What we get wrong about agency proposals and how to fix it with Emily Shapiro & Robin Boehler

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency podcast presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to midsize agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. With 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant.

Please welcome your host, drew McClellan.

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. And we are going to talk about Biz dev, Biz Dev, particularly around and some of the mistakes we make when we submit a proposal or some of the other written pieces of a proposal, whether it’s an RFP or a proposal that the client just asks you to do or a prospect just asks you to do.

There’s some places where we kind of shoot ourselves in the foot right from the get go. That seems silly, and there is no one better to talk to us about those kinds of mistakes than people who see agency proposals all day, every day. And as you know, there is nobody who does more of that work and does it better and does it better with a heart for agencies than the folks at Mercer Island Group.

If you are a regular podcast listener, you’ve probably heard, Robin or Steve Bowler on the show before, or sometimes both of them. They are the founders of Mercer Island Group, which is an agency search firm. So about 50% of their time they get hired by brands to find them the right agency. And they go through that entire RFP process and watch all the proposals and the pitches and all of that.

And the other 50% of the time they are brought in by agencies who want to level up their new business game. So it might be they’re getting ready for a big pitch. It might be that they’re asking them to look at particular parts and pieces of the way they present themselves, whether it’s a website or their positioning or, bios or things like that.

But they are brilliant. And at Mercer Island Group, they have a whole team of people who have a depth of expertise. And they have helped many agencies land, new business that is bigger than anything they’ve landed before. They often join us to teach workshops there at the Build a Better Agency summit. These are great people who have a huge heart for small, independent agencies, and they just go out of their way to be generous with what they know.

And so when I reached out to Emily Shapiro, who is, working with Robin and Steve and Robin and invited them to come on the show, they said, absolutely. And we are lucky enough to have them here with us today. So without further ado, let’s welcome Emily and Robin to the show. All right. Emily. Robin. Robin. Welcome back.

Emily, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming back and talking to us about new business and some of the things that we could do a little better. It’s good to have you back. Thank you for having us. You bet. So you see a ton of written proposals, whether they are the clients just asking for a proposal or it’s a former a formal RFI or RFP.

Want to talk a little bit about sort of some of the things you see that I think you call them unforced errors, like just stupid things we do that cost us the opportunity to either win the business or to advance in the process. So what’s the what’s the when you when I ask you that question, like, what’s the glaring thing we do wrong when it comes to written proposals?

We might have different answers here, but I would say that the number one thing that is a make or break is when the agency makes their proposal, writes a proposal all about themselves versus writing about themselves through the client’s perspective or the client’s business challenge. And we see so many of these come in. We do, you know, dozens of reviews a year.

And we also help agencies on the other side of our business by just going through their proposals. Oftentimes agencies will come to us and say, we’ve won or we’ve lost, you know, three of the last pitches or we can’t get past the first round. So we look at their submissions, we look at their pitch decks and there is such a stark difference between a submission that is about the client, about their business challenge, about how this agency will solve that business challenge versus work or so great.

And this is all about us. And one thing agencies just tend to forget, or maybe just don’t know, is that clients don’t know the agency world very well. They don’t know a lot about agencies and sorry for anybody with general feelings, but they don’t care very much. They care about their habitat and who’s going to solve their problems.

So talk a little bit more about like give me an example of if I’m trying to convey a message. What’s the agency centric way versus the client centric way that makes sense. Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that just, you know, without going too far into this, because I could talk about this all day. This is one of my favorite things, helping agencies with their proposals and their pitches.

But I would say that there’s two key things that take it that just immediately change the the playing field for a written submission. One is just the esthetics, the look and feel of the submission. If it looks and feel like like if it looks and feels like the agency’s brand, they’re missing the mark. It needs to look like the client’s brand.

It has to look like it could, you know, fit in an Instagram style on their on their social media or that it was there. It could be a landing of a page on their website. It has to look like the client. And then I would say the second piece is that is just like right away, right off the gate is a cover letter or an introduction that is only about the agency through the client’s eyes.

