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Proposals to states and federal government is easier to automate than proposals to the commercial sector.
A federal RFP is pretty much a standard format with standard types of sections. It is much easier create an automated mechanism when you have these types of requests.
However, when you get involved in commercial environment, it is up to the entity writing the RFP to specify the format of the submission.
Some will want narrative, some want you to fill in a matrix, some want a Question/Answer, Question/Answer and some ask a question and you write a page or pages of response for that question.
There are WAY too many variables to address with a canned approach.
Besides...I don't think anyone said that all proposals are written from scratch. However, Exec Summaries, Solution Overviews, Win Themes, etc., are. You take a section of boilerplate from another effort as a starting point. However, it is a starting point. When you look at that material, you ask the team why it won...Expand it and ghost-write the material about the competition (They are probably different this time). If it lost, why did it loose, and then you fix it (the section or the product or both). You don't drop it in and forget about it. You then write material around it to address the particular effort and to integrate it into the whole effort.
And by the way...YES, sometimes (not often thank god), you do write from scratch. Companies do come out with new products that have never been proposed before once in a while.
Unfortunately, the way the original situation was addressed was to enter variables in a front end (name, subject, product), and out pops a proposal.
Sorry...I've done this for 20 years...it don't work.
John Posada
Name withheld upon request. Please reply on list.
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Whether push-button proposal components are achieveable or desirable
depends on what your management means by proposal.
I've worked for several years as a proposal manager, coordinator, and
writer for high-tech companies that contract with the federal government
and state governments.
In this arena, every company has a selection of boilerplate material that
can be customized for each bid. It's absolutely unheard-of to write entire
proposals from scratch.
