Responding to an RFP

written an RFP. There's so much more information out there now that it's almost as if every time and interaction starts with the customer coming to us with some interest. You know, they've done some research on their own. So even that is like a verbal form of the RFP. And and what I think, And it just hit me as you as you said it, and I because I

agree with the assumption. But it's almost as if getting an RFP maybe we should be thinking of it as like an invitation to the party, okay, And it's like the question now, is is this a party I want to go to? And is it a party I want to step in, take a look around and get the heck out of? Or is it a party I want to go to and actually participate in. Maybe that's just a little shift on the on the on the concept because there are you know, three or four big things

that I got to understand. How did they get here? Did they get here on their own or do they are already have some help? Are they using the internet and doing all their own research, whatever that might be. And then for us, it's getting an understanding, you know, if it's a written RFP or it's a verbal conversation, just listening and or fully re to better understand what's happening so that you can assess your position before you try to improve your position right and determine your response.

And I have to tell you, as I was thinking about it this morning before we got on the call, I was reminded of some of the greatest strategists I was lucky enough to work with. And I think about, you know, just names, no one that's going to know, but Dan On Nuskin, Becky Mitchell, and Tom Grohle, who might be a recognizable name because Tom is the uncle of rock and roll as Dave Grohl. But Tom Grohl was one of my mentors. So those three names were

mentors of mine. As a sales rep. And one of the things all three of them had in common was this ability to really assess our position and to include a case like this where there's a live deal on the table that we've been invited to participate in. And for them, it was all about strategy first, not just

oh we got something, let's go run to act. It was about really assessing what is this thing that we've been invited to all about, and how do we figure out do we belong, how do we influence it before we just run with some set of answers.

of mentioned in a minute ago. When I look at an invitation, because that's really what this is, I got to ask myself, is this a party I'm even interested in attending? And that should come from your knowledge of the account in the political landscape in sidey the account, the relationships you do have or don't have. It goes back to the concept of account strategy and planning. Have we been working on this account to develop champions or at least coaches and those kinds of things, or is

this a cold opportunity for us. That's the first thing. And then inside of that, I think You've got to have a willingness. If you decide you're going to try to participate, you have to have a willingness. Or maybe it's a point of view that just says, listen, whether this customer buys from us or not is not the first question to answer. The first question to answer is

what does good really look like? Now I'm going to sound like a broken record because I talk about this all the time, but my job is to help the customer to find what good looks like so that we can look at that from both sides of the desk, and I can start to answer the question before the customer even does. Am I a good fit for that?

Because if I've really helped you think through what good looks like and we've landed on what good looks like for you and your organization, it then should become obvious to me and my team are we a good potential fit for this set of outcomes and what it takes to get to those outcomes? So I should be qualifying this opportunity in that way first, before I start thinking about what can I compete against other offerings that it might already be at the table. Take that out of

the equation. Because that clouds your vision. That gets you focused on getting the win over the competition, versus defining and anchoring tim catoism, which I love, right, anchoring the conversation and the problems we're trying to help you solve, and more importantly, in my mind, the outcomes we're trying to help you drive. I think it got to start there.

You got to have the willingness, you know, to make the customer earn your expertise a little bit when it comes to your product and your solutions, right because you know, well, kid, you're going to say something, I think.

I'm going to honor the required capabilities you come to the table with. But my first responsibility, I think, is to get some things on the table that you may not have thought about yet, or you may not have thought about fully yet, in order to expand the universe of what's important for you to think about right before. Because I think this is all about and this is my mindset I'm when I say this, I think this is all about the customer getting to a great outcome

and to your point about triangulating the truth. So I'm not only trying to triangulate the truth about that what is really a great outcome and what's truly required to get there and if you really thought about all of that and if you really thought about all of that with depth. But the other thing I'm trying to do is I'm trying toqualify you, right. I mean, you're the one who invited me to this party. Do I want to spend time with you. Are you worth spending time with?

