How to Win More RFPs
Sales leaders talk about RFPs like they’re a habit they are trying to quit. I’ve heard things like:
“We don’t do many RFPs anymore.”
“We get asked to respond to RFPs but we try to stay away from them.”
“I did RFPs a lot more when I was younger, but they take a toll on me now.”
There’s a lot of scar tissue out there when it comes to RFPs.
Maybe it was a really tight window to respond.
Maybe it was a big spec creative/ideation requirement.
Maybe it was that the client refused to tell you their budget.
The RFP process can feel adversarial when each side knows that the eventual relationship will need to feel like a partnership. The whole thing can feel performative – like you’re being asked to put on a show rather than solve real problems.
But I’d like to tell you what it’s like from the client’s side, having been there myself and having run agency searches for clients.
We are risky to the buyer. All of us – your agency, my consultancy, their firm. The B2B buying experience is fraught with peril. The research firm Forrester says that, on average, 13 people are involved in the buying decision on the client side. That’s 12 other people that know it was the buyer’s call to hire you. If it goes wrong, that person could get demoted or even fired, threatening their ability to pay their mortgage, send their kids to college, afford their car payment, etc., etc., etc.
You are not just competing against other firms and agencies. You aren’t just competing against the client deciding to have internal resources do the work. You are competing against the status quo. And you are competing against the human instinct to survive in the face of danger.
While people are much more motivated by fear than opportunity (human survival instincts are so very strong), there is an opportunity we all have as firms and agencies to minimize the feeling of risk and to work to inspire a vision of possibility.
You must overcome millennia of survival instincts, but it is possible.
These are my top five pieces of advice for all firms and agencies pursuing work via RFPs:
1. Build relationships to circumvent RFPs. To avoid future RFPs, build real relationships with people you want to work with. This takes effort and it takes time. But if you do, you can be the person the client goes to when they have a problem that needs fixing. Or, at worst, you can help them design the RFP so that it favors your agency. We want to return the favor to those that have helped us, so your odds of winning are huge.
2. Be selective. Brent Hodgins, managing partner of Mirren, a BD consulting firm, often repeats a mantra that, “A lead is not an opportunity unless it’s qualified.” Do not chase every RFP that comes to your inbox; develop qualification criteria. I met a guy last year that chased 130 RFPs to win six of them. The opportunity to participate does not mean obligation to participate.
3. Ask great questions. I recently ran an agency search process for a high-end home builder, and I was amazed that some of the agencies didn’t ask a single question during the Q&A period or otherwise. We interpreted that as a lack of interest and not being deep thinkers. Clients want a partner that years to understand more deeply so they can develop even better solutions for complex problems.
4. Make your response easy to digest. Make it easy to understand. If the RFP lays out what they want to see, follow that flow in your response. This makes it easier for them to determine if you answered the requirements. They are busy and not looking for a complex novel to decipher. Use color. Use graphics and images. Embrace whitespace – don’t cram too much on a page. Use call-outs for particularly poignant info. Embrace brevity. No one wants to decode a 115-page manifesto. A sharp 15-page response that answers the brief will outperform a bloated one.
5. Personalize it. We all know a template when we see one. If you want to stand out, make the response feel like a campaign about you and the client. Anytime you talk about your agency/firm, do it in the context of why it matters to them. And if you get asked to present, adapt your proposal into a presentation. Do not have paragraphs of words on a screen when you are presenting. It’s a presentation, not a bad college lecture.
There are certainly many, many more things I could advice you on to be better positioned to win competitive RFPs, such as presenting pricing, determining whether you are favorite or filler, constructing pursuit teams and sub-teams, creating compelling pitch narratives, winning during the Q&A, negotiation (actually, I already wrote about that – you can read more about negotiation here), and on and on.
If the goal is to win, focus on what the client needs to know to get them over the next mental risk hurdle, and present your approach in a way that resonates with the way the decision makers think. Make the thing that is supposedly all about you, all about them.