EP112: The High Value of Outsourced RFP Support
Should you build your own internal RFP team? Or outsource the proposal process?
If your company is just breaking into the RFP space, you may be looking at larger companies that have as many as 10 dedicated proposal professionals and wondering, is that where we're going? Is that what we should be doing?
So, what factors should you consider in deciding whether to buy or build an internal RFP team?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I explore the pros and cons of building your own in-house proposal team, explaining why it’s crucial to have the infrastructure to support an internal RFP team and invest in their professional development.
I discuss what it looks like to outsource your proposal team and why I suggest the hybrid approach—hiring one or two people internally and then bringing in an external response management team like the RFP Success Company.
Listen in to understand how a hybrid approach benefits growing companies and learn how we can function as your proposal team in the short term and help you build out an internal team over time.
Key Takeaways
What factors to consider in deciding whether to build or outsource your RFP team
The volume of RFPs per month that merit building an internal proposal team
The pros and cons of building your own internal RFP team
Why it’s crucial to have the infrastructure and investment to support an internal RFP team
What it means to ‘buy’ your proposal team
Why I suggest a hybrid approach (1 or 2 internal hires + an external team)
How the hybrid approach gives you a bigger, more experienced team right out of the gate
Why the writer and proposal manager should be 2 different people
How we help growing companies build out an internal proposal team
RFP Success Show EP112 Transcription
You're listening to The RFP Success Show, with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30 and even 50%, and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:25):
Welcome to The RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek, your host and founder of The RFP Success Company. Today, we are talking about whether you should build or buy your internal RFP team. So obviously, this podcast is meant for those companies that are just breaking into state government, or really federal government as well, just breaking into the RFP space. Or you might be expanding a little bit on what you've been doing and you're looking at those big companies that have a proposal team of six, 10 people and wondering, "Is that where we're going? Is that what we should be doing?"
Lisa Rehurek (01:07):
We get this question a lot, because what we do is we end up being the outsourced arm for many companies. So we get a lot of people asking us, "Well, why should we hire you versus maybe building internally?" So I want to answer that question here on this podcast today, and the answer is that illustrious answer that we all love so much; it depends. I know, it's an annoying answer, but it does depend. But let's talk about the factors that come into play when making this decision. The first thing that we want to look at is volume. What is the volume of RFPs that you plan on bidding on? If it's, say, hovering around one to three per month, outsourcing, or really a hybrid plan, which we'll talk about here in a bit, is probably the better plan. If you're going to be looking at a lot more than that, then looking to build is best. Building internally is best, but it also takes time.
Lisa Rehurek (02:10):
It's not something that you can always do right out of the gate, just go out and hire six to 10 proposal professionals. You're maybe at that spot where you've got one, one and a half people and you're thinking, "Okay, it would be great to build on this." So there's definitely opportunity to do that if, again, your volume is going to increase tremendously and you want to, maybe your company's growing and you're going to be similar to one of those corporations and you need a whole separate unit. We're going to talk about the pitfalls for each one, the pros and the cons really of each one.
Lisa Rehurek (02:47):
So let's talk about building. If you're thinking building is the best way to go, what I want you to think about first is do you have the internal infrastructure to support that team? And when I say support I mean train, manage and develop a proposal team. Where will they sit in the organization? Is there going to be a leader that's able to help grow and develop the team? This leader needs to understand their roles, understand the value that they bring. One of my biggest pet peeves, and I bet everybody in the proposal world agrees with this, is that the proposal team tends to sometimes be this ugly stepchild. They get blamed for the losses and they get no credit for the wins. But when you have a really solid proposal team, they're driving a whole lot of that sale.
Lisa Rehurek (03:39):
So even though there's a salesperson involved, or if there's a salesperson involved, your proposal team is taking that information and turning it into a sale on paper. So they are part of the sales organization, they are part of the sale of that contract when they win, and you want to treat them as such. So we've seen a lot of people that go out and say, "We're going to build our own internal team," and they kind of build it, but it's like this second-thought team that sits over on the side and they don't have any great leadership around them. You've got to have the leadership that can manage that kind of a team and build it out appropriately.
