Understand Your Best Clients and Win Their Next RFP

AuthorSusan Van Dyke
DateJanuary 19, 2015

Request for proposal. Those three words are usually the start of a slow churning stomach ache that burns until the moment your response is sent and received. And confirmed three times over. This is especially true, I have found many times over, if the request is lobbed into your office by a current client.

The potential to lose the work, and, I suppose, to lose face among both clients and colleagues, can be stressful.

Proposal responses do not require a law degree or legal drafting. In fact, they usually require plain language, practical responses and succinct promises. I often tell my clients at the outset of what’s often a long and painful exercise in drafting of a typical response that the language, tone and content is different from that of a legal document. As it should be because increasingly so, the evaluators are non-lawyers. They are your procurement department, the CFO, high level managers or board members who have little tolerance for proposal responses that are protracted and mundane. Even worse are those efforts that show little appreciation for client culture or needs.

The correlation between your understanding of the client and chances of retaining or winning work is high. Lawyers who know the client, their issues, preferences and history are equipped to appeal more directly to a client’s needs than anyone else. It’s also an opportunity to showcase your understanding of the individual clients and their organizational behaviour and culture. Why is this important, you ask? Well, because clients...

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