Proposal Team Structure: Key Strategies for Successful Remote Collaboration

Key Proposal Team Roles and Responsibilities Throughout the Proposal Process

In the past, building an RFP proposal team often meant gathering everyone on-site for hours-long strategy sessions in war rooms. Today, fortunately, we have more flexibility in building our proposal teams. With the rise of remote work and collaboration tools, you can now focus on selecting the best talent and expertise, regardless of location, to craft a winning proposal.

So, who should be on your proposal team? While roles and responsibilities may vary based on your company's specific needs and resources, here are some key roles and responsibilities essential to a strong proposal team for winning new business:

• Proposal Lead: This person champions the proposal process. Often a member of the sales team, an executive sponsor, or even a bid manager or procurement team member, the proposal lead initiates the go/no-go discussion, gathers the team, gets buy-in from the stakeholders, designs the RFP process, and sets the strategic direction. They are responsible for developing win themes based on the RFP, offering customer insights, and ensuring the final bid is submitted on time.
• Proposal Manager/Coordinator: Acting as the project manager, the proposal manager or proposal coordinator structures the team, establishes milestones, sets the timeline, and ensures resources are properly allocated. Sometimes this role acts as the capture manager, ensuring all the requirements in the RFP are defined, and leading capture planning processes to align the proposal with the requirements. This role is all about managing deadlines, tracking progress, developing workflows, and keeping the proposal on schedule from the kickoff meeting to submission.
• Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): SMEs provide the specialized knowledge and content necessary for the proposal. They develop and review sections of the response related to their expertise, ensuring accuracy, meeting the needs of the RFP, and relevance to the client’s needs. Often SMEs will be responsible for technical product knowledge, project plans, pricing, acting as a strategist on question responses, understanding deliverables, and being part of the review team. They are key stakeholders in the proposal process and will take the lead on developing deliverables. 
• Proposal Writer: The proposal writer takes input from the SMEs and refines it, ensuring the proposal has a consistent tone and meets all RFP requirements. This role also drafts key sections like the cover letter and executive summary and ensures the proposal’s win themes are highlighted.
• Visual Designer: Whether it's a graphic designer, desktop publisher, or marketing team member, this role manages formatting and ensures the proposal is visually appealing and complies with both the client’s requirements and your brand guidelines. Their goal is to add clarity, optimize your content, and polish through professional design elements.

Some teams will have just three people sharing these responsibilities and wearing multiple hats. Others will have large teams with a single person responsible for each critical requirement in the opportunity. However the team is structured, it's important to clearly define each team member’s responsibilities to avoid confusion or overlap. A well-structured proposal management plan, supported by a responsibility matrix, can help everyone stay on the same page. Every team member should know exactly what they’re accountable for, ensuring smooth collaboration throughout the proposal process to develop a winning proposal.

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Using a Proposal Manager to Optimize Communication in the Proposal Process

If responding to RFPs is critical for your business development, having a dedicated proposal manager is essential. This role not only guides the team through the project management of crafting the proposal but also ensures it’s delivered on time. A proposal manager brings structure to the proposal development process: what can otherwise feel like herding cats, particularly when it comes to keeping the team aligned and communication clear.

One of the key contributions to the RFP management process the proposal manager makes is establishing effective communication guidelines. As the proposal process ramps up, calendars can quickly be overwhelmed with meetings, breaking up deep work time for subject matter experts and writers and creating starts and stops in the development process. A good proposal manager will act as a team leader and establish guidelines to avoid unnecessary meetings. For example, by stopping the “Quick Update” meeting and ensuring team members utilize instant messaging, phone calls, and debriefs to facilitate more focused work, the proposal manager will keep the project and project team on task.

A proposal manager can streamline meetings by organizing a single daily check-in, like a morning Stand-Up. This short meeting serves as a space for the team to review progress, set goals for the day, and address any potential roadblocks. This keeps everyone informed and focused without overscheduling.

In addition to managing meetings, the proposal manager helps control the flood of emails that often accompanies RFP responses, formatting, and proposal work. They can define when and why emails should be sent, reserving them for critical updates or major shifts in the project. For daily communication, they can implement end-of-day status reports summarizing progress, upcoming deadlines, and key information. This provides the team with a clear sense of where things stand without constant back-and-forth emails.

