« ProTip: Keep the Flow of Your Questions Smooth | Home | CFLs + Clean Power + Cold Weather + Gas Furnace = GHG Emissions Spikes »

Increase the Depth of your Client Relationships

By crooky | March 14, 2008

I came to a conclusion recently - I’ve been spending a lot of time spinning my wheels, writing proposals for RFPs issued by people that I don’t know. Last year, I wrote over 30 unsolicited proposals and won one of them. The lion’s share of my business came from two clients - the University of British Columbia and Rocket Builders. Rocket Builders is interesting because they’re not so much a client as they are partners. However, they do a lot of selling for me and hand me a lot of work. UBC has been great because they just keep asking me for more things. I’m now working with two different divisions of the University and would like to work with more.

This isn’t to say that I won’t work with other people - I will and I do. I’m just not going to jump through arbitrary hoops the way an RFP process makes you. The advantage of working with people that you know relatively well is that you can feel out a situation before you put pen to paper on the proposal. Some of my clients will have me in the meetings where they’re deciding what the problem is - almost like a staff member. That puts me in a great position to meet their needs with a proposal and the subsequent work.

I also find that inviting people I’ve worked with into a deeper relationship with myself leads to work. For example, I interviewed the VP Technology from a local high tech company last year for a NanotechBC project. I got a really good vibe from her so I made sure that I stayed in touch and then when Rocket Builders threw their year-end party last year, I invited her. I also invited her to get more involved in the SFU Alumni Association when we started some new initiatives. It culminated in her recommending to one of her co-workers that they meet me to talk about some market intelligence work. Before I met this co-worker, she’d already heard good things about me and had been reading my blog. It was a very refreshing conversation and I hope it will lead to some project work.

The point is that consulting is all about the relationships that you build. People don’t want to work with people that they don’t know or trust. Let me tell you about the one “cold” RFP that I responded to and won:

I was surfing BC Bid and found an RFP for an election review process. That’s right up my alley so I checked it out. When looking at the RFP, I noticed that they’d set a cap for the whole project that was so low, nobody was going to be able to meet all of their requirements and do a good job. I did the back of the envelope calculation and figured out that it would take X number of days and at the cap they’d set, it would only pay about $20/hour. There aren’t many consultants that will work for $20/hour.

I did something that I wouldn’t normally do in this case - I wrote them and told them that their cap was too low and why I thought so. They thanked me for the input and I didn’t hear from them again for a while, assuming that they gave the job to some undergrad student on co-op. A few months later, they wrote me back saying that they didn’t get any bids for their RFP and they were going to re-issue it with a much higher cap and wanted me to put in a bid.

I took another look at the RFP and found that I had an experience gap. I looked around for another consultant that I could work with to tackle this job and didn’t find anyone in time. I had to phone them back and tell them that I couldn’t put in a bid. They were disappointed and, as it turned out, only one person put in a bid on the second round and they had a big experience gap in research methodologies. I had a good, honest, face to face meeting with this organization and by the end of the call, they’d convinced me to take half of the RFP.

It worked out beautifully. They were a great client and we now have a budding relationship that may lead to more work. They trust me because they know that I’ll tell them how it is. The moral of the story - work comes from people that know and trust you. Responding willy-nilly to RFPs is for chumps. Don’t forget about the people that give you work and think about ways to thank them.

*********************
Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

Share/Save/Bookmark

Topics: Business of Consulting |

Comments