EP132: RFP Response FAQs, Part 2
Here at the RFP Success Company, we get some of the same questions over and over.
And in episode 129, we covered eight of the most common questions we get from our clients and community.
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I’m answering seven more FAQs, explaining why you can’t wait until orals to go into detail on your requirements and what to do if you don’t think the procuring agency is asking the right questions.
I discuss why you shouldn’t assume the evaluators aren’t going to read your entire response (even though they may not) and challenge you not to use the answer, ‘Yes, we will meet the requirement.’
Listen in for insight on the benefit of including graphics and tables in your proposal response and learn how to use the client’s language in an RFP—without repeating the question word for word.
Key Takeaways
Why you can’t wait until orals to go into detail on your requirements for an RFP
How to provide enough information about your qualifications without overwhelming the evaluators
How to guide the agency in your response if you think they’re not asking the right questions
What to do if you’re uncertain about the client’s objective in an RFP
Why ‘yes, we will meet the requirement’ usually isn’t a good enough answer
Why you shouldn’t assume the evaluators aren’t going to read your entire response (even though they may not)
The benefit of using graphics and tables vs. answering with a wall of text
What to consider before you add an ‘additional notes’ column to the RFP Excel doc
The problem with copy-pasting the exact wording of the question in your response
How to use the client’s language without repeating the question word for word
RFP Success Show EP132 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):
Hello everybody and welcome to the RFP Success Show. I'm Lisa Rehurek, your host and founder and CEO of the RFP Success Company. Today we're doing part two of frequently asked questions. We had about 15 questions that we find that our clients and our community ask us over and over and over, so we thought, "Hey, this is a great time for me to do a podcast episode to address these questions," so we did part one a few episodes back. Now we're on to part two and it looks like, yeah, seven questions that we've got for part two, so we're just going to go ahead and dive right in.
(01:01):
Part two, question number one, "Can't we just wait until we're invited to orals to go into more detail about requirement so we don't overwhelm them in our response?" We get this a lot with our clients, because there's this really interesting balance of answering the question appropriately, positioning yourselves, but not going overboard to give them too much information. The deal is that orals are completely different. You have to respond to that RFP, and first of all, you've got to do your best in that RFP response to actually get to the orals. Never presume that you're going to get to the orals, even if you're the incumbent. Look, we've seen plenty of incumbents not even get to the orals because of the crappy job that they did in the RFP response. It happens all the time. Well, I shouldn't say all the time, but it does happen a good amount of time, because sometimes we get comfortable as the incumbent and we think, "Well, we've got this, they know us, we'll just respond," and the response tends to be impersonal and they don't even make it to orals. I don't want you to ever just assume that you're going to make orals.
(02:12):
The other things to think about is that people in the orals might actually be different people than in the evaluation committee. Now, generally there's at least one, but it's probably not going to be all the same people, so you want to make sure that both your response ... Again, you want to make sure your response is responsive and the best that it can be, but you want to make sure that you hit on all of the most important things in your response, and of course in the orals. Also, orals might not happen. They might get to ... Especially if the RFP doesn't indicate. Most of the time what we see in RFPs is that it says that there may be an oral presentation. It very rarely says for sure, oral presentation. If the orals don't happen, then you've missed that opportunity, right? Again, you don't want to overwhelm them in your response, so don't do that, but you want to get to the orals, so you need to know how to respond to RFP questions in a way that meets the requirements, talks about your value proposition, positions you as the expert, but doesn't overwhelm. It's a tricky balance, but you've got to get that right so that you can get to the orals.
(03:23):
All right, question number two. "The agency clearly doesn't understand what they're asking for in this RFP, so isn't it better to be more high level and generic in our response and set them straight when we win the deal?" No, because you might not get that chance, right? Again, what I was just saying on that first question is that you've got to win the business first, right, so you might need to guide them a bit in that response. You might need to share with them a different way to approach it. You might say, for example, "In our experience, X, Y, Z doesn't particularly get to the result that we believe you're trying to get to, but this is our approach to that instead." That is, if you feel like, "Okay, they're really not asking the right questions or they're asking something that really isn't relevant," you're going to have to guide them, but you still have to be responsive.
