With the widespread use of formal procedures to help corporate law departments evaluate and select outside counsel, the pressure to successfully respond to requests for proposals (“RFPs”) and win beauty contests has never been greater. Here are some winning secrets.
1. Assemble a team. A response team is important—especially if your firm is large. Make sure your entire firm is aware of who the team members are, what they do and what they will expect from the rest of the firm when an RFP arrives. Often, large firms have marketing managers who assume the responsibility for coordinating the effort. In other firms, managing partners or office managers assume this role. Whatever the situation, it is important that you appoint one individual to oversee and coordinate the entire response. This creates clear accountability. In addition, give your team as much time as possible to respond by establishing a strict firm-wide policy that requires attorneys who receive RFPs to send a copy to each of the members of the response team within 24 hours.
2. Focus on the right opportunities. With limited resources, you can’t afford the luxury of responding to each and every request. Instead, you need to focus on the profitable opportunities and ignore the unprofitable ones. How do you do this? The first step is to make sure you have a solid understanding of your firm’s own market position and future objectives. How do want to be perceived in your marketplace? What type of business opportunities will help you cultivate this perception? What are your core competencies? Begin applying your answers to the RFPs you receive and you’ll increase your chances of picking the right clients. For example, if you’re trying to focus more on high-end, bet the company litigation opportunities you may think twice about responding to an RFP for commodity work.
3. Analyze the RFP. Make sure you fully understand the instructions and call the prospective client if you have any questions. Also, keep in mind that happy clients do not normally bid out the work that they know you could do for them. If in existing client sends you an RFP, it could be a sign of a damaged relationship. In any event, you should always attempt to meet with the prospective client once you’ve finished reviewing the RFP but before you begin to respond.
4. Learn as much as you can about the prospective client. Both your time and your prospective client’s time are valuable. Therefore, you should gather as much pertinent information as you can about the prospective client before your meeting. This could include information about your prospective client’s financial performance, competitive landscape and industry trends. The information will help you uncover areas where your firm’s services might be of value and frame the content of your meeting. It might also help you discover critical opportunities to differentiate your firm by, for example, helping your prospective client establish valuable business relationships with your existing clients. In addition to Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw, http://www.hoovers.com, http://www.corporateinformation.com, http://www.edgar-online.com and http://www.ceoexpress.com are some excellent sources for client information and industry trends.
5. Meet with the key individuals on the prospective client’s team. Your goal should be to learn as much as you can about them and their objectives so that you can draft a more tailored response. In addition, the meeting gives you an opportunity to qualify the prospect to insure that there is a synergy and that your firm actually wants to bid on the work being offered. It is also an opportunity for you to start building rapport with members of the prospective client’s team and to demonstrate to them your firm’s commitment to client service.
6. Identify the true decision-makers and assess your client’s needs. While the questions in the RFP might fairly represent each committee member’s informational needs, the final decision-making is rarely this democratic. Office politics, personality differences and the effects of hierarchical structures are all part of the group dynamic. It’s up to you to unscramble the code. Perhaps a colleague can provide insight into the decision-making process based on his or her experience with the prospective client in previous competitions. And, during your meeting with the prospective client, don’t be afraid to ask questions about how the decision-making process will work for the current competition and how it has worked in past competitions. Pay close attention to the responses and any comments about other members of the selection committee.
7. Respond to the RFP exactly as directed. RFPs are designed to allow your prospective clients to make quick, apples-to-apples comparisons of different law firms and streamline the process of selecting the best one. The sooner you realize this and accept that most RFPs are not written for your benefit, the better off you will be. Don’t fight them. Don’t complain. Call the client to resolve any questions you might have, meet with the selection committee if you can, and then respond exactly as directed. Use the same structure and the same headings. Make your prospective client’s job as easy as possible. There’s nothing worse than differentiating yourself based on your inability to follow directions.
8. Focus on the client. If you’ve done your homework, drafting the response should be one of the easier steps in your response plan. While they can take many forms, most successful proposals focus more on the client ‘s needs than on the history of the firm and the attorney’s bios. They also include a summary of the law firm’s understanding of the engagement, information about the firm as it relates to the engagement, and proposed approaches to handling the engagement—in addition to deliverables, timing and fees. Whatever you do, don’t overwhelm the client with a verbose response. For many attorneys, this is easier said than done.
