That was what I had originally envisioned for this post. A list of questions to consider before you commit to expending the time (as well as covering the hard costs for travel, etc.) associated with a serious RFP response. Maybe even ten questions. After all, people do like lists.

As I got into it however, I started thinking about how I have come to approach this decision-making process over the years. And I realized that all of the questions I had in mind were really just variations on one big question:

Why would the client choose your firm over other respondents?

For example:

If it is an out-of-town project, and there are qualified local firms that offer the requested services, why would the client choose you over the local options?

Is it the continuation of an ongoing project, or the implementation of a plan that was developed by another firm? If so, why would the client choose you over the firm with previous experience on the project?

If you didn’t help the client write the RFP, and it looks as though someone else did, why would they choose you over the firm that gave them the assistance?

If it is a price-sensitive client, and your firm charges premium fees, why would they choose you over the less expensive alternatives? Can you make a compelling case for why your services are worth more? Do they even have the ability to take that into account? Or are they required to hire the low bidder?

Are there other firms who have done this exact same type of project for organizations just like the client? Or even worse, the client’s competitors? Many clients see safety in hiring that kind of familiarity, rather than using their imagination to picture how non-specific experience might be relevant to their project. Will you be able to convince them that it is?

Is the project big enough to attract the attention of “superstar” firms? What can you offer the client to offset the appeal of a big name?

Hopefully you are already on one of these “inside tracks.” You’re the local favorite. The firm that helped them write the RFP. The one who worked with their competitors. Or even the superstar firm. Even if you are, however, you need to be aware that there might be respondents that fall into some of the other categories themselves, and you need to be ready to preemptively offset those threats.

And if you aren’t any of those things – you’re just someone who found the RFP through FindRFP, or through another method of monitoring RFP opportunities, and you need the work – then you need to give some serious thought to what you are going to do to level the playing field.

Photo by DraconisVH.

The reasons for this shift aren’t hard to understand. The ability to view PDFs is now pretty much ubiquitous, and receiving information in this format enables people to get it faster, and easily pass it along to others in their organization.

There are also some clear benefits to this situation for brochure senders. It saves on printing and postage costs. It eliminates the need to store pre-printed brochures, and the waste that accompanies that practice. It makes it easy for you to customize materials on the fly. And it’s also better for the environment, assuming that the recipient doesn’t just turn around and print out their own copies.

There are drawbacks as well, however. You lose some control over the way that the brochure is viewed. And if your brochure has to be printed because it isn’t easily viewable on screen, not only will some of the environmental benefits be lost, but it may be reproduced on a printer that doesn’t show your work in its best light.

You can prevent most of these problems by avoiding the mistake that most people make when they begin getting requests for PDF brochures. What is that mistake? It is making a PDF of your existing printed materials. That is because the page orientation, font sizes, layouts, and lack of interactive functionality are geared toward the printed piece, and viewing this on the screen is going to lead first to user frustration, and then to the printing of the brochure on inappropriate equipment.

PDF vs. URL

Before I go any further, I should address a question that I know some of you are asking. Why would I want to send a PDF at all when I could just send a URL to our web site? The first, and probably most important, answer is that many potential clients just want a PDF, not a link. They may be requesting information from multiple firms, and want to keep the brochure files together in one folder, or whatever. The bottom line is that you’re not going to endear yourself to a prospective client by being difficult, especially in the early stages of the process. In addition, sending a PDF does allow you to do some customization – highlighting your most relevant projects, personnel, and service offerings – and a PDF also has a better chance of printing out nicely than a web site if the recipient does insist on printing.

Convinced that a screen-specific PDF brochure makes sense for you? Here are some tips that I have picked up through doing some of these myself and talking to others about their approach:

Ideal Document Size/Orientation

This is an area were PDF brochures made from printed pieces typically have big problems. Computer monitors have a landscape orientation, and if your PDF brochure has a portrait orientation (vertical 8.5×11, for instance), then you are going to force the viewer to do one of two things. They can view the full page all at once, which will be quite small because of the wasted real estate on either side of the screen, or they can fill the screen with the width of the page and scroll from top to bottom. Neither of these options creates an ideal viewing experience, and the result is likely to be the printing of the document.

