Bill Fritsch, president of Seattle ad agency, Hydrogen, and Larry Asher, creative director of Worker Bees, Inc. lead a workshop, Writing Proposals and Pitches, at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. They recap some of the highlights of their last workshop here:
You make the phone calls. You send out the letters. You buy the lunches. Finally, you get what you’re after: the coveted Request For Proposal arrives in the mail. You’ve been invited to the dance.
That’s when things start to go wrong for far too many advertising agencies and design firms. Through carelessness, arrogance, or the simple failure to listen, they sabotage their chances. In the many years we’ve been on the writing and receiving end of proposal responses we’ve discovered that most of these RFP faux pas are eminently avoidable.
Read carefully, respond carefully
Whether by force of habit or careless neglect, agencies take themselves out of the running by nothing more complicated than failing to follow instructions. We witnessed one RFP for a multi-million advertising and design account that spelled out “please take no more than a paragraph or two to answer each question.”
The client’s motive wasn’t simply to conserve paper. They felt that shorter responses stood a better chance of getting read by busy members of the selection team. The request for brevity was also an intentional device to see how well contenders could condense complex ideas—matching the demands of a good marketing communications program.
After wading through one page-long answer after another from one contending ad agency, the client threw the penalty flag and never seriously considered the firm for their business.
Neatness and accuracy do count
We’re sometimes called upon by our clients to help them find marketing partners outside of our areas of expertise. On one occasion, the task was to find a design firm that specialized in environmental and retail store graphics. Each contending firm was sent a briefing document that included a link to a web site where they could view photos of the client’s retail stores and signage. Despite all those cues, one design firm usually known for its professionalism managed to spell the client’s name wrong 39 times in their RFP response. It wasn’t the only factor, but it led to their elimination from the review. How do you spell “unforgivable?”
Tell the truth
You have to wonder if agencies and design firms think their prospects aren’t savvy enough to smoke out a fib. What other explanation could there be for the ad agency that submitted as part of their portfolio samples a famous campaign done by a staffer—at another agency—on the other side of the continent? Had the agency simply come clean and spelled out the origins of the work and why they were showing it, no harm would have been done. But, by pulling a fast one, the firm contributed to its removal from the finalist list.
Another contender for the same multi-million dollar piece of business appended their address with a four-digit suite number, possibly hoping to conjure up images of high-rise glamour. Their street address, alas, could easily be traced to a residential, suburban neighborhood. There’s a strong possibility this company could have saved itself from the reject pile by truthfully pointing out the upside of dealing with an agency where the principal works out of a home office.
A favorite venue for RFP truth avoidance is the facts and figures section. Overstating billings, numbers of employees, and current clients has almost become standard operating procedure. We’ve seen RFP responses where firms claimed clients they, in fact, no longer served, and one agency listed an employee who had left the ad business years before to go into a very different line of work.
Beware. Astute clients have ways to get a true picture.
Good marketing communication starts with you.
Another area where we’ve watched agencies and design firms drop the ball is in the writing style of their responses. It’s a bit depressing, actually, that companies ostensibly in the business of selling communications services revert to trite, convoluted, or overblown writing in their answers to RFPs. Perhaps these and other RFP stubbed toes are a byproduct of a firm that didn’t really want the business all that badly. Our advice? If you get an RFP from a client you don’t want or don’t feel you have a good chance at winning, you’re better off not answering it at all than answering poorly. You never know, after all, where that marketing director on the receiving end might land next.
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