The Proposal is the Closing Argument

Suppose you are a young lawyer who was just hired into a big firm. But instead of being brought into a new case at the beginning, you are brought into an existing case at the end. The legal team assigned to the case has been arguing in open court for the last 30 days. They’ve been establishing relevant facts with the jury, building their arguments supporting why your client is innocent, and doing their best to undermine the prosecution’s argument.

But here’s the problem. Even though you weren’t present for all of those arguments, even though you weren’t witness to how they presented the facts or even what facts were presented, they’re handing off the case to you to deliver the closing argument. Wait, what?

This doesn’t make sense, of course, but that’s exactly what we do when the salesperson hands off an RFP to the proposal team without thoroughly briefing them on everything that’s happened up to that point.

When your staff sits down to draft a proposal in response to an RFP, their job is to present the proverbial closing argument. This necessarily means the proposal team must get briefed by the salesperson or SME about who the decision makers are, what motivates them, who the influencers are and how they’re impacted, who the current vendor is and how well they’re viewed internally, the history of the program and how it came to be, etc. They need to understand the backstory. Only then will your proposal team be able to write effective proposals.