Past-performance writing voice: past tense, specific, humble

Past performance is the section in an RFP response where a lot of otherwise-careful writers suddenly sound like a LinkedIn post. Present tense. Active verbs. Adjectives. A sense that the writer is selling rather than reporting. That voice costs points with evaluators, and it does it quietly — they do not flag “tone was wrong,” they just rank your past performance lower than another vendor’s that read more credibly.

This post is about the voice. Three principles. Each one is illustrated with a real past-performance narrative, anonymized, from an actual awarded bid.

Principle 1 — Past tense

Past performance is, by definition, work you did in the past. The tense is past. This is not a grammar rule; it is a framing rule. Present tense on completed work reads as marketing — “we deliver managed services to X” — because the phrasing attempts to generalize a specific past engagement into an ongoing capability. Evaluators read this and silently discount it.

Here is the same narrative in two voices. The engagement is real; the customer is anonymized.

Version A, present tense (wrong):

We deliver 24/7 managed detection and response services to a mid-sized regional bank. Our analysts investigate security alerts across the customer’s full cloud and on-prem estate, triage in real-time, and escalate critical findings directly to the customer’s security leadership.

Version B, past tense (right):

Between October 2024 and March 2025, we operated a 24/7 managed detection and response service for a mid-sized regional bank. Our analyst team handled alerts across the customer’s cloud and on-premises estate, with a median triage time of 18 minutes for critical findings. The engagement concluded on schedule in March 2025 when the customer in-sourced the function.

The second version is longer, more specific, and sounds less impressive in the way present tense sounds impressive. It is also more credible. The evaluator finishes the paragraph and believes it happened.

Principle 2 — Specific, not adjectival

Adjectives are the second tell of a weak past-performance narrative. “Comprehensive,” “world-class,” “robust,” “best-in-class” — PropLibrary catalogues these as the exact words evaluators filter as fluff. Past performance narratives that lean on adjectives are trying to sell the reader on how the engagement was, rather than telling them what happened in it.

The specificity rule: every adjective in the draft gets questioned. Can it be replaced with a number, a named scope, or a dated milestone? If yes, replace it. If no, ask whether the sentence needs it at all.

Version A, adjectival:

We provided comprehensive and seamless integration services across a complex enterprise environment, delivering world-class outcomes for our customer.

Version B, specific:

We integrated the customer’s SAP S/4HANA instance with their Salesforce CRM and three downstream reporting systems. The cutover weekend was March 14–16, 2025, with a planned 18-hour downtime window and an actual 14-hour downtime window. Post-cutover, the integration sustained the customer’s end-of-quarter volume in Q1 and Q2 2025 without incident.

Version B has no adjectives, and it sells the engagement more effectively than version A, because the numbers and dates let the evaluator picture the work.

VisibleThread has written about the pattern of RFPs being won on specificity rather than volume — the past-performance equivalent is that an evaluator who finishes a specific narrative can tell their colleague what you did. An evaluator who finishes an adjectival narrative remembers only that it was a paragraph.

Principle 3 — Humble on scope

The third failure mode is over-claiming scope. A narrative that describes a limited engagement as if it were strategic transformation reads as puffed. Evaluators recognize the puffing, even when they do not name it, and they discount the narrative accordingly.

The humble voice says what you did, narrowly. It does not reach for the broader significance. It lets the evaluator draw the inference about what the engagement implies about your company’s capability, rather than making the inference for them.

Version A, over-claiming:

As the strategic technology partner for [Customer], we led the transformation of their data architecture, unlocking unprecedented capabilities across their analytics function and repositioning them as a data-driven organization.

Version B, humble:

We migrated [Customer’s] Redshift data warehouse to Snowflake between June and November 2025. The migration covered 12 source systems, 340 production reports, and 8 analytics applications. On completion, the customer’s analytics team continued to operate the platform internally; our role ended at handover. We remain available for support under an on-call contract.

Version B tells the evaluator what you actually did. It does not tell them that you were a “strategic technology partner” — the evaluator decides whether the engagement implies that, based on the specifics. Most evaluators are happier drawing their own conclusion than being told which conclusion to draw. The Shipley guidance on past performance repeatedly emphasizes the same point: describe the work, let the reader judge the significance.

Why this voice wins

Evaluators read past performance narratives under three mental frames, usually simultaneously: is this real, does it match what we need, and can we trust this vendor’s description of reality. The past-tense, specific, humble voice passes all three. The present-tense, adjectival, over-claiming voice fails the third — the evaluator cannot tell whether to trust your description, and when they cannot tell, they discount.

The asymmetry is the important part. A confident-sounding narrative does not add points when it is convincing; a humble narrative does not lose points when it is boring. The downside of over-claiming is worse than the upside of it. Write to the downside.

What this changes about the KB

Past-performance blocks in the KB should be written once, in the correct voice, and reused. A block drafted in the wrong voice will be pulled into bid after bid. The voice problem propagates. When we review a customer’s past-performance content library, the exercise is usually: identify the blocks written in present tense, identify the blocks weighted with adjectives, rewrite them in past-tense specific humble voice, mark them as verified.

This is uninteresting work. It is also the work that meaningfully moves evaluation scores on the past-performance section of every bid that pulls those blocks, for years. The compounding return on a one-time voice cleanup is large. The January backfill ritual is where a lot of teams catch these voice drifts as part of the freshness pass.

Every awarded bid in my career where the past-performance section scored noticeably above the technical section, the narratives were written this way. Not all of them. Enough of them that I trust the pattern.