Anyone who owns a business, whether they’ve been to business school or not, knows one thing: You need customers. No customers, no business. How you get customers, of course, is the question.
In my business, one of the main ways to get business is responding to RFPs — requests for proposals. Here’s how it works: a company hears about you, checks out your website, contacts you, schedules a call, tries to figure out if you’re the real deal and, if you pass their sniff test, asks you to submit a proposal.
In the beginning of my career, I would get very excited whenever anyone asked me to submit an RFP. It meant I had a big one on the line, a horse in the race, my hat in the ring, or whatever other metaphor I could conjure up to reinforce my belief that I was actually going to make a living. Like a beanie wearing college freshman, I dove into the proposal writing process with great zeal.
