How to Write a Past-Performance Entry That Actually Wins Points

Past performance is one of the highest-stakes sections in any competitive proposal, yet it's routinely assembled at the last minute from whatever scraps a shared drive happens to hold. This episode of Development takes a practitioner-level look at why that approach consistently loses points — and what a deliberate, infrastructure-first strategy looks like instead. The focus is on specificity: what a winning entry actually contains, why evaluators score the way they do, and how to build a library that lets your team pull a polished, relevant entry in hours rather than days. Here's what the episode covers: How evaluators actually score past performance — relevance is assessed along two axes (scope and complexity), and narratives that don't explicitly address both leave evaluators with nothing to credit. Leading with the parallel, not the summary — the most effective entries open by connecting the completed work directly to the current requirement, before any administrative detail appears. Specificity over generality — vague phrases like "delivered on time" are invisible on a scoring form; concrete, outcome-shaped claims about real problems solved are not. What a well-built library entry contains — contract facts, a pre-written relevance mapping, specific outcomes, customer voice (quotes and paraphrases from reviews or award letters), and verified reference contact information. Writing entries at capture time, not proposal time — the window right after contract closeout, while details are fresh and customers still take your calls, is when the most valuable intelligence can be gathered. Managing reference relationships and entry age — tracking lookback windows, maintaining customer relationships between awards, and auditing references before they go cold are all part of keeping the library genuinely useful. Teams working inside response automation workflows will find this episode particularly relevant — a structured past-performance library is the raw material that makes automated assembly accurate rather than generic. If your team is still deciding which opportunities are worth this level of investment, go/no-go scoring can help focus your capture energy where past-performance strength is already strongest. For deeper reading on proposal structure and compliance, proposal templates from RFP.co offer practical starting points aligned with evaluator expectations. For more on the tools that can reclaim time during response, check out the episode Document Automation Software: 20 Platforms That Could Win Back Your Time. RFP