Video Transcript

 Reid: Alright. What’s going on, everybody? I’m Reid, I’m E3’s marketing manager,
I’m here with Joe. He’s our biz dev guy. And we’re here to talk a little bit about RFPs. They’re very common in the sales process with large organizations and small we’ve gotten them before. I was hoping you could sort of talk us through some of the pitfalls are of RFPs and just sort of our thought process on how those do and don’t have a part in the sales process?

Joe: Totally. Yeah. Reid makes a really good point about how both large and small
organizations run RFPs. And they do it for different reasons. And so I’m going to start with, because this video is going to talk about why to not do RFPs and why they aren’t always the best process that you can run. But I want to start with a couple of caveats.

Joe: Number one, I understand why you’re going the RFP route, even for a small organization that doesn’t have to, you don’t have to actually do that, you’re trying to understand how do I compare different agencies that have these really like intricate websites that probably couldn’t articulate really well what they actually do? And they have this long list of services and all their services match up. How do I compare them? And so you start thinking to yourself, I want them to all submit answers to the same questions and I can compare it to the ones that I like best. Right? So I get it.

Joe: That’s called I haven’t done this a lot before, and running an RFP process feels like a safe way to make this decision. Or I’ve only grown up doing it this way. And this is the only way that I know how to, and I haven’t explored other ways to do it. So that’s kind of one. On the other side, you have organizations, large organizations that are required by their procurement teams to run RFPs at any dollar amount of any real necessity, right? Anything that’s going to be impactful for the organization at all. And in that environment also completely understand, you literally have to do an RFP or regardless of your choice, you are not going to be able to work with that company.

Joe: So those caveats aside, for a lot of the times that I receive RFPs, it is in those two buckets and I would say that our perspective largely is that running an RFP is not an efficient way to make a buying decision. But again, I recognize that there’s lots of reasons why you might start that way. I’ve even had somebody say to me in the sales process, “Oh, there’s another way to do this besides RFP?” Oh, cool, let’s do that way instead. So I do think there’s this element of not sure what else to do besides run an RFP. Yep.

Joe: So I’m going to articulate this through kind of an analogy and a comparison. Just imagine this. It’s a little bit out there, but imagine this being the case. Imagine that you had decided for yourself that you needed open heart surgery and then you went to five doctors and you said, I need open heart surgery. Would you please tell me how you’re going to do open heart surgery on me? Can you show me three to five people of comparable statue and size and age that you’ve done open heart surgery on? And can you tell me about the results of their open heart surgery? None of us would buy that way. We would never do that to a doctor, right?

Joe: But we do that to our consultant clients or partners all the time. Right? We go out and we’re like, I need a new website. Would you please tell me about how you build websites? Would you show me what you would do for our website? And would you then please show me three to five and give me references of people who look like me and have similar situations to me that you’ve built websites for? The issue with this is that it lacks context completely right? If you are so convinced that all you need is a new website, you don’t need messaging support, you don’t need to be repositioned, your brand doesn’t need touching, your overall digital landscape isn’t messed up. You don’t need a creative update.

Joe: Content architecture doesn’t exist to be done if you’re so clear that you’re like, Nope, I can articulate all of it, and I just want you to build it for me, then my strong recommendation is to not run an RFP, which is expensive and takes a lot of time. My strong recommendation is to go to a website shop and articulate all of that for them and be done, right? Yep, that makes a bunch of sense.

Joe: So that’s the first piece about RFPs is that I think you make a choice inside of them where you’re trying to dictate to the people you were asking to thing for you how to think, which starts to negate the value of working together, right? So the other piece that is really a challenge for RFPs is when you run them in what I’ll call a strict RFP style. And what I mean by that is there is no verbal communication.

Joe: There is a question period during which you will collect questions from all the thirty different agencies that you’ve sent this thing to. There’s no narrowing of what agencies you might be thinking about. And then you take those in, you send out the answers to them. You don’t tell things like budget and you don’t tell things like, “Here’s what I actually care about the buying process,” and you don’t give any cues to how to show up well. And so you’re just asking for, it’s basically spec creative without real context for what matters to you.

Reid: And that also plays into something we’ve talked about before as well. And another thing that’s important in the sales process is having leadership at the table.

Joe: Yeah, totally.

Reid: In those strict RFP environments, you’re not going to get access to leadership on their team to ensure that they’re on the same page and all of the other sort of pitfalls that we’ve talked about in those circumstances.

Joe: Internal alignment is lacking in them very often. And so for those companies that I’ve seen do the RFP well, normally ones that to do it well, are doing it because they have to, right? Like they are required by procurement to do an RFP. It’s very, very rarely by choice that they choose to do it and do it well. But what they do is they just run it like normal buying process. So they’ll talk to you.

Joe: They bring leadership into the conversation. You get very aligned on what is the objective of this work? What do you really need to see to make a decision? Do we have the expertise to do that or not? And do we have an approach that you understand, you feel good about, and can make that decision with? And then all you do together is get guided through how to fill out the RFP, right? And it’s not to say that they’re sitting there and giving you like, “OK, you’ve got to put in to like, get the win.” It’s not like that at all. It’s saying, we’re having a conversation. Here’s what I’ve learned. Here’s what I am trying to showcase. Here’s what I need to see from you guys, and here’s how I would like you to respond in this way so that as I share this about internally, we have common language.

Joe: We have alignment internally about what we’re seeing, right? So if you use the RFP to create internal alignment around, here’s what we are evaluating on and here’s how we understand this. But you’re willing to sit at the table and be human and have conversations. It can function really well. What happens is when people try to run these really strict environments where it’s like the main purpose of it in their head, and this is they will literally say this is, “well, that’s not fair to the other agencies.” And my perspective on that is like, you have no, you don’t have to be fair to agencies. You’re trying to get a result for your business. Who cares about whether or not you’re fair to the person that you’re about to hire to work with you.

Joe: You’re trying to hire the right person. So how about we run a process that allows you to hire the right person? If you can do that inside of an RFP by still being a human and running it how I’ve mentioned a couple of these companies that we work with, that we’ve started to work with through RFP because they run it like real buyers and they just tell you, “here’s what I need you to fill out in order to get it through the organization,” makes a bunch of sense. So I think there’s a time and place where they can be done and done well. But by and large, 95% of the time they are run in a really strict manner whose main priority is fairness, not exploration of fit, and that’s the big difference in running and RFP and running and RFP poorly.

Reid: Ok, awesome. Very helpful. Thanks, Joe.