EP131: 80%+ Win Rates in State Government RFPs, Part 2—with Steve Schramm
Steve Schramm’s team has achieved 80% win rates on state government contracts by making RFPs part of a larger business development process.
So, how does Steve identify target clients and build relationships with them before an RFP hits the streets? How does he track prospects and recognize when opportunities are coming down the pike?
Steve serves as Founder and Managing Director at Optumas, a strategy and actuarial consulting firm out of Scottsdale, Arizona, that specializes in publicly sponsored health and welfare programs.
Steve is responsible for the design, development and implementation of healthcare reform projects, supporting clients in the realm of strategy development, risk analysis and communications.
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, Steve is back to explain how to nurture relationships with target clients, challenging us to research and raise our visibility with prospects before an RFP drops.
Steve discusses why it’s crucial to build a sense of trust with state government clients, describing how to demonstrate creativity and convey trustworthiness in a written response.
Listen in to understand Steve’s system for tracking prospects and learn how to identify optimal opportunities for your business to work with high-value state government clients!
Key Takeaways
How Optumas builds and nurtures relationships with prospects before an RFP drops
Steve’s insight on how to identify, research and raise your visibility with target clients
Steve’s response to someone who says they don’t have time to research prospective clients
Why practically-focused creativity and innovation works in state government RFPs
What qualities a company needs to be successful in state government contracting
Why it’s crucial to build a sense of trust in a proposal and how to do that in a written response
The challenges Steve has faced in state government contracting work (and how he overcame those challenges to retain the client through the next RFP round)
Steve’s advice on owning your mistakes and customizing your communication skills to serve state government clients
Steve’s system for tracking prospective clients and when their RFPs are coming out
Steve’s first 3 steps for responding to a perfect-fit RFP in less than 7 days
3 questions to ask yourself before you respond to a request for proposal
Connect with Steve
Resources
RFP Success Show EP131 Transcription
(00:00):
You are listening to The RFP Success Show with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20%, 30%, and even 50% and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to The RFP Success Show podcast. I am Lisa Rehurek, your host, founder and CEO of The RFP Success Company. We're on part two of our conversation with Steve Schramm. He is managing director and founder of Optumas and he has been responding to RFPs for a very long time. I won't even toss the number of decades out, so we don't age ourselves, Steve. But it's been fantastic ride for him and I together. We worked together a long time ago in corporate America. We have done a lot together. They have been a client of ours and we've both learned a lot along the way. He's got some really great golden nuggets that he's sharing with us for... He's a small business. He's got 30, 35 employees and he's cracked the code to success with RFPs, so let's dig in a little bit more into some of these questions.
(01:15):
I want to talk about relationship building. One of the things that Steve was talking about in the first episode is that you've got to tailor your RFP response to the client, and how do you do that? You do it by having additional knowledge. So Steve, tell us a little bit about how you build that relationship outside because once that RFP drops, there's no conversation. You can't have that in state government. You can't have that conversation. How do you go about building that relationship and nurturing it and getting the information that you will need when it's not a current client? So I'm talking like prospective clients.
Steve Schramm (01:54):
One of the things, Lisa, that I talked about in the last conversation was the RFP has to be just one of the steps and frankly, it's one of the last steps in a larger business development process. The first step is determining who your prospects are. You have to have a set of business development criteria to determine who your prospects are. I actually have a set of six criteria. I have them taped to my desk and I look at them every time an RFP comes across our desk. It's how we determine who our prospects were going to be. Once we know who our prospects are, we are absolutely unable to stop researching about our clients. We are relentless when it comes to constant research about what our prospective clients are up to. If you have a set of three to five targets, you need to be monitoring what they're up to.
(02:58):
Once you've identified who the targets are and you've done the research, your next step is to figure out how to raise your visibility with that prospect before the RFP hits the streets. Where do they go for information? Do they go to conferences? Are they part of trade groups? There's all kinds of ways to get in front of prospective clients. Even state government clients that have very strict procurement rules, you can find ways of getting in front of them before the procurement happens so that you're not in danger of violating any procurement rules. Raising your visibility is critical. Then the next step is you have to know when it's likely that that RFP is going to hit the street so that you're ready and you are up-to-date and your information, your feedback's going to be timely. Those are things for us that are really, really important to our differentiation process. Without those steps, we would not be successful from a relationship perspective because we're beginning the development of that relationship during that targeting and that research phase.
