Ten Signs Your Marketing Needs a Tune Up: RFPs

If the car you drive has always had a faint knock in the engine, and you don’t notice a sudden drop in mileage or speed performance, it’s easy to ignore the knock after a while. The ‘no harm, no foul’ nature of the knock soon turns in to ‘the car runs fine’.

A trained mechanic, on the other hand, hears the knock and knows that it means a loss in mileage performance of several miles per gallon. The mechanic knows what to listen for, what noises mean and how to fix them. Good mechanics even know how to calculate how long before the fixed knock will pay for itself in reduced gas consumption.

Detecting ‘knocks’ in the business development performance of your law firm is not easy. But there are signs that you can look for which can indicate areas that can be optimized to improve performance.

Tune up sign 1:

The firm responds to more than 90% of the RFP/RFI requests it receives and wins one quarter of those requests or less.

What does this indicate?

If true, this indicates that the firm does not have a formal process to assess the worthiness of responding to each RFP. As a result it responds to nearly every request wasting a great deal of attorney time and energy. It also indicates that there is no formal response improvement process in place to evaluate and adjust responses to improve the firm’s win rates.

Many firms respond to requests without proper pre-qualification assessments, without speaking to the issuer to understand the originals and objectives of the RFP and often don’t follow up after to understand how the firm performed in the beauty contest. Often firms lack a formal process which can reduce attorney time spent on completing the process or fail to include information which can differentiate the firm’s services such as value added services, technologies and systems and staff roles in serving client needs.

This is the first in a ten part series explaining signs that indicate that your firm or personal marketing program could use a tune up.

Tomorrow: What do discounts indicate?

As always, if I can help you fix the ‘knocks’ in your business development, give Eric a call at 502-693-4731. You’ll find that I am an eager resource and that it costs nothing to talk.