So this is your business. I’m enthusiastic about this. You know, we can solve your business challenge. We’ve done it before. But enough about us. Back to you. So the cover letter is very, very prospect centric as well. And from there, you know, it just set the tone. Hopefully they continue that on through. But that just sets the tone for the proposal, for the written submission that we’re here to solve your problem, not to talk about ourselves.

Emily, I bet nine out of ten proposals are agency branded. Yes, nine and a half maybe. Yeah yeah yeah. Oh my gosh, Robyn, you had something to add. Yeah, I think I would I I’m very close to where Emily started in terms of what was the first thing I thought of. I just would frame it differently. So it’s very it’s it’s a relative of what she said.

I think the biggest mistake that agencies make is they don’t customize their proposals. And that goes to it’s too much about them. And so all the way from the look and feel to the cover letter and look and feel, by the way, is not just about using the client’s branding. It’s also about adding visuals from the client’s advertising or the client’s website, and a mistake that we’ve seen agencies make is using.

So let’s say that your your brand is a yoga studio, right? You’re pitching a yoga, you know, a chain of yoga studios. Well, make sure you’re using the visuals from that yoga studio, because if you just search for generic yoga studio videos or you have visuals, you could very well end up with a visual of one of their company.

And we actually have seen that happen. Oh, where’s your mindset? Oh wow. They brought in our competitors visuals. So you know being but for the client to see themselves in your proposal is what you’re looking for. That’s the end goal for them to be able to see yourself in that proposal. So I can think to myself, wow, that that’s about me in all ways.

So the customization piece, I think is critically important. And that goes all the way through to the cover letter. So if you have a can cover letter, you put it have a blog proposal as well. That’s not customized. Right. And if you have and case studies that you just always pop in regardless of what the ask was, that’s not customized.

So it’s just a it’s a slight difference in the way that framing it. But I think Emily and I are on the same page on this. Yeah. So at the end of the day, of course, what the client wants is that they’re going to be very important to the agency, and the agency is going to focus on them.

So I can totally see with your examples like this is how you set the tone of we are going to make you the priority. We are going to have you as the crown jewel as opposed to your, you know, sort of on the periphery of us thinking about us. Yeah, it’s it’s attitudinal in its communication. Yeah. And also just writing in a way that helps the client follow your story, follow, you know, you’re telling a story here.

This is not just a checkbox exercise where they ask for these 25 things check, check check, check. And you just throw them in. You know, the first thing that an agency should do when they get a chance to talk to clients is to ask, do we have to respond to the proposal in the order in which you asked for it?

Right. So sometimes you’ll get a proposal and I’ll say please include the following 25 things. Well, do you have to present them in order one through 25, or just present them somewhere along the way? And in most cases, clients will say no, just as long as you present it. Yeah, yeah. As long as you cover it, we’re good to go.

And then you get to craft a story. And for some agencies that aren’t in competitive pitches but have been asked to write a proposal, and then you need to make sure you know what needs to be included in it, as opposed to, hey, just put a proposal together for us. You need to ask the client, so what would you be looking for in that proposal that could help you make a decision to move forward?

So you need to know what those items are. Would you recommend that agency if an agency is not in a sort of a formal shoot out with an RFP or an RFP, but somebody just said, hey, send me a proposal, would you recommend that the agency say, what do you want included in that proposal? Or would you recommend an agent say, here are the things we typically include in a proposal.

Is there anything else? Is there anything we’re missing or anything else you would want? I like your second approach better than your first okay. But I yeah, I think there’s another way even to kind of adjust that to say or maybe an additional question, what would be most helpful to you and helping you make a decision about having a second, another conversation or what we most helpful to you in that proposal to make sure that we’re addressing the needs that you have right.

So and if someone asks an agency for a proposal, I would certainly hope that the agency would say, can we have a conversation before we submit that to you? Right. And that conversation is to get to know and understand the business needs and objectives and to make sure that you know, the implications of what’s really going on on the business agency’s have such happy ears and are so eager, oh, wow, we get you right something, right.

Yeah. But what’s it about? Right. Yeah. What do they need to hear or see? Right. Yeah. And what’s happening is, you know, if you make an assumption that, well, all they need is new subscribers. Well, maybe they need a certain kind of new subscriber. Maybe they’re looking to reduce their the cost per ad. Maybe they’re looking to, to grow certain parts of their market versus the entirety of the market.