Lisa Rehurek (04:19):
What do you say to a business owner or a sales business development guy that's listening that says, "I don't have time for all that research"?
Steve Schramm (04:28):
There are plenty of places that can do research effectively on your behalf. There are sources, databases that you can go to that have information. Some are public, some are subscription. There's no such thing as I don't have enough time to do my job. If you are a sales exec, your job is to understand and know your prospects. So for me, that's a red herring. If you want to grow your business, you have to put the time and legwork in to know your prospects.
Lisa Rehurek (05:10):
Right. You know what's hilarious about that is people will say, "I don't have time to do that research, but let's bid on this RFP." Well, if you've got time to bid on the RFP, you should have been doing the research bid on the right RFP and less time all the way around, right?
Steve Schramm (05:24):
Absolutely. If you know the client, instead of the RFP taking you three weeks to respond to, it'll take you a week, a week and a half because you know the themes, you know what you're going to write to, you know how you're going to differentiate yourself. It is so much easier to write to a qualified prospect RFP than to one that you're going to write blind. Why would you write an RFP response to someone that you have no understanding of, no relationship, you don't know what their issues are, you don't know if they value what you bring to the table. If you're over everything on your business development criteria, why would you respond? Not only are you wasting your time and your team's time, but frankly, you're wasting the evaluation committee's time. You're doing no one any good.
Lisa Rehurek (06:15):
I agree. It's like going out on a date with a smoker knowing that you have no intention of ever dating a smoker. Why even waste your time with that? I'm in the dating pool right now, so all my analogies are dating-related, but it's kind of the same thing. Are you going to go out? Are you going to waste your time going out with somebody that has a habit that will never fit into your lifestyle? Same thing, right?
Steve Schramm (06:40):
Same thing.
Lisa Rehurek (06:41):
Yeah. And you had a powerful statement there that I should have written down when you were saying it. You were saying something about it's so much more powerful to go into a qualified prospect. That is brilliant. It's a change of mindset. For some reason, I think people see, well, this is RFP and this is really easy. All I have to do is answer a bunch of questions and submit this and I'm going to get a $200 billion contract. People get stars in their eyes and get really excited, but it's a lot of work in there. I love what you say about that work upfront and how much easier it'll make the RFP process on the back end.
Steve Schramm (07:18):
Lisa, don't get wrong. Do we respond to some RFPs that don't meet all of our criteria? Absolutely, but it's part of a larger, well-thought-out business development process. It may be that this is our first opportunity to introduce ourselves and raise our visibility. We know that our business development process, the sales cycle takes 18 to 36 months. So it may be that yeah, we're going to start out with a blind RFP response as the first step, but that cannot be the norm. That should be the exception to the process. So be thoughtful. Be mindful about how you're pursuing business. RFP is just part of a larger business development process.
Lisa Rehurek (08:08):
Yeah. That actually supports what you said about that larger business development process. You're making a strategic decision to bid on something. Your expectations are probably that you're not going to win and that's okay. We're doing this for a different reason and it's because you know how that fits into the bigger strategy. But if you're just bidding to, "We can do this. Oh, my gosh, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this," which is what those rabbit holes some of these companies go down because it gets exciting, I get it, the opportunities, but it's not going to do you any good in the long run. All right. How important would you say creativity and innovation? Now, let me just caveat this with we're talking state government contracts here versus if you're in the corporate space. So listeners, if you're in the corporate space, creativity and innovation is going to be a different answer than probably what Steve's going to give us here. But from a state government RFP perspective, what do you think in regards to creativity and innovation and how important that is in your response?
