ABC contract and do you have any help desk performance statistics that I can cite? If so, tell me all about them in an e-mail." As discussed previously, give the project managers a deadline to get back to you.
  
  
• Follow the procedure described immediately above for every corporate experience summary that doesn't meet or exceed the RFP's requirements. Revise the summaries based on the e-mail responses from project managers.
  
  
• Write the necessary chapter introductions and assemble the personnel and corporate experience chapters in draft form. Include exactly the number of resumes and corporate experience summaries asked for in the RFP. Evaluators attending our proposal writing courses tell us that including more information than asked for in these two chapters can be detrimental to your evaluation score. You not only fail to gain evaluation points, it can cause you to lose points. Evaluators tell us, "We find it annoying to have to read information not requested in the RFP. From our perspective, we assume that you are overdoing it to make a weak company look stronger."
  
  
• Send the draft versions of each to management for review early in the process along with excerpts from the RFP outlining the personnel and experience requirements. Management can point out where more tailoring should be done and the proposal team should have sufficient time to refine them to meet management's expectations.

By tackling the aforementioned issues early on in the project, your proposal team will have more time at the eleventh hour to address more pressing issues. Personnel and experience are two of your most important corporate assets. Your goal should be to not lose a single evaluation point when these assets are evaluated.