So if you don’t ask any questions, you’re just guessing right at what could be an educated guess. But it’s still a guess. You want to get closer to an answer than a guess. Well, and I think, too, you want you want to be able to reflect that you’re a good listener and that you ask good follow up questions after the initial question, but that you actually heard them.

Because I have to think, for a lot of clients, especially if a client is looking to make a change from one agency to another, it’s often what we hear in like client satisfaction surveys is didn’t feel like they were listening to us. Yeah for sure. I would say the number one reason that we see clients move from one agency to the next is poor service to client, serve as a service doesn’t get highlighted in a pitch as much as it should, or in a proposal as much as it should, but it is the general reason why the most often cited reason for why a client looks for a new agency.

The other oft cited, often cited reason is that we’re seeing today more more than we did, I’d say before Covid is consolidation of agencies. Yeah, clients, a lot of agencies, you know, they got an SEO agency and then they’ve got a paid media agency and they’ve got a paid social agency, and they got a creative agency. And then we got a creative social agency.

And they’re kind of figuring out that, you know, maybe we could have maybe we can have a single agency do everything, or maybe we can have just one creative agency and one media agency, and we’re seeing a lot of that. So that’s the other thing is that while specialists are still important, you know, the pendulum seems to be swinging in the direction of being able to talk through a whole customer journey with your offering.

Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re seeing that in our research as well. We always ask, how many agencies are you currently working with and the number? Most people aren’t going down to one, but they are going down from 7 to 5 or 5 to 3. They still want them to have subject matter expertise, especially in their industry, but they’re happy.

They’re better with having a more of a full service or not even full service, but as a full service offering. Yeah, a great so when when you made the comment that we don’t highlight the service enough in in a written proposal or RFI or RFP response, what’s the proper way to talk about how we serve clients? That’s a really good question.

And it’s hard to do in a written proposal without thinking it about another client, which you also don’t want to do. So I one of the places I look for that actually is in the case studies. How well did you get to know the business? You know what? What was what’s your process look like? Like Robyn mentioned that we that it’s to the agency a agency’s advantage to tell a story through their written proposal.

The study is a perfect place to tell a mini story that, you know, that applies everything that you will do, how you did it for a business without taking the ship, the focus off of the prospective client because you’re supposed to talk about a different client in the case study, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, right?

It’s a perfect place to talk to talk about how you worked with your client, how you went from start to finish. And and you go ahead. Robert, I would I would add another place to where you can use your written proposal to talk about account service is in your bios. You. Oh, and that’s, that’s where you get to talk about your role on the business.

So if you’re an account service person your bio should should talk about the clients you work with, not just about that. You love to surf, right? No one cares, really. But whatever. It’s like you’re saying, you’re a people person, right? Yeah. At this stage of the game, those things are platitudes and they don’t. They’re meaningless. But to talk about, you know, I run the following accounts over time.

The other thing that gives confidence to a client that there might be enough people working on their account or the right level of people, is to have in in the proposal, the proposal and the account structure with titles. You don’t have to put names at this point in a written, but you do. You should put your account structure in so you can see, you know, are we getting a VP at the account level?

Are we getting, what are we getting and how many like and then so let’s say there’s a VP. We’re going to know that person is likely going to be running more than one account or overseeing more than one account. Who’s, you know, who’s that person that’s more dedicated to us and how much help does she have? You know, is there an A?

That kind of thing helps give confidence that they’re going to set my account up for success on the service side. And I’m not getting all Junior Woodchucks. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can do that also in your scope of work when you when you actually do submit a proposal that is a formal scope, you know, that’s a budget.

With the budget that’s a place to to highlight, you know, how many hours are we going to get from each level. And clients look at that to say, you know, many clients don’t understand the agency world and the agency model, and they think that they’re going to get a dedicated person. Now I’ll up to them right? Right. All to them.