That’s why a landmark/horizontal orientation is the cornerstone of a good PDF brochure. In fact, page orientation and appropriate font sizes are probably 90% of what makes a screen-friendly PDF successful.

The actual size of the document is a little less important than the orientation, and is somewhat flexible, since varying screen ratios means you aren’t really going to be able to create something that completely fills every screen. Letter or A4 size (depending on the country of you audience) are good because the dimensions will remain the same when they are printed, but they do leave a lot of screen unused on many monitors. Dimensions like 11.7 x 6.7 come a lot closer to using the full screen, but because of all the variability in actual screen sizes, it probably comes down to the ratio you feel best suits your layout. If you do use a non-standard page size, I suggest trying a test page on a few monitors before creating the entire brochure.

Font Sizes

After document orientation, font size is probably the most important factor in a successful PDF brochure. Depending on the font you are using, I wouldn’t go much below 12pt (or maybe even 14pt) to ensure easy readability on all monitors. Captions are obviously a problem, but if you can’t live without them, you could experiment with using the PDF “notes” feature to create pop-ups for captions. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to make this look nice, so please share any ideas you may have.

If you’re having trouble fitting all of your copy while keeping it readable, you can also try getting creative with some of the other PDF capabilities (“next page” or “read more” links, etc.) to present your information. In general, however, you should look at this as an opportunity to make your content more focused and concise, because that is what someone who requests an overview brochure via email is probably looking for anyway. Save your detailed information for white papers, case studies, or other items that make sense in a more traditional printed format.

Image Resolution

Given that this document is intended for on-screen viewing, your first reaction may be to downsample images to 72dpi when you make your PDF. I would recommend, however, that you actually use a higher resolution – assuming that you can do it and not make your file more than 3-5 megabytes. That is because you will want the highest resolution possible if someone does print the document, and there is also a chance that some people with large monitors will be be viewing the document at greater than 100% size, even on screen.

If you’re pushing the limits for an emailable document, switching the image quality from “Maximum” to “High” can also make a significant impact on your file size, and I have found that to have very little effect on image quality.

Document Properties

In the document properties window, Acrobat Pro allows you to control several factors related to how users wlll see your document. The most useful of these are found in the Initial Vew tab. You should definitely set the magnification to “fit page,” which will enable the user to see that this is a horizontal document intended for on-screen viewing.

A more controversial feature is the “Open in full screen mode” option. Full screen mode is clearly the best way to view a PDF brochure, but when someone opens a document that has this feature implemented, Acrobat gives them a scary warning message about full-screen documents being used to impersonate applications that could try and get their personal information. I haven’t done any surveys of how people react to this message, but I do have a concern that it could lead some less tech-savvy recipients to get nervous and completely close the document. You may want to consider the technological sophistication of your likely recipients when deciding whether or not to use this feature.

Links and Navigation

You should definitely take advantage of the PDF’s ability to include clickable links to you web site, blog, Facebook profile or page, Twitter profile, etc. And don’t forget that you can also create links to other pages with the PDF itself. While the possibilities here are endless, one basic application of this would be allow someone to skip from an overview page with a list of services directly to a detail page for a particular offering that is relevant to their needs, without having to page past several other service descriptions.

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about what makes a great PDF brochure, and what kind of feedback you’ve received on yours from potential clients. And if you have one that you would like to share, feel free to either post a link in the comments or send me the PDF. If I get a few good ones I’ll share them in a follow-up post.

Photo by cicciostoky.

These spreadsheets, which are available for download from the Wellesley Hills Group website, address concepts that are explained in detail in the book, but there are also some instructions within the files, so you could get some use from them even without having read the book.

The first file is a pretty straightforward monthly budget template, which isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it will save you some formatting time, and the included sample is informative if you haven’t had much experience with marketing budgets. The second file, however, is much more interesting. It can help you to better understand how your sales pipeline works (i.e. how prospects move from being a lead to a customer), and what levers you can move to get more customers out of the end of the pipeline.

