by Barbara Weaver Smith, Founder and President of The Whale Hunters
It’s getting harder and harder to do business without responding to RFPs. More companies are demanding them, and unless you have a strategy to compete effectively for RFP business you will leave money and opportunity on the table.
But RFPs are dangerous. Not only do they drain time and energy from work that you’ve already sold or other new business opportunities that offer you more control, they also leave you vulnerable. Some companies use the RFP process only to get new ideas for their internal team, or to lean on their current agency for more creative ideas and cheaper pricing. It’s quite possible that your proposal will make its way into the hands of a competitor, whether internal or external.
So it’s important to have rules that you follow faithfully when there is an RFP opportunity.
1. Does it fit your Target Filter criteria? In other words, is the opportunity right for you? The right size, the right industry, the right services required? If not, don’t respond.
2. Do you have a prior relationship with the organization that put out the RFP? If the answer is “no,” don’t respond. Yes, I know there is an occasional fluke where an unknown company gets the job. But it’s rare, and the odds are stacked against you.
3. Is there an RFP consultant or head hunter advising the company? If so, you need to have a relationship with that consultant. They always prefer that the job go to a vendor with whom they have a prior relationship. If you don’t know the consultant, don’t respond.
4. Can you discern why they want to make a change? Do they have a job that their agency of record can’t do or doesn’t want to do? Are they looking to fill a niche that is just right for you? Or do they want to change agencies? If so, do they change too frequently (a sign of instability and trouble ahead for you)? If you don’t know what they are trying to accomplish, you don’t know them well enough to respond to their RFP.
5. Have they allowed sufficient time for a good response? If it comes in over the transom with a seven day turn-around request, it’s wired for someone else. How much time is reasonable? Thirty days is fair. Three weeks might be okay if it’s a smaller request. Otherwise, don’t respond.
6. Do they have excessive creative requirements? Remember, you are vulnerable every time you design a solution and send it along on paper. Reputable companies know this and ask for examples or prior experiences without requiring you to invent a plan for them, which of course they could then implement internally or share with an incumbent vendor. If the requirements seem excessive, they probably are. Don’t respond.
The bottom line on RFPs is this: unless you are well-connected with the organization that offers the RFP, you know what they are trying to accomplish, and you are certain it is a good fit, you are better off to let it go.
If you have not yet developed the kinds of relationships that will position you to win RFPs, now is a great time to start! Get to know an RFP consultant who represents customers that you want. Introduce yourself and your company to purchasing agents at three key target companies that you would like to do business with. Learn what they are looking for, how they buy, how you can be competitive in their RFP process. The time to build the relationship is before an RFP is released, not after.
And make it a New Year’s resolution to “Just Say No” when you know you should!
Co-author of Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company, Barbara Weaver Smith founded The Whale Hunters to bring a powerful, proven sales and business development process to small companies that want a fast track to growth. Barbara consults with companies to implement The Whale Hunters Process, trains regional representatives, coaches teams responding to mission-critical RFPs, writes The Whale Hunters Wisdom newsletter, and authors The Whale Hunters blog.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Should We Respond to that RFP? | agencyside
Obama's Comments on Michael Vick Spark Prison Debate - The Daily Beast
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By praising Michael Vick’s “second chance” after the NFL quarterback served 19 months in prison on a dogfighting conviction, Mansfield Frazier, an ex-con, says the president is creating an opening for a national discussion on opportunities for former prisoners.
President Barack Obama is causing quite a stir in the national prisoner reentry movement with his comments on Michael Vick. “So many people who serve time never get a fair second chance,” Obama reportedly told the owner of Vick’s football team, the Philadelphia Eagles. “...It’s never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out.”
The Eagles signed Vick after he served 19 months in prison for running a dogfighting operation, and by praising the team’s owner for giving the quarterback a second chance, the president is broaching a subject that’s sure to be polarizing. As states across the U.S. struggle with looming budget deficits, Obama perhaps realizes the timing may be right to address what he has called the country’s “incarceration and post-incarceration crisis” and remove barriers that inhibit successful prisoner reentry by offering former offenders an opportunity to reclaim their lives and a modicum of dignity.
While Obama’s conversation with the Eagles’ owner, Jeffrey Lurie, about second chances for formerly incarcerated persons might be among his most publicized pronouncements on the subject, they certainly were not his first. As a presidential candidate in September 2008, he sent a letter to the Third Annual Prisoner Reentry Summit commending San Francisco city leaders for their “innovate work to reduce recidivism” and pledging to create opportunities for former prisoners if elected.