Lisa Rehurek (04:23):
Second thing on if you want to build is do you have the investment to build internally? And it's not just about the salary, so yes, you need to pay them well, yes, they're going to get all the same benefits, total comp of course, but it's also the training and professional development component as already mentioned, but that does take an investment. Are you going to hire a professional proposal manager as a key role, but then do they have anybody internally to network with and help them grow their skillsets? If they don't, and you don't give them external professional develop in the way of, say APMP, which is the industry association and a way to network with other professionals, that could result in turnover.
Lisa Rehurek (05:11):
They're going to want to grow their skillset, they're going to want to have professional development. So do you have something in place for that? And you've got to think about that from the leader of the proposal team, all the way down to the editors or the graphic designers. So if you're thinking again of a team, let's say even a team of three to four, you've got to have budget in there to make sure that they're continuing to get their education and their professional development. If you are an organization that doesn't value that, that doesn't do that for your other employees, I'm still telling you you've got to do it for the proposal team, because they need it and you want them to have it. You want them to continue to grow and to continue to get better.
Lisa Rehurek (05:49):
Back to the goals. If your goal is to bid on more than two to three per month, this would be the time to think about whether build is the right strategy for you. Think anything less than three RFPs a month, it might be hard to get the full breadth of the team that you need, because you do need writers, you need proposal managers, you need editors, graphic designers, you need that whole kind of cadre of people. You can go out and hire one, or one and a half or two people, but it's probably not going to get you what you need. That one or two people can't be your entire proposal team. You will burn them out and they will likely go away. And you don't want that, so you also want to be thinking about long term. How can you build something that can sustain longevity in what you want?
Lisa Rehurek (06:43):
The worst thing is to build an internal team that gets to know your company, that gets to know your content, that really gets to know how you sell and what you stand for and how to present that and position that in RFPs, only to get burnt out and leave, and you've got to start all over again. So that's pretty brutal. That's another downfall of building, but when you build, of course, then you've got your team built internally. You control, you've got them full time, you can control where they spend their hours. So there there's validity absolutely to building, but there's also validity in buying, and when I say buy, I mean outsourcing. We, of course, do this. This is what The RFP Success Company does, so of course we're going to be biased to this being a great solution, but it's a great solution because we see that it works.
Lisa Rehurek (07:35):
Now, my personal philosophy is that it's hard to completely outsource the proposal team, and the reason being is because if you've got one or two reps inside that can really kind of know the content and wrap their arms around the company assets, the company marketing assets, really know the company, know the numbers and can drive things internally, and then they can have a partner from the outside that really helps them pull this all together and cross over the finish line for the win, that's, in my opinion, best case scenario certainly when you're working with one to three proposals a month, even up to maybe eight or nine proposals a month. It's a hybrid approach, really, and that's what we suggest, is this hybrid approach. Hiring one or two key people internally, then bringing in an external team like us, it can be a great solution. And again, this is what we've built our business around, because we've seen that it works, because we've seen that this is what our clients need.
Lisa Rehurek (08:42):
But logically we're a proponent of this, but I also know there's a time and a place to build, so I've given you that. Let's talk a little bit about why we believe it's great to outsource and have kind of this hybrid approach. The first thing is you get the benefit of having that partial internal team, but then the depth and breadth of experience with our outsource partners. So if you work with an outsource partner, whether it's us or somebody else, you end up with one or two key people that are working with you pretty regularly, but they've got a network inside our company that they can tap into when they've got a specific industry, or they've got a specific question that they've never seen before. They've automatically got this network built in, so it brings in additional depth and breadth, plus a nice network of additional people.
