Color Reviews For Quick Turn Proposals
Submitting a quality RFP response takes focus and time. You’re writing, editing, gathering forms, and just hoping you’re hitting all the basic requirements. Sometimes that’s enough to win. But if you find yourself losing bids over and over, it might be time to take a closer look at your process. This is where color team reviews come in—they help improve your proposal as you go so your response is as strong as it can be.
What Are Color Reviews?
The Shipley color review process is a series of structured review stages designed to guide and improve proposal development over time. Widely considered a best practice in the industry, each review—Pink Team, Red Team, and Gold Team—serves a different purpose.
The Pink Team review happens early in the proposal process to focus on big-picture items like structure, whether the story makes sense, and if anything important is missing. It’s a chance to catch major gaps and make sure the content is headed in the right direction.
The Red Team review takes place when the proposal is nearly complete. At this stage, reviewers look at it through the customer’s eyes—checking for clarity, compliance, and persuasiveness. It’s all about making sure your proposal tells a customer-focused story and clearly shows why your team is the right choice.
The Gold Team review is the final checkpoint before submission. It focuses on overall readiness—checking for clean formatting, consistent messaging, and any lingering errors. This is also when leadership gives the green light, making sure the proposal is polished and ready to go out the door.
Making Color Reviews Work For Small Businesses
While having color reviews sounds great in practice, I often have to get a little creative with the small businesses I work with. The full color review process is ideal for RFPs with long turnaround times (a month of more) and businesses with the resources to have full reviews. However, responding to RFPs with short turnaround times requires a consolidated review cycle to maximize efficiency. Here’s what I use.
First, a Kickoff/Strategy Meeting to fully understand the requirements and develop a win strategy including win themes, approach, past performance, personnel, and price.
Next, an Annotated Outline is created. While this is not a proper review session, it is an important step to align each response section with the right information. I’m not talking a few bullet points—these should be fully fleshed out ideas including drafts of graphics, key points, and call outs. Having this level of detail allows the next draft to be developed more easily given the tight deadlines.
Then, a Pink/Red Team Review. This will be the first (and likely only) detailed review of a fully written response. Because this will be the main review, it’s important to have an outside reviewer that hasn’t been fully involved as a writer, review the doc and give objective thoughts. Some suggestions for reviewers are:
Proposal Managers/Writers
Coworkers not fully involved in the proposal writing process
And finally, a Compliance/Submission Review. This review should focus on ensuring all the RFP instructions, evaluation, and PWS requirements are met. This is also the time to double check that all Pink/Red Team comments were incorporated, and the proposal makes sense overall.
