EP123: Finding the Right RFP Opportunities
The good news is there's a ton of resources out there for finding RFPs in the state government space. The bad news is you have to work at finding the RIGHT opportunities.
So, how do you build a consistent process for identifying RFPs that are a good fit for your business?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I share five strategies for finding government contracting opportunities, explaining how to conduct regular research on RFPs in different states.
I describe how to set up Google Alerts around a standard list of keywords and why aggregators are the easiest way to find RFP opportunities for your business.
Listen in for insight on finding specific procurement sites for target states or agencies and learn how to build authentic relationships with buyers, so they give you a heads up when RFPs are coming out!
Key Takeaways
The abundance of resources for finding RFP opportunities in the government space
Why you need a consistent process for finding RFP opportunities
5 strategies for finding the right RFP opportunities in the SLED market
Why I suggest conducting regular research on RFP opportunities in different states and agencies
How to set up Google Alerts for a standard list of RFP keywords
Why aggregators are the quickest and easiest way to find RFP opportunities
How to find specific procurement sites for your target states and agencies (and get on their lists)
Why it’s crucial to understand the procurement landscape in your state(s)
How to get selected as an approved vendor in a particular state
What it means to build authentic relationships with buyers and procurement officials
How to build time into your calendar for finding the right RFP opportunities
RFP Success Show EP123 Transcription
(00:00):
You're 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):
Hello, everybody, and welcome to The RFP Success Show. I'm your host, Lisa Rehurek, founder and CEO of The RFP Success Company, where we help businesses do better so they can win more. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about finding RFPs. We get a ton of questions from clients, from prospects, from everybody about how companies can more easily find opportunities. Now, I've touched on this before as part of a bigger topic, but I felt it was time for its own episode based on the sheer volume of questions we get on this, so here we go. I'm going to focus for this particular podcast. I'm going to focus solely on the SLED market here, and when I say "SLED," I mean state local education market because that's what we specialize in, and it's what most of our listeners bid on. But you can learn some things from this if you bid on corporate as well. If you bid on federal, you're going to get a lot that you can leverage from this as well.
(01:22):
Now, I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is there's just a lot of resources out there in the government space, not so much in the corporate space, but in the government space, there is a ton of resources out there for finding RFPs. The bad news is you have to work at this. It's not a magic pill. So many businesses just think that a state contract is that magic pill and that the RFP is going to show up on your doorstep on a white horse, but it just doesn't work that way. It really doesn't.
(01:57):
We can get a little bit starry-eyed with the, "Oh, my gosh, I can start doing these state contracts and we all we have to do is bid on this RFP," but it's so much more than that. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I preach that constantly. Bidding just solely on this RFP that hits your desk, if that's all you're focusing on, you're going to lose over and over and over, so finding RFPs is part of the strategy, it's part of the game plan, and you've got to have a process. You've got to have that game plan. You've got to have that strategy, and it needs to be consistent.
(02:29):
In a perfect world, if you can have someone in your organization assigned to this, that truly is the best thing versus what we see a lot, and I understand, I mean, I get it, but what we see a lot is various multiple people doing different pieces whenever they have extra time, and there's really no cohesive, consistent process, but you need it. You need that process, and you need a game plan, and if you're serious about government contracting, then you've got to find a way to make this work, okay? Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you five different things that you can do, starting with the least effective and moving to the most effective strategy.
(03:11):
I will say, what I want to tell you is that you should do all of these things. Again, in a perfect world scenario, you've got somebody in your organization that is assigned to do all of this. You can have multiple people assigned to doing this, but they need to know what their role is, they need to have a consistent plan, and everybody needs to know their role and their place instead of just a free-for-all, everybody doing the pieces of it that they think, or that they like best, or whatever, and nobody's talking to each other, and there's no cohesion to it. Think about that if you're somebody that is willy-nilly with it. Again, I understand. We're all doing the best we can, and a lot of times we have limited resources, but if you're serious and you want to be in this market and you want to be winning...
(03:54):
Why I get so passionate about this and this conversation we're having right now is, look, when you've got everybody out there doing their own thing, everybody's going rogue, half-assing it, whatever you want to say, then you're going to find the wrong opportunities, you're going to bid on the wrong things, and you're going to waste all this time. What I guarantee you is if you get it streamlined and you start bidding on the right things, you're going to have enough resources, certainly more than you have now, because people are just... You're probably wasting a lot of time doing things that you shouldn't be doing, so think through this as I'm talking through it, give yourself a game plan, get your team all on the same page and everybody growing in the same direction, doing the right things at the right time, and it's going to help your strategy a lot.