Steve Schramm (09:10):
I'm going to differentiate a bit between types of creativity and innovation. On the corporate side, you can have really new and exciting conceptual creativity, conceptual innovation, big ideas that really maybe haven't been tested tried and true, haven't been operationalized. I don't go down that path on the state government side. On the state government side, for creativity and innovation, what they want is practical creativity, practical innovation. Tell me what you've done that is creative and innovative and has proven to be beneficial to the clients. The creativity and the innovation has to have proof associated with it. There has to be some there there. So I would differentiate on the state government side between conceptual innovation and conceptual creativity to state government much more practically focused. Tell me, have you done it? Has it been successful? Are you able to quantify your creativity, your innovation? If you can answer those three questions, have you been able to implement it, have you been able to quantify it and is it demonstrable, that's the kind of creativity and innovation that works in state government RFP responses in my experience.
Lisa Rehurek (10:49):
Yeah, I 100% agree with you. It's brilliant to see when that is executed well in the response because most people just don't pay to that. Again, most people are scrambling to just get the answers to the questions that they've asked, let alone adding that little extra something else in there. That's really great advice. Thank you. Do you have any other important qualities that you would say a company needs to be successful in state government contracting?
Steve Schramm (11:15):
We describe ourselves as a relationship-based consulting firm. We try to make certain that in every phase of our consulting with our first, prospective clients and then when we convert them to existing clients, we focus on the relationship. What I mean by that is do we make their lives easier? Do we make them better at what they do? Are they more efficient and are they more effective? Then the second thing is when the fecal matter hits the air circulating device, are we going to do the right thing for them and do they know that in our RFP response and in everything that we do on a day-to-day basis? Because at the end of the day, I have to make their life easier for them to want to work with me. Then once they're working with me, they need to know I've got their back and we will, no matter what, be there for them and we will do the right thing. That's what we have shown to be proven successful in state government contract.
Lisa Rehurek (12:30):
Okay, I have a follow-up question on that. Before I go there. I'm going to jet off for a quick second for a commercial break. We will be right back with Steve Schramm.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
The opportunity to dramatically increase revenue through RFPs has never been better. If you are ready to respond to more RFPs, tap into our team's 60 plus years of combined experience. Our fractional RFP response team becomes your RFP response team seamlessly. For more details, email us at wecanhelp@rfpsuccess.com.
Lisa Rehurek (13:05):
Right before the commercial break, he was talking about how they found success and really what differentiates them. My follow-up question to that, which I was going to ask you right when you started off and then you really hit on it, you just didn't use this word, is trust and how do build trust. If you think about it, for what you do, a lot of the technical stuff is going to be not the same, but every company that's going to bid on some of these contracts are going to have the base requirements. They're going to be able to meet the expectations. If you think about evaluation criteria, meet expectations, probably everybody that bids is going to be able to have that baseline requirement. So you're building those differentiators that we've talked about, but how important is it in that response to build a sense of trust and how do you do that in a written response?
Steve Schramm (13:58):
From our perspective, trust isn't what gets you hired because they haven't had a working relationship with you, but trust is what gets you retained and where you have long-term relationships. So from our perspective, in our RFP responses, the way we convey trust is we show specific examples in our responses where we displayed actions worthy of gaining the trust of our clients and we provide real and true proof points for that. Sometimes we use callout boxes. Sometimes we use real-life examples. Sometimes we actually, in our response, we're completing a sample of the project and we're showing how we used a lesson learned in another state or another client that is in a very analogous situation. There are ways that you can convey behaviors worthy of trust and responses from your clients that showed they trusted you in your writing of your RFP response. You just have to be thoughtful and it's not easy.
Lisa Rehurek (15:21):
It is not easy, but I agree with you that some of those proof points and... Here's some examples of things that we've done. One of the things that my team always laughs because one of the things that I always say and they always repeat back is there's a human on the other side of that RFP and that human has a responsibility to hire a company that is going to come in and do the job and do it well and not screw you over. As Steve would say, when the fecal matter hits the rotating vernacular, I think that's what you said, but anyway, something like that. I would just say when shit hits fan, which is going to happen. Inevitably, there's going to be a situation and you're right, until you get into that, they're not really going to know, but there is some element of trust that you can build.
