EP133: How to Set Yourself Apart in an RFP Response
How do you set yourself apart in an RFP response?
We recently helped a small business client get their first RFP win. And they were up against some big players in their industry.
So, what did they do to stand out among the competition?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I’m discussing three categories of content that will take you from MEETS to EXCEEDS expectations on your next proposal response.
I explain how to demonstrate DISTINCTION in an RFP and share our top three strategies for catching and keeping an evaluator’s INTEREST to get the score you deserve!
Listen in for insight on identifying your VALUE PROPOSITION in a proposal response and find out how our upcoming RFP Success Accelerator can teach you to set yourself apart in an RFP.
Key Takeaways
3 categories of RFP content that will take you from MEETS to EXCEEDS expectations
How we define distinction as setting yourself apart from everyone else who submits a bid
What it looks like to demonstrate industry credibility in your writing
How to identify your differentiators and why they can’t be something your competitors do
Why it’s crucial to catch and keep an evaluator’s interest in an RFP
Our top 3 strategies for keeping an evaluator’s interest (even if they’re skimmers)
How we define value proposition as the benefits of your product or service
Why your value proposition should change based on the specific RFP opportunity
Resources
RFP Success Show EP133 Transcription
(00:00):
You are 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 2030 and even 50% and meet the industry trailblazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:24):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek, your host, founder, and CEO of the RFP Success Company. And today I want to talk to you about how to set yourself apart in your response. Because, and I say this all the time, you've probably heard it if you've been following me for any time, meeting the requirements alone is not good enough anymore. It gets you that meets expectations along with everybody else that's bidding. So at the end of the day, you've got to find a way to set yourself apart to get those exceeds expectations. And I've narrowed down the over and above to three categories, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.
(01:04):
What are the three categories that after you meet those requirements, after you've answered all the questions and signed all the dotted lines. What is it that's going to take you from meets expectations to exceeds expectations? And those three areas are distinction, interest, and value. You really need to win in those three categories to get the win. We just actually helped a client win their very first RFP, and not only was it their first RFP win, which is exciting enough, right? That is so fun, so exciting for us as their consultants. But when they looked at the list of competitors, they were blown away.
(01:45):
They were like, "Wow, we really beat out some big players and some of our bigger competitors that we wouldn't have expected to beat out." And it just makes the win that much more sweeter when something like that comes into play because you're like, "Wow, it's one thing to win if you have maybe one other competitor or you're all on the smaller side, this was a smaller business and that's how you're going to win." So right now, speaking very directly to you, small businesses. If you want to play with the big dogs, if you want to be in that arena where you're like, "Hey, how do we compete against these big guys?" It's through distinction, interest and value proposition, and you can do it.
(02:28):
Here's what I want to tell you is a lot of times those bigger companies aren't doing any better at this than the smaller companies. And the bigger companies generally have those proposal teams in place that know what they're doing, but also we all get caught up in the timeframes. And if you don't have a big robust team or if the team has too much on their plate, this stuff falls by the wayside. So you can win against those big guys. And if there's proposal managers and proposal writers and all of that listening that are with bigger companies, you know how important this is and this is just going to be a good reminder for you for the things that will set you apart.
(03:14):
The other thing that I want to say to the small businesses out there is that at the end of this podcast, I'm actually going to tell you how you can join us for a new course that's really going to help you with what we're talking about today. We've never done a course like this before. I've never pitched anything like this before on the podcast, but I want to give you an opportunity to sign up to learn more about it at the end of this podcast. It's super exciting. All right, so let's dive into each of these three areas and we're going to start with distinction. So what do I mean when I say distinction?
(03:50):
It really means that you need to set yourself apart from everybody else that has submitted a bid. And we can sometimes imagine that there's maybe one or two other competitors, but I want you to start thinking and have the mindset that there's going to be eight or 10 competitors that you're coming up against. That the evaluators are reading eight to 10 to 12 different responses to this. And the reason that I want you to think about this is because you need to be thinking bigger and shooting for the stars on how you need to be presenting yourself in order to get that distinction.
(04:30):
I feel like when we're thinking about we need to distinguish ourselves against one or two competitors, it just lowers your vibration on that. It just lowers your expectations for yourself. So I want you to think higher and be thinking, "Oh my gosh, there's eight or 10 different competitors, and how are we going to set ourselves apart?" The first thing is industry credibility. So what industry credibility do you have? Some of that is things like we've been quoted in such and such publication, or we've won an award or we've been touted as the number one XYZ company that provides so many solutions. Those are all great things.