(04:40):
All right, so let's dive into these five different things that you can do, starting with the least effective, and moving to the most effective strategy. The first one is just regular research, all right, a couple of times a week. Spend 30 minutes just digging around googling, going to different states, different agencies, and just looking for what's out there.
(05:03):
Now, the pro of this is that it's great to help you stay on top of what's going on in that agency or that state in general, and that's going to help you a lot with one of the upcoming strategies we're going to talk about. There's going to be a lot that you find there. We'll be out researching for one particular thing, and we end up finding all sorts of different RFP opportunities, or industry news in that particular state that we can pass on to our clients. You'll stumble upon all sorts of things if you're out there doing it. Again, a couple of times a week have somebody on your team that can spend 30 minutes on a Monday and then on a Friday and then that just again gives you a glimpse of something that might be coming down the road. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find an RFP that's been recently released.
(05:51):
The con to this approach is obviously it's a little willy-nilly. It's really easy to miss things. It's not a cohesive strategy that's going to tell you exactly what's coming when, so I don't ever recommend doing this alone, but it should be part of these other strategies that I'm talking about, because again, it's going to help you with one of the other strategies we're going to talk about in a little bit, and also just you should always have your pulse on the industry and you might stumble upon something, hopefully in a timely manner, again, if you're doing it on a consistent basis. That's number one, regular research.
(06:27):
Number two is Google Alerts. If you don't have Google Alerts set up, you got to do it. Setting up Google Alerts is just a great way to find things, it's just not all-inclusive. Similar to regular research, you don't want to rely on it. It's a great coupling to these other strategies that we're going to talk about, but it's super easy. You're just going to Google how to set up a Google alert if you don't already know. They'll ask you for your keywords and a few other parameters, and then you're going to get regular alerts. You actually get to choose whether you want them daily, or weekly, or how you want to get them.
(07:01):
The keywords piece is important, so you need to know what your keywords are. I personally, I have Google Alerts set up just for the name of our company and for my name because I want to see where we're popping up, so it's a good business strategy overall, but it's really great for just following along what's going on in your target agency. Get that keyword list. If you don't already have that, brainstorm that with your team. You should always have a standard list of keywords that's going to help you in a lot of different ways that's going to help you in another one of these strategies that we're going to talk about, actually, the third one, so the next one we're going to talk about. Then you have to get a little creative sometimes and do a little trial and error with Google Alerts. For example, if you're a tech company and you provide cloud-based services, I'd probably start with setting a Google alert for RFP Cloud. It would be even better if you set it up for a specific state, so Arizona RFP Cloud, and see what you get.
(08:04):
Now, the challenge with this is that there are a lot of variations of keywords that you could use, so maybe instead of RFP, it's procurement. I'd probably start out with both, Arizona procurement cloud, Arizona RFP cloud, and then you start seeing what you're getting. I have an alert. I don't remember the exact keyword word that I have in there, but it is RFP, and I get a lot of just things that RFP stands for that has nothing to do with request for proposal, but that's okay, I'm willing to wade through that. You just have to get used to what works for you.
(08:38):
Now, you're probably not going to get everything that you need. You're going to miss things, so again, this is not all-inclusive, but the great thing about this is you'll also likely get all sorts of news that will help you as you stay on top of what's going on in that state or in that locale, whatever that is. Number two, Google Alerts. Definitely get that set up. It's super easy. You just, again, have to set some time aside throughout your week to make sure that you're reviewing that on a regular basis.
(09:11):
One of my biggest pet peeves, and my team will tell you this, is when we get a call from a client and they're like, "We have an RFP we need help on. It's due in two weeks," but it was released three weeks ago. I cannot stress enough the importance of finding the RFPs as soon as you possibly can. You might think, "Oh, we've got plenty of time." They've given you five weeks for a reason not to because it's going to take you five weeks to produce a winning proposal.