In addition to trying theses tools (especially the second one), I would also strongly encourage you to take a look at the book. I initially assumed that it would be aimed primarily at firm principals or sole practitioners who practiced marketing on the side, as opposed to full-time marketing professionals. As it turns out, however, I have found a huge amount of useful information, especially in big-picture areas like forecasting, planning, and achieving buy-in from other stakeholders within a firm.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t a lot you can learn from these big-firm marketing operations, including things that don’t cost any money at all. That’s because some of the most potent advantages large firms have don’t come from financial resources, but from the smart planning and resource management that come from taking a thoughtful aproach to the marketing process.

So if you want to stay ahead of your small to mid-size rivals, and maybe even snatch some projects away from the bigger players in your niche, try some of these large-firm tactics.

1. Utilize a CRM System

Everyone (hopefully) understands that you need to know who your perspective clients are, but many people don’t recognize that keeping track of every interaction with them is equally important. Customer resource management (CRM) software is the tool that makes this possible. It allows you to keep track of how a prospect got onto your radar and what kinds of overtures they have (or haven’t) responded to, which is what enables the tracking activities that are proposed later in this post, and it also facilitates the scheduling of future tasks for prospects, which will help ensure that you stick with a regular program of follow up.

DesignM.ag had a very good post a few weeks ago that provided an overview of some of the CRM software that is available today. I have had good luck with DayLite, which is Mac only software, although I will say that it doesn’t provide a tremendous amount of guidance on how to set up your database, requiring you to figure out some of the principals of CRM on your own. Salesforce.com offers a little more guidance, and is widely regarded as the industry standard, which can have some benefits if you ever want to to share your system with someone else, or bring in another person to help manage your marketing efforts. Salesforce can be one of the more expensive options out there, but there are a couple of different plans, and it is very rich in features and well supported.

2. Create Systemized (But Not Standardized) Marketing Materials

Reinventing the collateral wheel for every new prospect or project opportunity seems to be a favorite pastime of smaller creative firms. Maybe this is because they don’t have a good system for accounting for the time spent on this activity, and therefore don’t recognize its cost. Or maybe they just don’t have the luxury of forward thought when it comes to marketing, which brings with it the realization that this inquiry actually won’t be the last, and that there will be another, similar request within weeks.

Successful larger firms don’t approach marketing collateral on an ad hoc basis. They respond to inquiries or opportunities by drawing from a deep well of static and interactive materials.

This isn’t to say, however, that you should utilize a generic, one-size-fits-all response to inquiries about your firm and its capabilities. A good system should be thought of as a highly customizable kit of parts, with room for appropriate information that makes it unique to the recipient. This will yield materials that are higher quality, more comprehensive, and less time-consuming to produce than those that are the result of starting from a blank page.

How do you do create this kind of system? Start by looking at what you have sent out in the past year. There’s probably quite a bit of good material there, and you may even be surprised by some of the great content that you’ve produced and forgotten about. One you’ve identified the raw materials, standardize the formats and create a catalog of your new inventory to help you find things quickly in the future.

3. Look at Leads in a “Funnel”

One pretty standard sales management technique at big companies with a long sales cycle is to view prospects in a “funnel.” The basic idea is that at each stage of the sales process some of your potential customers are going to fall away, because they have selected another firm, decided not to buy, been deemed non-qualified, etc. This means that you need a lot of prospects at the wider top part of the funnel (the initial contact) in order to keep a decent flow coming out of the narrow bottom (where they become clients).

A typical funnel, which could be customized to account for the unique characteristics of your industry and/or sales process, might include the following levels:

1. Inquiry
2. Presentation
3. Follow up/Consultation
4. Proposal
5. Contract Negotiation

If you assign all of your prospective clients or projects to various parts of the funnel, and then monitor the funnel contents, you can watch for gaps in the flow of potential work, especially at the top end of the funnel. If you notice a narrowing of the “Inquiry” category, for example, then you know that you need to increase your efforts to add new prospects to the system.

This is another area where good CRM software can be a big help. Some of the more full-featured CRM programs, including DayLite and Salesforce.com, have funnel tracking features built into the system, which makes it easy to set up and monitor your own funnel.

4. View Your Marketing/Sales Process as a Pipeline

While the funnel is a way to monitor the health of your prospect flow, the pipeline model is a tool for actually moving prospects toward becoming customers.