(05:11):
And I would say that if you don't have those things, put them on the wishlist. Here's what we want to strive for. But the other way that you can get industry credibility is to showcase in your writing that you know what you're talking about. And what I mean by that is not just saying things like, "We help companies do blah, blah, blah, or we have helped companies do yada, yada, yada." You say things more like, "In our experience working with the top 100," or whatever or the majority of the X, Y, Z or whatever kind of distinguishing group of people you can call out there. So you say, "In our experience," or you can say, "As we've worked for 10 years in this industry, we've learned that yada, yada, yada."
(05:59):
And you don't want to give them something that they know. You don't want to give them something that is in their RFP or that is obvious to them. You want to call out something like, "Hey, we have learned that this process goes easier if we start with this instead of this, and here's why." I know I'm kind of giving you high level things here because it's going to be different depending on your industry, but you want to brainstorm this with your team. And you want to sit down and say, "Okay, what are some of the things that we can do that we can say that we can claim?" And stop making it about you. Start making it about showcasing that...
(06:36):
I mean, this is partially about you, but you're really, I don't want to say twisting because I don't mean that in a manipulative way. But you really want to showcase it in a way that says, "Hey, we understand this industry. We've been in this industry for 20 years. We've seen it change, we've seen it grow, and in our experience, here's what's worked best and here's how we've been able to get the results for our clients because we did this, this, and this differently from our competitors."
(07:05):
So you really want to showcase that hard. Again, if you've been following me, if you've read my books, anything like that, I talk a lot about show versus tell. And this is a prime example of how you can show versus tell. So you're kind of telling them, but you're painting a picture in their mind and you're building that industry credibility. It's very, very important. In the same vein, it's your experience credibility too. Instead of just saying what we see all the time, all the time is the, "We help you, we help companies, we've helped companies, we've helped 20,000 companies, we've helped 30 companies." Whatever that looks like.
(07:43):
Instead of saying that, just say, "In our experience working with over X number of companies in this industry, what we've learned is dot, dot, dot." And here's why I want you to start playing with it. Because the more you play with it, the more you're going to be able to massage this and work it into some library content. You should have some prompts ready so that you're not trying to do this when you have an RFP on your plate. Nobody's got time for that. Nobody's got the frame of mind for that creativity. Everybody's busy and the deadline is looming. So the more you can have prepared upfront, the better with that.
(08:20):
So you really want to start thinking about that industry credibility, that experience credibility. And then I want you to brainstorm what are your differentiators? And a differentiator cannot be anything that your competitors are doing, and it can't be an expectation. So if you say that your differentiator is, "We deliver on time and on budget." Well, no, I expect that. I expect when I hire you that you're going to deliver on time and on budget. So you can't use that as a distinguisher. The only way you can use that as a distinguisher, differentiator is if you're in an industry that has a bad reputation for that.
(08:58):
So I'm going to pick on general contractors just because traditionally, I would say in the home remodeling arena, there is a bad reputation that the general contractors have gotten over the years. So now you can say that you do that, but you better back that up with some proof because nobody's going to believe you because there's a bad knock there, right? That's the only time that you can really use that as a differentiator, but really with backing it up with something. So I would sit down with some of your team, I would brainstorm those differentiators and brainstorm what you want your differentiators to be.
(09:38):
Because in a year, what you don't want to be doing is sitting there saying, "Ah, I wish that over the past year we had been building this, this, and this." We and my company were just talking about this the other day. We wish we had more of this that we could claim in our marketing. It's like, "Okay, well now let's talk about it. Let's brainstorm on what we want to say so that then we can reverse engineer and start getting that done so that we've got that experience or we've got that distinguisher that we can claim." So that's all about distinction. How can you really showcase and get them to believe it?
(10:14):
You want them to feel it and really believe what you're saying. And they're not going to believe you if all you're saying is, "We help you do this, or here's the steps of the process that we do." No. Why are those the steps of the process? Why have you created that process? And what has your experience told you, given you so that you develop that process? So you need to go deeper on a bunch of that stuff to get to that distinction. Now let's move to the next one, which is interest. So back in the beginning when I said I want you to be thinking about the fact that you're competing against eight or 10 other competitors.
(10:55):
This is where that comes in handy too, because now you're thinking there's eight to 10 proposals that the evaluators are having to review. That is a lot of proposals. Oh my gosh. I don't want to read them. We barely want to read our own, right? That is a lot of things for the evaluators to review and keep their attention span. And by the way, almost always, this is not the primary job of the evaluators. Their job isn't just to evaluate RFPs. Their job is a million other things. And by the way, they've been thrown this RFP response that they have to evaluate. So they're thinking about all the other things that they have to get done.
