Why does one agency win over another in an RFP? Hint: It's not your "culture."

For more than a decade, RFP Assistants has been coordinating and facilitating agency review processes for all types of advertising/marketing programs and projects. In that time, there is one question that both our clients and the agencies we work with ask us over and over...

“Why does one agency win over another?”

Of course, all participating agencies have to be able to accomplish the goals set forth in the RFP – but let’s face it, that’s the easy part. So what is it? The worst part of my job is informing agencies that they have not won an account….they always want to know what happened. Why didn’t they win? Many times the response I get from my clients is, “it just felt right with the other agency.” When you are not ‘the other’ agency, it is a bitter pill of randomness to swallow.
So why is one agency selected over another? The answer, in my humble opinion, is not arbitrary at all and it’s been staring us all right in the face – it’s the people and the process.

People

So many agencies talk about their mission and their culture with prospective clients. Stop it. It’s the wrong audience. That stuff is important to your recruits, your staff, your investors…prospective-clients don’t give a hoot. Trust me.
What matters to prospective-clients is the people they work with from an agency – their direct account-team. Who are these people? What do they bring to the table in the form of talent, resources and personality? And let’s face it; we all know account teams within an agency are not equal. You have your work-horse-team, your growth-sales team, your complacent-renew-as-is team, and so on… So choose the account-team you present to any prospective-client carefully and purposefully.
Talk about the value your planned account-team would offer to the program. Every RFP starts with goals for success, the dreaded KPIs. Assign a team that can achieve those goals. Demonstrate how they’ve been successful in the past. And always bring them to the pitch! Prospective clients are happy to meet the agency-head but they REALLY want to meet the people they’ll be working with daily. And let them be heavily involved in the pitch. Meeting a potential account team is the RFP-equivalent of test-driving a car. The right mix of people is crucial to RFP winning!

Process

Many agencies will say, “Hey we talk about process!” Trust me, you don’t. You talk about what you’ve done for others, case-studies…it’s not the same. Focus on how your agency tackles a new project, step-by-step. Keep it simple and walk through the steps you take to achieve goals and create success for your clients.
It shocks me how many agencies only talk about their culture, their products/services and their awards and accolades. While these things are nice, they describe nothing about your agency that is relevant to the prospective-client and the task at hand. Walking through your process for tackling a new advertising/marketing program will show the prospective client how you work. If it matches how they work [or more importantly, how they WANT to work] your agency will be the one hired. I guarantee it.

It’s really simple math! Purposeful account team + desired process methodology = winning agency.

So now when I have to tell an agency that they didn’t win and the client gives me the response of, “the other agency seems like a better fit” I can tell the agency to look at the account-team they assigned [or many times didn’t assign] and their process for getting the job done. It seems simple to include these two things, but rarely do I see an agency do it, or do it well. When they do, they tend to win new business over and over. Now go win some new business!