Peter Darling who is a legal marketing consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area, a partner in the Repechage Group and an expert on RFP preparation, submission and strategy.
Assuming, after a middle-of-the-night self-examination, you have decided that it is worthwhile to pursue an RFP, the next step is understanding what the basic elements of a good one are. And to do that, you first need to grasp a few basic principles.
Firms typically don’t understand these. Why? Well, lawyers are lawyers. They spend their entire careers thinking, writing and working in the argot of law, which is facts, logic, information and precedent. While legal writing is precise and elegant, it can also be incredibly boring, particularly for non-lawyers.
And the thing about legal writing is that along with being boring, it’s also not optional for the reader. Whether or not your opponent has written the most dry, unpleasant piece of prose since the English language was invented, you still have to read it, and the statements they make are still on the record, as are the facts they write about. You (and the court) still have to read it, and you still have to respond. If someone includes a particular defense in a response to a pleading, there it is. It’s now part of the record.
RFP responses aren’t like that. Although technically, the recipient has to read them, they don’t have to remember them or react to them. In other words, unlike with legal documents, an RFP response does not win by sheer facts, by size, by logic or by anything else like that. It succeeds by being persuasive, which is why it’s a marketing/sales document. It’s not a legal document.
This is a massive distinction. Again, lawyers write legal documents, but an RFP is not a legal document. It’s not about information. It’s about emotion, branding, and persuasion. Lawyers often do not understand this, because they live and work in a completely different world.
Which has another implication. The thing about marketing of any kind is that you have to give the recipient a reason to read it. It has to be funny, informative, interesting … engaging. Again, this isn’t like legal writing. It’s more like advertising. A successful RFP response isn’t the one that overpowers the reader with the sheer weight of facts. It’s the one that also connects emotionally with the reader, that makes them believe your firm is the best one to work with.
Which means, finally, that your response has to stand out. That, in a way, is what all this adds up to. Because your RFP response has to be persuasive, and has to provide the reader with a reason for reading it, it also has to be different. It has to be unlike everyone else’s response, and it has to tell a unique story, with a unique point of view and a unique selling proposition.
In law, the idea is to rely on past cases and established principles to justify your argument. An RFP response is the exact opposite. There is a real human being sitting there who has to read your RFP response, and if your response is just like everyone else’s, he’s going to be bored and confused, and you will not win.
Before putting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, the basic principle of an RFP has to be thoroughly grasped. It’s not an information document. It’s a marketing document, which has to be engaging, which has to persuade and convince rather than overwhelm with information, and which has to be unique.
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