By devising a sequence of interactions that you can have with a prospect, and creating materials to support those interactions, you can accomplish several things. You increase the number of prospects that you can manage simultaneously, improve the quality of your communications with prospects (giving them something of value, instead of just asking them over and over again if they are ready to hire you), and also decrease the instances of prospects “falling off the radar” after an initial inquiry and exchange of preliminary information.

Here’s an example of a very simplified approach to this process:

• Initial contact: Send capabilities brochure
• One week after initial contact: Follow up to answer any questions
• Four weeks after initial contact: Send link to download relevant case studies
• Eight weeks after initial contact: Send invitation to view archived webinar
• Every 4-8 weeks thereafter: Send link to relevant industry news with a personal note

The exact content of this program will depend, of course, on your business and the materials you have at your disposal. It may also be more or less focused on direct contact depending on your personal style. You will also want the ability to break out of this system when appropriate. For example, someone who is about to make a hiring decision make get more information at the outset than a person who is strictly a long-term prospect.

As with the funnel, a good CRM system will help you to manage this process.

5. Measure and Focus

Smart marketers of consumers products measure everything, and then focus their resources on the tactics that work. Unfortunately, with business to business offerings (like creative services), it can be be hard to measure the effectiveness of marketing tactics. Completed sales are much less frequent, which means less data, and since our web sites generally aren’t transactional, it’s harder to gauge the value of efforts that drive prospects to the web.

Big firms still try to measure what they can, however. They make efforts to find out where a prospect came from, and then store that information during the months that it may take for that prospect to become a client. But small firms seem to do this less frequently, and rarely seem to take action on what they do learn, instead sticking with their industry’s standard marketing tactics, regardless of their effectiveness. This is unfortunate, because in reality having fewer resources to work with warrants more focus, not less.

The specific techniques for measuring the value of various marketing tactics are too varied to go into here, but most of them are not particularly complicated. In fact, once you get into the measurement mindset you will find that most of them are actually pretty obvious. Ask people where they heard about you and record it in your database for future reference, use Google Analytics to evaluate the performance of your keyword advertising and SEO efforts, use an email marketing service that enables you to see how many people actually read and click on your emails, etc.

6. Dedicate Time to Marketing

Having one or more full-time staff members devoted to marketing may be the most important advantage that larger firms have over their smaller competitors. Having full-time marketing staff means that more content can be developed, more prospects can be followed up with, and more proposals can be prepared, all without cutting into the time available for billable work.

Even if you don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on marketing , however, you can achieve some of the same benefits by dedicating a percentage of your time to marketing activities. Rather than just setting a goal of x hours per week, try setting aside a block of time for marketing (say one hour per day, or two hours on Tuesday and Thursday). Put it in your calendar, and if something else comes up, don’t cancel it, move it.

You may feel like you don’t have enough activities to take up that much time, but that’s just because you haven’t taken the time to come up with a plan. Spend the first week on that, and then you’ll plenty of tasks to fill up your marketing time for weeks to come.

This really just scratches the surface, and I hope to be able to elaborate on some of these items in future posts. In the meantime, however, I hope that this gets you to start thinking about what large, successful firm do correctly when it comes to marketing, and how you now use some of these methods to improve the effectiveness of your own efforts. If you have your own thoughts or recommendations, I’d love to see them in the comments.

Photo by The Wandering Angel.

Very thorough, yet concise, and has a flow that makes it clear that it wasn’t just pasted together at the last minute. Well worth checking out.

This isn’t surprising, of course, because there are a lot things you can learn by looking at how other firms handle their proposals, even if they were prepared for a type of project very different from what you are pursuing. You can get some insight into how other people show project schedules, how much detail they include in descriptions of previous experience, what information they include in resumes, whether their scope descriptions are narratives or lists, how they organize their fees, and how closely they adhere to the technical requirements of the RFP.

Unfortunately, examples of previously produced RFP responses aren’t always easy to find. Even though most RFP responses for government/public projects become public information once they are opened, very few organizations have systems in place to make these responses available over the Internet. And even when they are available, it takes some creative searching (and a little luck) to find them.