And you know, because it's the old you know, A third, a third, a third, even when the owner organization is an RFP. In a way, I'm of the strong belief that a third of the people involved in that RFP are the ones actually sponsoring it. They want to see some change, they're going to put their names on it. A third of the people, you know, they're all long for the ride, they'll, they'll, they'll, they're all in for the change, but they're not going to put their name

on it. They don't want to own it. And then there's a third of the people who are praying to God this thing doesn't happen because it's going to change their life. They don't want it. Right. And my only point is I'm constantly trying to triangulate who am I in front of? Am I talking to? Which one of

those three people am I talking to? And if I find myself in that third person's office, I'm not suggesting that that data point alone means I qualify me and my team out of the deal, but I probably does qualify me out of their office. Right, So all of these data points matter but it does. I think I'll go back to first and foremost, you have to anchor the conversation in what are you really trying to solve for?

Because if you can get that door open about what are the outcomes you're trying to achieve, it's easier to start talking through required capabilities at a deeper level. It's also easier to pull them back and say, well, how did we even get there? What problem are we trying to solve for?

to make the strategy work. I'm gonna have to take a step back and ask myself, is this a flanking opportunity or a fragmenting opportunity? Can I flank the deal with additional differentiation that I have that is important to getting the outcomes? And even but that's only going to work if I've also got relationship, right, I've got some credibility in the account. And then secondarily, or do I fragment it? So I look at this large deal and go, this thing is set up seventy five percent of it

for the competition already, and that makes perfect sense. But this twenty five percent over here, we do really well, how do I maybe pull that piece of the deal out? Like that's that's like a real serious competitive strategy conversation that should be happening early if something's coming to us

and we can already tell other people are engaged. Here's the other thing too, when you think about the people if you've got a third party involved, like a consultant, which happened, which is happening more and more right in certain industries. It's been happening in other industries for a long time. But if you've got a consultant in the room, you've got to be start to ask yourself some questions about that. What does that relationship mean to the customer?

How does that consultant get paid? Right? What is their objective which is you know, often not totally aligned. Their objective is to save money, right, because that's how they get paid. They get a percentage of cost savings and this and purchasing is aligned with that to one extent or another. And then the line of businesses does even isn't even aware of that relationship. They've got a responsibility to the customer base or to the patient or whatever marketplace,

you know, vertical market I'm in. So then you've got to start to triangulate all of that. There's a lot more than just oh you want these ten requirements. Let me tell you how we do it right?

of circling around this other point with the RFP. That can be a little bit of a dance that when you decide this isn't for us and you need to walk away, that is not always easy, especially if there's an established relationship there.

So but on your on your question, the contents of atit and gratefully, I think this is really in and of itself a really important skill set, right because we've all seen this go really bad, like I remember no names please, right, we'll protect protect the guilty but I remember getting a phone call from a Fortune five one thousand, I think for five hundred client, and it was the administrative aid for the CEO, and we had responded to an RFP and midway through we got cut. So we

didn't we didn't walk away, but we got cut. But this is close. The rep shows, without any agreement from anybody else, the account executive on the on the account chose to send the CEO a letter letting the CEO know how awful his team was in no uncertaint terms.

And obviously I had no idea about it, nor did anyone else, but I'm the one who got the call from the CEO's office, and of course, of course, you know, I immediately took responsibility and apologized, and he was happy that I was willing to, you know, own it, and you know, we walked away having a good conversation. But you know,

there's a way to exit gracefully, you know. And whether it's midway through the RP when you think you're about to lose, or it's early on and you're seeing yourself, I don't think we belong in this one, as much as we'd like to compete. If this was a brand new opportunity. Maybe we could better influence it, but these require capabilities are already set up for somebody else, et cetera, et cetera. You have got to find a way to

exit gracefully and live to fight another day. And again, even that is a skill, and I think how you do that? Again? It goes back to strategy. It goes back to In one account, we just might be able to call somebody up and say, listen, Rachel, we've known you a long time. The reality is we already know that like you, and I may be so tight that I can say Rachel's reality is this has clearly already

