How to win an RFP shoot-out

Tips and tricks for “reading between the lines”
 
We recently helped an ad agency respond to an RFP for marketing services. It’s not the first time we’ve been tapped in that capacity. We’ve also served, in the past, as a judge at the Clio Awards and film festivals.
 
There’s a big connection here. The latter paves the way to the former.
 
An RFP—whether for marketing services or whatever—will outline just what is required to respond. It’s basically a huge list of boxes to be checked. But if you only see it in that light, be prepared to lose.
 
Winning the RFP game
 
RFPs are hopelessly impersonal documents. Which sets up the expectation of hopelessly impersonal responses. But that’s a fallacy of perception you need to overcome immediately.
 
First off, that zillion-page, eye-glazing RFP PDF that’s consuming half your hard drive was—surprise—written by an actual person. It sure doesn’t feel that way. But it was.
 
And therein lies your first opportunity to best your competitors. Find out who wrote the thing. It won’t be signed, but it will list a contact person/head of procurement. So look them up on LinkedIn. Find out about their background. Read between the lines of their experience to get a feel for the kinds of things they’re comfortable with and uncomfortable with.
 
Dive deeper. Check out their connections. Do the same for them. Because there’s a good chance you’re looking at other members of the selection committee right there, even though none of them have been named in the RFP.
 
An RFP winning lesson from a parallel universe
 
The reason we mentioned our background as a creative competition judge is because there are lots of parallels to the RFP-judging world. When you examine them, they suddenly become very useful in the crafting of your response.
 
Judging entries is boring. It’s a big and thankless task. You get a huge stack of submissions, you’ve got a zillion criteria by which to judge them, and you’re up against a looming deadline to get it done—with the tacit threat of defending your decisions afterward, adding to the pressure.
 
So think about that. You’re submitting your RFP response to someone who, we can safely say, will not enjoy looking at it.
 
Is that an opportunity, or what?
 
We were privileged to judge the Clios for the category of U.S. Radio. The process involved sitting in a room with other judges, clipboard in hand, and listening to hour after hour of radio spots, marking our scores as they played.
 
And you thought commercials were annoying during rush hour.
 
Here’s the thing. Many of these radio spots were highly creative. Many took an innovative approach to the challenge at hand. Some employed novel production techniques to craft a unique aural texture.
 
Call us jaded, but none of that mattered. Know which radio spots advanced in the competition?
 
The funny ones.
 
It was all too obvious, sitting there in the room. All of the judges were bored. The radio spots played on. But every once in a while, a funny one would come along. It would get laughs—even more than normal, since it was playing to a crowd. And scratch, scratch, scratch went the judging pencils. You just knew that that spot had scored well.
 
What, then, is the lesson here? And how can you apply this to your RFP response efforts?
 
It doesn’t mean “make your RFP response funny.” If only it were that simple. But it does imply that your response should be as enjoyable to judge as possible.
 
How do you do that?
 
Crafting a winning RFP response
 
Start big, and work your way down. By “big,” we mean “theme.” In our marketing-services example, this meant coming up with a creative theme for the RFP response itself, which reflected the overarching goals of the marketing campaign, while reflecting nicely on the ad agency for their inherent creativity.
 
The details? How about “all of them.” Make the prose sing. The verbiage of the RFP didn’t, but yours should. Include an executive summary that builds, Declaration-of-Independence-like, to a clarion call to action. Get them excited. Make them think about the killer results you’ll be delivering, and how that will help advance their cause—and their career—because of it.
 
Make it easy on the eyes. Be lavish with your white space. (Here’s an entire article we wrote about that very subject.) Include captivating illustrations; really work to find great ones.
 
Make the layout reader-friendly. Use incremental, style-sheet-constrained subhead fonts to give it an “outline” degree of clarity, without looking like a boring… outline. Use color. And use it to set off disparate elements (sidebars, success story call-outs, etc.) so the reader knows, instinctively, what’s part of the main narrative vs. what’s parenthetical.
 
What’s the right structure for an RFP response?
 
Here’s something else to consider. The recipient of your RFP response will not be reading your document in one hand, while holding the original RFP in the other, comparing them side-by-side and trying to scan back and forth between them as if following a tennis match.
 
To the contrary: Your document will be the only thing they’ll read at the time.  (Why? Because it’s easier and faster. That’s why.) So take them by the hand and lead them through the narrative that you create, even if you need to re-order some of the elements in the original RFP in the process to make it clearer/more logical. As long as you can go through your draft, when you’re done, and see that you’ve checked all the boxes in the RFP, then you’re fine.
 
Define “winning” RFP in the right context
 
An RFP is traditionally a gated competition. Meaning, you cannot win the RFP by your written response alone.
 
Think about that.
 
If you look at the vetting schedule, typically published at the very front of the RFP, you’ll see a list of dates: deadlines, responses, etc. Certainly, you’ll be obsessing over the “submission deadline” for your written response. But what’s the next item on that mini-calendar? Is it “conferences with finalists”?
 
Aha! If that’s the case, then bear in mind that the goal of your written RFP response is not to win the competition. Rather, it’s to advance you to the conference stage.
 
That’s a subtle, but significant, difference. It lets you tease, rather than fully answer, various questions. It transforms your job from “explaining” to “qualifying and impressing.” You need to prove that you’re good enough to be in that room. And it’s an opportunity to bullet-list “sexy” examples of the types of solutions you might advance for the client if you win… just to whet their appetite and let them appreciate the caliber of competitor you represent.
 
There are plenty of other ways to win the RFP game which your rivals might overlook. Contact us and let us help you nail that next one. 

---