Since I do run across examples of RFP and RFQ responses on occasion, I am going to try posting links to them as I find them, and I hope that some of you will consider sharing your discoveries as well.

The first installation of this series is an assortment of responses to a request for proposals issued in July 2006 by Piedmont, California for a Piedmont Civic Center Master Plan. The responses from five firms, along with the original RFP (Civic Center RFP.pdf), can be downloaded from this directory on the City of Piedmont’s website. Note that some of the responses are broken up into multiple PDFs, so you will need to download multiple files if you want to see all of them.

FYI, I believe that the team led by Fisher-Friedman Associates was the winner.

Most graphic designers, however, don’t produce as many artifacts with the potential to use – or save – large amounts of resources. This makes it a little more challenging to create a meaningful sustainability strategy, and even harder to explain that strategy to current and prospective clients and the community at large.

Sure, you can make a commitment to using recycled paper, but that only gets you so far, and what about the growing number of projects that don’t use paper at all?

The following ten firms, using varying levels of creativity, have managed to devise and present plans or statements that effectively convey their commitments to sustainability. Some of these are more detailed than others, but I think that all of them can provide some inspiration or guidance to other creative firms looking to formulate their own strategies for talking about sustainability.

Creative Slice

Creative Slice is an Arizona-based “green website design” firm that puts sustainability at the forefront of their marketing and business plans. The “Green Choices” page on their site details their efforts in a clear, concise manner.

Brainforest

Chicago-based Brainforest describes their sustainability efforts as part of the “Good Works” section of their site. Many of the activities described are minor by themselves, but they add up to a pretty impressive list, and create the image of a firm that takes sustainability very seriously. The list also benefits from specific references to services and products the company uses, with links where appropriate.

Digital Eskimo

Digital Eskimo takes a low-key approach, offering a very brief description of their sustainability goals on their “About” page, and then offering details on a few key initiatives, including a rooftop vegetable garden and shared bike program.

Ecocreative

Sustainability is a major focus of Ecocreative’s business plan, which is reflected in the fact that the Australian firm features their sustainability plan on the top level of their web site’s navigation. In addition to an intro page, they have a detailed policy section, sections on efforts in the workplace and on the production of client projects, and even an interactive “ecodates” calendar.

Orange Bike Design

The sustainability page on the Orange Bike Design site is pretty straightforward, but they also offer a nicely done series of monthly newsletters on the topic of sustainability.

Roughstock Studios

In addition to their introductory sustainability statement, Roughstock Studios of San Francisco offers some interesting materials for download. There is a purchasing policy that “gives preference to local vendors who meet a stringent set of sustainability and fair trade criteria,” and a PDF brochure that offers advice on how to market your company as a sustainable business without opening yourself up to accusations of “greenwashing.”

ecoLingo

As a firm that practices “eco-conscious graphic design,” ecoLingo has green themes integrated throughout most of their site, including a description of their philosophy in the “Integrate” section.

Ripe

The Greener page on the site of Ripe, a creative studio based in Washington, DC, offers a fairly straightforward philosophy, along with some tips, resources, and a list of organizations they participate in, all in a clean, attractive format.

EnviroMedia

The sustainable practices of EnviroMedia, an Austin-based “social marketing” firm, are contained within a paragraph on their Culture & Values page. It’s short, and not in the form of a policy or plan, but makes an impact by being well-written.

Designarchy

The sometimes rambling ideas conveyed in the Green Thoughts section of the Designarchy site are probably further from the sustainable design mainstream that any of the other sites included here, but it is worth checking out as an example of a very passionate, personal approach to the topic.

If you have a sustainability plan that you’d like to share, or know of someone else who is doing a good job in this area, feel free to leave a link in the comments.

Yesterday, however, I was looking at the blog of The List CEO Todd Knutson and saw something that threw me a little bit. He had a post on 7 Voicemail Messages for Successful Ad Agency New Business Development. In it he lays out a strategy for the information you should include in each of seven (that’s right, seven) voicemails that you might leave for a prospect without getting a response.