Obama said in his letter that he “recognized that American urban communities are facing an incarceration and post-incarceration crisis.” He vowed to create a prison-to-work incentive program… to create ties between employers and third-party agencies that provide training and support services to ex-offenders and to improve ex-offender employment and job-retention rates.” He also pledged he would “work to reform correctional systems that prevent former inmates from finding and maintaining employment.”
Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking at the Project Safe Neighborhoods Annual Conference in July, echoed the president’s commitment to the issue by stating that incarceration is not an economically sustainable way to combat crime.
“Most Americans have a very punitive mind-set…they don’t seem to care that we lock up far too many people, for far too long, for relatively minor crimes.”
Obama speaks out on Michael Vick and felons getting second chances. Credit: Getty Images; AP Photo
“At the close of 2009, the U.S. prison population was 1,610,446—a rate of 504 inmates in custody per 100,000 U.S. residents,” wrote Randall G. Shelden, a senior research fellow at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, in a recently posted research brief. “If we include jails, the number of people incarcerated totals more than 2.3 million, and the incarceration rate climbs to 754... The United States incarcerates almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners yet has only 5 percent of the world’s population.”
Holder’s verdict on the cost of our “incarceration nation”: “At a cost of $60 billion per year our prisons and jails do little to prepare prisoners for jobs. This is a recipe for high recidivism. And it’s the reason that two-thirds of those released are rearrested within three years. It’s time for a new approach.”
Michael Vick’s case might provide the right entrée for a national conversation about such a new approach.
Happy holidays and new year, b safe.
Harold Meyerson - Stimulus funds on the slow track
When Democratic senators and representatives voted to approve the $787 billion stimulus package nearly two years ago, the ones who came from swing states and districts knew they were taking a political risk. What they didn't know was that the economic benefits of the stimulus would become so entangled in red tape that even today, much of that money remains unspent.
A story that ran Sunday in the Los Angeles Times estimated that only a quarter of the $630 million in federal funds allotted to the city of Los Angeles had been spent. Los Angeles is in no way exceptional. California Inspector General Laura Chick, who was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to monitor the state's stimulus spending, estimates that only about half of California's federal funds have been spent.
Some parts of the stimulus - those that go to defray the states' Medicaid costs, for example, or for extended unemployment insurance - get disbursed immediately. Funds devoted to preserving ongoing governmental operations have been spent at a steady clip as well. By the end of September, according to numbers I crunched from the California, Texas and New York City Web sites, these places had spent 63, 58 and 61 percent, respectively, of the federal funds targeted toward public schools - and each is on track to use up what was designed as a two-year allocation by the end of this school year.
The funds that went to existing government services and benefits, in short, were spent as intended. Their effect on the larger economy was to keep things from getting worse by preserving the status quo - just as this month's tax deal, by forestalling tax increases, avoided diminishing the level of money in circulation. But much of the money devoted to boosting private-sector hiring, above all in construction, remains stubbornly unspent, nearly two years after President Obama signed the stimulus into law.
At September's end, just one-third of the $4.5 billion allocated to California for transportation projects had been spent, the state's Web site shows. In Texas, just 5 percent of the funds allocated to the largest energy project had been expended, while in New York City, only 27 percent of the funds allocated for infrastructure and 3 percent of those targeted for improving energy efficiency had been spent. Some of this money is for long-term projects, but most of it isn't.
When it comes to building things, the stimulus, as Lincoln said of Gen. George McClellan, has the slows. Ironically, when we think of our iconic stimulus programs - the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other New Deal public employment programs - we think of the things they built: the Bonneville and Boulder (now Hoover) dams; the Triborough and San-Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges; the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown; LaGuardia and National (now Reagan) airports; and thousands of schools, post offices and roads.
What's more, the New Deal built them at a pace that seems almost incomprehensible today. When the winter of 1933-34 loomed, President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to forestall a wave of starvation in a nation that didn't yet have unemployment insurance or food stamps. He authorized Harry Hopkins, his jobs-wizard, to create a four-month-long project (the Civil Works Administration) that would employ 4 million people. Beginning operations on Nov. 9, Hopkins had 2.6 million Americans on the job by Christmas and 4.3 million by February - this in a nation of 125 million. In their four months on the jobs, they built or improved 40,000 schools and 998 airports.
So what happened? How have we gone from a nation that could put millions productively to work in two months to a nation that still struggles to restart our construction sector two years after the stimulus passed?
Part of the answer is technological: Most WPA and CWA workers were employed on pick-and-shovel jobs long since replaced by labor-saving (and job-reducing) machines. Part of the answer is that big government (the stimulus) was slowed by good-government requirements (environmental impact reports, competitive bidding and the like) that didn't exist in the '30s. Also, strapped state and local governments laid off many of the workers needed to approve the stimulus projects. Layoffs and furloughs in California's Office of Historic Preservation, the state's inspector general told me this summer, created a 60-day bottleneck for even routine structural improvements.
