How RFPs Cost Creative Agencies
When companies share requests for proposals (RFPs), they give agencies an opportunity to compete for new work. But they also subject interested parties to a time-intensive, muddy, and impersonal process. And it’s one that we are no longer interested in participating in.
Here’s why we’re swearing off RFPs for good.
Intellectual property protection.
While all RFPs are taxing, there is a type of creative RFP that is especially draining: The RFP that requests original work. This is where creative-industry RFPs differ from others: We are often asked to provide our work, such as custom brands and strategy, ahead of the time — for free.
At HDco, our ideas are our inventory. They are the equivalent of our hard goods. So asking us to provide them up front would be like asking a concrete company to pave the road in order to compete for the account. It just…doesn’t make sense.
We take every step to protect our work when submitting original creative for an RFP. But the truth is, you cannot unsee an idea. So while we never send files that contain original work, we can’t fully prevent the ideas we share from being used down the line without our consent. Submitting this type of RFP puts our intellectual property at risk and calls into question the value of our work.
The time requirement.
RFPs demand hours and hours of work from people across departments. Submitting a quality RFP, which includes relevant work examples, a beautiful presentation, and nitty-gritty information responding to the document’s specific requests, can compromise our office for days.
In 2020, HDco spent 151.25 hours responding to RFPs. That’s close to a month of work. That’s 151.25 hours that weren’t spent serving our clients and that we did not get paid for. And we’re no longer pouring weeks of time and resources into a project that might land us a client.
Poor return on investment.
The truth is, the hours we spent on RFPs have proven to be a poor ROI. Even when we do land an RFP, which is the best case scenario, we’ve seen the project derail shortly thereafter.
We’ve experienced it all, from projects failing to move forward (even after we made original creative for the client) to budgets diminishing after securing the account. We once won an RFP and only received 25% of the original contract amount because of budget cuts.
We have been burned too many times by empty promises and RFP wins that turned into losses. We’re no longer subjecting ourselves to that.
What we’re doing instead.
We may not be looking to submit RFPs any longer, but we are actively seeking new clients. So how are we balancing those two goals?
Meetings.
Healthy working relationships don’t start with RFPs — they begin with personal connections. Anyone can put together a well-done proposal. Few can be wonderful to work with. And we are confident that if people sat down with us, they’d want to work with us. So that’s what we’re doing: Sitting down with people.
If you send us an RFP, we’ll send you a calendar invite. Building personal connections is more worthwhile (and less time intensive) than putting together an RFP. And all of our favorite projects have started that way.
Website updates.
RFPs are a good way to show off your work to potential clients. But you know what? So are websites.
This year, we are dedicated to maintaining an up-to-date website, one that reflects our work and our capabilities. We are committed to uploading new case studies each month so that whenever we send a link to potential clients, they can view our most recent work. This saves us the hassle of building out extensive RFPS, and isn’t browsing a website more fun than sifting through a PDF anyways?
To hear the more vulnerable details behind our experience with RFPs, check out our podcast episode on the topic. We think you’ll like the unfiltered version of events Profresh provides.
