A past-performance story in three sentences

Most past-performance stories are too long. They take up a page, they front-load context, and they bury the result in the last paragraph where the evaluator has already stopped reading.

The compressed form is three sentences:

1. Mission. What the customer needed and the constraint they were under.
2. Move. What we did that mattered.
3. Measured outcome. The number, named.

Here is a real (anonymized) example from a recent submission:

A regional health system needed to cut their claims-denial backlog ahead of a CMS audit, with 60 days to a deadline they could not slip. We deployed our denial-triage engine into their existing Epic instance in 11 days, trained two analysts in week three, and ran the backlog in parallel with their team. Denied-claim resolution time dropped from 47 days to 12 days inside the first quarter, and the audit closed without a finding.

That’s three sentences. ~80 words. Mission-move-outcome. The evaluator can read it in 25 seconds and remember it the next morning.

What makes the compressed form work

The mission sentence does three jobs at once. It names the customer (regional health system), it names the constraint (CMS audit deadline), and it sets the stake (a deadline they could not slip). An evaluator who has read 12 vendors’ past-performance pages by the time they get to yours will give you 25 seconds; the mission sentence is the sentence that earns the next two.

The move sentence is mechanical. It names the action (deployed into Epic), the timeline (11 days, week three), and the staffing model (two analysts, parallel team). A move sentence that says “we partnered with the customer to drive transformation” is dead on arrival. The compressed form forbids it by length.

The outcome sentence is the only place numbers should appear. Two numbers, both verifiable: 47 days to 12 days, audit closed without a finding. The audit-closed-without-a-finding is the load-bearing claim, because it’s a binary fact a reference call can confirm. “Improved efficiency” is not a fact a reference can confirm; “the audit closed without a finding” is.

Where the long form is right

Compressed past performance is for the body of the proposal, where you have ten of them across five sections and a page budget that won’t let any one of them run a page. The long form — a one-page case study with context, approach, screenshots, and quotes — belongs in an appendix or a separate discussion document. Both forms exist for different jobs.

The mistake is putting the long form in the body of the proposal because the writer was proud of the work. The evaluator does not care about the writer’s pride. The evaluator cares whether the past-performance story maps to their requirement, and the compressed form maps faster.

The takeaway

Mission, move, outcome — in that order, in three sentences, with at least one verifiable number in the third. If the story doesn’t fit that shape, the story isn’t ready to ship.