What's Your Team Look Like

Tiffany Ramos

I know this isn't RFPIO-specific, but it is something I'm interested in understanding.

What does your team look like? The ones using RFPIO every day. Maintaining the content. Responding to RFPs. Project managing the RFPs in RFPIO.

What do you call yourself?

How many RFPs are you responding to? What about security questionnaires? Proactive proposals?

Sooooo many other questions I would love to ask!

Tara Kolinsky

This is a great question...I've seen a lot of team setups throughout my career. I tend to enjoy smaller companies best, so most of the companies I worked for, we had small teams. We usually called ourselves the proposal team or the RFP team. I also see Response Management Team on occasion. I find the teams that are most successful have at least one person 100% dedicated on content management (a luxury I didn't have at most of my companies but wish we did) and then others focused on proposal response. The content manager is important because without it, maintenance of the library always loses out to RFP deadlines and then content gets outdated fast.

Volume-wise, I've seen a huge span. Again this really depends on company size. I usually say max bandwidth of an average size (100-300 question) RFP at any given time is 4-5 per person a month and that really depends on complexity and turnaround. If the questions are very repetitive and straightforward, you can manage more, if the questions are more complex or a lot of customization is required, less. Private sector turnaround times were usually anywhere from 2 weeks to a month (with outliers always) and that plays a part also. Its been a few years since I've looked at those trends though, so those numbers may be outdated.

I've also found that how each proposal team manages the response can vary greatly. I am of the school of thought that the proposal team should be taking the heavy lift on the response. They should be answering anything that is repetitive and have deep technical knowledge to understand the complexities of the solution and be able to answer at least 80% of the response (likely influenced by the fact that I primarily worked at smaller start-up like companies). They should also be providing all project management responsibilities of the response. But I've also seen successful teams where the proposal team primarily focuses on the corporate content and relies on SMEs for pretty much everything else. And at big orgs, I've seen the RFP broken down even further which different sections being project managed by different proposal managers.

I'm always surprised to see just how much the approach varies from org to org.

With security questionnaires, that's another thing that seems to vary. I've worked for companies where that responsibility fell on the proposal team but also at some where the security team took that on. I think both approaches can be valid, so long as there is a solid review process in place when the proposal team is taking it on. Having someone (or several someones) focused on security questionnaires can be wise too since they tend to be higher in volume but more repetitive and the content is high stakes to get it right.

I wasn't leveraging Proposal Builder when I was a customer, but we did provide support for Proactive Proposals as well. I'd say that was a much smaller part of our role, but we created and maintained 'plug-and-play' content that could be used to craft a proactive proposal.