(11:37):
There are time crunched. They've probably got stuff going on in their personal life. We are overstimulated with content and communications. There is a lot going on in our lives these days, and an evaluator is just a human being that is going through all of that stuff just like the rest of us are. So the more you can do to not just catch their interest but keep their interest, the better you're going to be. If they're just going through the motions and you're losing them along the way, guess what? They're just going to mark you down as meets expectations. They're going to kind of comb through to make sure you meet the expectations, and that's all they're going to give you.
(12:14):
If you can capture and keep their attention and their interest, they're going to pay more attention and give you the score that you deserve, which hopefully is that exceeds expectations. So what can you do to keep their interests? Keeping their interest, it's just so important. One thing very simply is format your RFP response properly. What do I mean by that? Keep your paragraphs short. Keep a lot of white space on the page. Use bullets, use visuals, use tables. Any of that that you can do that can get their eye to go automatically to certain things. Call out boxes. And those call out boxes by the way, need to be a key piece of information that's going to get you and exceeds.
(13:01):
On the evaluator criteria, don't just put something silly like, "We have 10 years of experience." That's really boring. Put something punchy there that is going to distinguish you so that when their eye goes to that call out box, they're going to grab a hold of something that's going to help them give you that exceeds expectations, right? So keep it interesting, keep their eye moving. The other piece of information that I always love to share is that I read a statistic once, I don't remember where it came from, but it was eyeopening because that statistic was 79% of people are skimmers. Skimmers.
(13:38):
Now we're skimmers on any ordinary day, but if you've got eight or 10 of these proposals, those evaluators are going to be skimming. And again, they're going to be skimming, did you meet the requirements? Did you meet the requirements? And they're going to be giving those meets expectations. So what can you do to get to the skimmers? I'm telling you it's call out boxes. It's bullets. It's making it easy and controlling where their eye goes. Again, I hate to use the word controlling because I don't mean manipulation in a bad way. I mean, you are guiding them to the pieces of information that are most important for them to read, to keep their interest and to give you the score that you deserve.
(14:18):
So formatting is so much more important than you think of. A lot of times people think, "Well, formatting's important because it's that first visual impression." Yes, that's true, but it goes so much deeper than that. You want to keep their attention, you want to guide their eyes to where you want them to go. So keep that formatting in mind. And here's the clincher for that is you've got to give them enough time. You've got to give yourself enough time for that formatting. And what happens is we tend to give all of the time to the writing like, "Oh, this thing is due in three weeks.
(14:56):
Well, two weeks minus two days, we'll have all the writing done and then we'll get it out the door in two days." No, no, no, no, no, no. You need a good week. Depending on how big that RFP is, you need a good week at least for formatting, editorial review, those kinds of things because it will take time for all of the reviews, for all the formatting, yada, yada, yada, and depending on how many people you have working on that. So formatting very, very important. Integrating stories. So people love, love, love to read stories. And I'm not just talking about a boring case study, there's a time and a place for a case study.
(15:35):
But telling stories and including metaphors and analogies and things like that to really make it relatable. So the more relatable it is, the more interesting it is and the more it will keep their attention. So in order to get that interest, tell stories, and I don't mean in a really cheesy way, but you can give an example. Instead of a really structured boxed in case study, you can give a story about a client that you worked with and here's what their challenges were. And because of your background and what you knew, here's how you steer them to a solution that you felt was going to be a better fit for them and what that resulted in.
(16:18):
But tell it in a story versus just a really boring, like I said, a boxed in case study. Don't do it in one full paragraph. Again, keep those paragraphs short. Maybe make it a little bit more visually interesting. Put it in a shaded box as this is a story that we're telling you and even title it something interesting. So I feel like it used to be, especially in government proposals, maybe not so much in corporate proposals, but in government proposals. And actually not even used to be, it still is this way in that we feel like it's got to be buttoned up and super professional, but that's not the case anymore.
(16:55):
People just want to see the human in you. The human in them wants to see the human in you. So write to those stories. And then also the way that you write your content. We here talk a lot about writing to a sixth, to an eighth grade level. In Word, there's actually an add in that you can add into the word function. It's really easy to add, just Google it, and it is the reading level. You don't want to write to a 12th grade reading level. I know that sounds crazy, you're like, "Well, it's going to make us sound dumb."