9. Pay close attention to pricing. The decision on how to price the account is an important one and deserves special attention. Sadly, despite its critical importance, a strong focus on pricing is often one of the most overlooked steps in the response process. The stakes are simply too high for attorneys and their firms to ignore the myriad alternative fee structures and the ways in their competitors might use them to win the business. Whether or not your situation calls for creative pricing, your decisions will likely be made in concert with firm management. In each instance, your goal should be to fairly allocate risks and rewards so that you can achieve a proper balance between client satisfaction and your own profitability.
10. Deliver your proposal in person. Although this may not always be possible or practical, it should be your preferred way of presenting your response. If you can present your proposal in person, be sure to keep it short and interactive. If possible, let the members of the selection committee guide the discussion to the issues they feel are most important. Also, make sure every member of your presentation team knows the objective of your presentation; who says what and for what purpose; and who takes notes of all client backgrounds, questions, actions, body language and next steps. Also, in the heat of the moment, many rainmakers eager to close the deal make the mistake of promising more than they can deliver. Before you begin, take a very close look at your firm’s ability to service the prospective client and make sure that during your presentation you manage expectations accordingly. Remember: promise little, deliver lots.
11. Debrief your team. Immediately after your presentation, meet with your team to gauge your performance. What went well and what didn’t? What questions were asked and how did you respond? How did the different members of the selection committee respond? What additional information did you learn about your prospective client’s objectives, the engagement’s scope and each of the individual members of your prospective client’s selection committee? What can you do better next time? Consider following-up the meeting with a memo responding to unanswered or imperfectly answered questions and capitalizing on any of this newly discovered information.
12. Debrief your client. Once a winner is selected ask the client what did and did not go well. To get candid responses, consider having a senior attorney who wasn’t part of the presentation call your prospective client to ask for feedback. If you took the time to ask the prospective client for this post-presentation meeting when you first made contact, your request will likely be granted.
13. Develop a proposal knowledgebase. While structure, content, legal fact patterns and tone can vary from one RFP to the next, most foundational questions require the same basic responses. As a result, you can save a great deal of time by organizing your past proposals into an electronic database. The sophistication of your knowledgebase will depend primarily on your budget and the number of proposals you plan to write. One popular software program is Pragmatech’s RFP Machine (http://www.rfpmachine.com/indexie4.html). Their Proposal Automation Suite links seamlessly with Microsoft Word and makes it very easy for you to develop and populate proposal templates. Once it is set up, the software reads questions directly from your prospective client’s proposal documents, searches your answer database, and formats and inserts your answers automatically into your RFP documents.
13.5 A note on Web-based competitions. New Web sites such as http://www.elawforum.com and http://ww.firmseek.com, allow corporate counsel to post RFPs and solicit proposals. They also promise assistance and offer proposal templates to less experienced firms. No one can argue that these new solutions make sense from an efficiency perspective. They provide a framework for active dialogue between participants and help speed the overall selection process.
But, while technology has helped improve the procedures, the substantive questions in your mind should remain the same. Before entering a Web-based competition you still need to review the RFP closely and try to determine the primary purpose for which the prospective client is using this Web-based vehicle. Are they looking for the low bidders on commodity legal work? Or, are they merely supplementing their current RFP process—one that places a high value on relationships and partnering principles—with a more efficient alternative? If it’s the former, you should be very careful before you decide to reply unless you’re comfortable competing primarily on the basis of price. If it’s the latter, it may very well represent a profitable, long-term opportunity for you and your firm. The best test—call and try to arrange a meeting.
Felice Wagner, a former practicing attorney, is CEO of Sugarcrest Development Group, Inc., a D.C. firm that gives seminars and training programs throughout the country on business development and client loyalty. She can be reached at (202) 462-7046 or felice@sugarcrest.com. Want to see how you measure up as a rainmaker? Take the Rainmaker Reality Check today!