Lisa Rehurek (09:34):
You also can get a much bigger team right out of the gate. When you build, it's going to take you a while to build 6, 7, 8 people on a team, but right out of the gate, you can have a team that includes writers and managers, editors, graphics. Again, hard to do internally from the get-go, and also sometimes it's hard to hire, say, an editor or a graphics designer when you might not have enough work to keep them busy full time. Let's say you're only bidding on one or two RFPs a month, it's probably not a full-time job for an editor or a graphics person, full time for a proposal manager. The other piece of the puzzle that we always suggest is that the writer and the manager are two separate people, and the reason being is because they really have two separate talents. Your writer is the one that can think creatively and position the writing to be what the readers need to read, what the evaluation criteria is asking for, where the manager needs to be very detail oriented.
Lisa Rehurek (10:42):
So that writer has to have a little bit of a creative bent to them, a little bit of a marketing bent to them, where the proposal manager needs to have attention to detail. They need to be able to really track what's going on, track milestones, stay on top of people, be a little assertive in pushing back when people miss their deadlines, all of that. So it's really two very different skillsets. Now, you can do them together as long as you've got some backup there, but it's really hard for one person to be playing that creative role while also tracking all of the attention to detail. Our brains just don't shift as easily between those two things as one would think. We suggest having those two positions separately, so now you're looking at at least two positions there, plus an editor, so it can start adding up.
Lisa Rehurek (11:33):
The other key piece of outsourcing and doing this hybrid approach is you get ongoing mentorship and training. So if you've got an internal team of, say, one or two people, they'll get ongoing mentorship and training from a team of proposal experts that have been doing this for 20, 30 years, instead of internally in your organization, you probably don't have anybody else that has ever worked in proposals at that level. So it gives this automatic built-in mentorship and training that can occur for that smaller team that you have internally.
Lisa Rehurek (12:10):
So just to recap, if you want to build, you need to really map out that organizational chart. What does this look like in the short term and what are we building it to in the long term? What is the volume of RFPs that we bid on? Who's going to lead this team? And I would also suggest, and this is something that we do with our clients when they say, "Hey, we're ready to build," because a lot of times people will hire us to help them in the short term and then look to us to help them build that team for the long term. And one of the key things is that we map out the role descriptions, we map out how are those people going to be measured, what is success going to look like? And then really what type of a person do we need to hire for that position, and at what point is that position going to be hired?
Lisa Rehurek (13:05):
So there's a lot to think about, there's a lot of strategy around it. Please don't be haphazard about it. You can't just say, "Hey, we need a proposal person, let's hire them," and bring them in. It really should be part of a larger discussion. If you want to outsource, highly suggest the hybrid approach. Again, bringing in maybe one person, two people that can be the owners internally, and then they've got a whole team of people outsourced that really partner with them to get everything done. And, again, we do this all the time and it's a beautiful partnership. When everybody's on board, it is a very beautiful partnership. When we've got this internal team, they're taking the lead and taking charge on those RFPs, and then they're tapping into us for management, for writing, for editing, for graphics, whatever it is that they need, or they're managing two, and we're managing two. So there's a whole lot of ways that we can do that when you are outsourcing and you've got that hybrid approach.
Lisa Rehurek (14:05):
There's definitely benefit to both approaches. You first want to ask yourself, what is the anticipated volume? What is our long-term goal, and what is going to get us our most efficient and effective process so that we can win more? The ultimate goal is to win more RFPs. Not to burn out our staff, not to just have butts in seats that don't matter. You really want to have that strategy for success for winning those RFPs. You can do it either way, but there is a strategy behind it. So if you have any questions, come out to LinkedIn, ask us some questions. Feel free to email us. We love to help wherever we can. Thanks for listening today. Again, I'm Lisa Rehurek, your host, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
This has been another episode of The RFP Success Show, with Lisa Rehurek, eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@rfpsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, The RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20, and even 50%. Learn more at therfpsuccesscompany.com.