(17:27):
I promise you, it isn't. We have example after example of the way that somebody wrote something that was like a 12th or 13th or 15th grade level and we rewrote it to a sixth or a seventh grade level, and it's just so much more readable. It doesn't make anybody look dumb. It doesn't sound like you're dumbing it down. So any of you worried about that, that's not the case. It just makes it more readable and absorbable, right? So again, you're trying to keep their interest, you're trying to get them reading. If you give them a really long sentence that they have to read three or four times, they're probably not going to reread it, number one.
(18:03):
And number two, if they do, shame on us, we're just making it too hard on them. Make it easy on them. Your sentences should not be any more than say, 14 to 18 words in a sentence. There's also a really interesting study about sentence length. If you have a sentence that's 43 words or more, the comprehension rate is less than 10%. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Well, there's no way that our sentences are 43 words long." I would go back and check because frankly, we've had people tell us that and we look at their stuff and they've got many, many, many times where they've got 43 words or more. It's easier to get to 43 words than you think.
(18:45):
So the way you write your content is very important to keeping the interest and the attention of the evaluators. So you want to be very, very careful there. And then the third area is value. So we just talked about distinction, then we talked about interest. Now we're talking about value. And this is really just what is your value proposition and how are you weaving that throughout the proposal? So very basically, a value proposition is a statement that clearly identifies the benefits of your product or service. What benefits are you going to deliver to the customers?
(19:24):
Now, the important thing here is that it's the benefit that they want, that they need, not the benefit that you see that they need, not the benefit that you believe that they need, not just a generic benefit. So that value proposition probably changes for every single RFP that you respond to. One of the first things that you should do in your pre-writing strategy is thinking about what is our value proposition for this particular opportunity? And then you need to weave that throughout your response. People say, "Well, it's scary. I don't don't want to keep writing it over and over and over, and you keep telling us, stop making it about us. And so we don't want to do that."
(20:06):
Well, here's the deal. Your value proposition isn't about you. Your value proposition is about how your solution adds value to the client, to the benefits that they are seeking. So you need to write it as such. Number two, you're not going to take that statement and just drop it in exactly the way that you write it on the front end. You're going to weave it through and remind them. As humans, we need to hear something five to seven times for it to sink in. And your value proposition is one of the most important things that they're going to get out of your response.
(20:41):
So you want to make sure you sprinkle that throughout quite a few times. And again, you want to customize it for the different areas that you're putting it in, but making sure that you're getting that value proposition in. So distinction, interest, value. Here's the secret sauce of all of that though. Here's the secret sauce of all of that is that the more you know your customer, beyond just what the RFP is telling you. The better that you can write to all these three things, the better that you can incorporate these three things. If you don't know enough about what benefits they're seeking, you can't really write to that value proposition accordingly.
(21:20):
You certainly can't write to distinction if you don't know who your competitors are or really understanding the hot buttons of your client. And then the more you know about them, the more that you can speak to them to make it more interesting for them to read. Because I tell you what, we want to read a whole lot more about what's in it for us and what relates back to us. If it's not something that we can lean into, we are not going to, the evaluators are not going to. So that's the secret sauce. The more you know your customer beyond just what is in that RFP, the better you're going to be able to write these three things.
(21:56):
So if you can get those three things integrated well into your response, if you can do that correctly, you're likely going to win because very few companies get this right, and the evaluators are going to love you. You're going to stand out in a really, really good way. All right, so that's the podcast. But I do want to tell you, for those of you who want to dive deeper, because I know we have small businesses on here who are like, "Ah, we need some help." I'd love for you to join us for our upcoming accelerator program. So this is where we're going to work with you in a group environment. We're going to develop library content. We're going to help you write those credibility statements.
(22:33):
We're going to help you actually develop your process to make things simpler and to ensure that you meet those requirements, but then building that library content to support it. When we help you with that process, it's going to give you more time to be able to develop the writing and all of the things that we just talked about. And we're going to help you build some of that upfront so that the next RFP you get, you've got everything. You've got all your ducks in a row, and it's going to make it so much easier for you to respond to RFPs. So to learn more and to get information on this upcoming program, you want to sign up, you want to go to therfpsuccesscompany.com/accelerator-waitlist.
(23:13):
I know that's a mouthful, don't worry. That's going to be in the show notes. So just click on that. You're going to get on the wait list and we're going to send you all the communication about it. There's also going to be another kind of pre-class so you can learn even more about what's going to be in there, and we're going to talk about even deeper stuff that I'm talking about on this podcast so you can learn more there. I look forward to those of you who are going to join us there. All of you, I appreciate you being here and listening to the podcast. So thank you. And again, you've been listening to the RFP Success Show.
Outro (23:45):
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.