(09:42):
Can you get it done? Can you answer the questions and submit something in two weeks? Sure. But it's really hard to get a winning RFP done in that short of a timeframe, so we want all the time that we can possibly have, so if your mindset is, "Yeah, it's okay if we've missed it by a couple of weeks," you got to shift that and start thinking, "Look, we got to find these RFPs as soon as possible," and really have some urgency around that, build that into your culture because it is hard to lose any time, let alone a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks is... Ugh, it's so heartbreaking because that's a lot of time. It is a lot of time. A lot of time, that's double what you end up having, so strategies one and two are going to get you. You're probably going to find stuff, but you're probably going to find it where you're behind, and that can be significant.
(10:36):
Let's go to number three. Strategy number three is aggregators. There are a lot of aggregators out there. What I mean by an "aggregator" are there are a lot of companies out there that aggregate RFP notices from all over the place. Now, again, this one very much is specific to government, whether it's state or federal, and again, we're going to focus on state, local, all of that, but the aggregators that are out there, if you're not signed up for an aggregator, and if you're not willing to pay to sign up for an aggregator, you shouldn't be in the business. Hard truth, you just shouldn't be in it.
(11:12):
There are aggregators that cost $30 a month, and there's aggregators that are going to cost 1500 a month, and you just get to decide which one is best for you. If you've never used one, I'd start with the least expensive one. Or if you're like, "No, this is a big strategy for us this year," then go do your research. Find the one that you feel is solid for you. I'm going to give you the name of several of them here in a couple of minutes. But this is probably the quickest and easiest way to find RFPs.
(11:41):
That's the pro, right? The pro is there. You're going to sign up for an aggregator. It's a lot like Google Alerts, but obviously Google Alerts is searching Google for anything and everything. The aggregators, you're going to go in, you're going to put in your keywords. A lot of times they give you an option to do state versus federal. They're going to give you an option to do a particular state. Sometimes you can pay for just one state. Let's say you're in the state of Arizona. I keep using Arizona because that's where I'm located. If you're in the state of Arizona and you only want to do work here, then that's great. You can get an aggregator focused on the state of Arizona. Sometimes it'll do regional, and then sometimes national, so you've got those options there.
(12:21):
Again, it's the quickest and easiest way to find RFPs because you're going to put your keywords in. Remember how I said in step two how important it is for you to know those keywords? It is because you're going to need them here for the aggregators, and you put that in, and then you're going to get alerts. Again, generally, on a daily basis, you're going to get alerts, and it's going to come straight to your inbox. Super easy, super quick. Yes, you're going to have to pay for it, but that's part of the gig.
(12:50):
Now, the downside is a couple of things. You're going to have to spend a little bit of time going through those aggregators. You're going to have to go through the list of opportunities they send you. You're going to have to trial and error and play around with your keyword and shift things around as you learn what you're getting. That's one downside. Another downside is that often they will be delayed by three, five, seven, ten days, so a little bit more predictable than just Google Alerts and regular research, but it's still going to be delayed, and it's hugely valuable time you're losing. But again, some of them are going to show up. If it's only three days, not that big of a deal. If it's 10 days, you start getting into a place where it's like, "Oh, I'm not getting them quick enough," but you'll start getting a feel for that.
(13:38):
Now, let me give you a couple of aggregators that we know of that we have worked with in the past that work really well. The first one is findrfp.com. This is the least expensive one that I've personally ever seen. I think it's about 30 bucks a month, somewhere in there. It's pretty raw, it's not fancy, it's not pretty, but it does the trick. A couple of others that are really strong, mygovwatch.com, and bidnetdirect.com. You can do trials on all of these. What I do is I go out and do as many trials as you can and really find the ones that you feel like, "Okay, I like their format. I like what they're giving me."
(14:19):
You might even want more than one. If you're willing to invest in more than one, I'd have two. That would be ideal is to have two different ones, and then you can test over time, are they giving you the same thing? How much more timely is one over the other? Then maybe over a six or nine-month period, you'll realize, "Okay, I like this one versus this one, so I'm going to get rid of this one. We're getting all the same opportunity." Aggregators, aggregators, you've got to do it. Again, they all have state-specific. Make sure to find one specific to where you can choose state and local versus everything being mixed in with federal because that pool can get really murky. That's strategy number three.
(15:01):
All right, strategy number four is the specific procurement sites for your target. Now, this gets harder because obviously, you've got to know who your targets are, but this gets increasingly more effective, and it doesn't really cost you anything. It costs you some time, especially on the front end, but it doesn't cost you anything as far as a monthly subscription. The best-case scenario, you know who your targets are, you go out and you get on their lists.