(04:18):
Again, I want you to think about, here's this evaluation committee member, a person, sitting on the other side of this reading your response, with a printout of their scoring sheet next to them. You've got to make sure that they can understand how you're being responsive enough to hit that meets or exceeds, hopefully exceeds, button or check-mark on their scoring criteria, but again, you might need to guide them a little bit. You want to prove to them that you know what you're talking about, and so you can tell a story, you can give an alternative method, while still being responsive.
(04:55):
Okay, so I've got a friend, actually. She was not a client, she's a friend of mine, and we did an episode, oh, it was back in the early days, so it's probably within 20 episodes of the beginning of this podcast. Her name is Robin and she's with a company called Axiom, so you can go back and see if you can find that episode. Actually, we'll drop it in the show notes, what episode that is, so you can listen to it. They actually were reading this RFP and they're like, "I don't think that these guys know what their objective is. They seem really confused." In the Q&A period, they chose to ask a very simple question. "Can you confirm what your collective objective is for releasing this RFP?" It was a relatively simple question. There's a lot of times companies don't want to ask questions because they don't want to show their cards, they don't want the competitors to get the answers, but if you're confident, which you should be, and you are playing offense and not defense, then it's okay to ask those questions because you need them to be the best you can be.
(06:00):
Their company asks these questions, and what ended up happening was, the company that released the RFP, this was a corporate RFP, not a government RFP, I believe, is that they couldn't answer it. What they had to do was step back and basically reissue the RFP, and they brought my friend's company in, I believe, to help them lay the groundwork and really understand what their objective was. Sometimes they don't know. If you've ever worked on the procurement side, if you've ever dealt with that, writing RFPs is really hard, too. Writing the actual RFP, and sometimes there's multiple people with their fingers in that pot and sometimes they don't have time, so they're taking an old RFP and they're melding it with new comments from other people, other departments, and then they're just tossing it out there. Don't be afraid to ask the question, but you might need to guide them a little bit. Don't just give a generic proposal, because you're probably not going to win if you do that, and we don't want that to happen, right?
(07:00):
All right, question number three. "Why isn't, 'Yes, we will meet this requirement,' enough of an answer?" Sometimes it is. I'll tell you that right now. Sometimes it is. If it's a very basic simple question like, "Can you meet the requirement of being in the state of California?" "Yes, we meet that requirement." I'd actually elaborate on that and say, "We've got offices in," to tell them where your offices are, but every now and then you'll come across one that, yes, it's okay to say, "Yes, we'll meet this requirement." The reason that you don't want to do that frequently is because it's just the baseline, and again, everybody that's responding is going to hit the baseline most of the time. Why else would they be responding? Right? You don't want to be just like everybody else. You need to stand out. You need to show them why you're going to meet that requirement, particularly if you can meet it better than anybody else. Give them a little bit more there to seek their teeth into, give them something.
(07:59):
Again, back to that example that I just gave, where, "Are you able to conduct business in the state of California?" Let's say, "Yes, because we've got offices in this many cities and we've been conducting business here for 25 years," versus a competitor who maybe just says yes, and they don't know the robustness of their presence in California. You need to use that as an opportunity. Don't go overboard, don't give them too much, but give them more than just, "Yes, we will meet," because I tell you right now, you don't want to just meet. Again, if you think about that person sitting at their desk, scoring criteria printed out, sitting next to them, and they're having to check something off, I always envision the boxes being meets expectations, exceeds expectations, doesn't meet expectations. You want to hit an exceeds expectations check-mark, because if you meet expectations the majority of the time, you probably won't win, or if you do, you're going to squeak it out, and we don't want that. We want it to be a resounding yes, yes, yes, that they want to hire you. That's question number three.
(09:06):
All right, question number four. "Are they really going to read the entire response?" Probably not. Probably not, so if you listened to part one of this, one of the things that I said in answer to several of the questions was, a lot of times they parse out pieces of the RFP to different team members. In that case, obviously they're not going to read the whole RFP, but there's a statistic, I think it's like 72%. It's somewhere in the seventies, of people, skim versus read. Even though they're supposed to be reading it, they're supposed to be scoring you based on what they read, a lot of times they're skimming, so they're not ... Even if they're going through the whole thing, they're maybe not even reading the whole thing, but here's the deal. You don't want to guess who's a skimmer and who isn't. You don't want to guess how many skimmers there are. You don't want to guess what pieces of it they will or won't read. You don't want to guess what pieces of it the skimmers will or won't catch in their skimming.
