Page 304 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Reading RFPs 295

with little to do; therefore, you want them to acquire proposal-writing experi-
ence. Second, the RFP might have come from a firm that knows little about your
consultancy, and although your odds of winning this opportunity are small, you
wish to respond, using the proposal as a marketing tool. Third, assuming the
Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule), 80 percent of your revenues likely come from
20 percent of your clients (like the prospective client in Scenario 1), and much
of that remaining 20 percent of revenues—in my experience, anyway—is RFP-
driven (as in Scenario 2). Those revenues keep the lights on and get the garbage
collected. Finally, RFPs have become increasingly important in consulting.
In the late 1990s, one of the consulting industry’s most lucrative “products” was
strategic sourcing, which helped clients to source required components through
competitive bidding, thereby reducing costs for products and material they did
not make in-house but outsourced from a variety of suppliers. The vehicle by
which those components was sourced was the RFP. Ironically, during the first
decade of this century, businesses began to apply to consultants similar practices
taught them by the consultants themselves. Long a function in government con-
tracting, procurement (which suddenly included procuring consultants) became
an important function in the corporate sector. 2
Given the growing importance of consulting RFPs, you need to learn how to
respond to these documents and, therefore, how to read them strategically. I’ll
show you how, if you’ll follow these three steps:

◉ Read for the logics.
◉ Read for the psychologics.
◉ Strip all the requirements, including those not named as requirements and not
in the RFP’s section on requirements, and test your proposal’s content against
those requirements.

Step 1: Read for the Logics

As you know, having read the first section of this book, the logics will involve
many of the technical elements of the RFP and your team’s response to them in
the proposal. I’m not going to talk about this step, for an obvious reason: If you
don’t have the subject-matter expertise to understand and respond to the RFP’s
technical requirements, you’re whistling in the dark and have little reason to bid.

Step 2: Read for the Psychologics

As you also know, the psychologics includes those elements of persuasion other
than logic itself—the heart rather than the head, the emotional rather than the