(15:32):
Now, here's what I'm going to tell you. Some states make it really easy. You can go on, you can google "state of Arizona procurement," and they've got a procurement site and you can go on and sign up and it's beautiful. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a pretty comprehensive one as well, but a lot of states are still very archaic and they don't have it, or it's very disjointed.
(15:58):
What you need to do here is a little bit of homework. Who are your top prospects? I would choose no more than three states to start and have somebody in your organization really do some legwork around that state. Talk to procurement, find out if the state procurement covers all of the counties in the city that you're targeting. Maybe you just care about the state itself and maybe there's just one particular agency that you care about. The tighter you can get on who your target is, the better, because then you can learn about that particular target. If you imagine a state and you're like, "Well, we'll do anything in the state of Arizona. Well, you've got the state, then you've got the counties, you've got..." I mean, how many counties in Arizona? I think we have 11 or 12, but some states have 30-some counties. What about the prison system? What about the community college district? What about education? What about all of the school districts? Where does all of that come into play?
(16:53):
The more about your target, the easier it will be to find where those RFPs are, so pick up the phone, talk to procurement, find out what their state procurement site covers. Understand the procurement landscape in that state. You want to learn it like the back of your hand. Some states are kind of decentralized, meaning, again, all of those entities that I just rattled off do their own procurement. That's brutal, right? Some are centralized, where everything has to go through central procurement. That is beautiful. I love those states because then everything's in one place.
(17:31):
Get on any and all lists that you can. You want to find out how you sign up to learn about it. Is there an email they can send you? Or do you have to go onto the site every day and look? You've got to know that and build that into your research calendar, if you will. Remember in the beginning, I said, you need to carve out a certain amount of time every week to do research? Well, you should have a calendar for who and what is going to do what, when, and where, and this should be part of it.
(18:05):
The other thing that you want to find out is if they have any MSAs, which is master service agreement. Every state calls it something different, so it might not be an MSA, you can say, "A master services agreement," they're going to know what you're talking about. What that is you get, it's usually a one to a two, sometimes three-year term where you can respond to an RFP and get selected as an approved vendor, so it doesn't guarantee you any work, but you basically get on the approved vendor list, and then any entities within that state can go to that approved vendors list and do work with you, or that's sometimes the only group of people that get RFPs from the agencies within a state, so you definitely want to get on that. Find out when the next one's coming up for bid, find out what the different categories are to make sure that that's something that your service or product is going to be able to respond to. Then get prepared to bid on that, get the old RFP for it. They generally don't make a ton of changes for that.
(19:10):
The beautiful thing about MSAs is that you can really start working on that. If you call and they say, "It's not coming out for another year," it feels deflating, but it's like, ah, that's a beautiful thing, because for the next year now you can spend really making sure that you're prepared to respond to that RFP. We could get into a whole conversation about MSAs because then you've got to work the relationships. We're going to talk about that here in a couple of minutes. You have to work the relationships to even leverage that MSA, but still, you want to get on those MSA lists for your key targets, and again, hoping that you've got one to three key target states.
(19:49):
Please, out of the gate, do not try to do eight or ten, or, "We can work with any state." Well, yes, sure, of course you can, but you've got to target it because we only have a finite amount of resources and time. Find one, start on that, then expand it to two or three. Start on that when you really get comfortable, then maybe you can go to five, but be targeted as much as you can, and I promise you, it's going to pay off.
(20:14):
The other thing that you need to do is stay on top of what's happening in the state. I mentioned this above in number one with regular research. You want to watch the governor's news, what the governor's priorities are, what the state of the state is every year. Each agency a lot of times will post key initiatives for the year, and you can follow along with the progress, but the more that you know about that state, number one, the easier it's going to be to build relationships.
(20:42):
Number two, you're going to probably have an upper hand in what's coming down the pike. For example, we had all those ARPA funds that have been dispersed to the states. Well, where are those going? Who's got them? How are they using them? All of that kind of stuff is great to know because now you're going to be in the know about what is going on in that particular target state, and you're just going to know it, like I said, like the back of your hand, and there's, oh, there's so much power in that you guys, there's so much power in that. All right, that is strategy number four.