been written for ex competitor, and that's okay. If that's if that's where this is headed, those things happen, and if we can't influence it, let's just move on right. In other cases, it might require a more formal response. We used to do a lot of this kind of thing, where we would look at an RFP and say, hey, if it had the following couple of outcomes in it and or the following couple of required capabilities, we could

potentially play. And so we would send a letter and just stay very very kindly, hey, based on your RP. It looks like this is where you're headed. We believe that there's some conversations around the following outcome and or required capabilities that need to be had. If you if you'd like to have those, we are a potential player. If not, that's okay, but we're probably we're not going to play because we don't. You know, it just doesn't make sense. That's probably the wrong language, which you get

the point. And what I find interesting is you would immediately find some things out. Those conversations on one in the spectrum or somewhere in the middle would immediately tell you if your gut is correct. You might It wasn't all the time, but more frequently than people might think.

We would get a response to the verbal conversation that I just walked it through, or the written conversation I gave an example of that would say well, whoa, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute, come on here, come in here and

talk to us about that stuff. Okay. Again, it didn't mean we were going to stay in the deal, but it did give us the opportunity to go in and try to influence and I better understand so that we could look the cuts in the eye, often in that very moment and say, okay, based on this conversation, we're all in. Or based on this conversation, we're clearly not the right fit. And by the way, here's what we

think you might want to do. You might want to call these people like especially I'm laughing because especially, like if this was already wound for one competitor, we didn't want to make it easy for the competition. We you know, so if we knew somebody else who could make their life difficult whether they win or not, and and like an honest competitor for the you know, for the customer to consider, we say, you know what you should do.

You should call those folks over at because they're another group that might be able to do this really really well, you know that kind of thing. Again, I'm doing this with the customer's best interest in mine, but I'm also trying to make life a little more difficult for one of my competitors who's already made tried to make my life difficult by writing an RFP and then getting me pulled in as a second or a third bit. So you get my point, right, I mean, but this is

all about really good strategy and preparation. It's all about really think it's chess like this is thinking three four moves ahead, not just reacting to the move that the other player just made on the board, right, you know. I mean I'm not the greatest chess player, but I understand that concept really well, and so I would my biggest piece of advice on this would be when you get something like this, stop for a minute and think about strategy before you just act.

And guess what you know, four years later, we're looking for the same type of vendor and I did not call them.

require a different lens. There are accounts that, because of their size or just how the company is built, they're more formal, right, and you know RFP like so that first thing, understand your territory makeup, and understand which accounts are probably more apt to live in this world of a more formal process, and then start thinking about forget the deal level, forget the RFP level for a minute,

start thinking a level up at the account plan. Who are the people that once decisions start getting made that are going to affect us. Who are the people inside of that organization that are going to matter when it comes to writing an RFP, putting an RFP together, that kind of thing, and start creating what we used to call, and I think is still often called a relationship strategy. And it's funny when I use that word sometimes you'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got lots of

personal relationships in the account. I'm like time out. There's little R and there's big R. Like little R is that right, we go to lunch, you take my phone calls that kind of stuff. Big R is We're having business conversations that are forward thinking, right, And they both matter. I'm not suggesting one doesn't matter and the other does.

They both matter. But when I talk about relationship strategies with people, I'm thinking about again strategy keyword, getting in a room and really thinking about, especially if there's more than one of me calling on the account. Who are all of these different players by name or by title that we know we need to start building relationships with and how are we going to do that? Who inside

of our team is going to do that? How is Rachel going to go after this person and the marketing team that we normally need access to, while Brian goes to this person uh, and the people who typically own the lines of business, somebody else is going into some technical parts of the business. How are we going to build those relationships over time so that there's some strategy

against strategy and thought out execution to do that. Because if you live at the account level, it makes it a lot easier to do the next thing, which is to start getting them thinking about the issues that we are most relevant to in their world before those issues either become big, big issues or before somebody else gets in there and starts building an RFP at the product level that we now have to respond to, right, And that's you know, because what happens is another competitor's coming

