Consulting Proposal and Criteria Map
Five documents and three sheets built so every section answers something the buyer will compare on, including the criterion they only ever said out loud.
Free download · No account needed
Requirement Response · 4 of 11 rows · two plant operations diagnostic, specialty food manufacturer
How we know it is the column that decides the bid
| Ref | What they will compare on | How we know | Weight | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C-01 | Whether the work can run without stopping the production lines | Said on the call | Heaviest | Answered, approach section 2 |
| C-06 | Whether their own team can keep it running after we leave | Inferred | Medium | Answered, half a page |
| C-04 | Price against a budget nobody has stated | Inferred, needs confirming | Unknown | Clarification asked |
| C-08 | Our benchmark data across 40 comparable manufacturers | Not stated anywhere | None | Cut |
C-01 decides this bid and it is in no document. The COO raised it unprompted, raised it again at the end, and described the previous consultant keeping his supervisors in workshops all week. That is why the work is out to tender. A bid that answers the two page brief perfectly and books a week of workshops loses to one offering forty minute slots around the line.
C-08 is the row that will annoy you. Benchmark data across forty comparable manufacturers is the strongest asset this practice owns, and nothing the client said touches it. So it leaves the proposal, where it earns nothing and consumes the pages C-01 needs, and one sentence of it goes in the cover letter instead.
Eleven rows in the full map. Three are stated in the brief, four came out of the call, three are inferred, and one is asked for by nobody.
Search this and every result hands you the same eight sections. Executive summary, problem statement, approach, deliverables, timeline, team, pricing, terms. The better ones tell you to open with the client's problem instead of your bio. All of it is a container, and bids are not lost on containers. They are lost because a proposal answered the written brief beautifully and missed the thing the buyer cared about most, which was said out loud once and written down nowhere.
So the first artifact is a map of what they will compare on, with a column recording how you know each one. Stated in the brief. Said on the call. Inferred and needing confirmation. Not stated anywhere. In the sample the heaviest line is whether the work can run without stopping the production lines, which the COO raised twice in conversation and which appears in no document. A section that maps to nothing gets cut, including the strongest thing the practice owns.
Public procurement is the one place the rule is published. FAR 15.305(a) requires an agency to evaluate solely on the factors the solicitation stated, and FAR 15.304(d) requires it to state their relative importance. A formal solicitation hands you the criteria, so that job is compliance and the RFP response pack owns it. Here you infer them, then price so every day names the condition it rests on and every exclusion appears as a zero line.
What's in the pack
Requirement Response
One row per thing they will compare on, with how you know it, its weight, the page that answers it, and the evidence offered against it.
Pricing Build
Every day attached to the condition it rests on, exclusions carried as zero lines, and contingency held against one named assumption instead of spread across the total. Testing that fee against what similar engagements actually took is the pricing and fee model pack's job, before the number lands here.
Deliverable Schedule
Draft date, review window, final date, comment rounds inside the fee, and an acceptance basis specific enough to argue from, matched to what the findings pack actually delivers.
What They Are Actually Comparing
The four sources a criterion comes from, the four questions to ask the buyer, and the rule for cutting your best material when it maps to nothing. Where the only channel is a written RFP, splitting those questions between the shared window and your own assumptions replaces the call.
Approach Narrative
Instrument, failure mode, threshold and stopping rule: four sentence types that prove method convincingly and assert nothing at all about this client.
Assumptions and Exclusions
Each assumption states the number it becomes when the condition fails, so a defensive paragraph turns into a choice the buyer makes before signing.
Team and Credentials
Named people against phases with the day split visible, plus the labelling that makes an individual's prior firm experience offerable rather than disqualifying.
Proposal
The document itself, with its page budget assigned from the weights in the map rather than eight headings of roughly equal length.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River with the brief and your notes from a qualified discovery call, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and fill them in yourself.
- 2
Map it before writing
One row per thing they will compare on, recording how you know each: stated in the brief, said on the call, inferred, or asked for by nobody.
- 3
Price the conditions
Every day names the assumption it rests on. Every exclusion becomes a zero line, so the boundary lands while the buyer is working through the money.
- 4
Cut what maps to nothing
Any section answering no criterion comes out, including your strongest material. Then check the page budget against the weights before it goes.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The zip is Word documents and CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: send the brief and your call notes and the criteria map comes back built, with the thin rows flagged. The rest sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word (.docx) for the five documents and CSV (.csv) for the three sheets, zipped together. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open the criteria map, the pricing build and the deliverable schedule straight off the download with no conversion step.
The client never told me what they are comparing on. Now what?
Ask. Four questions, ten minutes: what are you comparing bids on, which of those matters most, how does price sit against the rest, and who else is reading this. Asking feels like admitting you do not know, which is why almost nobody does, which is why it works.
How do I show method without doing the work for free?
You show the machine rather than the output. The export you use and why that one, the divergence that is the finding, the threshold at which a theme is reportable, the rule for when sampling stops. Every one reads as years of practice and none names a problem in their operation.
I have no client references. Does that end the bid?
No. Federal evaluation rules score an offeror with no relevant past performance record neutral rather than unfavourably, and they count experience held by key personnel. So the years you spent doing this inside a firm are offerable, labelled as an individual's experience rather than as your practice's contract.
How is this different from a proposal generator?
A generator turns a form into eight headings. This builds the map first: what they will compare on, how you know each one, and what to cut. The proposal is then written to that map, and the deliverables it promises are ones a scored diagnostic genuinely produces.
What happens after they say yes?
The priced scope becomes a statement of work. The SOW and contract pack gives every deliverable an acceptance basis two people who disagree would score the same way, and turns each priced assumption into a mechanism rather than an argument. Then the intake pack turns the client's shared drive into an index and a gap list.
Bid on what they compare
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or send River the brief and your call notes and get the criteria map back with the weights and the cuts already marked.
Edit with AI