(16:06):
You can build a feeling, an emotion in that response that says, "Okay, I think that they'll have our back. I feel confident that they've course corrected well in the past with other clients and this feels good." There's an emotion going on when they're reading your response and you want it to be a good one, right, hopefully.
Steve Schramm (16:25):
Absolutely.
Lisa Rehurek (16:31):
Good. All right. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've really faced in your state government contracting work, not even in the RFP process, but in the actual work with state contracting and how did you overcome that to then get that client to stay with you through the next RFP round?
Steve Schramm (16:49):
I will tell you early on in my career, we had a client on the East Coast. It was a big state client and we made a calculation error. It was a small error. It was very much located in a very small portion of the work and it wasn't even an error that was what we call client facing. It was part of the background justification, but when it came to deciding what were we going to do, were we going to disclose it or we were just going to say, "You know what? That's inside baseball and nobody really needs to know about it," the right thing to do was to disclose it and say to the client, "Hey, we made this error. It impacts what we did in a very small way. Your client facing, your front facing stuff, it doesn't impact," but we said to them, "We made an error. We need to correct some of the background information that we've provided."
(17:56):
And I said to the client, "And if you need me to, I'll go in front of the people that have seen this documentation and explain why we're updating the information. And if need be, if you need me to step down as a result of this, it's my project, it's my team, I take responsibility for it." They were understandably frustrated and they said, "You know what? We need to think about it. We need to call you back." So a couple of hours later they called back and they said, "You know what? First, you recognized the error. You could have papered it over, we would've never known. Someone could have found it in the documentation years later, digging. Would it have been an issue? Hard to say. You gave us a solution. You took responsibility for it and were going to explain it. So no, we don't want you to step down. We don't want you to resign as our contractor because you've shown that you're worthy of our trust."
(19:01):
We've had challenges. Look, math is hard and you're going to make mistakes. The right thing to do is to recognize your mistake and to be upfront about it and come up with a solution that works for the client. You only have one chance to prove that your reputation is earned and is something that you deserve. That chance is not when things are going well, it's when you make a mistake. I think that's the differentiator that proves who people are and proves what a firm is all about.
Lisa Rehurek (19:44):
Yeah. And you said math is hard. Heck, Steve, sometimes being human is hard, just being human. We all make mistakes. Wouldn't you say that that moment better defines a trusting relationship and probably upleveled the trust in their eyes in you because of that, because of how you handled the mistake, not the mistake itself?
Steve Schramm (20:06):
Absolutely. They looked at us and realized, okay, we're cut from the same cloth. We have the same kind of beliefs. We're going to deal with challenges in the same way. The second challenge that I would say we've had in our government contracting work is it is so easy to get down in the rabbit hole and so into the details that you lose perspective and everything is jargon and everything is detailed and really complex and hard to read. It's hard to pivot out of that mindset and be an effective communicator for your state government clients when they need you to be publicly communicating very complex issues to an audience with a wide variation in their understanding of the topic. So you have to be able to customize your communication skills. And funny, one way you get better at customizing your communication skills is practicing your RFP responses and writing better, more concise, succinct responses that everybody can understand. One of the things that we like to say is you play like you practice. So everything that you're doing when you're writing an RFP response, that's your practice.
Lisa Rehurek (21:44):
Yeah.
Steve Schramm (21:45):
Ultimately, if you take a client focus in your writing, you're going to take a client focus in your work.
Lisa Rehurek (21:50):
That's so true. So spot on. I love it. You talked about this a little bit before, but I have one more question for you before we go into the lightning round and that is, just how do you ensure that you know what opportunities are coming that fits your high-value client or your target clients?
Steve Schramm (22:09):
So first thing, we talked about it a little bit earlier, you have to have business development criteria. You have to have target criteria. Those are things that you and your leadership team, your business development team have to agree upon, because that's what's going to guide your efforts. Second thing is you have to have a way of staying in touch, in tracking, researching of what your prospects are interested in and when their RFPs are going to be coming out. As I said, there are subscription services, especially on the state Medicaid side. All of this information's out there and publicly available. You just have to make certain that you have the correct notifications put on. You can use services based on keywords. I will tell you, we actually paid The RFP Success Company to help us fine-tune our keywords based on their experience and expertise in the marketplace. Because you guys had ideas about keywords that connected to our work based on your bigger picture view of the market that we hadn't thought of. It was a great way of broadening the amount of potential opportunities we would consider as part of our business development.