in at the low level and they're trying, you know, they're trying to product hide the conversation and basically get somebody at the low level to spend twenty thousand or forty thousand dollars a budget to do a science experiment and to hope that science experiment turns into some enterprise opportunity. And I'm not saying that's a bad strategy depending on the account, but again, that's a tactic that somebody else

might be using. And if you're not having if you're not building these relationships and having these business conversations on the front end. There's a good chance that that might happen. Right now, all of a sudden, somebody's brought something from the bottom of the organization up and people are starting to look around, going, oh, that's interesting. What does that thing do? What does it solve for? So before you know it, you've gotten backdoored into an RFP. So that's

why I think this thing is so important. I think the other thing you can do is I have found this very effective in the past is to have a we used to call it internally, I think we used to call it an RFP or a big influencer and what it was. And again, this is like anything else. If you're not careful, people will see it in the

wrong way. But we had a document when we would do large managed services engagements for example and other large but there's just just one example where we could go into an organization and we say, listen, we know you're thinking about this topic. We understand you know why you would be thinking about it for the business, and this is where you're trying to go and this, for example, is the cost savings and the people impact on everything that you can do for the business. It's all very

positive stuff. What we have found though, is the numbers associated with these projects are so big for the company, The outcomes are so big for you, whether you do it with us or not, that that can start the cloud judgment and people can get so focused on the number, the outcome, the cost savings and all of that stuff that people forget what it really needs to get to that outcome and make sure that you not only get

to that outcome, but then it actually stays. It doesn't revert back to the old way six months later because you didn't do it right. So we'd like to give you something. This is a two to three pager. These are all of the things, and we would write it in customer language, not product or future language. These are all of the things that we know organizations need to think through so that they could come to the right

conclusion for themselves. Security was like, as an example, like, if you don't think through security as it relates to the following two or three or four bullets, there's a good chance you're going to make a decision and something's going to go wrong on the other side. I'm not telling you what decision to make. What I'm suggesting to you is these are the three or four security bullets that you and your team better think through before you ask anybody to come in here with products and solutions.

It was obviously well written for us because of the product and solution differentiation we had, but there was no one that could read it and say, oh, that's because you do this and other people don't do it, or that's not what it was. It was. This is stuff that whether you buy from us or not, if you don't think through good up, you're going to have revolts, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera as a result.

the customer and almost vendor agnostic. Yeah, can really be beneficial.

you are. And we had no issue looking someone in the eye and saying, hold on a minute, we do these things really well, but you tell me what on this list isn't important for you, and we'll take it off. That's not what this is about. This is about whether you buy from us or not. What does it take to get to a great outcome like we were. We were we were doing contracts that were very large and five to seven years long, and we're going to have an impact on a customer's business. That's that is fact.

And the numbers, not just the dollar valued us, but the numbers to the customer were significant. And so we had no problem looking the customer and say, hey, this is about whether or not you can you can cut whatever your total revenue line is at the top, if you can save somewhere between I don't know, one to two percent of that. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, But if you want to do that, this is what it takes to get to those kinds of

outcomes and actually make it stick. So that's how to your point. It's yeah, I love how you just discuided. I just wanted to add that additional piece in because it's just it's about you. If I'm the right fit, that will be a natural outcome.

down or backtrack this podcast. But if you could just kind of wrap up your key points as it relates to these RFPs, I'd love to have you do that here as we close.

it's like, hey, well that's easy. It's like, wait, stop right there for a minute, help me better understand what you're trying to achieve before I start talking about myself. Right, that's the one. But on the formal side of this, it's you really got to read it, right, I mean, you got to read the dang thing, and you have to really think about, Okay, what is this as written telling us? Look, and I know you're making some assumptions, but looks like it's already been written for looks like

this is pretty early stage. And then you can take that that initial understanding and match it up with the relationship strategy that you do or don't have in your account, and you can start to make some of the decisions

about next steps. But what I promise you is a universal truth is that unless you wrote the RFP, which we're not talking about in this case, that the first next step is to is to get in front of people to better understand do you have any opportunity to help this customer think through this conversation more widely and deeply than they would have if we weren't in the room. That's the first decision you got to make, and then get into the how are we going to do that?