No matter what they’re spending, they think, you know, Drew’s going to be only work on my account. Well, you have to be spending a boatload of money to get anybody fully dedicated in any part of any any kind of agency, media, PR, creative, you name it. The client’s got to be spending a boatload of money with you for you to get any dedicated person.

So you want to show them that you know who’s the person with the most hours on the business you’re looking for. And then when they do the math on those hours, it’s like, wow, that’s, you know, five hours a week, ten hours a week, whatever that looks like. Feels good. Right? Right. Well, and I think it also, I think one of the challenges for agencies is clients connect with or associate the agency with one person.

And right from the get go, what this says is you’re getting a team of people, right. And so you have multiple points of contact, multiple places of support. And it’s not just all dependent on what they or whoever you know, is sort of the lead the most time spent person. Yeah. Yeah. Great. What else do we get wrong?

Where else do we stub our toe right off the get go? Yeah. I mean, when you say right off the off the get go, I just also have to put I have to put this in. This is before you even get to a written submission. But that website or that email address you have on your website, that’s like new [email protected], make sure someone’s checking that email address.

Oh, right off the gate. Like this is just make sure I think that will change the game. Like make sure someone’s checking those emails and responding right, like check and respond. That seems pretty logical. It seems logical. And you know, we spend so much time meeting with agencies and learning about agencies and they’re just, you know, so many agencies that are really enthusiastic to work with us and vice versa.

We love meeting new agencies. Almost every I’d say every review we run, we invite somebody that we’ve never invited before. And, you know, we love doing that, but we can’t do that if you don’t respond to our examples. Yeah, that’s oh my gosh, just I think it’s a it’s a critical point that Emily’s making here. And so it’s not specifically about written proposals, but it is about how you get to write a written proposal, which is the answer being willing to answer our questions.

So if you get if a client or a search consultant reaches out to you, first of all respond. That’s just I mean, basic. But the other point is respond to the questions that get asked so shockingly. And I think, drew, this will surprise you because this has happened to us with Army agencies. I mean, I’m already not happy about hearing this, but go ahead.

I know what you’re going to say. Yeah. When we ask you, can you please list your client experience in the following categories? Do it. We’re not asking because we’re trying to steal your clients. We’re asking because we need a do you have enough experience right. And B are you concurrently conflicted. Right. Do you are you working with a compelling right?

We don’t want to waste your time if you’re conflicted. But we also know that not every all of your experience is showing up on your website. So, you know, like, let’s say we’re working with a spirits brand and you work with the spirits brand three years ago, they’re not currently on your website. Well, if we don’t ask you, right.

And we’re going to assume you don’t have it, well, we don’t assume things in our business because we’re going to pass by agencies that could be really good for this. So we reach out on every search we do. We reach out to all the agencies that are on our list and ask for experience. And we’ve had agencies and agencies say, just say yes, we have experience in that category.

Until you tell us who the client is and why you’re asking, we’re not going to respond and sign an NDA. We get our brands often, and all we’re asking for is who your client list is. We’re not signing an NDA over that. So if you’re not willing to sign right, there’s lots of other agencies who want to play.

So you’re that hard to work with. I can’t recommend you to my client. Right? Right. But that gives me a little bit of headache. All right. Yeah. So we need to take a break. Mostly. I now need to take an aspirin after that answer, but I want to take a quick break and then we’ll come back because I want to talk about the workshop that we’re teaching coming up.

And also I have more questions about all the clearly stupid things that we do to get in the way of getting to business. So let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back. Hey, everybody, I just want to remind you, before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the Amish community.

And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com. Slash groups, slash b a b a podcast. So again, facebook.com, slash groups slash baby podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency on our leader, and we will let you write in. And you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders.

And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are going to be of value to you. So come join us. All right. We are back with Emily Shapiro and Robin Bowler, and we are from Mercer Island Group, and we are talking about all of the incredibly stupid things we do that get in the way of us having the opportunity to win clients, or at least win an opportunity, go to the next level.

So I mentioned right before the break timeliness of this interview is great because October 14th and 15th, Emily and Robin and Steve Bowler will be in Denver with us teaching a two day workshop all about written proposals. And I love this workshop. It we’ve we’ve done it once before. The agency that went to it loved it. In fact, they said of all the Mercer Island Group workshops, this is one of my favorites.

