The proposal backlog after a long weekend
Memorial Day Tuesday: 11 RFPs in the inbox, three SMEs back from PTO, and 90 minutes before standup. Three triage moves we use.
It is Memorial Day. Tomorrow is the Tuesday after. The proposal team’s inbox has been quietly accumulating since Friday afternoon. The actual hour of triage is between 8:00 and 9:30 AM Tuesday morning, and it is the most consequential 90 minutes of the week.
This is a short post on the three moves we use. They are not novel. They survive contact with the actual Tuesday morning.
Move 1 — the inbox is read backwards
Most proposal teams open Tuesday’s inbox and start with the oldest unread thread. The argument for that order is fairness; the argument against is that the oldest thread is often a prospecting email or an internal status request whose cost-of-delay is low. By the time you get to Friday’s 4:55 PM email, you have spent 40 minutes on threads that didn’t need 40 minutes.
We read backwards. Newest first. The reasoning: a newly arrived RFP with a short due date is the highest-information, highest-urgency item in the inbox, and we want to know whether it exists before we decide how to spend the morning. Friday’s “we’d love your input on next quarter’s pricing model” can wait until 9:00. Monday’s “RFP from State Agency, due Friday at noon” cannot.
The practical artifact: the proposal manager has the inbox sorted descending by date for the first 30 minutes Tuesday morning. After 30 minutes, the sort reverses to ascending and the rest of the morning is spent in arrival order.
Move 2 — the SME ping, before standup
The second move is a Slack message to every SME we know we will need this week, sent before 8:30 AM. Not a meeting invite. Not an “are you available.” A specific request: “I need 25 minutes from you Wednesday afternoon to review the technical-architecture section of [bid name]. Best three windows: Wed 2-3, Thu 11-12, Thu 3-4. Reply with which one works.”
The effect is mathematical. SMEs return from a long weekend with a triaged inbox of their own. The first message they see from the proposal team has roughly an order of magnitude more chance of getting a same-day reply than the fifth. Sending the ping at 8:30 AM Tuesday — before the SME has even opened their own inbox — usually means a calendar invite is on their schedule by 10:00.
The Lohfeld observation that proposal managers spend more time chasing SMEs than building strategy is correct. It is also avoidable. The chasing is mostly a function of pings sent late.
Move 3 — the deferred bid/no-bid
A long weekend creates a temptation. Three RFPs arrived between Friday and Monday. The team is back. Standup is at 10:00. The instinct is to make the bid/no-bid call on all three before standup, so the morning produces decisions.
Resist the instinct. A bid/no-bid made in 12 minutes Tuesday morning is a worse decision than a bid/no-bid made in 45 minutes Wednesday afternoon with the capture lead in the room. The cost of deferring a day is one day of capture-window time. The cost of a bad bid decision is anywhere from 40 to 300 hours of writer time spent on a bid the team won’t win.
What we do instead: the Tuesday standup includes a single line per inbound RFP — “RFP arrived, due date X, bid/no-bid scheduled for Y.” Y is rarely the same day. The discipline is that the decision has a date and an owner, not that it happens immediately.
The exception: an RFP whose due date is short enough that any deferral of bid/no-bid eats into capture work. Those get the same-day decision. The rule of thumb — if the due date is more than 14 days out, the bid/no-bid can wait 24–48 hours; if it’s under 14 days, decide today.
What we don’t do
We don’t try to clear the backlog by Tuesday end-of-day. The Tuesday after a long weekend is not a productivity day; it is a triage day. The win condition for Tuesday is that every inbound has been classified, every SME has a calendar request, and every bid/no-bid has a scheduled decision. The drafting and review work resumes Wednesday.
Treating Tuesday as a normal production day, with the additional pressure of “we have to make up for the long weekend,” is how teams ship sloppy bid/no-bid decisions and start drafts on RFPs they would have declined with a clear head.
This post is short because the move is short. Three things, before standup. The triage works.