This post is Part I of a six week series created by Peter Darling who is a legal marketing consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area, a partner in the Repechage Group and an expert on RFP preparation, submission and strategy.
Increasingly, clients looking for legal services rely on the dreaded Request for Proposal, or RFP. Legal marketers, from firms of every size, hate these. Essentially, here’s how they work: the client invites a limited number of firms to prepare written proposals (and sometimes deliver live presentations). They then select a firm from this group, presumably based on the quality of the proposal.
For law firms, RFPs are the classic double-edged sword. On the one hand, they represent a real-live potential client. But on the other hand, proposals chew up enormous amounts of time and effort, and usually don’t win the business. I make my living helping firms prepare winning proposals. Based on having done hundreds, I have some thoughts on the subject, which I’ll be sharing in a series of blog posts on the Next-Generation RFP.
The first concept is the most simple, and probably the most important: When it comes to RFPs, think hard about whether you should participate at ll. And if in doubt, don’t. Remember the old movie War Games? “The only winning move is not to play.” That’s what this is.
The thing about RFPs, first and foremost, is that they only look like they’re fair. In fact, they’re usually not. The winning firm almost always has a strong preexisting relationship with the client. If you lack that, your proposal is probably a waste of time. The rule I give my clients is this: if, at 4 AM, when you’re staring at the ceiling in the darkness, you don’t honestly believe you have at least a 50/50 shot at the business, and have a good relationship with the client, a proposal probably isn’t worth the effort.
An RFP, really, is intended to provide political air cover for what is actually a subjective, personal decision. It is, after all, impossible to actually measure how good a law firm is. Law firms aren’t machines, and there’s no way to come up with a set of objective metrics that will determine which firm is best. Which means that, instead, the person making the decision will have to eventually, rely on instinct, intuition, likablility, emotional intelligence. Which means that an RFP is inherently unfair. If you don’t have some preexisting indication of a strong personal relationship, you’re almost certainly wasting your time in responding.
Granted, there will be occasions when you should participate in an RFP response even when you know you can’t win. If an account is really strategic, or for internal political reasons, or something similar. But those are few and far between, and in the main, they key concept to remember is that responding to an RFP is an investment. There will be a cost.
RFPs take a LOT of work. A properly-done response is a major investment of time, money, morale, and pursuit of other opportunities. To put some numbers behind this, I once estimated that for a major firm that would prepare an RFP and then deliver a pitch, the cost, including attorney time and lost billing, consulting time, design, administrative support and so on, came to around $75,000. You should only pursue it if, standing alone, it makes measurable business sense. Otherwise, the smart business move is to politely say “no thank you” and move onto something more promising.
Remember the middle-of-the-night rule. If, then, you don’t honestly think you can win, you won’t.
Peter Darling can be reached at peter@repechagegroup.com