But what Robin and Steve and Emily have done is they have gathered samples from agencies of everything from bio shows, cover letters, proposals, Rfis RFP is case studies I think. Is that is that all of it? Right. Yeah. And then we’re in the workshop. We’re going to look at the good, the bad and the ugly of all of those.

And we’re going to kind of workshop how to make them better. And I promise you, if you join us, you are going to leave with templates and tools and, and and an entire deck of best practices. Last time we taught that literally people were at the end of each day running up to their hotel room and changing proposals they were in the middle of, and people were coming back in and saying, oh my gosh, we got to the second round because we did this or that from the workshop.

So if you want more information on that workshop, it’ll be in the show notes. But you can also go to the Agency Management Institute website under How We Help. You’ll find the workshops and it’s again October 14th and 15th in Denver. We’d love to see you there. We do have a couple seats left, so please join us. So back to the topic.

Let’s talk a little bit about Bios. I think that feels to me like an opportunity to really give the prospect a sense of who you are and what you’re all about. How do we get that wrong? Well, it’s actually really, really simple. We talked earlier about making your submission prospect centric and that applies to the Bios too. So yes, we the client wants to know who you are or what your title is.

And then the only other thing they really want to know is what will you do for my business? Yeah. You win this business. What are you doing on my account? How are you showing up day to day? So what I hear you saying is they should not be a canned bio that you use for every proposal. No, I mean, maybe the first few.

You know, there might be pieces that you can take. Like you’re sure well know your experience. You want to customize like your education or things like that. Yeah. Category your education, your your position, you know, your title, things like that. But yeah, it needs to be customized so that the client understands that you are enthusiastic and you’re thinking about how you’re going to partner with them.

Yeah. I mean, I think if I were like a the list of the things. Right. So yes. What’s the role that I would play on your account? Here’s the experience I have. It gives you the confidence that I understand that I’ve done this a lot. And with clients in relevant industries, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same industry.

So, you know, retail is big. It doesn’t have to be the same kind of retail. It’s but you work so people want to know you, you know, understand the speed of retail if that’s what it is. And then maybe something about how many years you’ve been at the agency. So you know that they’re not getting you know, this got everybody on this on this team has just started with the agency in the last year.

Well that’s less scary right? Oh yes. You know, I’ve been with agency X for ten years, 12 years, six months, whatever it is that you want to be able to show that to and pictures. So you should have a photos of the people. Because in today’s world, names don’t always tell you everything, right? Right. And a client wants to know they have a diverse team.

So not all men, not all women now, not all white people. So, you know, what are the ages of the people on their team? As you know, they have people from, you know, are there Gen Z folks on the team? Are there millennials? Are there senior people on the team that might look like they might have some wisdom and experience that would be helpful.

So, you know, a photo and photos that are all seem to be somewhat uniform taken by the agency. But it’s worth investing in that technology, doing that on a fairly regular basis. So you have your new people, something we need to do at mastermind Group actually, is to update our photo so they all look and feel the same.

So not the photos of our dogs. No no no no no. There are agencies that feel really clever about that. And it’s our pictures of their mom. You know, I’ve never seen that. Well, there is one agency that I’ll give it away to them. It’s called mother. The agency is called mothers. So when you go to their bios, you see the picture of the mother.

But when you hover, you get the person who’s there. So it’s a nice tribute to their moms. And their name is mother. That’s that’s clever and relevant and on brand. Yeah. And on brand. And you get still to see the person that that’s there that you know you’re actually going to be talking to. Yeah. Yeah. Where we are as an industry very dog centric.

And so they think a lot of people think that’s clever. Either that or baby pictures. I’ve seen that too right. Yeah. Yeah it does. It does not help. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. In terms of the actual proposal, talk a little bit about some of the, some of the places where we get it wrong in terms of the actual like now we’re talking about the meat on the bone.

What, what are what are some best practices for proposals that we don’t seem to understand? Yeah, I would say that just setting the tone at the beginning, after you write that, after you make the look and feel, feel like the client and the cover letter is about the client restating the business issue, you know, like, we know why we’re here, like you told us why we’re here and we know why we’re here.