Lisa Rehurek (23:36):
I love that, that you would consider. Yes, yes. All right. Are you ready for some lightning round questions?
Steve Schramm (23:43):
Absolutely.
Lisa Rehurek (23:45):
A little bit more fun here. No. RFPs are super fun. I don't know what I'm talking about. Hello. Okay, so what's the last song you listened to?
Steve Schramm (23:53):
Just last night, the song that I added to my playlist was 17 by Mahalia. It's a phenomenal song about being comfortable with yourself. The most recent concert that I watched was actually also last night. Was wandering loose on the web and found a Tiny Desk Concert by Fred again. It's an NPR series and the guy is a genius. You have to Google search NPR Tiny Desk Concert Fred again. Guy is amazing.
Lisa Rehurek (24:42):
That's so cool. I love this question too because it adds so much to my playlist, so love it, love it, love it. All right. If you received a perfect fit RFP today and had to submit the bid within seven days, what would your first three steps be?
Steve Schramm (24:56):
First, you got to set aside an hour to brainstorm. If it's a perfect fit, that means you know you're going to bid, but you don't know how you're going to bid. You have to brainstorm for an hour. Second, once you brainstorm for an hour, you've talked about all different aspects of it, only then do you start solutioning. What are our win themes? Do not solution upfront. Everybody goes really vertical initially with their thinking. Spend an hour thinking horizontally, then go to the win theme. The last thing is you got to do your writing guide. So brainstorm, win themes, writing guide.
Lisa Rehurek (25:38):
Love it. I love it. Okay. Where's your happy place?
Steve Schramm (25:42):
I have two. If you're talking about just me being by myself, it's on my bicycle. It is where I think and where I don't think. Literally, you turn your brain off so that you are not consciously thinking and your subconsciously processing questions. What I really want to be doing is I want to be with my family. We have a house up Telluride and Telluride is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Lisa Rehurek (26:10):
Beautiful, beautiful. All right, books or podcasts?
Steve Schramm (26:14):
Most recent book is Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights.
Lisa Rehurek (26:18):
Ooh, okay.
Steve Schramm (26:19):
It is a fantastic look at how you can approach life and be appropriately bold when you should be, when the timing is right to be bold.
Lisa Rehurek (26:35):
Interesting. Interesting. All right. Last but not least, is there a business superstar out there that you want to give public shout-out to, somebody that deserves praise for their accomplishments? Who is it and why are you giving them praise?
Steve Schramm (26:48):
Absolutely. I'm going to praise my current mentor, Dr. Art Pelberg. Art Pelberg has helped probably a dozen startups be successful. He's always the guy behind the scenes. He's not the face guy. He's not the front guy, but he's the one who, like Mike Rowe in Dirty Jobs, he gets things done. So that's the shout-out is to Dr. Art Pelberg for helping me be successful at Optumas, but also more than a dozen other firms be successful. He does it from the perspective of he wants to make the world a better place. All of the startups have been healthcare-related and they've been focused on the most vulnerable populations, Medicaid, behavioral health, substance abuse. That's why Art Pelberg deserves a shout-out.
Lisa Rehurek (27:50):
I love that. Well, shout out to Dr. Pelberg for sure. Steve, thank you so much for being here. This has been a wealth of information for our listeners and for me. As always, I learn things from you, so thank you for being here. Any last words that you want to share with our audience before we close out?
Steve Schramm (28:05):
If you are committed, if you're doing the right thing and you can add value for that perspective client, then you should respond to an RFP. If you can't answer those three successfully, I don't care what your business development criteria are, you shouldn't be responding.
Lisa Rehurek (28:29):
Yay, I love it. I love it so much. Thanks again for being here. It's been great. Everybody, you've been listening to The RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek. I look forward to having you back on the next podcast.
Outro (28:40):
This has been another episode of The RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, The RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10%, 20%, and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.