By Lisa A. Rozycki, Principal, LR Marketing Group

The cliche, "f you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there," is appropriate when it comes to accounting firm proposal processes or the lack thereof. Many firms are performing poorly in competitive bid processes because of a lack of direction and a set of best practices to follow.

Are lone rangers in your firm meeting with prospects because they brought in the lead even though other professionals in your firm may be better qualified to handle the sales call? Have you ever been asked to write a proposal for a manufacturing prospect and they wanted it the next day? Are people in your firm going out on sales calls and talking about strategy in the car on the way over to the meeting?

If you have experienced any of the above problematic scenarios, developing a proposal process, a roadmap that is made available to your firm that outlines what should happen from the time a lead comes in the door to the follow up after your firm wins or loses the engagement, may be the solution.

There are several things that a proposal process creates:

• An environment where the firm's professionals are collectively learning from each other by sharing information and strategy;
• An environment where suddenly there is teamwork and cooperation between departments and service groups. All of a sudden, by bringing people together to talk about an opportunity, your auditors are suddenly talking to your tax group, and your tax group is talking to your consulting group, and so on;
• An atmosphere of pro-activity where your firm is winning significant engagements and is going after more like them; and
• In the long run, win rates that increase considerably because there is a process behind creating proposals.

If you feel your firm could benefit from a proposal process, the first step is to develop a proposal log if you don't already have one. A proposal log outlines all of the proposals that have been written and delivered within the past few years and where they are in the stage of the process- won, lost, or still open. This will give you some ammunition to promote change. It is important to tally the revenue lost or generated over more than one year because some engagements, government, financial institution, and not-for-profit, for example, may be proposed for a period of more than one year. For this reason, if you lost an engagement, you essentially not only lost this year's revenue, but also the revenue proposed for subsequent years as well. The revenue loss associated with having no direction can really add up.

The next step is to obtain buy-in for creating a proposal process from your managing partner and partner group by presenting your findings and the benefits of establishing a proposal process. Hopefully, this can be presented at a partner meeting or firm retreat where consensus to move forward can be gained by the entire group.

The steps in a proposal process that you need to think about include:

• Criteria for Proposing
• Competitive Intelligence
• The Pre-proposal Meeting
• Developing A Service Strategy
• The Written Proposal

• Presenting The Proposal
• Debriefing the Prospect/Proposal Team
• Measuring and Promoting the Results

Criteria for Proposing

How often do you feel that you are writing a proposal for an industry that your firm does not have experience in serving, you can't compete, or you don't have the staff to do the work? It is for these types of reasons that we need to formulate criteria questions in a proposal process that assess whether or not your firm should propose on an opportunity. Questions should address your firm's qualifications, the prospect's relationship with your competition, staff availability, type of ownership, risk and opportunity, any other complex issues that exist, and the ability to uncover needs in a pre-proposal meeting. Unless a prospect is willing to meet with you, you should not be proposing on the engagement. This usually is a signal that they are price-shopping.

Competitive Intelligence

Accounting firms need to know what is going on around them to get their fair share of business and to grow. Gathering competitive intelligence is not just monitoring secondary sources such as newspapers, trade journals, and other media outlets. It is more than running a D & B report to gauge the client's ability to pay.

For an accounting firm, competitive intelligence is about knowing your competition, your competition's clients, your competition's employees, industry trends, the prospect, and the prospect's employees.

Competitive intelligence starts with documentary and online research and evolves from that. Documentary research involves the use of texts and documents as source materials: government publications, newspapers, certificates, census publications, and countless other written, visual and pictorial sources in paper, electronic, or other hard copy form.

Documentary and on-line research includes reviewing competitors' web sites, advertisements, marketing literature, and proposals. It also involves looking at a competitors' organizational chart to determine who chairs what departments, who works underneath department heads, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how the firm has grown or cut back, and what kind of information competitors are revealing at trade shows. All of this information can reveal a great deal about a firm.

