Most proposal teams hold color team reviews. Far fewer can say what each review is supposed to hand back. When a review ends with a conference room of people saying the draft "needs to be more compelling," the team has spent a day and gained nothing it can act on. A color team review is a production step. It has an input, a job, and an output. If any of the three is missing, it is a meeting.
Start before the RFP
Two reviews belong in capture, not in proposal development.
- Black Hat. Small groups each play one likely competitor and build that competitor's strategy and solution. The output is a revised set of win themes, including the ghosting themes that answer what the competition will say, and a capture plan with the competitive analysis finished. It is worth the effort on larger, contested pursuits; it is overkill on a small task order.
- Blue Team. A review of the win strategy and the draft solution: technical, management, staffing, transition. The output is an approved solution for each major section, a writer assigned to every section, and a list of gaps in data, subject-matter experts, and discriminators. If writing starts before Blue Team is done, the team is writing toward a solution nobody has agreed to.
Pink is about the story
Pink Team reviews the first full draft against the customer's requirements. No section is blank, even if all it holds is a description of what will go there. Reviewers check compliance and completeness, but the emphasis has shifted: is the story correct, current, and understandable, and does it answer the requirement and the need behind it? Reviewers should not be fixing commas. The output is scored volumes, in-line comments, and compliance problems captured for immediate action.
Price gets its own reviews
Lime Team is the first pricing review, held between Pink and Red. It compares pricing options against the technical offer and produces a revised pricing strategy and an updated cost model aimed at the price to win. Green Team is the final pricing review, normally between Red and Gold. It confirms that every pricing artifact the RFP requires is present, in the prescribed format, and, most important, that the price reflects the technical solution. A proposal should never go out the door offering a solution that cannot be delivered at the proposed price.
Red reads like the evaluator
By Red Team the document is nearly complete: Pink comments incorporated, graphics and resumes final or close to it, formatted the way it will be submitted. Reviewers take the perspective of the source selection board, in this order: compliance with every solicitation requirement, clarity and consistency across volumes, responsiveness to the customer's hot buttons, and only then whether it is compelling. The output is the same as Pink, scored and specific.
Gold and White Glove
Gold Team is two or three senior executives in the authority chain for the work, reading a submission-quality document for win themes, discriminators, and the few technical points that decide the award. White Glove is the last page-by-page check that the corrections from Gold were made and nothing broke in production.
How to tell whether your reviews work
- Every review has entry criteria. If the draft is not ready, the review moves; it is not held anyway.
- Every reviewer has a scoring sheet tied to the evaluation criteria, not a blank page.
- Every review has three parts: a short in-brief, protected review time of a day or two, and a debrief.
- Every review ends with named action items, an owner, and a date. "Make it more compelling" is not an action item.
Layered Intel installs this discipline for companies that do not have it and staffs independent color teams for companies that do but are out of reviewers. Either way, the test is the same: a review should produce action items instead of opinions.