That also gives the client some confidence. Yeah. And show your interest in the client’s brand. You know, do some research, show that you’ve gone a little bit above and beyond the information that they gave you. You know, from the get go you we see this in so many different ways. Like proprietary research does not have to be complicated.

It can be that, you know, we recently did a regional pizza place and so they visited it and shared pictures of is, you know, they visit they ate there that that’s a big deal. You know, that feels very custom. And there’s effort in that. There’s enthusiasm in that, you know, and beyond that, you know what? What else can you uncover about this brand?

How can you show that you cared enough to dig a little bit? It’s not that complicated. Yeah, I would add to that the when you talk about business goals, if, if in the proposal specific business goals are listed, list them in your cover letter and again in your proposal to your written document so that people understand that you know that they’re looking to to, you know, to grow x percent, whatever the actual measurable numbers, some clients will actually list them.

Now if they took the time to list them. Right. That’s important. They’re important. The words in the document are important. And I think what happens is that agencies read these proposals or read the RFP, and they the first thing they see that feels like, oh yeah, we could do that. And he run, read every word, use a highlighter I when I when we help agencies when they’re pitching I take the proposal I print it out.

I don’t print very much these days, but I print it out and I use a highlighter to highlight the things that I think are going to be critically important to include in somewhere in the written response, in some form or fashion. And then I go back and I check against those. So less and less worried about did you get numbers one through 12?

Right. Because everyone what. Well, most most agencies will do that. But did you get the nuance of numbers one through 12. And the stuff that was in the preamble where they’re giving you background on their business, this not just for fun, right? Yeah. They give a lot of effort to do that. Right? Yeah. That specificity, specificity is your friend.

Vagueness is the enemy here. So specificity is key. And I also think Emily mentioned doing some research. And I’m sure there are agencies that will listen to this and say for our written proposal, you want us to do research for a written proposal. We should do some early strategy. And the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. What I love is when an agency writes and we couldn’t help ourselves, then never use this exact language.

We couldn’t help ourselves. We do then and we learn some things about your target audience. And then they just have a few slides. We couldn’t help ourselves. We learned some things about your competition and how tough this industry is. Either one of those two is enough. I actually will add ten points to my score for any agency that shows any strategic approach to an initiative, right?

Like like that, that curiosity about, oh, I wonder how the how what’s happening here, whatever. That’s what clients want from us. They want us to ask, does really insightful questions. So I can totally see what you’re saying, which is if we show them, we ask those insightful questions even before we’re asked to do so, that we’re just wired that way.

That speaks volumes about what it’s going to be like to work with us. Well, and you’ve you time through that. If an agent is going to participate in a review or submit a proposal, just go all in, go about it. Otherwise, don’t do it, you know, because it’s so clear the when we we have ten submissions come in, it’s so it’s so clear which agencies are enthusiastic and are really hungry for the business and which just kind of pulled it together and answered, maybe answered all the questions, maybe not.

And, you know, sent a word document. And there’s there’s stark contrast in these different submissions. Yeah, I probably quote you guys once a week when I say to somebody like, oh, you know, we’re we’re on this site, we’re downloading RFPs and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, remember what Mercer Island Group says, which is this is not a volume game.

If you’re not going to go all in and do it really well, don’t do it. So you have to be more judicious about who you do it for, because you don’t have the bandwidth to do a great deep dive for 20 of them. So pick the ones who have the best shot at and go all in, because otherwise you’re going to be over ten.

Yeah, I use a little bit of a peanut peanut butter analogy when I talk about this. I use it for other things too. But you know, if you’ve got one teaspoon of one tablespoon of peanut butter, what would you prefer to spread that on one slice of bread and have a really good snack, or spread it on a whole loaf and no one will eat any of it right?

It’s still the same resource. It’s still the one tablespoon you see. You have x number of resources you can put against new business at any given point in time. And so if you responding to five RFP at once, they’re likely not all going to get enough love. But if you choose 1 or 2 and you know you can put enough dedicated resources against it to really show up as a much better, you see your time.