So that you can then show up And I think this is the other thing I would recommend you have to show up at these meetings with something. The RFP influencer that I talked about a few minutes ago is a good example that you can use to get people's attention. Here's another quick example. In these large managed print services deals that I used to work on, we had a

ten question test and I loved this. We would get a meeting with we would try to get it with multiple people, but even if it was only one, we had ten questions. And I've helped other clients I walked them through this example for and some of our clients, I've helped them kind of build their own version of this doesn't answer to be ten, it might be five, whatever, But we had ten salient points, and they were discrete questions. They were yes, no, They break the rule on open

ended questions. They were closed ended questions, but they were purposefully closed ended because we would say to everybody in the room, Okay, we're going to ask you ten questions. Don't share your answers with anybody else. And the first question would be who, by name and title is the project sponsor. The second question would be something like what are the business metrics that are being used by that

person to judge the success of this project? The third was and then we got into some yes and knows about the collective organization, et cetera. And then when we got down we say okay, we'd go around the room and say, Rachel, how many yeses or actual answers do you have? And Rachel would share her answers, Oh, I answered yes, or I have an actual answer to four, somebody else would have five, would to somebody have seven.

We'd say, okay, what does that tell you? And then we would make them we'd make them figure it out, because what that tells you, first and foremost is we're all not on the same page. We all don't have the same answers. And then we would say, look, here's

our experience. Our experience is if you can't do eight, if you can't answer eight or nine of these ten questions collectively, you should not do this project with anyone because we know from our experience, and we can point to other accounts clients where it didn't work because they couldn't like we have learned, these are the ten questions that will tell you whether or not this project is

going to succeed, whether you do it with us or not. Now, some of those couple of those questions probably started to lean towards our differentiation, but a lot of them were actually about them. And so the point I'm trying to make here is a lot of what we've been talking about today is about how you sell, not what you sell. A lot of it has been about your willingness to look somebody in the eye and go listen, whether you buy from me or not. Let's just put that to

the side for a second. Well, let's just have a live conversation about what you're trying to achieve, how you're going to measure success, whether or not you've got alignment around that internally, so that we can then have an odd conversation about what does it truly take to get there? Because if you're willing to have that conversation with me, I'm willing to give you everything you need to include. Look you in the eye and say I'm not the right fit. Who would deny that? I'll tell you who'll

deny it. The one third of the people who don't want anything to do with this goes all the way back to what we talked to the beginning, and that's and that's a data point, right, And I know what I do with that data point. I'll let you choose to do what you want to do with that data point. And I and I think that's what it really boils down to. This is about how you react in a moment, not what you say. I mean, what you say comes right behind it. But you get my point. Yeah, that's

that's my summary. Oh, last, but not least, you know my favorite. Out of every ten deals you work, you're going to win three just for showing up. They know you, they love you, they like you. Whatever you're gonna lose, You're gonna lose three just for showing up. They know you, they hate you, whatever, you know. It's the four in

the middle. That you really got to compete for, and so your ability to quickly assess when you get an RFP in the mail, you know it ain't the first three, right, It ain't one of the ones you're gonna win automatically because you got the RP and the mail. But now so now it's in one of the other two categories. This is one you're really gonna have to compete for

or one you're gonna lose no matter what. And I think it was our friend John mcmahonon said there are two winners in every deal, right, the REP who wins the deal and the first REP to get out of the deal because they realize they don't belong in it. Whoever said it, I'll give John credit. I've never you know, but I don't know if it's true or not. But somebody said, I think it's brilliant. So that's the thing here, really understand quickly can we compete and is it worth

competing for? Strategy and then execution the end the end world?