Ready to respond to a request for a proposal? You will be after reading this blog post! These requests from government entities are called a few different things: Requests for Proposal (RFP), Request for Qualifications (RFQ), Invitation For Bid (IFB), and/or Request For Pricing – Commodities (RFP-C).

They are all essentially the same thing: all the reasons your company is the best fit for a government contract. And the great news is that you already have much of this information. It’s just a matter of organizing and sometimes reframing it to fit the proposal’s needs.

Before you even take on your first proposal, organizing your business documents is helpful so they’re easily accessible when creating RFPs. To do this, create a proposal library which should include critical documents about what your business does. It may also be helpful to create email aliases for every role in your company, such as marketing or accounting. Creating a proposal library will help organize your emails by topics and keep your inbox from being flooded with everything.

The secret to writing is starting somewhere. It is very easy to get overwhelmed by how much information you think you need for an RFP, but often getting started is the hardest part. Pick a section and go. You don’t have to write everything for a proposal in order, and once you get started with one item, you’ll find that the others come more easily.

Your content does not have to come out perfect the first time. You can edit blank space, so create a draft and tweak it. As you do this over and over, you’ll find it comes to you easier. Make sure to save your past proposals in your library to reuse and repurpose the content again.

Different entities will have different point values. Some are numbered systems, like how you were graded in school. Others use a percentage system. No two submissions score the same. Each agency has its own scoring system.

A few things you can do to make the most of any point system are:

• Be clear about the services you provide and your commitment to doing good work
• Demonstrate your understanding of the project
• Give examples of your civic activities, which can be important to some organizations.

These can all be documents in your proposal library, so they’re easy to pull.

As you do more work with the government, your experience will grow, and you want to ensure you’re documenting that accurately for future proposals. Think outside the box when documenting this. For example, an architectural and engineering firm’s vice president and the principal may hold that title, but that may not be their role in every project. Sometimes they may act as a subcontractor, sometimes the prime. If the project is civil, they are likely the project manager, but if it’s structural, they might be the civil engineer. That’s a lot of experience and expertise that could be relevant to future projects.