This is not a more shots on goal situation. Yeah, well, and you know, agency time is expensive these days. And so you don’t want to waste that resource. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s depleting too. Yeah. Right. You know keep losing. Have one more thing I do want to say I’m trying to think about. So you know, agencies get nervous about there are going to be how many agencies are also going to be responding.

So if it’s a public RFP keeping in mind it could be any number. Yeah. So those public RFP says public proposal machines R&D and machines. And there are things the agency should be thinking about before they decide to go forward. Number one, is it a required RFP because it’s every three years we have to review this. And the same age is one for the last ten times.

Don’t write a proposal. It’s a require. They have to do it. It’s a government requirement whatever that might be. And so you’re just you’re just filling out that dance card and you’re wasting your time unless it’s really right for you. Those government ones are tough because it’s an open call. Yeah. So you have no idea how many you’re competing against.

If it’s a more structured RFP, the usual number is around ten. That sounds like so many, but let me tell you how it comes out. Now, I don’t have the statistics, but I have my memory, which is pretty good. And I’ll tell you that when we finished scoring ten RFPs, we typically get the following distribution. There are usually 2 or 3 that are very clearly move ahead.

They did a really great job. They they answered all the questions. They maybe did a little extra. They stood out and they they took the time to really put a Polish proposal together. There’s usually two that just did a terrible job, right. Not doing anything right. They just mailed it in or they clearly don’t even know how to do this, but they tried and they just don’t know how.

So they need to get better. Or they just this is obviously canned and it’s just a capabilities deck essentially. So that leaves five. Yeah. Five more that are possible. You want to be the number four of the 123. You want to be there next one has four are likely going to advance. So that’s the place where you know you don’t want to be competing with those five for that one last slot.

You want to get into the one, two one, 2 or 3 slot to go all in on the even the written proposal, do the little bit of extra strategy, start to think about their business. Start to think about how you might solve the problem. Now the solution is at this point, but just we couldn’t help ourselves. We dove in and looked at your target audience.

We know. Then we looked at your competition. Yeah, we’re thinking about this in an interesting way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We have time for one last question. So in terms of case studies, most glaring mistake, I would say not telling us easily, like in a very succinct headline kind of way, why you’re including that case study. Like leave it, don’t leave it up to the client to decipher why you’re in the see, that can actually make it so easy.

And the other piece, too, I’ll say is, again, I hope nobody has gentle feelings here, but we’ve gotten to our meeting with our client where, you know, everyone’s read the RF, the submissions, and were deciding who to invite to the next round. And there are times the client says, oh, I didn’t read that page or I missed that part, I didn’t read that worse.

And hearts are breaking for people listening to this because people put so much effort. It costs so much to participate in a review and to hear that not everybody reads. Everything doesn’t feel good, but it’s the truth. We read everything. That’s our job, literally our job. We read it all. But if with that in mind, if maybe the client’s not going to read every single word, make it really the stuff that they’re going to read, the headlines, that you know, that the first few sentences make it really clear why you’re putting that information in there.

So give me an example of a headline on a case study that would make me go, oh, I see why they shared this. Yeah. So let’s say the business challenges to broaden the target audience without alienating the current audience. Right. And we see that often actually. So a headline for a case study could be this is an example of how we brought like literally this is an example of how we met your business challenge.

We broaden the target audience without alienating the current customer. But that can be at the top. If that was an ask, please include case studies that demonstrate x, Y, and z. This case study demonstrates x, y, and z. Make it so easy. Does that mean case studies? The headline is the name of the business right? Yeah. And it could be they could be the name of the business.

Cohen bringing the brand to a new generation. Yeah. Right. Right. Something like that could be more artful than what I suggested. Yeah, I think I see what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also think that another mistake agencies make is weeding out results. And now they’re going to the agency they’re listening to saying, but what if we can’t?

We’re not allowed to share the results. There are things you can share. There are always things you could share. And I would say if you can’t share results, don’t use that case study, right. If you can’t, at least give that nuance of the success. Right. So, you know, you’ve got to show something that that actually is the proof that what you did move the business in some way.

