Mid-Atlantic Region

Four Tips for Creating Proposals That Resonate with Clients

By Paul Dumansky
Proposal and Strategic Content Manager at Crowell & Moring LLP

Your proposal is the greatest proposal ever compiled. You are sure of it. The potential client would be outright reckless to select any firm besides yours, if for no other reason than how much time and energy you have put into creating a proposal that you believe perfectly fulfills all of the requirements that the RFP outlined.

This is a common feeling among many of us upon completing a pitch or proposal, and yet on many occasions, our firms do not get the work for which we are bidding. The odds are stacked against us – most RFPs are sent to at least three or four firms, while others are sent to dozens. These firms have great lawyers and talented legal marketing professionals like yourself who are tasked with putting their best foot forward, often resulting in a glut of excellent proposals that represent thousands of hours of work, only one of which (usually) will end up as the winning bid.

So how do you set your proposal or pitch apart and maximize your odds of being the winner? Here are four tips to make your pitches and proposals get the potential client’s attention.

1. BLUF

No, not “bluff” – we do not want you tricking a company into thinking your firm can do work it cannot. Rather, give the “BLUF” – a long-used military acronym meaning “bottom line up front.” In short, do not bury the lede. You want to get right at the core of what the potential client is seeking, and you want to do it immediately.

This means NOT starting a pitch with: “Our firm is one of the top intellectual property firms in the nation, with more than 100 lawyers who have experience in pharmaceuticals, telecom, etc.” Instead, get right to the point: “Based on the facts presented in this RFP, we believe Client X can develop viable non-infringement and invalidity positions for each patent, for which we recommend a Paragraph III certification. We are well-suited to assist Client X in this endeavor, with a proposed team that—as outlined throughout this proposal—has experience both with this drug and with Paragraph III certifications.”

Often the structure of an RFP can be rigid—questions have to be answered in a specific order and word or character limits have become increasingly common—and this can make it a challenge to state what you want to right out of the gate. But there are workarounds. You can lead with an introduction or an executive summary. If those are restricted by the proposal’s format, then make sure in your answer to the first substantive question that you include as much pertinent info to the potential client’s need as you can.

Another reason to adopt a BLUF approach: With many, often lengthy proposals to read, the decision-makers are unlikely to read every page of every proposal. You do not want your biggest selling point wedged into the middle of paragraph three on page seven because that’s where it “fits” best. Do not miss the chance to state your BLUF.

2. It’s Not about You – Focus on the Potential Client

In the example above on how not to start a pitch, you see one of the key flaws common in our proposals: we are so focused on demonstrating how qualified our attorneys are that we lose focus on the main purpose, which is to address the potential client’s issue. Or more to the point, we get the following feedback: “You talked too much about your firm’s capabilities and did not tell us how you could go about helping us solve this problem.”

This is an admittedly fine line. We cannot demonstrate that we can resolve the matter at hand unless we describe how our firm has the knowledge, resources, and past experience that will enable us to do so. But this should be secondary in the proposal.

For example, if you are bidding to conduct an internal investigation for a municipality, you should mention your experience with similar investigations and for similar public entities, but not until you have demonstrated an understanding of the relevant legal issues and how to best go about conducting the investigation. As marketers, we should not hesitate to lean on our attorneys for the more legally substantive components of our proposals and on our library and/or research services departments to help unearth any pertinent info. Do you understand what local, state, and federal laws come into play when there have been accusations of bribery, money laundering, and misappropriation of funds? What phases should be part of the investigative strategy? The municipality needs to know these answers.

When you seek someone’s guidance on a problem, do you prefer when they respond by talking about how they have vast experience dealing with such a problem and are experts in their field, or would you prefer that they carefully listen to and assess your problem and then give specific recommendations on what you can do to solve it? Assuming you said the latter, the same principal applies when responding to RFPs.

3. Be Direct

“Our attorneys bring to bear a range of capabilities and have practiced in nearly every jurisdiction around the globe and our clients depend on us for their biggest matters and …” yawn. Statements similar to the above are a major reason we have started to see more of the aforementioned word and character limits in proposals. And not only do these statements not help the potential client address their issue (see #2 above), they say nothing unique, because many other firms are saying the same thing. If enough of these statements are in your proposal, the person making the decision on who to hire will transition from “reading” to “skimming” and your odds of getting that work plummet.

There is an old adage that good writing consists of nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. This is also true of proposal writing. Terms like “preeminent” and “highly regarded” and “reputable” have lost all meaning to clients because they hear them all the time from most of the firms with whom they are dealing. State what you need to state without adding anything “flowery” to it: “Attorneys on our team are Certified Information Privacy Professionals for both the U.S. private and government sectors. This will be particularly helpful for the company given the scope of this engagement and the compliance questions at play as the company looks to make its product available to the Department of Justice.” There is nothing ambiguous in this statement, and it holds far greater heft than empty generalities.

Relatedly, avoid the common clichés that we are guilty of from time to time. Of course this is somewhat hypocritical to say considering the phrases “bury the lede” and “get right at the core” appear earlier in this article, but this is not a proposal asking a company to hire the firm and spend a lot of money with us. These clichés can be part of our established vernacular and difficult to eliminate, and so it is imperative to read through your proposals in their entirety to make sure that you delete any such phrases that may make your client think that there is a lack of original thought in your response.

4. (Truly) Creative Pricing

Firms and clients are all seeking to structure relationships on mutually beneficial economic terms. As such, many RFPs have (for decades) requested alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), and yet the billable hour has remained the predominant way that clients are charged. Recognizing this reality, all too often we can be prone to adapting recycled AFA language from one proposal to the next without making a stronger effort to come up with a billing arrangement that will serve the interests of both parties.

There should be a discussion at the outset of every major proposal involving the appropriate attorneys, business development professionals, and accounting/finance team members that evaluates what terms can be drawn up that would please the potential client while also making sure that taking on the matter will be profitable to the firm. This is challenging! Aside from the time commitment, people are apt to fall back on what they know, i.e., an AFA we used for a similar client last year.

What we should be doing is working together internally to review what the potential client’s matter will entail from both sides, what factors are likely to come into play, what factors could possibly come into play, what contingencies can be built in to any pricing that protect both parties should any unknown or unlikely developments occur, and what type of follow-up should be happening and (at what intervals) to make sure that both sides are satisfied and a positive, long-term relationship can be developed.

When you create detailed and creative pricing proposals, you are demonstrating to the potential client that you took the time and effort to review and analyze in-depth all facets of their matter, and that will (more often than not) at least get you to the next phase of discussion.

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All of the above can be easily remembered when you aim to do one thing: put yourself in their shoes (sorry again for the cliché). If you state up front how you can help potential clients, focus on their problems, concisely and specifically lay out a plan of action, and offer a customized pricing option to accomplish the goals of the matter, you are likely to find yourself moving a lot more “potential clients” to “clients.”