When the pack of leaders crosses the finish line at the end of the race, do you want to be among that pack or do you want to be leading it?
This is an important question, because one answer indicates an attitude that can put you among the leaders but not necessarily give you the contract.
Following are two examples from my own experience. In both cases, I was an inside marketing staff member with the same employer, and the same person was the principal on both efforts.
The first effort was a municipal public works department annual rotation list for civil engineering services. The Request for Qualifications (RFQ) said that multiple teams would be selected.
The principal gave me the RFQ and said, "They're going to select five or six teams, so they will most likely short-list 10. So just get us a top 10 position. Get us on the short list and I'll win in the interview."
I asked him which projects he wanted to present, who he wanted on the organization chart, and in what role(s). Then I started assembling the draft Statement of Qualifications (SOQ).
I sent the managers of each exemplary project a copy of the scope and the current project description, and asked if they had any additional details relevant to the scope. I also located and sent them a project image and asked if there were any better pictures that never got to the marketing files.
I sent each person on the organization chart a copy of the scope and asked if they had any other relevant projects that had not yet gotten onto their resumes.
I gave the completed draft to the principal, then took care of his mark-ups, printed and packaged the SOQ and had it delivered. Two weeks later we found that we weren't short-listed. Apparently, I had gotten us 8th place, but the city only short-listed 7 teams.
The second example was for a regional transit agency. We were already working on the conceptual design. But the agency decided to resolicit for the detailed design, thinking that might bring some new minority-owned firms into the mix. However, many firms didn't know how politically-motivated that client was, and we didn't want other firms to think we had lost the project for technical reasons, so the detailed design became a "must win" project.
The principal said I shouldn't work on anything else until the submittal was delivered. So for the next 30 days, I worked on that SOQ—nothing else. I updated resumes and project descriptions, wrote new text about M/WBE utilization on our projects, tracked down letters of praise for other transit system projects, some letters in their entirety and pulled quotes from others. I got hold of a system map and indicated every location in the system where we had led or participated in a project.
The client had intended to go from SOQs to technical proposals and interviews. But when the SOQs were evaluated, the client announced that it was selecting from the SOQs because the highest ranked team was 400 points ahead of the second ranked team.
We were the selected team!
The moral of the story:
When you participate in team sports, you play to win. When you set out to win work, you have to write to win. You won't come in first if you plan on coming in second or third.