Yeah. Did you gauge if if it’s about bringing a new generation in, maybe you talk about engagement by, you know, Gen Z, engage with the social posts x percent more than they did before. This campaign is something like that. Show us in the results. And the last thing that I’ll say about case studies, as well as the rest of the proposal on this subject, is going to Emily’s point.

Less is more. So it doesn’t mean to be to have so little that you’ve that you’re vague and you haven’t answered the questions. But take a look at do you have too many words on a page where people are going? I mean, like, I’m, I read that whole thing, right. Keep in mind that you you want to be the person who chooses what information they read versus hope they read the important things.

Yeah. So headline subheads bullet points, right? Wayfinding whitespace. Yes. I’ll make it easier for people to read what you want them to read. You don’t have to say every single thing you know in these proposals, right? You want to leave them wanting a little more so that you know that there’s going to be a follow up, has a proposal itself, is likely not going to be what they decide on, is the beginning of a conversation awesome.

This has been great. I knew it would be a great conversation. Emily. Robin, thank you so much for for being with us. Robin, it’s always good to have you back on the show. Emily. Now you’re going to have to come back to I love it. I would love that. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

Tell everybody how to learn more about Mercer Island Group, and then I’ll give them the information about the workshop one more time. But I do want to emphasize for listeners, yes, Robin and Emily and their team often get hired by brands to find the right agency, but they also do a ton of work with agencies, helping you get ready for that critical pitch or helping you look at things like, let’s look at all of our case studies or all of our bios.

And they have they have, without a doubt changed the trajectory of many I agencies who have been smart enough to bring them in. Many of our agencies have landed their biggest piece of business because and right after they worked with Mercer Island Group. So you absolutely want to know who they are and what they’re all about. You want to follow their content.

So Robin or Emily, how do they find you guys and more about what you do? Yeah. So our website is am I group.com and email us. We would love to hear from you. We would love to meet with you. You know this is how you learn about us. We would love to learn about you. So email us. We would love to spend some time learning about your agency and getting to know what you need, and explaining more about what we do as well.

Yeah, awesome. And again, if you want to hang out with them in person, which is it? Which is a mind blowing change your business sort of two days again, October 14th and 15th in Denver, head over to Amy’s website and go under the How We Help tab. And you’re going to see workshops and it’s getting it right proposals that when you can register today and you can be with us in a month and you will take away all of this learning, you’re going to get there, deck all the samples.

You’re going to have so much to take back to your shop and teach your team. I promise you, it is time really well spent. So Emily and Robin, thanks for being here and I’m looking forward to hanging out with you guys. Pretty soon. Likewise. All right, all right guys. So lots of takeaways from this episode I promise. I know you heard at least one thing and you’re like, oh yeah we do that.

All right. So first of all, fix it. Secondly, go follow Mercer Island group. Keep learning from them. They’re also super active on LinkedIn. So follow them. There. They’re they produce a ton of great content. So connect with them and put this stuff in the play. There’s no reason to expend all of these resources and shoot yourself in the foot.

It’s just stupid. So let’s not do stupid things. Let’s do smart things. I want you guys to have a great, robust end of 24 and get ready for a killer 25, and you have lots of tips from this episode to do that. So before I let you go, you know, I want to say thank you to our friends at White Label IQ.

They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So White Label does does design PPC and dev for agencies just like yours. So they have a huge team. They’re able to help you fill out your roster. If you guys are super busy or if those are services you don’t want to have on staff because you don’t use them up very often, they’re a great resource.

So you can check them out at White Label iq.com slash. Am I good friends of am I? We’ve known them for 20 some years. Good. Good human beings do great work and really love to serve agencies because guess what? They were born from an agency so they understand your world because it’s their world too. And last but not least, you know that I always like to wrap up by reminding you that I am really grateful that you come back every week.

This is fun for me, and I love bringing these smart people to you and helping you grow your business. But I wouldn’t get to do it if you don’t come. Listen. So thanks for listening every week. I’ll be back next week and help do. All right. See you then. That’s all for this episode of Amis Build Better Agency podcast.

Be sure to visit Agency Management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode!