Welcome to Answering the RFP! Where despite the fact the RFPs are evil, we turn that evil to good by using RFP questions as opportunities to give clear, confident answers.
Whether your sales opportunity involves an RFP or not (hopefully not) answering questions is a golden opportunity to lay the foundations of trust. And when you’re selling a service, trust is the coin of the realm.
“Answering the RFP”
This “Answering the RFP” series is primarily for our agency partners, to help them confidently answer questions that come up in a website sales process. I’ve been partnering with design firms, advertising agencies, and marketing professionals for decades and I know that for many of you, engaging in website projects can be extremely risky. Especially if it’s for an existing valuable client, and you’ve had web projects so south due to problems with website developers.
That’s why we work hard to ensure that our partners have everything they need to ask and answer questions at the start of a potential project—where a project’s success or failure may very well be set, for better or worse, in that critical, strategic question and answer process.
Now HOLTER Strategic provides exclusively WordPress development, and we follow a Low Code / No Code development philosophy. So our answers will reflect that approach. However, many of the questions and answers we’ll explore are platform independent. So even if you’re not engaging in Low Code / No Code WordPress development, stick around, because building trust is critical to every service-oriented sales opportunity.
The Most Relevant Question: Cost
Our first set of videos are going to address the most relevant question behind every sales process, what’s it going to cost! And so I’ll review all the factors that go into pricing-out a website project over the course of the next few videos.
But I should probably say something about why I say RFPs are evil. Admittedly, not all RFPs are entirely evil. In fact, every potential project needs some form of documentation. But if a sales process devolves into essentially a document exchange, the resulting projects will end up as flawed as the process of getting there.
I’ve had to engage in some RFP processes that literally forbade conversations with the firms being solicited—and required only a document exchange. Those kinds of RFP are unequivocally evil. I don’t even respond to them anymore. But when you can engage in conversations, and you can turn a document centric process into conversations that can provide strategic Q&A—which can be the start of a valuable professional relationship.
Conclusion
So subscribe to Answering the RFP and start building your confidence in answering questions about the website development process. And turn those risky website opportunities into value opportunities to gain new clients, or deepen relationships with your existing ones.
So until next time Be Clear. Build Trust. Win Clients.