(10:04):
There's a whole lot of luck that has to go into it if you choose to just not worry about the fact that they're not going to read the entire response. They probably aren't, especially if you're third or fourth in the line. If you're first in line, they might, but third or fourth, they're getting tired, they're getting bored. It's the same old, same old, so don't assume they're not going to read the entire response.
(10:26):
Question number five. "Why should we use graphics and tables when they're asking for us to address the requirements?" Something that we tend to love to do in our clients' responses, because it allows our readers ease in reading that response. It puts it into a format the evaluators can look at, see immediately. The skimmers can grab ahold of it if it's in a graphic or ... Now, you got to make the graphic simple and easy. Same with kind of tables, but one of the things, for example, if there's a question and they're asking for short bits of information, but they're asking five things in one question, a lot of times we'll put that into a table because it makes it really easy for the evaluator to go, "Okay, check, check, check, check, check. They've got all these five things." Versus, having to wade through heavy content. When it's heavy content, a lot of times if there's five questions in one, they've got to go back. They've got to map it back to the question. It just makes it hard for them.
(11:31):
The easier you can make it on the evaluator, the better, because they'll just get through your response better, they'll be happier, kind of that unconscious positive bias, and you won't have all of those annoyances and frustrations that put you into a negative light with them. It just makes it easier to read and it just makes them happier. Think about when you're reading something, as well. If it's just a bunch of text, it's sometimes, "Ugh, I don't want to read all that text," so make it easy on the evaluators.
(12:03):
All right, question number six. "I know they don't have a column for additional notes in the Excel spreadsheet, but could we add one so we can explain our yes/no response better?" This is actually a really tough one. First of all, most of the time they don't allow you to add anything, so their Excel spreadsheets are locked down and you don't even have that opportunity. I would say, double check that first before you go through, "Should we, should we not?" Because there's probably no ... I would say 90, 95% of the time, they're going to have it locked down. You're not going to be able to. Now, in the off chance that you can, I would say you might add a little bit there. Oh, it's such a tough question to answer because it kind of depends on their appetite for that. If you know the client well and you know them, you would have an answer for that yourself. If you don't know them at all, you could maybe add a little bit in there, but I would be very, very careful to not overwhelm it, because again, the way that they're set up to score it is probably like the Excel spreadsheet is set up, and you just don't want to make them mad. You don't want to upset the apple carts.
(13:11):
All right, and the last and final question, question number seven, "Why can't we just repeat the keywords from the question in our answer and call it good?" Now, I always say that you should use their language, so if they're calling it a system and then you turn it into a process, I would use the word system because that's the vernacular that works for them. That terminology works for them, but you don't want to just repeat the question, because then it just looks like you dialed it in. They want to believe that you're the expert. That's why they're hiring you. You are the expert, so make sure that you have your own voice there. Don't just repeat their question. Don't repeat a whole bunch of their keywords, but use their languaging so that, again, back to making it easier for the evaluators, as silly as it sounds ... "Well, we're asking for a system and I see that they've got a process, but that's not quite a system." In the evaluator's head, they're judging based on their own experience and knowledge of what a system is versus a process, and you can't assume that that it's synonymous for them.
(14:21):
Use their language as much as you can to make sure that the evaluator can follow along and understand that, yes, this fits what they're looking for, but do not just copy and paste all of their language and their question. That just is, that's going to annoy the evaluator. It's= going to look like, "Well, shoot, you just dialed this in. That's no good." I'll tell you, we received a proposal the other day from a vendor that we asked for. It wasn't even an RFP, it was just an unsolicited proposal, and it was just really sad because I know we really liked them when we talked to them, but their proposal came in and they just dialed it in. It was boilerplate. They did nothing custom for us. They used all their own language. They didn't take anything that we had talked to them about and use that languaging in understanding kind of how we work in our business, and they immediately went to the garbage and it was a big fat no, even though we liked them in the interview. Just know that these are human beings, they buy with emotion, and if you turn them off, if you annoy them, if you frustrate them, it's just going to go against you. It's just better to be as clean there as you can, and don't look like you've just dialed it in.
(15:33):
All right everybody, so that is the seven questions for part two. We had eight questions in part one, seven questions in part two, frequently asked by our clients, by our community, and I hope this has been helpful. We'd love to hear from you. Come out and tell us what you thought. If you've got any questions that you want us to answer in future frequently asked questions, we'd love to hear them. Thanks so much for joining us today, and we'll see you on the next one.
Outro (15:59):
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.