Infrastructure projects remain among the most stimulative forms of anti-recessionary activity - so long as the projects actually happen. That's one reason liberals like me have enthusiastically supported them. It's now clear, however, that unless presidents, governors and mayors appoint their own Harry Hopkinses and create fast-track procedures for construction, stimulus projects will be no more than a pale ghost of their 1930s' predecessors, unemployment will remain outrageously high and the politicians who backed the stimulus will be left scrambling for explanations. These are among the grim lessons of our mega-recession, as many of those swing-district Democrats can sadly attest.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
NYTimes.com: Online Bazaar Builds on Its Base With Sense of Community
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Saturday, December 25, 2010
Top 10 Digital Advertising Innovations of 2010
Mayoral race focus turns to fundraising
Focus of mayoral race shifts to fundraising
By Kristen Mack and John Byrne, Tribune reportersDecember 25, 2010
ct-met-chicago-mayor-race-1226-20101225
With Chicago's mayoral contest coming into clearer focus, the campaign now turns to fundraising shows of strength, a scramble to consolidate support and preparations for an early voting push.
Rahm Emanuel took a big step toward solidifying his spot on the ballot, and state Sen. James Meeks shook up the political calculations by dropping out late last week.
A lull between Christmas and New Year's is expected as voters celebrate the holidays. When the calendar turns to 2011, candidates will have seven weeks until the Feb. 22 election.
The next benchmark in the contest is campaign fundraising. The current cash collection period ends Friday and reports are due by Jan. 20, but candidates with something to brag about are sure to start trickling figures out sooner.
Showing strength in the money game tends to boost the perception of a candidate's viability, leading to more campaign donations. Conversely, a weak campaign checkbook can lead to a downward spiral as money sources shrivel up.
The field got smaller with Meeks' departure, and it could shrink further. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners still could toss as many as five largely unknown mayoral candidates off the ballot in the coming weeks. What started out as a field of 20 could be cut to eight.
Meeks' decision is viewed in Chicago political circles as helping the other two major African-American candidates, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, because the black vote could be less splintered. A recent Tribune poll found black voters supporting Davis at 21 percent, Meeks at 13 percent and Braun at 10 percent, with another 30 percent undecided.
Geographically, Braun could benefit more — she's now the only remaining South Side African-American candidate, with Davis hailing from the West Side. The city's South Side historically has had greater voter turnout than its West Side. The city's only elected African-American mayor, the late Harold Washington, hailed from the South Side.
As for whether there should be further winnowing among black candidates, Braun said it's not necessary for another African-American contender to drop out.
"There are two Hispanic candidates. There are still what, 18 candidates in the race?" said Braun, only slightly exaggerating the total. "We're all going to be called to present our positions, to make our case to the entire city that this is not a city divided, that we are one community."
Davis, who got the backing of a group of African-American ministers, community leaders and elected officials who were seeking a consensus candidate, likes the idea.
"I don't think anybody would disagree, a unified community is the most desired outcome that can take place from any of these conversations," Davis said.
City Clerk Miguel del Valle, one of two major Latino candidates along with Gery Chico, questioned whether such a scenario would be best for the city.
"I'm a Latino, and I've been approached by people in the Latino community who say we need to back a single candidate," del Valle said. "My response to that has been that I want to be elected mayor by every corner of the city, every ethnic group. This campaign should be about bringing people together."
The fundamental dynamic of the contest, however, hasn't changed much. With five major candidates still in, it remains a difficult task for any one of them to muster the 50 percent plus one needed to win outright on Feb. 22.
Emanuel is off to a wide lead in early polls, leaving other candidates trying to gain traction. The goal is to hold Emanuel under a majority and finish in the top two to force an April 5 runoff. A head-to-head matchup provides a clearer contrast for voters and potentially lessens the impact of Emanuel's expected large fundraising advantage.
Meeks' departure is viewed as most hurting Chico, the former Chicago Board of Education president. One less top contender means there are fewer candidates splitting up the overall vote. Chico has been trying to position himself as the alternative to Emanuel and has early support from old-line establishment bosses such as Ald. Ed Burke, 14th.
As for Emanuel, he talked about moving forward and focusing on issues after the elections board voted Friday to keep him on the ballot. But a month or more of court challenges loom if the case makes it to the Illinois Supreme Court. The ballot challenge will still be a distraction for Emanuel, though not as big of one as if he was fighting to get back on the ballot.
The situation needs to be settled fairly quickly — early voting starts Jan. 31 and city officials must have time to print the ballots.
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
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