Dear consultants;
We love working with you. We love including your information in our proposals and qualifications documents. We know you are under pressure just like we are. However, there are a few things you can do to make our lives and our future collaborations on marketing MUCH easier:
When we ask you for information to include in one of our RFPs, please only send the information we request. Don’t send every possible piece of collateral you think we might need just in case we might use it someday. It just makes work for us and those extra documents someone thought we might pass along to whomever you hoped might see them don’t go anyplace but the recycling bin. If you’re not sure exactly which project/reference/person to send me, call and ask.
If the RFP or someone from our marketing team asks for information in a specific format, please send it in the format requested. (e.g., don’t send me a four-page PDF resume of your lead principal if the thing I asked for was a 50-word paragraph in Word.) It tells me you’re not paying attention to my request. Now I have to edit that resume down from four pages to 50 words and your principal is going to be upset that whatever they thought was the crucial information about their credentials didn’t make it into my 50 words.
If I ask you to answer a question that is asked in the RFP, send me copy that specifically answers the question. Don’t send me the closest piece of boilerplate collateral you have. I have seen members of our marketing team spend literally three days reading through consultant data to pick out the few pieces of information we need for the RFP and put it in the right place. When that happens I end up at the office until midnight. It makes me cranky.
Thank you for sending us referrals and those RFPs that you’re not sure we have seen. If your firm is not the consultant we always work with, it brings you higher up on the list of folks we want to work with.
Finally, to those of you who already do things the way we requested above, thank you. It’s one of the reasons you are the consultant we always want to include in our RFPs.
aecsarah 