Mock RFP Tales: Introducing The Misadventures of a Proposal Team

When deadlines loom and requirements pile up, the proposal team rallies virtually. Some days it’s smooth sailing. Other days? Total misadventure.

Welcome to Mock RFP Tales — a new storytelling series where proposal chaos meets real-world lessons.

If you’ve ever worked on an RFP response, you know the truth: things rarely go as planned. Deadlines slip. SMEs disappear. Forms get forgotten. And at least once, someone realizes in a color review: “Wait…did we actually answer all the requirements?”

Most proposal blogs explain these challenges with lists, checkboxes, and best practices. Useful, yes — but sometimes a little dry. I wanted to try something different.

Why Mock RFP Tales?

Because stories stick.

It’s one thing to read about “building a compliance matrix.” It’s another to feel the panic of a team realizing three days before submission that half the Performance Work Statement (PWS) is missing from their draft because no one tracked the “shalls” and “musts.”

That’s the idea behind Mock RFP Tales. These are fictional stories, but they’re built from the real challenges we face in the proposal world. Each one ends with practical guidance you can actually use.

Season One: The Misadventures of a Proposal Team

For the first series, we’re following a fictional proposal team — a cast of characters you’ll quickly recognize: the overworked Proposal Manager, the technical Volume Lead, the Pricing Lead trying to keep up with shifting scope, the writer under deadline pressure, the reviewer dropping late feedback.

Each week, you’ll get:

• A short story about one of their “misadventures” (missing compliance tools, forgotten forms, ghosted SMEs, copy-paste disasters, and more).

• A breakdown of what went wrong.

• A practical takeaway you can apply to your own proposals.

The names and personalities are fictional, but the lessons are very real.

What’s Coming

We’ll kick things off with The Case of the Missing Compliance Matrix — a cautionary tale about what happens when you skip one of the most important tools in proposal writing.

After that, you’ll see stories about past performance cut-and-paste disasters, executive summary breakdowns, and portal upload panic. Each post will be both entertaining and useful — part story, part survival guide.

⚡ Stay tuned: Mock RFP Tales: The Misadventures of a Proposal Team launches next week with its first story.

⚡ Got a misadventure of your own? Don’t keep it to yourself — share it with me! Your story could inspire a future episode of The Misadventures of a Proposal Team.