There are certainly some things that I like about this post. First, it is a structured approach to the deployment of a marketing tactic, which is always good. After all, having a pre-planned set of messages is certainly better than just calling whenever the mood strikes, and blurting out the same desperate plea for a callback each time. Second, he advises that you keep the messages very short, which is good advice if you want someone to keep listening after you have left three or four of them. And third, the plan operates under the (correct) assumption that recipients of voice mails from people trying to sell them something very rarely call back.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do some cold/warm calling to people on you prospect wish list, and I’m definitely not a believer in the “I left her a message, and she’ll call back if she really wants to work with us” approach, but I have been pretty clear about my belief in the ascendancy of content marketing over large-scale cold calling.

After all, for those prospects that you want to work with bad enough to call seven times without having them pick up the phone, isn’t it worth the effort to provide them with something of value (like a report on their competitor’s social media activities, or some recommendations on how to improve conversions on their website), rather than just leaving seven snappy voicemail messages?

I can already hear what some of you diehards are saying. “I can’t direct that level of effort toward all of my prospects. I have so many people on my list that all I have time for is cold calling.” To which I reply that if you have that many people on you list – people who you can call seven times without a response – then you should really be looking at opportunities to create content that will lead prospects to contact you when they are looking for your services, instead of just relying on a big list and a lucky dialing finger.

Photo by Jim Linwood.

The responses – almost all negative – made me think more about my own opinions on this topic, which I touched on a few weeks ago in a post about responding to RFPs.

While I’m definitely more open to the possibility of there being value in speculative work than most of these interviewees, I agree that it’s not right in every instance, and in some cases it’s a horrible idea. Unfortunately, the standard recommendation to just look at these situations on a “case-by-case” basis isn’t all that helpful, which led me come up with this simple rule of thumb:

When someone asks for spec work, don’t do it.

In other words, be wary of the following approaches from potential clients:

• We’re asking five firms to design/write/produce ________ for us, and the firms that presents the most appropriate solution will get the project.
• Why don’t you show me a couple of concepts, and if we like one of them we’ll buy it from you.

In the first approach, you are doing spec work that really isn’t going to give you a decisive competitive advantage, since the other firms are doing the work as well. Sure, maybe your work will be better and you’ll get the project, but in most of cases I don’t think the odds are favorable enough to justify risking your valuable resources on the effort.

I shouldn’t even have to tell you what’s wrong with the second approach, other than to point out that it’s getting dangerously close to the tactic that Mo Fuzz, played by Don Cornelious in the 1988 cult classic Tape Heads, uses to trick Tim Robbins and John Cusak into producing his record label’s music videos for free.

And the right time to do spec work?

The best time to do spec work is when the client isn’t asking for it, or even expecting it. By showing extra hunger for the project, and also giving the client an idea of how you work, you’ll yourself apart from the competition, which might make the extra effort worthwhile.

I’m not advocating this for every opportunity you pursue, but if it’s a project that you really want (or need), then don’t hesitate to do some research on the client’s customers or competitors, develop a strategic approach, or even produce some design concepts.

You’ll probably increase your chances of getting the job, and the fact that they didn’t ask for spec work also increases the likelihood that it’s someone with whom you’ll actually have an enjoyable, and profitable, relationship.

Photo by thatonecoolkid94.

Because these RFPs are issued by such a broad range of organizations, and cover so many different types of projects, the right assortment of tools are essential to finding the opportunities that are appropriate for your business, and finding enough of them that you will have a reasonable chance of actually winning some.

Here are a few of the methods that I have experimented with over the years, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

1. Onvia

Onvia was my go-to RFP monitoring tool for a few years, until I tested it against Find RFP (below), and then switched over to that service completly. Even the cheapest Onvia package is far more expensive than other RFP monitoring services, and the charge goes up dramatically if you want nationwide coverage.

Like the other, less expensive, services, Onvia gets most of its information by scouring all of the websites that state and local governments use to post RFQs and RFPs. Onvia’s justification for their higher price is the extra research and market analysis services they provide, and the fact that they also include some private (non-government) bid opportunities. Both of these extra features, however, seemed to be aimed primarily at contractors and other companies in the construction industry, so unless you sell parabolic light fixtures, rent construction barricades, etc., it’s probably not worth the extra money.

