This post is Part III 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.
Before digging into the nuts and bolts of how to prepare an RFP response, we need to pause for a second to make one very important, very simple, very compelling and (usually) very ignored point:
Hire. A. Designer.
Because how the thing looks has at least as much impact as what it says, no matter what the lawyer you're working for claims. Design is incredibly important, as is photography.
I recently completed a massive RFP for a new client. The finished document was 92 pages long, and included reshot photography of all the attorneys involved in the pitch. The prospect, a government agency, was the most boring institution you could possibly imagine. The law firm specialized in government law, particularly transportation law -- the law governing everything having to do with buses, trains, highways, everything. Seriously, the entire topic was like watching paint dry. Nothing much new had happened in the field in twenty years,nothing much new was going to happen, and so on.
But by the time the designer got through with it, the entire subject was transformed. The whole process of driving trains, paving highways, buying buses and defending lawsuits from people who alleged that they fell down because the bus driver was careless suddenly because the most dynamic, fascinating topic ever. The proposal looked like it cost a million dollars. And the firm, of course, won the business.
Here's what hiring a really good designer for a proposal does:
It tells the prospect that you really care about the product, and you really want the work. This is important.
It makes the document look clean, modern and organized -- up-to-date and contemporary, no matter what the subject.
It makes it much easier to read. A lot of graphic design is the organization of information, into a hierarchy that prioritizes information. More important information is more visible, and so on.
It will include a lot of white space, which is critical -- it prevents the verbiage of the proposal from overpowering the reader.
And in a way that, by definition, defies categorizing by words, transforms the appearance, and the impact, of whatever it is that you're writing. Take a look at the home page of, say, Apple. The design is fantastic. Typically, the pages feature one immense, beautiful image, with a minimum of type and clutter. It beautifully conveys the emotional content of the product, the brand and the company. The new operating system, Yosemite, for instance, has a page with an enormous, full-color picture of Half Dome -- an enormous solid granite wall. Viewers get the point, without reading a single word. That's what design does.
The key when thinking about design for proposals is to remember that most of the information your readers get in documents or web pages is in a very carefully, expertly-designed atmosphere. Think of high-end magazines, web pages, even television shows. They're usually beautiful, and beautifully designed. Even the Wall Street Journal is like that.
A proposal for thousands of dollars worth of legal work has to meet that same standard. Whether they know it or not, or say it or not, that's what your readers really expect, and to stand out, and to win, that's the level of design you need to demonstrate.
Relative to the cost of the proposal as a whole, which can approach $75,000 for a major proposal from a major firm, designers are ridiculously cheap. And given the impact they have, they more than pay for themselves.
Just. Hire. A. Designer.
Peter can be reached at: peter@repechagegroup.com