(21:13):
Then strategy number five, which is the best-case scenario is you're building a relationship with the actual buyer and they give you a heads up of when things are coming out. As you're working through strategy number four, you're going to start to learn who those buyers are, and then you're going to start building relationships with them. I know people a lot of times will say, "Well, how do you build relationships with state people?" Well, you just pick up the phone and you start calling them.
(21:42):
Now, you don't want to call and continuously try to sell them. You want to call and build an authentic relationship with them, help them, give them information they might need. Help them by, if you've got a whitepaper, or you've heard something in the news, even offering to do a free 30 or 60-minute strategy session about what they need to look for when they're getting ready to put together an RFP for cloud services, for example. Just anything that you can do to help them, they're going to start seeing you in a different light. It's not about sell, sell, sell. It's about building that connection. Sales 101 is building the connection, building an authentic relationship with your buyer.
(22:25):
The more you can do that, the better, the easier it's going to be. People are going to get to know you, and they're going to say, "Hey, we've got an RFP coming up that we think fits for you. Keep your eye out over here." Again, you can't do this with a lot of people. Maybe it's just one agency or up to three. It's time-intensive, so you want this for your key, key targets. You know, "I want to work for the state, Arizona State University. We want to get in there. We know they've got a really great contract. We know that this..."
(22:56):
Oh, here's the other thing you're going to learn as you start to research all of this and build these relationships is you're going to learn whether or not they have a great relationship with the vendor that's in there doing what you want to be doing, and any little glimpse of problems, you can start to sneak in a little bit there. There's just a ton that you can do when you're building those relationships. For some reason, when we're thinking about state government, a lot of companies think, "Well, we'll just wait for the RFP," and they don't think about the amazing, amazing value there is to building those relationships. It's a game-changer, but again, time-intensive. The con is it's time intensive.
(23:35):
Frankly, as you look through these strategies, and I say the least effective to the most effective, the least effective strategies are the quickest and the easiest and the most effective strategies are time-intensive, so you've got to have a really good balance in here. Combining them all is the best case in a perfect world. Do all five of the strategies. Again, what I said at the beginning of this is, if you're serious about government contracting and finding the right opportunity, not just any opportunity, then you employ all of these and you invest one to two hours a week, I would say, to review Google Alerts, doing your research in your target market, another one to two hours per week, reaching out to your target buyers, procurement in the state and locale, building relationships, sending emails, et cetera.
(24:23):
We always recommend something that we do with our clients, actually, a lot of our clients, is building a relationship-building calendar very simplistic like, "Here's what I do on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. Here's who does what when. Here's when we have meetings to come together to compare notes," if you have multiple people doing it, but that calendar will just help you stay consistent, stay on track of everything, and it just becomes part of your business development strategy. The more honed-in strategy you have, the more success you're going to have.
(24:55):
I'm not expecting that you're going to spend eight hours a day on this, but like I said, if you can spend two to four hours a week doing all of this stuff, you're going to see a massive difference, and if four hours feels really heavy, then start with one, "What can I do in one hour a week, 30 minutes on Monday, 30 minutes on Friday? What can I do to start?" Do that for 30, 60, 90 days, and then say, "Okay, I've got this down. It's become a habit. It's built into my world. Now, let's double that. Let's do two hours instead of one hour." That's what I suggest.
(25:28):
Just as a quick recap, least effective is just regular research on the internet and through the state agencies and states. Number two, Google Alerts automated. Get your keywords in there. Number three, sign up for at least two aggregators to get you started. Number four, really get signed up for all of those agency and procurement sites that you can and start doing research there. Number five, build those relationships with the key contact that you need. By the way, when you're building relationships, you want to build a relationship with the actual buyer. That's generally somebody in the agency, and also at the same time the procurement officials because procurement officials hold the cards a lot of times, and you want to be building relationships with both.
(26:13):
All right, everybody, that's a lot of information I crammed in. Got to go back and listen to it again. Take notes, build your calendar, start working on this strategy, and come back and tell us how it's working for you. Let us know if you've got questions. We've got a community on LinkedIn called The RFP Success Community. Feel free to go join that. We've got moderators out there that are there to answer your questions. Come tell us how it's going. Again, everybody, this has been Lisa Rehurek, founder and CEO of The RFP Success Company, and you've been listening to The RFP Success Show. Thanks for tuning in.
Outro (26:48):
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.