Review and analyze publicly available information such as Hoover's, Inc. and Dun & Bradstreet reports. Attend presentations given by your competition, clip articles, obtain a copy of their client newsletter, and ask a client to collect junk mail for you to see what is being mailed to the marketplace.

In addition, interview experts, clients, and referral sources. Centers of influence and others may have important information on a prospect or marketplace.

If your firm belongs to an accounting firm network and someone outside of your area has expertise in serving a particular industry, schedule a phone interview with that person to talk about industry trends and buzz words.

The Pre-proposal Meeting

The pre-proposal meeting is an opportunity to confirm the information you gathered during the competitive intelligence step. If you don't know, ask whom else you are competing against and what the prospect likes or dislikes about their current firm. These are important questions but ones that accountants fail to ask.

Developing A Service Strategy

After the pre-proposal meeting, gather your proposal team together to discuss strategy. Based on the prospect information that you've gathered, determine how this prospect would like to be served? Does the prospect want quarterly client meetings? What type of communication medium do they prefer? What value added services can the firm offer that this prospect would benefit from? Based on the client information, what fee arrangement should you propose? If you win the work, will it be profitable?

Determine the right team to serve this prospect. The pre-proposal team is not necessarily the team that should serve the client. Who should be the Partner in Charge on this engagement? Is it the partner who received the lead? Does someone else have the expertise to serve this client? Do both partners share the responsibility? The client service team should be determined during the service strategy session.

The Written Proposal

Nick Wreden, author of FusionBrand: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future has an interesting concept: "firms think proposals are a fast track to selection. Prospects view them as a road to rejection."

Wreden says, "When prospects review a stack of proposals, all making the standard claims about "success," "commitment," or "satisfaction," they first look for reasons to disqualify your proposal." Maybe you didn't follow the RFP, the proposal was too long, or there was too much boilerplate language. Maybe the fees were out of line with the other proposals presented. This is why it is so important to customize a proposal to provide solutions to the client's needs.

"The entire proposal should be perceived, written, and presented as if a member of the prospect's staff were presenting it to senior management," Wreden says. This eliminates the most common mistake which is starting out with a history of the firm.

The Presentation

Hopefully, you will have the opportunity to present your proposal in person. Use the same media that the prospect would use internally and use visual aids where appropriate. However, a PowerPoint presentation is not a substitute for a written proposal.

Make it a point to rehearse beforehand. Everyone on your team that is present at the meeting should have a speaking part in presenting the proposal but don't over do it. When in doubt, send the same number and gender of people that the prospect will have present at the meeting. Ask how much time is allotted for the meeting ahead of time.

Debriefing the Client and Proposal Team

After every competition, win or lose, follow up with the prospect and the proposal team to identify what was done well and how you can improve for the future. Be sure to ask specific, open-ended questions to find out why you won or lost the engagement. Preferably, have someone who was not a member of the proposal team interview the prospect.

Measuring the Results

Continue to log a record of proposals that have been written and delivered and where they are in the stage of the proces- won, lost, or still open. They can also be tracked by proposed fees, the partner/team, by industry niche, by service area, by office, or by referral source.

Implementation

Once the proposal process is created, it should be implemented consistently throughout the firm. It is the managing partner's job to hold people accountable for using the process. Because there need to be consequences for not using the process that was approved by the partner group when you received the buy-in at the beginning to create the process, it is up to management to enforce it.

Promoting the Results

Once you start to see a significant increase in your proposal win ratio or you used the process to win a significant engagement, promote the results and recognize people for their efforts. When employees realize that their contributions are an important part of a firm's success, they are more likely to embrace the goals and objectives of the organization and the proposal process in the future.

Learn More About Our Services for Creating A Proposal Process

Lisa is the founder and Principal of LR Marketing Group, a marketing consulting practice specializing in growing revenue of professional service organizations through market analysis, planning and implementation, public relations, lead generation, and business development. Lisa has over 25 years of marketing experience. She can be reached at 1-610-582-0097 or lisa@lrmarketinggroup.com.