Hi,
All of us have answered RFP’s and struggled with the requirements trying to answer them by our products features. We never took a step back to read between the lines.
Hot buttons, that’s what we need to identify. They are the the words that keep on popping in the RFP document because whoever wrote the RFP has an emotional bias towards some features, problems, or outcomes of the project that he can’t help but repeating these words.
Knowing these words (hot buttons) help you know what to focus on when you prepare your response, it also helps you create a “theme” . A theme is The repeated expression of your abilities and capabilities to:
- Address hot buttons.
- Meet evaluation criteria.
- Counter the competition .
I use a word frequency counter, which is an add-in to MS Word or a standalone program that produces great results.
The table below shows the RFP analysis.
The first section is requirements like “Decision support tools, Web based marketing repository”, etc. However the second part of the table shows words like consistency (mentioned 3 times in page 2, one time in page 6, and 2 times in page 16), collaboration (mentioned once in pages 2 & 13 and mentioned 2 times in page 26), and service level agreement (you figure it out).
It is clear that your customer appreciates consistency and is keen on collaboration among his team and finally he is concerned about having a service level agreement in place.
these are things that were not mentioned in the requirements but your customer will sure appreciate any response that “echos” these valuable concerns, they are your customer’s Hot Buttons !
|
Requirement |
Page no. |
Emphasis |
|
Decision support tools |
2 |
High |
|
Web based marketing repository |
6 |
Medium |
|
CV’s of team members |
21 |
Low |
|
Detailed implementation methodology |
23 |
Medium |
|
Hot Buttons |
||
|
Consistency |
2(3x), 8, 16(2x) |
X |
|
collaboration |
2,13,26(2x) |
X |
|
Service level agreement |
27,35,42,62 |
X |