For quick questions, feedback, or clarifications, tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack can facilitate more immediate communication. Direct messaging platforms allow team members to engage in group discussions or 1:1 chats, which can be referenced later, ensuring nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

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Six Strategies to Engage A Remote RFP Proposal Team

Remote work has the benefit of bringing together whatever experts you need, no longer constrained by geography. But it can add difficulty with figuring out the best ways to communicate so information doesn’t get lost and team members feel like they know where and how to work best. 

So here are some strategies for engaging with remote teams, specifically to help get high-quality proposals out the door on time: 

1. Create clarity around tasks and responsibilities: Make assignments, follow up, make sure team members don’t have questions. Arguably one of the best (and potentially only?) benefit of having your entire proposal team in a war room is to keep tabs on them. Are they making progress on their assignments? Are they focused? Let’s face it – creating clarity on tasks should always be true regardless, but even more important in a virtual setting.

2. Establish communication protocols and expectations: Between emails, chats, phone calls, and meetings, communicating in the digital age can sometimes seem overwhelming. Explicitly outlining when to use each form of communication is the difference between your team remaining informed and engaged, or important information falling through the cracks. 

3. Build your knowledge backbone: Knowledge and content libraries are often overlooked, underfunded, and underutilized. Proposal professionals know they’re necessary, but are often moving from one deadline to the next without the luxury of time to pause and update content for future use. In both virtual and face-to-face settings, the more content you can have at the fingertips of your proposal managers, capture managers, and subject matter experts, the more efficient, effective, and streamlined proposal development will be. From your boilerplate text and template to updated resumes and projects, now is the time to invest in your knowledge library. This can be stored in RFP software or something as simple as a comprehensive document. Use what works for your team and helps writers and SMEs with time management by finding the right answers quickly.

4. Use technology to your advantage: Remember when chalk boards were replaced with white boards and white boards replaced with smart boards? Well, there’s a new board that we all should have in our arsenal of collaboration tools: the online board. With tools like Microsoft Whiteboard and Mural, we are no longer bound to the confines of a conference room white board (or risk the possibility of your brainstorm being erased!). We now have white boards that we can access anywhere and at any time. These tools help with automation, summarizing notes from brainstorming sessions and storing proposal development ideas to be pulled up at a moment’s notice.

5. Limit distractions and focus on deep work blocks: War rooms are synonymous with working hard (and working long hours). Those in the war room are expected to have their head down, making progress on their assignments, proposal content, proposal reviews, and the overall deadline. On the flip side, in-person war rooms can also be incredibly distracting. One comment or question could lead to an hour-long discussion and disrupt the flow for all in the room. In a virtual setting, your team members have the ability to focus without distractions, in what we call deep work blocks. In between deep work blocks, it’s important to encourage your team to take regular breaks and step away from their computer. 

Bonus point! Try employing the Pomodoro method: as a group, agree to focusing for a one-hour deep work block with no distractions – no email, chat, phones. Then, come together for a 15 minute break to debrief, ask questions, post comments or ideas, or simply to talk about anything else other than your deadline!

6. Have fun! There are two types of proposal team experiences. There are those that are high stress, long hours, zero fun, and with little recognition or reward across the lifecycle of the RFP. Then there are those that are high stress and long hours, but that are fun, engaging, and rewarding. It goes without saying which type of experience you want to create for your team. As you’re scheduling out your proposal deadlines, consider also scheduling in moments for team building activities, virtual happy hours and coffee dates, or theme days – all where work talk is off limits. 

Bonus point! Reserve five minutes at the beginning of your daily stand-up meeting for One Good Thing – an around-the-horn rapid-fire opportunity for each team member to share one good thing happening in their personal life. Some days it might be as small as a fresh pot of coffee at home, others it could be as big as closing on a new house. We are more than our job, role, or career and the importance of providing a space for your team members to come together as people, not just coworkers, cannot be understated.

Of course, in-person war rooms will always have their place in the proposal world. Instead of being a requirement, though, let’s reserve in-person war rooms for those most critical of pursuits, and allow our bid team members space, flexibility, and balance we all so desperately crave. It probably won’t hurt your win rate either!

Contact us today to schedule a consultation and let us help you optimize your proposal team.