Rethinking Your Agency RFP Process
Posted: May 9th, 2011 | Author: Will Flynn | Filed under: All Junto Health Posts, Marketing Mistakes, The Whole Enchilada | Tags: RFP | 2 Comments »While the RFP process is a necessary evil, there is an opportunity to make it less complex and more tolerable for everyone involved. Writing the RFP, determining who gets it, and taking questions can be excessively time consuming.
One way to streamline part of this process is in the actual RFP. Recently, we received an outstanding RFP from Aaffect, a marketing research firm. They required the response to be no longer than 10 pages. What a wonderful idea, for the agencies and the client. It was to-the-point and gave the client a quick snapshot of capabilities surrounding their needs.
This RFP also required each agency to summit their proposal anonymously, with an accompanying identifying document. Talk about fair. Your RFP had to do all the work.
With the proposals in, now you need to select agencies to present and set up meetings. Presentations can be flashy, but we suggest looking for the real grit.
It’s important to pay special attention to healthcare knowledge, experience with similar hospitals, service lines or issues, agency biographies, proximity, campaign samples, depth of services, measurable results, easily accessible rate cards and references.
We love to hear about your experiences. What do you think of the status quo proposal process? Have you written a particularly effective RFP? Do you have an RFP horror story?
Will, this is a great perspective, and as a frequent consultant to marketing teams seeking a new agency relationship, I find two items really interesting…the first is the limitation of the response to a page count. Whether it's ten, fifteen or twenty, whatever the magic number is, I find when clients are reviewing the responses, they get more out of a concise response. Seems like setting the rule to a page limit should be unnecessary…answer the questions, and leave it at that. So many agencies don't do that…they don't use the RFP as a guide for the response. They have a canned response they dust off, and send off, and then add to it…usually including a variety of things not requested, and frequently ommitting important items. The second piece that was intriguing was blinding the responses. This would absolutely level the playing field. However, many of my clients like to go to the agency website to see how they position themselves…if the agency can't do a great job marketing themself, the client frequently scratches their head and says, I am not convinced…still, an intriguing concept.
The one piece of advice I would have for everyone out there is to do away with the spec creative…unless your a national name brand, and your brand position is ubiquitous, it is presumptious for any agency to suggest they can figure it out in a simple RFP. And for the client, they risk having the involved parties "love" a concept that is totally off brand…
Thanks for starting this dialogue…hoping to hear others comment.
Candace Quinn
Brand=Experienc
Marketing & Brand consultant to Healthcare Organizations
Thanks for the comment, Candace.
Spec creative is such a time and money drain. Without completing the strategy and branding stages, how can spec creative even head in the right direction? We found this article interesting on the death of spec creatives and why agencies should let it go: http://www.dontdrinkthekoolaidblog.com/spec-creative/