2. Find RFP

As I mentioned above, I tested Find RFP against Onvia for several months before canceling my Onvia subscription, and I didn’t see any relevant opportunities on Onvia that weren’t also on Find RFP. Combine that with the fact that Find RFP was a lot cheaper ($29.95/month for national coverage) and it wasn’t a hard decision.

Governmentbids.com is similar to FindRFP, but I haven’t tested it before. FedOpps.com is another option that I haven’t tried, but it seems to have some additional features, and they don’t provide pricing on the website, so I am assuming that it is more expensive. Most of these services have free trial periods, so it might not be a bad idea to try more than one and see what works best for your business. If possible, try them simultaneously so that you can see if one is picking up opportunities that the others are missing.

One thing that I will suggest about any of these services is that you consider using a keyword search to tailor the RFPs you receive, instead of using industry codes. The industry codes are pretty vague in many cases, and it is very common for RFPs to be categorized incorrectly. And the more specialized or obscure your service is, the more important it is to use this approach. Don’t just pick an industry code that sounds close and hope it works, because if RFP writers select other codes then you won’t see those opportunities.

3. RFP Database

RFP Database is different from the other RFP services in that it relies on users to supply RFPs and RFQs, rather than pulling information from government sites. Members earn “credits” for submitting RFPs they have found in other places, and then use these credits to view RFPs submitted by others.

The good thing about this system is that it isn’t limited to government RFPs. Users can submit opportunities they find anywhere, so you will occasionally find things that don’t show up in the other services. The downside is that the coverage is not at all thorough, and opportunities can occasionally show up very close to the due date, which combine to make this mainly useful as a tool to augment another service such as Find RFP.

4. RFP Postings on Professional Organization Sites

Depending on your specialty, there is a chance that there is a professional organization out there that posts RFPs of interest to you on their website. I won’t try and list any here, since you probably know which organizations are relevant to you, but just as an example, here is the American Planning Association’s RFP/RFQ database.

Most of these sources aren’t going to notify you by email when a new opportunity is posted, so you’ll either have to set up a system to remind yourself to check these regularly, or use a tool like ChangeDetection.com to alert you when something is added to the page.

5. Local or State Government Purchasing Sites

The hundreds of sites that services such as Find RFP troll for their listings can also be accessed directly, generally for free. So if you have a particular geographic focus, it might be worthwhile to track down the RFP/RFQ areas of websites run by the state, city, and county governments for that area, as well as universities, hospitals, etc., and sign up to be notified of new opportunities that meet your criteria. Just go to these sites and root around looking for language like “doing business with us” or “resources for businesses.” The actual list may be called “bid listings,” “procurement opportunities,” etc., so don’t just look for “RFP” or “RFQ.”

The same rule about using keywords instead of industry/commodity codes that I mentioned in item 2 also applies here. Don’t set up a situation where you are depending on the RFP creator to categorize the RFP correctly.

6. Google Alerts

Setting up Google alerts for keywords such as “graphic design” and “RFP” or “interactive exhibits” and “RFQ” seems like a great idea, but my experience is that it really doesn’t work. Things seldom appear, and when they do it is often months, or even years, past the due date.

7. Twitter Search

No post these days would be complete without mentioning Twitter, and in this case it actually does seem to be more useful than Google for generating timely market intelligence. Most of the mentions of RFPs on Twitter seem to be people looking for them, but there are occasionally tweets with info about new opportunities.

You should probably have a standing Twitter search for phrases related to you industry anyway, and this should pick up any tweets about RFPs or RFQs. You might also try testing some RFP-specific phrases to see if that is worthwhile. There are a variety of options for creating these searches. My current favorite is TwitterSearch for iGoogle.

Putting it Together

My  recommendation is that you use a combined approach in order to see the maximum number of opportunities and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Start by picking one of the inexpensive paid services like Find RFP to do most of the work for you, and then set up all of the free tools as you have time in order to provide some extra coverage. Since these RFPs are by definition “public,” there is a lot of competition, so you’ll need to see a lot of them to find the few that you really have a chance at. Taking a look at a large number of RFPs also gives you an chance to share the opportunities that aren’t right for you with friends and colleagues, which can be a great networking activity.

If you have other tools or tricks for finding public RFPs, feel free to share them in the comments.

Photo by rvaphotodude.