Ask more questions

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. We just wrapped up a workshop on all of the elements of written proposals: cover letters, bios, case studies, responses to RFP, RFIs, actual proposals. How do you present strategy? How do you present budgets in a way that clients understand them and actually lean into them, so that you get as much of the money as you need to do the work they're asking you to do? We did that workshop with Mercer Island Group one of our great strategic partners, and just want to give you a couple of the takeaways from this two day sort of drink from a fire hose learning experience. I'm not going to do it justice by any stretch of the imagination in a couple of minutes, but just a couple quick takeaways that I think are good reminders for all of us.

Number one, somebody asked the question when we are participating in some sort of a formal RFP or RFI, and there's an official questions where you submit your questions, everybody sees all the questions and then everyone sees all the answers. I don't want to submit my questions because I don't want the other agencies to see the direction we're taking or what we're thinking about, or have sort of a clue into the insights or, or the area that we're going to lean into. And Mercer Island Group is super loud and clear about this. Absolutely ask your question. It doesn't matter if everybody gets the answer. The important thing is you have a question that you need an answer to. So get the answer. And number two, don't worry about that everyone else sees the answer. In most cases they're so busy paying attention to the questions they asked in the answers they got, they're not really leaning in to what you asked, why you asked, or what the answers were. And the client, the prospect, gives you credit for asking that smart question. So that's tip number one.

Tip number two is when you are asked to write a proposal or whether it's informal, like you had coffee with someone or you met them in a business meeting and they ask for a proposal or something more formal, like an RFP or an RFI. One of the things that apparently we are not good at is following up with more questions. We think that asking a bunch of questions implies that we don't know what we're doing. We don't understand their business, maybe their industry. And again, what the folks at Mercer Island Group had to say was absolutely not. Ask questions and ask a lot of questions. Ask deep, probing questions. Ask for time together. Try and get as much as you can before you write the proposal. Even in a formal RFP where they say you can't ask questions, it's okay to say, hey, we have some questions. Here's what they are. If they only answer a couple, great, you're further ahead. If they don't answer any of them, they still know you asked the question. And what I found most fascinating in this sort of vein of conversation we are having in the workshop, is that even when you could ask questions either of the client or the prospect, or of the search firm who's running the search, most agencies don't even bother to ask a question. They don't ask for more information about the client or the industry, or some of the other details that are missing from the preliminary material they've been given to prepare their response. Don't be afraid to ask questions. I've always thought that actually, the smartest people in the rooms are the people who are asking great questions. And one of the greatest compliments I think we can get as agency people is when a client or a prospect says to us, “Huh. Nobody's ever asked me that before. That's a really interesting question.” So don't be afraid to ask questions, whether it's publicly and everyone gets to see your question and the answer, or it's privately to either the prospect or the search firm. Do not be shy about asking questions. Questions don't make you look stupid. They actually, when you have thoughtful, deep questions, actually make you look pretty smart.

So that's it for this week. I'll see you next week.