Don’t Let Your RFP Turn Darwin On His Head
I’ve seen lots and lots of RFPs over the years and some very good ones recently. A good RFP—at least in my view, and I’m not making any claims about objectivity here—has agencies respond to a few focused questions as a pre-qualification and sets the stage for in-person presentations. However, I’ve also seen RFPs that go a bit further and delve into some serious minutia. Make sure your margins are an inch all around, use a certain typeface, alphabetically list every client you’ve ever worked for, etc. A year or so ago, we received an RFP with this kind of flavor, and we quickly determined that the cost (in hours) to respond exceeded the project budget detailed within the RFP. That’s a no-brainer: we opted out. Worse, though, was that the RFP’s intense granularity didn’t seem to serve much purpose. It created hoops to jump through that were unnecessary, especially considering that the vast majority of client-agency relationships are determined through “fit"—the two teams like each other and trust each other to make the work happen in the best way possible. So RFPs should get to “fit” faster and skip the extraneous hoops.
Here’s another big reason to eliminate all the unnecessary elements from your RFP: you’ll end up with the weakest participants. Aside from normal dips and lumps in the snake that happen to everyone, great agencies tend to stay busy . . . because they’re great. Not-so-great firms tend to consistently have more time on their hands. The more time-intensive response a RFP requires (e.g., multitudes of questions requiring voluminous written responses, requests for obscure information, asking an agency to abandon its own established proposal documentation, etc.), the more likely a busy agency is to focus its energies elsewhere. An agency working on fewer projects and with more time available will likely jump through those hoops. This scenario turns Darwin’s theory on its head. Instead of an RFP process advancing the strongest participants (its purported goal), the process self-selects the weakest participants because those are the only agencies with the time to respond. This is bad.
So the key takeaway? It’s definitely in your best interest to structure RFPs that encourage the best participants and get to “fit” faster.
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